In Defence of Property. (1907)

Book Review from the March 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialism: Its Fallacies and Dangers.” A collection of papers edited by Frederick Millar. Published by Watts & Co. for the “Liberty and Property Defence League.”

“Let us jealously watch the encroachments of the State, and never suffer it to become more than a watchdog.” Such appears to be the political doctrine of the band of belated individualists who are responsible for this book, for they include and condemn under the name of Socialism practically all State activity other than that of the mere policeman. Since, however, the propertied class has in its own interests been compelled to add to the State many other functions than that of the “watch-dog,” it is hardly necessary to consider the question at issue as being individualism versus collectivism at all, but rather as being—the class which lives by labour versus the class which lives by ownership, and whether those who produce should not own and control the product.

To those who seek a clear and useful criticism of Socialist principles the book under review will be disappointing. The facts of industrial evolution are not appreciated. The significance of the huge company and combine, where great and complicated branches of industry are run by hireling workers for absentee shareholders, is not taken into account. Nor is it recognised that industry is developing to the point at which the workers’ choice lies only between the oppressive collectivism of the trust or capitalist State for the profit of a few, and the collectivism of democracy for the benefit of all united in producing. The writers place themselves athwart the economic trend, and though as modern Mrs. Partingtons they may be excellent at a slop or a puddle, yet, trundle their mops as they will, they can hardly succeed in checking the rising Atlantic of economic development.

That there are misrepresentations is to be expected from such a source. Thus on page 17 we meet our old and hoary friend, “Sharing Out,” Socialism being referred to as the “confiscation and division of the national income.” It is also stated that Socialists “maintain that if a man lives in the house of another man, it is an extortion to ask him to pay a rent.” But the scientific Socialist knows that, apart from what is called economic rent, house rent is but the price of a commodity that, like every other commodity, tends to exchange at its value, which already includes its proportion of unpaid labour. The Socialist, therefore, holds that the robbery of the worker really takes place in the factory, not on the market.

Those who go into the highways and byways facing the opposition and abuse of the ignorant and the interested, and who, in their championship of the workers against oppression and robbery, brave the malice and persecution of the defenders of property, are told on page 24 that “The root of Socialism is cowardice. Here is the real source of the whole movement. It is the whine and the dream of the weaklings’ base fear of rivalry, of competition. It is the duty of real men to circumvent and defeat, by war if necessary, by invasion if necessary, by conquest if necessary, by extermination if necessary, the despicable effeminacy of creatures unworthy of the name of men, because they fear to carry on the competitive struggle in which the true life of manhood consists. The Socialist movement is popular because it appeals to these numerous creatures ; panders to their baseness ; promises them what they would be ashamed to desire or seek if they were men.”

Socialism and the Family.

Next comes the war-cry of the pro-property hypocrite,—”Socialism means the abolition of family life.” On this subject the defenders of that class whose heroes fill the divorce courts and whose morals are said to be “of the poultry yard,” have only vague innuendo and misrepresentation to offer. But what are the simple facts ? The family life of the workers is being destroyed by capitalism through the man, wife and child being forced into the factory to earn the daily bread; and where the home life remains it too often spells brutalising drudgery and ill-temper, owing to the poverty of the wage earner and the great waste of labour entailed by the individual household. The tremendous saving in drudgery that the co-operative household under Socialism will allow, the improvement in comfort, health, and happiness that it will bring, leave no room for doubt regarding the future of the home, while should any prefer the greater labour and discomfort of the old style, they would certainly be allowed to please themselves.

But what of the relations of men and women ? The Socialist knows that the methods of obtaining the material living, and the social order essential thereto, form the foundations of the moral and intellectual life of the time; and that with the changing economic foundation, not only must the relations of individuals to each other change, but their ideas also. The history of family life affords a striking example of this. As Prof. Jenks points out, permanent marriage had its origin in patriarchal society, and was due to no improvement in morality, but to the necessities of the pastoral pursuits of the man, and to his desire to secure for himself exclusively the labour of the woman and her offspring. The wife was bought or captured, and the children were valuable articles of merchandise. The very word “family” is derived from an old Italian word, famel, meaning a slave.

From its origin in the institution of property the marriage relationship has reflected the changing needs of property. Children are no longer chattels or assets in the old sense ; they are “encumbrances,” and paterfamilias’ former power of life and death over his household is now restricted to very meagre dimensions. The present marriage contract expresses the needs of the economic dependence of women and children on the man, and becomes an instrument for the control and transmission of property. Mutual affection is quite subordinated to questions of property and income, with the consequent outcrop of hypocrisy, adultery, and unhappiness. While on the one hand the number of men who do not marry is made greater by the insecurity of their lot, on the other hand the number of women who sell themselves on the streets is increased by the inability of many to obtain otherwise even the bare necessaries of life.

But when socialisation ends the reign of capitalist property and insecurity, when woman has economic equality with man, and the fear for the children’s future is ended by communal life, then the relationship between the sexes ceases to be a property one and becomes human ; and who can doubt that modern forms must alter with such change of circumstances, and that the matrimonial market and property contract, with the buying and selling of cohabitation for title and income, must, together with the corollaries of prostitution and domestic misery, become mere memories of a dark past. Who can doubt that the relations between man and woman, when freed of the demoralising influence of economic inequality and vicious social surroundings, will be healthier and purer than ever before being based no longer on a property transaction or economic compulsion, but upon mutual affection. Yet we are told, among much other nonsense on page 29 of the book under review, that under Socialism “the union of men and women would be an affair of the State, not of mutual regard” !

The Intellectual Few.

On page 54 the reader is told, “the more the origin of wealth is enquired into, the more clearly will the truth appear that wealth is caused by the intelligence of the few, as distinguished from the labour of the many.” Now even if this were so it would not bear the inference that the propertied class are the intellectual few reaping the reward of their intellectual labour, for the wealth of the few is accumulated from the purchase and exploitation of both “manual” and “intellectual” workers. But what is the truth regarding the wonderful inventions and improvements which have occurred in industrial processes ? Have a series of supermen arisen to produce at each stroke a great wage-saving improvement ? Herbert Spencer himself has exploded the “great man” theory, and has shown that the great man is the product of his age, whilst the history of industry shows that nearly all improvements have been the result of an accumulation of small inventions which up to a certain point were ignored or despised, in spite of their possibilities, because they were not immediately cheaper to work than the older methods. But a last slight improvement, based upon and supplementing the labour of those who had gone before, rendered the new process more profitable than the former methods, and rapidly the features of that industry became transformed. In 1857, Hodge, before a Commission said : “Present spinning machinery is supposed to be a compound of about 800 inventions. The present carding machinery is a compound of about 60 patents.”

And those who wrought these improvements, were they rewarded ? And were they members of our amazingly intellectual ruling class ? They were, indeed, rawly rewarded, while it is almost entirely from men of the working class that the leading inventions have come. J. Burnley, in “The Story of British Trade and Industry,” says, “It is a notable fact that the leading inventors of the latter half of the eighteenth century were of the artizan class—humble workers who, in their cottages and little improvised workshops, quietly worked out the mechanical problems which achieved so much for the world, if not for themselves.”

John Kay, after inventing the fly shuttle, died a pauper at the end of a few years of ineffectual struggle. Wyatt, who after three years of close effort produced a machine which “spun the first thread of cotton ever produced without the intervention of human fingers,” was poor, and allied himself with Lewis Paul, of Birmingham, who promised to finance the invention. Wyatt, however, never benefited by it, for nothing came of the idea until Arkwright revised it at a later date. Another poor inventor, Crompton, set himself to combine the spinning jenny and the water frame. It took him five years of secret experiment, but he eventually succeeded and for a while quietly used his improvement in his own work. Crompton, however, was asked how he managed to spin such fine yarn ; he then let the manufacturers into the secret on their subscribing about £50. The firm of which Sir Robert Peel, the grandfather of the statesman, was principal, were the first to make big profits out of the invention, making their machines after Crompton’s model. Soon millions of the spindles were working, but Crompton died a few years later in extreme poverty. Such is, indeed, the usual answer of capitalist practice to capitalist theory. The brains of the workers are picked, and their bodily strength exhausted, in order to increase the wealth of those who own the means of living.

The whole argument that “wealth is due to the intelligence of the few” is, in reality, nonsensical. There is no intellectual labour without some degree of manual labour, and no manual labour, however mechanical, that does not imply intellectual labour also. The marketable wealth of the world is not produced otherwise than by labour, intellectual and manual; yet the fact remains that it is a non-producing class who, by their ownership of the means whereby wealth is created, and by their control of political power, are enabled to compel the people to carry on production for them, and to hand over to them all the enormous surplus that remains when the bare necessities of the producers have been grudgingly provided for.

And it is in defence of the title of this owning class to the wealth created by others, that the book under review is published. Well does the League that is responsible for the book deserve to be called, as it is by many working men, the Liberty to Rob Defence League.

F. C.Watts

Blogger's Note:

There isn't a lot of information about Frederick Millar on the net, but he does get a few mentions in Edward Bristow's 1975 article, 'The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism', which was published in The Historical Journal.

An ‘anarcho-capitalist’ explains (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last November voters in Argentina elected as President, Javier Milei, who must have styled himself at one time an ‘anarcho-capitalist’ since that’s what the media keep calling him. In January he was invited to the gathering of global elites in Davos in Switzerland and gave a speech in which he expounded his views. He had some harsh things to say about the state, seeing it, as individualist anarchists do, as the negation of ‘freedom’:

‘The state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively. . . This means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom’ (tinyurl.com/29vuvjwr).

Strict anarcho-capitalists want to abolish the state completely and transfer all its functions, including the judiciary and the armed forces, to profit-seeking private enterprises. Milei doesn’t go that far as he sees a very limited role for the state (to protect and enforce private property rights and commercial contracts) and so is technically what has been called a ‘minarchist’.

Defining his ‘libertarianism’ he said:

‘Its fundamental institutions are private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, and the division of labour and social cooperation, in which success is achieved only by serving others with goods of better quality or at a better price. In other words, capitalist successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is a hero.’

Adding ‘and this is the model that we are advocating for the Argentina of the future’. So, it looks as if he is going to try to introduce ‘minarchy’ there. The result could well be some sort of ‘anarchy’.

Capitalist heroes?

It is a measure of the desperation of workers in Argentina that they were prepared to vote into the top office a person who calls capitalists heroes.

Are successful capitalists really heroes? To have a chance to be successful you first have to obtain money to invest in producing some good or providing some service. You can get this in various ways — inherit it, borrow it, even acquire it illegally — but you have to get it. Having identified what you think might be a profitable market you use the money to rent premises, buy machinery and materials, and hire workers. You put the workers to work at producing your product which you hope to sell at a price that covers these expenses plus a mark-up for profit. If your hope is realised you end up with more money than you started with. You have made a profit.

But what is the source of this profit? Since the only way that wealth can be produced is by applying human labour to materials that originally came from nature (usually after having been fashioned and refashioned many times) the source can only be the work of those who produced what capitalists sell. It’s the difference between the value of what workers add to the materials and what they are paid as wages. The source of profits is the unpaid labour of workers. Contrary to Milei’s assertion, capitalists do appropriate wealth produced by others. That’s not very heroic.

It is true that while some capitalists succeed others fail, and that how well you know your market or can identify a new market can affect how much profit you make and whether you succeed or fail. But this doesn’t increase the amount of wealth that has been produced. It is competition between capitalists to get a share of that part of new wealth produced by the working class over and above what it costs to maintain them. ‘Capitalist successful business people’ are those who do best in this competition at the expense of their capitalist rivals.

All on their own?

Milei argued that it is ‘free trade’, ‘free enterprise’ capitalism that has been responsible for the immense increase in both productive capacity and the amount produced since 1800.

It is a bold claim to say that this was achieved by private enterprises acting all on their own in pursuit of profits without any state intervention; in fact in spite of such intervention. We hold no brief for those pro-capitalists who favour state intervention, but we must point out that the state provides a range of key services that help private enterprises to operate and succeed. For instance, by arranging for a supply of literate and educated workers, or a health service to patch up workers so they can go back to work as quickly as possible, or payments to workers who are temporarily unemployed during a slump so that their ability to work doesn’t deteriorate for when they are needed in the next boom.

Milei denounced this state provision of services for capitalist enterprises as a whole as ‘collectivism’ (and also, as might be expected, as ‘socialism’):

‘The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn’t contribute to general well-being. Quite on the contrary, it’s an intrinsically unfair idea because it’s violent. It’s unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively.’

In his view, taxing capitalist enterprises to pay for such collective services amounts to stealing some of their profits by force:

‘[T]he market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward. But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less.’

There is an element of truth in this in that, if the state goes too far in this direction — as reformist politicians want as a way of trying to improve conditions for workers under capitalism — this will have the consequence both of undermining the quest for profit that drives the capitalist economy and of rendering capitalist enterprises uncompetitive compared with their rivals from other states. It’s why all reformist governments fail and are doomed to fail. But if a state which did not provide these services for its capitalists and left their provision to profit-seeking private enterprises — as ‘anarcho-capitalists’ and ‘minarchists’ want — then this too would undermine the competitiveness of its capitalists.

It’s the job of governments, as the executive committee of their capitalist class, to get the balance right. In any event, no state has ever not provided such services, so it cannot be claimed that capitalist development since 1800 has been due to private capitalist enterprises alone. In fact, capitalism has never existed without the state. The state helped it to come into being and has helped maintain it ever since.

Can the market fail?

Milei also took a pot shot at neo-classical economic theory which, he said, ‘designs a set of instruments that, unwillingly or without meaning to, end up serving intervention by the state, socialism and social degradation’. He had in mind in particular its theory that the state should intervene to correct ‘market failures’.

According to him, market failures are impossible:

‘The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures. If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence.’

Notable ‘market failures’ that he rejected as such were the emission of too much CO2 into the atmosphere and the emergence of monopolies. He says they are not examples of the market failing. Okay, let’s accept this and see them as the result of ‘free market capitalism’ working normally. That rather weakens his case for ‘free market’ capitalism. These are indeed results of how the capitalist market economy does work and why its operation prevents states from dealing effectively with problems such as climate change. In any event, state intervention to try to correct what are perceived as market failures has nothing to do with socialism.

Milei began his address by saying that he was there to tell his audience, made up of the world’s leading capitalists and political rulers, that ‘the Western world is in danger’. This danger, he told them, came from continuing to practise ‘collectivism’. At the end he remarked: ‘I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism’. He was right. It does sound ridiculous but that’s because it is ridiculous.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: No Man is an Island . . . (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism won’t be got by evolution but by intelligent design, though it would be nice to think there was an easier way. The political shortcuts turned out to be circular, but some people never give up hope that technology might open up some fast track to the Promised Land.

It was always so. Probably when the plough was first invented there was some Neolithic version of futurist Ray Kurzweil running around the Fertile Crescent gibbering about the Coming of the Singularity, while autodidactic peasants sat around in the smoke-filled back rooms of tribal longhouses discussing the revolutionary implications of the social democratisation of agriculture. Much to their chagrin what they ended up with was kings, wars, plagues and a lousy diet. With the later invention of the printing press some people no doubt foresaw a new flowering of subversive thought and the imminent rising of the masses, just prior to being drowned in a tidal wave of pulp fiction and religious junk mail.

Of course there has been huge progress, but behind each screaming wave-front of optimism trails the long, Doppler-shifted whine of hindsight. For all the smart phones and sushi bars we’re still slaves chained to the day job, compared to whom the playboys and girls of the Neolithic seem to have enjoyed great diet and health, endless holidays and free art classes.

The plough and the printing press were key technological developments in two of the most essential human activities of all, production of material goods and distribution of information. The whole trajectory of capitalism has been towards the efficiency and economy of scale of mass production and distribution, together with their correlates, state-imposed mass ideologies. When the horrors of Nazism and Soviet Communism turned people off ‘mass’ concepts, and rising affluence meant people couldn’t be fobbed off with production-line uniformity, a new cult of the individual was born.

At first this ‘lifestyle’ capitalism was little more than a marketing scam. We could ‘individually’ commute to our individual replica jobs, eat our individual replica food in our individual replica residential boxes, while watching mass-entertainment on our individual idiot-boxes. Advertisers called us princely consumers and we bought the flattery along with the products. The more we acquired a bit of individual ‘class’, the more we forgot the collective power of class consciousness. The more the notion of individualism was fostered, the more sheep-like we became. We didn’t mature into a society of individuals, we fractured into an atomised mass, our former commonality too vulgar to preserve.

Technology is embedding the illusion. Under Soviet rule dissidents were forced to resort to self-publishing their own material, a difficult and risky business known as samizdat, or self-made. The desktop publishing and internet revolutions have given us all the technology for this kind of independent self-expression. But people forget we are all products of society and therefore not so very different, so the upshot of all this self-publishing, blogging, Facebook and supposedly interactive Web 2.0 is that we have ended up with infinite versions of uniformity. Homogenous variety, samizdat become same-as-that.

If we don’t see the illusion it’s because we don’t have the attention-span to look at the big picture but only into a mirror. Instead of opening the doors to infinity we are mostly using the internet to create a narcissistic bubble around ourselves, a self-promoting solipsism which closes out every fact or idea which contradicts our own world-view. And the advertisers are slavering to make it more so. People now get different results for the same Google search due to ‘personality’ filters they don’t even know about (New Scientist, 23 July). Each person’s information environment is determined not only by their own conscious likes and dislikes but also by automated trackers deciding what is good for them.

Astoundingly, a similar thing could happen in the world of production, with the development of individual 3D printing, now being called by some the second Industrial Revolution. When the Socialist Standard first reported on this (August 2005) it was at an early stage, able to turn out fragile trinkets. Now it is possible to ‘print’ sophisticated equipment using composite materials with complex circuitry. The first 3D-printed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle has just been successfully flown (New Scientist, 30 July) and enthusiasts predict that in the future robots will walk out of printers, fully functional with batteries included.

If they were only foreseeing a revolution in new research and development at the lab-bench, the optimists could well be right. The lag between plan and prototype is certain to decrease by at least an order of magnitude. But no, they are talking about nothing less than the ‘democratisation’ of production, just as the digerati talked about the democratisation of knowledge through the internet. Even supposing 3D printers one day become as cheap as computers, this is still to confuse democracy, where people act together, with the cult of the individual, where people act alone en masse.

While the new parochialism of the internet involves huge waste of heat and storage in order to deliver infinitely slight variations of the same thing, so each person under the illusion of personal choice may end up printing separately what they could have produced collectively. This would be like boiling a single serving of rice in separate pots, one grain at a time. Capitalism is quite capable of this sort of stupidity if there’s money in it.

Most of the benefits of progress have historically percolated up like champagne bubbles to the rich, instead of downwards like loam deposits on the poor. If the rich can afford to print whatever they want, it follows that whatever mass-production still remains must exist only to cater for the poor, with all the quality and variety that implies. The poverty gap could then become unimaginably wide. In response to this, the poor majority might use the technology, with ‘hacked’ designs to get round regulations, to print their own guns and ammunition.

The most significant aspect of 3D printers is that they can ‘print’ themselves. They can’t print food or organic compounds though, or things larger than themselves. If 3D printing is the second industrial revolution, then nanotechnology is potentially the third. Eric Drexler is famous for his inspirational writing about the possibilities of nanotech, but even he overlooked the obvious political implication of a means of production that can reproduce itself. Not only would it abolish material scarcity (which has already effectively been done) but also any possible artificial barrier to individual abundance (which certainly has not). What worker would consent to slavery when they had the means to provide all their material needs through a domestic replicating device, which itself could be infinitely replicated? Capitalism would collapse, practically overnight.

No need to get too excited though. Nobody has come close to creating a self-replicating nano device, and like nuclear fusion it may remain permanently years away. Even if it could be done, such a replicator could run away with itself and convert the entire Earth into ‘grey goo’. Even if it were made safe, the ruling class would have every reason to ensure that the technology was never developed. Even if they couldn’t suppress it, material abundance does not imply socialist consciousness any more than knowledge implies wisdom. It’s no use to live as a king in an empty palace. One way or another, socialists have still got work to do.

Paddy Shannon

Class notions and social conditioning (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In capitalist society there is a massive emphasis on the individual. It is held up that we are all individuals and in complete control of our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. The more benevolent propagators of this belief mean that everyone is a individual in a society of individuals, and that we can all work together for the benefit of all. This is closer to reality than the “individuality” that the ideologists of capitalism believe in. They propagate the world as a “dog-eat-dog” society where the strongest individual “justly” gets ahead by trampling on the others, as we see when capitalists boast of their successes. Often capitalists will put these down to their superior intellect or “strength of character”, claiming that everyone can live the lifestyle that they live if they work hard enough. That raises the question of what exactly the working class is doing if it isn’t hard work.

This kind of individuality, of getting ahead and to hell with anyone else, is in direct conflict with humans as social animals, and we can see the disastrous effect it can have. The world of miserable alienation that capitalism has created is a abomination to the irrefutable fact that humans are social creatures and function best within a form of collective community. It is often argued by socialists that this was the case far back in the mists of history, where humanity existed in a state of “primitive communism”, as in small groups of hunter-gatherers that would share the produce of their collective labour. Later, private property developed as a ruling class emerged for the first time. This new class had to defend its hold over the majority class, and in ancient society this was usually by means of a combination of superstition and violence. When the ancient world dwindled with the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new social/economic system emerged, feudalism. Feudalism is essentially a system where a feudal authority would demand payment of some form for protection against another rival authority. In time, another class – the ancestors of today’s capitalists – emerged to challenge the feudal aristocracy, and swept them away in a series of bloody revolutions, by necessity enlisting the help of the oppressed class. This led to modern capitalism. Always, the notions of the ruling class tended to become the notions of those it subjugated.

The current ruling class have cultivated such ideas as nationalism, propagating the illusion that we live in a society with a collective social interest. The more enlightened among them probably saw the effects of separating and alienating people from each other and their labour, and so stepped up the spreading of beliefs like nationalism in order to try and convince people that they were not so exploited as they really were, and that everyone had a common interest.

Nationalism is a relatively new concept for social control, since in feudal times religion was the principle method of control over the majority. The newly emerging capitalist class in Europe and later Russia had to shake the religious institutions that held sway in partnership with the aristocracy. This was sped up with the introduction of real scientific ideas, however this was not always enough to drive such ridiculous falsehoods from the minds of the people. A good example of this was just after the Russian revolution. This is generally held up as a socialist revolution, but what is clear to anyone who breaks through this misconception is that the Bolsheviks performed the role of introducing capitalist relations into Russia, and setting themselves up as a form of state bourgeoisie. Since the Russian church was a powerful ally of the Tsarist system, it had to be toppled from a position of power.

In modern capitalism, since the workers own no means of production in reality or practice, they may revolt against the unnatural separation of human from human and labour from labour, so the illusion of working collectively for the benefit of a larger community i.e. the nation, had to be propagated. To do this requires a steady flow of social conditioning and manipulation. This conditioning wouldn’t take root if people knew it was conditioning, the same way as false propaganda wouldn’t have the desired effect if people were to know they were being lied to.

It cannot be argued that the material world has no effect on the person as if every thought they have had has come from them and them alone. Human behaviour is defined by surrounding material and social conditions. Take a baby from London and raise it with a hill tribe in central Asia and it will act like one of them and follow their moral code. Take a baby from the same hill tribe and raise it in London and it will act like a Londoner, go to school, go to work, go shopping and follow the English moral code. It would be plausible to even go as far to say the idea of “individuality” cannot exist in the true sense of the word, since we are all affected by each other and the world we create, thus linked by our social nature. To be an individual in the sense that you were completely separate and define your own existence away from your species is entirely unworkable.

The representatives of the capitalist class insightful enough to understand the aspects governing human behaviour are only too eager to spread the ideas of individual “free will”, patriotism etc, as they see people coming to understand their material surroundings and the effect it has on human behaviour as a threat to the position of the ruling class. After all, if we understand each other and why people behave like they do, why would be bother with the continued existence of a minority class that conditions the majority with a worldview suited to majority exploitation?

On the whole it isn’t that calculated, because we know too well that the capitalist class have a great deal of trouble controlling the social/economic system their predecessors created. The philanthropists and reformists among them are, as always, deluding themselves by thinking that the system can somehow be turned into a society where meaning and genuine collectiveness can flourish. Often the case is that some reforms are granted, as a way of quashing worker militancy while still maintaining the capitalist class in a advantageous position. However, reforms have failed to bring comfort and meaning to most of the world’s population since the entire capitalist machine is geared towards a minority living off a majority. How can human thought and development be free to flourish when the material world that is inseparably tied to human thought is controlled by some untouchable alien power that does such horrific things as creating scarcity on purpose and making workers massacre each other for nothing but the interests of one or other ruling minority?

In our day, the capitalist class has naturally attempted to blanket the workers with its own class outlook, that of individuals and character strength determining positions of power, and that anyone who is clever enough can get to the top. While it is possible for a worker to leap up and join the capitalist class, the same way as a capitalist can be cast down into the workers, this is a extremely rare occurrence. In class society there has to be a ruling class, and a subjugated class, and since we live in capitalism, talk of “moving towards a classless society” is nothing but twaddle. The only way to truly move towards a classless society is for the subjugated majority class itself to throw off the hindering notions and ideas placed on it from its rulers, and then put a final end to the rulers, forever.

Dan Read

Human Problems (1952)

From the August 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

When discussing the problems of the present social order (or rather disorder) we usually concentrate on those whose cause is most easily traced to the property basis of society, problems such as malnutrition, disease, bad housing. But there are other perhaps more subtle but none the less widely-felt sources of human misery. They are the “human” problems, in the sense that they appear to have little or no connection with material things.

Tell a man he needs a new suit or a better meal or a larger home and he will readily agree with you. But tell him he needs to be appreciated by others outside his family circle, to feel a sense of belonging to the community, and he may well reply with something like “I don’t worry about what other people think—I can look after myself all right.” The world of Capitalism is a hard one, and (as the “successful” gentry never tire of repeating) jt has no time for weaklings or fainthearts. Yet it is an undeniable fact that the vast majority of people are treated as mere cogs in the system that, in Marx's words, has resolved personal worth into exchange value. In spite of attempts to make it appear otherwise, the market place is still essentially impersonal.

Now the worker’s energies bought by the capitalist are not something abstract—they are part of a human being who is deeply influenced by the process of which he is part. Small wonder that someone who answers an advert, for “skilled hands” is easily led to believe he is valued by society at large, as by his employer, only for the skill he possesses. Not unnaturally he tries to come to terms with his environment to fit into society as it appears to him, and in doing so his thoughts tend to be moulded into the pattern that ensures the continuation of the existing state of affairs.

The nature of the system, then, has its effects on the natures of the individuals who support it, actively or passively. It is based on exploitation, on the survival of the slickest, and on the doctrine that some men are naturally inferior to others. Therefore it is not surprising that these concepts are reflected in people’s outlook on all aspects of life. Although it is unquestionably offensive to human dignity and self-esteem to feel oneself exploited by others, it is perhaps some compensation to believe that that’s the way of the world. Some have been lucky, some haven’t, some have “got what it takes,” others have only themselves to blame for their failure to make good—these are very comforting views for the privileged minority. But what is the price paid for thinking in this way by those who cannot hide from themselves the fact that they have got hold of the dirty end of the stick and are never likely to be able to leave go?

To the extent that the great majority of people desire approval and appreciation by others they also try to avoid being hurt by the absence of these things. They do this by building up a sort of self-defensive armour which protects them to some extent from the insults and injuries inflicted on them by strangers or even by “friends.” This is how Hortense Powdermaker, the anthropologist, describes the calculating Hollywood outlook, the capitalist mentality par excellence:—

“To the casual observer all relations seem to be on a remarkably personal level. But this is merely a sugar-coating for a deep impersonality. This impersonality comes out in two important ways. People are property in no uncertain terms, usually valuable property, and everyone has his price. Underlying the endearing terms of every conversation are the questions: 'What can I get from him? ’. . . 'What does he want from me?' . . . ‘ Will I need him in the future, if not now? ’Human relationships are regarded as basically manipulative and are lacking in all dignity."

By and large the attitude of present society towards its members is not calculated to restore the feeling of adequacy and personal worth that is lost by those who fail to “make the grade.” The greatest tragedy is that the cult of success is worshipped not only by those on top but by those underneath too. Intense individualism, the desire to stake one’s claim to recognition in the same way as to property, overlays the social feeling in man. As Barrows Dunham sums up capitalist morality, “The bricks which are to build my happiness I take from the wreckage which was yours.”

The effect that all this has upon the individual is to set up the same sort of conflict within himself as exists in society as a whole. The bankruptcies in the business world have their counterparts in the degradation of men, who are often led by their unfortunate experiences to believe that they are incapable of making a success of even the simplest relationship or job. Being thrown out of a job not only means greater poverty for people but it also shatters their confidence in the stability of their world. Far from being the natural state of affairs that its defenders claim it is, Capitalism goes so much against the grain of humanity that some doctors now believe that most physical illness has its root cause in forms of neurosis resulting from suppressed desires, anxiety and worry.

Many of the readers' letters and advice bureaux that have become such regular features in the mass- circulation newspapers and magazines are concerned with human interest problems. The frequency with which a few basic types of question arise—on frustration, boredom, loneliness, marriage failures—is too great to justify dismissing them as individual or personal affairs. The writers only mirror the thoughts, feelings, desires and ambitions of a large section of the community. One thing stands out clearly—there is a great difference between the good intentions or social feeling of most people towards those they come in contact with and their attitude to the wider problems of humanity as a whole.

But this difference is becoming less and less and at the same time the receptivity of socialist ideas is increasing. The case for Socialism amounts to saying that social affairs ought to be planned and intended in the same way that man's control over nature has been planned and intended. Society ought to be pursuing a purpose that is broadly human, not narrowly individual and class-based. The development of Capitalism as a world system is fast breaking down old barriers of prejudice and parochial thinking that have divided mankind against itself. People are more and more questioning the glib explanation of war as being due to the Eastern (or Western) mentality, or of business success being due to the inborn superiority of all capitalists. Man's knowledge of himself is at last beginning to accelerate, and soon it will convince him that he can be an agent in making the world he wants instead of a patient suffering the one he has got.

Production solely for use will not only solve material problems but will also give a fresh outlook on life to those whose horizon has been limited by subservience to private property and all that goes with it. The changing of the economic base of society will mean the changing of the human relationships that arise from it. No longer will people suffer an environment that often convinces them that every man's hand is against them, and no longer will the superficial differences between man and man overshadow the common interests that unite the whole of humanity.

Stan Parker

Socialism and Individualism. (1904)

From the December 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

The polemicists of reaction set themselves up as defenders of Individualism.

According to them Socialism will be the sacrificing of the individual to Society.

Is there any foundation for such a statement?

None.

Socialism is not an obstacle to the physical, intellectual, or moral development of man.

On the contrary, it is to-day the only social order capable of assuring the preservation of the individual.

Not only is capitalism the opponent of Individualism but it is its most redoubtable enemy.

Bourgeois society has sacrificed the living to the dead, the productive majority to the parasitical minority. It has made man a slave to the Rich. It has turned against the individual all the forces that have been forged to conquer Nature.

The individual has nothing to hope for, but everything to fear from a continuation of Capitalism.

The exploitation of man by man, of which the defenders of capitalism demand the continuance, is a powerful factor of organic degeneracy.

Denial is impossible.

Under capitalism man loses his means of action and development.

The iniquitous social system deprives him of the most primitive rights, refuses him the means of wealth production, the products of his hand and brain, condemns him to live in slavery, poverty, and ignorance.

Under this régime man weakens, deforms, and wastes.

The degeneration of the people, submissive to capitalism, is not controvertible.

It is proved – we have established it elsewhere – by a decrease in height, weight, muscular force, fertility, sight, hearing, smell, memory, etc., and by an increase of professional maladies, bodily deformities, accidents, lunatics, etc.

The cause of those evils is known, it is the exploitation of man by man.

The interest of the individual demands the abolition of social inequalities, the microbe of all degeneracy.

Socialism demands:

The integral development of man, physically, intellectually, and morally, the free growth of the individual.

Scientific Individualism – Individualism in the highest essence – is SOCIALISM.

Let us prepare its triumph.

(From the French of Désiré Descamps by A. W. Pearson )

Individualism and social evolution. (1926)

From the October 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

The channels of propaganda open to the defenders of the present system of society are enormous. Apart from their control of “Education,” with its distortion of history, their Press, with its daily circulation of millions, would enable them—if they had an answer to the Socialist attitude—to cancel any effort the latter could make.

Their inability to keep the workers in the ignorant and docile state that they desire is demonstrated on the one hand by the steady growth of understanding among the working class of their common interest, and the fading of their prejudice against the propaganda of Socialism. And on the other hand by the panic that is exhibited on certain occasions by the Capitalist Class, breaking out in all manner of forms, and giving further evidence of the hopeless case they have to handle.

Their latest attempt to check the growth of working-class enlightenment is the formation of a company, with £20,000 capital, called “The Individualist Bookshop, Ltd.”

The Daily News (15/7/26), in giving particulars of this company, tells us that:

”The object of the company is to provide a London bookshop, where the Individualist as opposed to the Socialist point of view will be expressed in various ways.”

“Only books free from what the promoters consider the unsound economic theories of Socialism; will be sold.”

“It will collect books on economic subjects, written from the Individualist point of view : promote the publication of such books; provide a reference library for the use of students ; establish a circulating library, and organise lectures.”

An “Individualist Bookshop” that is a limited company would make even its founders laugh, if the concern to save their skins did not prevent them seeing the joke.

But apart from the stupid title of this company, with its £20,000 capital, described by Sir Ernest Benn, who is largely responsible for its formation, as a “modest beginning,” let us take a book from the shelf of this peculiar shop, and examine it.

The first point that strikes us is, that before the book could be produced, a written language was necessary, and before this, language could be written it was developed in an oral form. This, articulate speech, commencing with man in his most primitive state, is his earliest effort to lift himself above an individualist and animal existence and become a social being. Speech, which is of necessity social, emphasises the distinction betwen man and the lower forms of life.

During a period of thousands of years, and by the co-operation of unnumbered people, was produced the dialects out of which have grown the modern languages of to-day.

From the spoken to the written word there is again an enormous period of time, extending over thousands of years, from the early savage to the dawn of civilisation. This fact gives us an idea of the countless number of people who contributed to the production of writing from the hieroglyphics to the alphabets now in use.

Another factor needed in the production of this book is the printing press, which has been made possible by inventions which carry us back to savagery. The discovery of the use of fire by the early savage, and later in the next period the production of iron, are inventions which, apart from the influence they had on the state of society in which they were discovered, are still in the twentieth century needed to produce the modern printing machine, which owes its existence to the work, thought, and cooperation of thousands of generations of people.

This simple little book not only represents the accumulation of knowledge through the ages from earliest man to the present day, but is also in the modern sense a social product.

The miners that secure the various minerals, viz., coal, iron, and copper; the lumbermen who fell the trees; the transport workers who convey this material to the mills and factories where other workers await to convert it into the numerous forms needed to produce this “individualist” book, such as the machinery that reduces the giant of the forest into pulp for paper, the circular saw that rips others into planks, the printing press and the tools used for its production, are all necessary to make this book. Then the workers in the building trade erect the factory, and the different branches of the printing industry commence operations.

With this vast army of workers the picture is not complete. The farm labourer, the miller, and the baker; the weaver, and the tailor; the tanner, and the bootmaker are needed to supply this industrial army with food and clothing. We see, therefore, that in the production of a simple article, not only must the individual take part as a social unit in that work, but that each industry is dependent upon many others, a dependence that often extends beyond national boundaries.

Without the accumulated knowledge of the past, and the social activities of the present wage workers, Sir E. Benn and his friends would be climbing among the branches of trees and living their individualist life on nuts and roots.

We have seen that speech was man’s first step forward. This implies the common acceptance of certain sounds to mean certain things. As the language developed, the rules governing it grew and changed in proportion, and now to speak a language we must learn and obey the rules that control it. This is generally accepted, and even the Anarchist falls into line without an ungrammatical curse at the necessity of so doing.

As the rules alter with the development of a language, so with society. The rules and regulations are changed as the methods of producing wealth and the character of its ownership changes, and creates new needs and interests, and makes old laws and customs obsolete.

In their early days the Capitalist Class forced the development of society forward at a rapid pace; institutions that stood in the way were crushed out of existence. The Handicraftman and the Trade Guilds could not survive against the competition of factory production, made possible by the development of machinery and the use of steam power. With these changes the worker lost his individual character as a producer and became a social unit.

The rapid growth of capitalist production with the concentration of capital into fewer hands have forced these concerns beyond their individual control. Nationalisation or joint stock companies managed by a staff of wage slaves takes their place. The average capitalist draws his dividend without knowing anything of the business he owns shares in, and in many cases does not know where his money is invested. By the manipulation on the Stock Exchange he can go to bed owning an interest in one part of the world and wake up to find that interest transferred to another concern thousands of miles away.

While taking no part in production, but owning the wealth that is produced, the Capitalist Class find the task of concealing their useless nature from the workers becomes more difficult. With the distinction between the non-producing owners and the propertyless workers becoming clearer as the system developes, its defenders are alarmed at the growth of the propaganda that points these facts out to the workers and which explains that as their trouble is the lack of the wealth which they produce in abundance, the remedy is to abolish the system which enables this useless class to rob them of the fruits of their labour. This implies a change in the form of ownership from private to common. The conditions are ripe for this change, which can be accomplished when a majority of the workers know what they need and how to get it.

Recognising that the confusion of the working class is one safeguard against the overthrow of Capitalism and the establishment of Socialism, these defenders of the present system raise the cry of individualism to defend a form of society based on social production, and in which the exploitation of the workers by the capitalist has lost its individual character and become one of class robbery.

For the same reason they welcome confusionists like Ramsay MacDonald, who, speaking at the “Christian Endeavour Convention,” says, “You are fashioning the world into the likeness which is in your soul ” (Daily News, 22/6/1926).

But such nonsense, which would disgrace a village parson, will have no effect on the workers when they know what they fashion neither a world nor a system in either their mind or “soul,” but that the means of wealth production prevailing when the present system of society ends will form the starting-point or foundation in the one that follows. Also that the character of the ownership of the social wealth and the manner in which it is produced determine the nature of the class struggle. And, further, that the political institutions necessary to maintain the present system offers to the modern wage workers the means to end it and establish Socialism.

Securing political power, they will overthrow the Capitalist Class and establish a system of common ownership in harmony with social production.

The Socialist, therefore, while recognising the causes of social development, does not ignore the human factor, but gives it its true value. By this means he avoids the pitfalls of the Utopian, who builds castles in the air or “fashions a world” with his “soul” for a pattern. But, acting in conformity with the knowledge obtained from a correct conception of history, he carries on the class struggle, knowing that this war, fought out by an enlightened working class, must end in their emancipation from the present degrading position of slavery.

E. L.

Socialism and the essentials of Anarchism. (1926)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another correspondent’s letter and our reply.

The Editor, Socialist Standard,

Socialist Party of Great Britain,

17, Mount Pleasant, W.C.1.

Dear Sir,

I have followed with interest the discussion which has been conducted in recent issues of your journal with Mr. Beer, of Deptford. It has prompted me to pen the following observations, which I trust you will publish together with a reply in your next issue.

A statement from you upon the theoretical differences which you assume exist between Socialism and Anarchism would be welcome. You must recognise that criticism of the activities of exponents of a creed is not criticism of the creed itself. The essential feature of Anarchist philosophy is the recognition, in the words of Herbert Spencer “that each man possesses the right to do that which he wills in fulfilling the demands of his own life, in so far as he infringes not the equal right of every other man.” Or, in other words, that he possesses rights as an individual. Anarchism asserts further that individuals when confronted with alternatives of action, choose that which is conducive to self-interest. Private property society tends to confine this self-interest within the narrow zone of immediate economic advantage, thus placing a premium upon petty cunning and scheming. It stifles the development and increasing differentiation of individuality and insists upon conformity to type. Mankind, however, is struggling, for the most part, unconsciously, toward a society in which the liberty of the individual, and the interest of the community will be synonymous terms. Recognising the essentially egoistic motivation of human behaviour, Anarchism asserts that only by fulfilling his obligations to himself in developing his individuality, can Man act in the communal interest. For individuality implies a logical self-completeness. The individual is a self-contained universe, the peculiar product of heredity and environment to whom no other individual is exactly similar. Consequently, no one but himself can legislate for himself, and therefore Anarchism is only realisable in a community of persons who have freely associated for mutual benefit. The antithesis of Anarchy is coercion. Moral values in such a free society would be based upon equity, and a mutual respect which is foreign tQ our present social structure.

The opinion is often expressed that Anarchists lack a policy, a suggestion with which I will now deal.

A blind evolution operates in the social, as in the organic and cosmic spheres, oblivious to human desires. Revolutions occur when the appropriate stage of evolution has been attained. They are the culmination of processes operating unnoticed over a lengthy period. Recognising this to be so, and also that man, in common with all matter, is the creature of the environmental stimuli amongst which he exists, Anarchists can only hope to convert humanity to an outlook diametrically opposed to that which its social surroundings induces, by the presentment of a clearly defined revolutionary gospel. That is the Anarchist policy, as I understand it. Persistent propaganda, characterised by clarity of thinking and consistent adherence to established principles. I used the term “Humanity,” above, intentionally. For the whole of mankind are the victims of social shortcoming, a logical deduction from acceptance of economic determinism which can scarcely be refuted, but is apt to be forgotten. The class conflict is the blind struggle of two camps, both of whom suffer from the same disease, which it is the role of the socially subservient to cure.

This is a brief sketch of my conception of Anarchist philosophy and policy. Trusting for a reply in the “ S.S.,” I am,

Yours sincerely,

John Adamson.

Our Reply.

This letter is printed as a further example of the difficulty in obtaining a statement of the Anarchist attitude upon social questions. The writer sets out by upholding Herbert Spencer’s individualistic dictum which followed from Spencer’s defence of private property in the means of life. In the very next sentence, our Anarchist rejects Spencer and opposes private property society. The argument that the individual possesses rights has been answered by other Anarchists that might is right, and the only right. The fundamental fallacy of the natural rights theory was completely refuted by Spencer himself in his “Study of Sociology” in his masterly statement of the organic nature of society.

Our correspondent is another Anarchist who ignores the fundamental conflict in Socialist and Anarchist ideas.

He claims that mankind are going towards a society in which individual and communal interest will be harmonious. What will be the basis of that society? Our Anarchist does not say. Our position is briefly that economic evolution has made common ownership of the means of life the inevitable next step in social progress owing to the form taken by the modern instruments of production. They cannot be individually owned except by a class of exploiters with the resulting poverty and insecurity of today. The economic pressure upon working-class life will compel the workers to seek knowledge to change the system in accord with the social necessities of production—social ownership. Further, that as the manner of ownership determines the manner of control, common ownership decrees democratic control by the wealth-producers.

Our correspondent offers no alternative to the Socialist position. He does not even deal with it. If he was a supporter of private ownership, his individualistic theories might be logical. If he agrees with common ownership, he must appreciate the necessity of social control.

The basis of social as well as individual life is food, clothing and shelter—the material requirements of life. How will they be produced and distributed in our Anarchist’s future society? We are not told. We are told that mankind is struggling unconsciously towards individual and social harmony. But our correspondent also says that Anarchism can only be realised by a body of persons who have freely associated for mutual benefit.

Which of his two positions he really favours we do not know. Economic necessity being the driving force, the workers will be compelled to carry on production for themselves. That economic necessity will not wait until the fruition of our correspondent’s dream of everybody freely agreeing to the terms of association. The common welfare decides, and therefore in matters of social necessity, such as the operation of the great means of production and distribution—the majority will count. Mr. Adamson and individuals who resolutely object to all forms of coercion will find that economic evolution is a great coercing force. In the production of every day’s means of living, all the producers must share upon a commonly agreed plan—democratically decided—not a plan that makes our everyday wants wait upon a whole series of groups of individuals debating and arguing until the last waverer is won to the others’ point of view. These matters of social evolution and economic development are forgotten bv our correspondent, who evidently does not see that the means of production demands co-operative working.

We are offered statements such as : “the individual is a self-contained universe,” and that “no one but himself can legislate for himself.” These are completely refuted by our Anarchist himself when he claims that mankind are struggling towards a society in which the individual and the communal interests will be synonymous. If the individual is a self-contained universe, why our correspondent’s desire for a community of persons for mutual benefit? Why the need for propaganda amongst others? The insistence of self-interest as a guiding motive by our correspondent ignores the facts pointed out by the Socialist, namely, that a common interest existing among the working-class, it is to their interest to act together as a class to establish a society which promotes the self-interests of the workers : Socialism.

We have frequently, in these columns, stated the attitude of Socialism to Anarchism, and do not feel that it is worth while to go into the whole matter once more at present, especially as each Anarchist who writes has an anarchism all of his own, each one apparently being a law unto himself, if not ”a self-contained universe.”

Adolph Kohn

Letter: Socialism and the fundamentals of Anarchism. (1926)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following letter in criticism of our article on Socialism and Parliamentary Action which appeared in the March issue. Our answer to Mr. Beer follows his letter.

Non-Governmentalism.

Concerning your reply to an article (Socialism and Parliamentary Action) for March last, while complimenting the S.S. for being the only paper to which we can refer for a clear exposition of the fundamentals of Socialism, I contend that you are exceedingly biassed in so far as Anarchism is concerned. You mislead your readers into thinking that the Leninists, together with the admirers of G. A. Aldred and other such like gentry are Anarchists because they may happen to advocate violence. Do not these people also advocate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? And is this not Parliamentarism in its most despotic form? Have you never read literature by Socialists who have also advocated violence? And would you call them Anarchists because they have done so? Certainly not. It is simply their opinion of a method whereby they can accomplish their objective. I have often noticed statements to the effect in the S.S. that the time is ripe for Socialism, but the reason we have not got it is because the people neither understand or want it; but when the people do want it they will have it, and not until then. This is just what applies to Anarchism. You say that we have no alternative to Parliamentary action. Our alternative is simply to make our own contracts instead of other people making them for us; and to resist taxation because we object to paying the salaries of the officials by whom, and the machinery by which we are ground to powder. As far as our method is concerned, for now it is sufficient for us to advocate Anarchism. When a sufficient number of people understand, it is they who will determine their method, as conditions and circumstances are continually changing. Come, let’s straiten ourselves out. Why not, instead of attacking methods of individuals, start discussing the fundamentals of the Philosophy of Anarchism?

(1) Has Society any more right to dominate the Individual than the Individual has to dominate Society?

(2) Does Society know better than me how I prefer to enjoy myself?

(3) Does not Socialism imply two classes : the Governing and the Governed?

(4) To whom does the product of a man’s labour belong?

To the above question I may add that if you answer it as a Socialist it is due to the fact that you fail to understand the exchange of equivalents.

(5) Has Society any more right to exploit the Individual than the Individual, or a set of Individuals, have to exploit Society ?

(6) Does not Socialism, Communism, Toryism, Trade Unionism, etc., stand for the subordination of the Individual to Society ?

(7) Can there be freedom in Society whilst not even one man in Society has the liberty to think, speak, and act in accordance with his own desires, so long as he does not infringe upon the liberty of another?

(8) Is not the goal of human happiness, Liberty ?

P.S.—I regret lack of space. I hope you will publish this in full. If you are prepared to go deeper into this matter, say so in your reply. If it is not published, you need not make any explanation, as I shall know.

Yours for Liberty,

A. E. Beer.

Deptford, S.E.

Our Reply.

The reference to violence in the above letter is no answer to our position. Violence has been advocated and used by defenders of capitalism of all types, conservative and reformist. That is true. The special kinds of violence advocated and used by Anarchists we have shown to be not only useless but thoroughly dangerous to a working class struggling for emancipation. The advocacy of barricades by our March correspondent showed the futility of the opponents of political action, and the above letter offers no alternative to the policy of the conquest of political power. The opposition to political action is an Anarchist attitude, whatever the Anti-Politicals may call themselves.

Our correspondent’s objection to paying for the cost of governments “to grind us to powder,” is not a working-class objection. As our March article showed, the working class do not pay for the cost of government. The workers receive on the average just enough to live on, and the capitalists therefore must pay (out of the surplus extracted from the workers) for the cost of government and officialdom. Hence their cry of “economy.”

The numbered questions asked by Mr. Beer are answered under the same number :—

(1) Rights depend upon power to enforce them. Society is compelled to act against the individual whose actions interfere with the well-being of the mass. But the class-divided society of to-day involves the mass being subjected by the few. A Socialist society means that the population will have interests in common, and the opportunity of dominating will have passed with the passing of property and class rule.

(2) Mr. Beer quite possibly knows best how he prefers to enjoy himself, but, in doing so, as an individualist, he may quite possibly make it impossible for others to enjoy themselves. The capitalist enjoying himself in his own way spells misery for millions.

(3) To ask such a question as whether Socialism implies two classes, governed and governing—implies complete ignorance of Socialism. Socialism means common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution, and, therefore, the abolition of classes. Full and real democratic control under Socialism also implies the absence of classes.

(4) Asking to whom does the product of a man’s labour belong implies that we are living in an economic world where an individual produces something by himself. Modern industry is co-operative, and any article is the result of the combined and cooperative labours of many workers. Today the product of the workers’ labour belongs legally to the employer; in a Socialist society the product will be used and enjoyed by the wealth producers alone, as there will be no owning or employing class to exploit the workers.

(5) This question ignores social evolution altogether. Exploitation depends upon suitable economic conditions, and until they have arisen it is not possible. The words right and rights are used by our critic, but never defined. “The right” to exploit is useless unless the power to exploit is supplied by the existence of an owning and non-owning class side by side, so that those without property are compelled to produce for the owners and to the owner’s advantage. Exploitation was once necessary to the evolution of society, but it has carried us so far that it has now become a hindrance and a menace to the further evolution of society.

(6) Society, embracing all the individuals within it as an organic whole, is obviously paramount in those affairs that concern society as a whole as against the individual. A class-divided society does not involve questions of the individual versus society, but members of one class versus members of the other. A society of common interests like Socialism would be paramount in those affairs that concerned the social body. The affairs that are purely personal and do not involve social relations would be the concern of the individual alone.

(7) Freedom of speech and action are obviously limited under Capitalism in order to maintain Capitalist Class rule. They fear the spread of revolutionary knowledge. A Socialist system in its very nature would make for the free expression of the individual in his thoughts and actions as long as the individual did not become a danger to the lives and liberties of his fellows.

(8) Is Liberty the goal of human happiness? The use of sentimental expressions in common use and misuse may mean a thousand and one things. Anarchists and other dodgers of economic evolution like to talk in these phrases, as it sounds well and idealistic. But what do they mean? You might reverse the question and ask : Is happiness the goal of liberty? Happiness and liberty are both conditioned on economic life, and the economic evolution has made possible (although not actual) happiness for all. Liberty for the mass is certainly impossible in a slave society such as chattel slavery, feudalism or capitalism. Abstract liberty means nothing. Economic freedom is the key to the situation, and until it is won by the workers all political and other so-called liberties remain merely the privileges granted to slaves, privileges arising out of economic development. When economic freedom is won by the coming of Socialism, the other liberties will follow. But absolute liberty, such as Kropotkin talks of, for the individual is impossible outside of a desert island, where it becomes liberty to go insane or die. Social freedom made possible for the worker by social growth and economic development will be a freedom invested with meaning by the possibilities that an advanced social world will usher in for each and all. In conclusion, we would say that these questions are suitable to an age of individualist thought, and apparently the questioner never thinks of what is made necessary by evolution, but simply disregards the needs of the situation and the possibilities at hand. He seems to think it is sufficient to think out some abstract principles of “right” and “justice,” and to concern himself with the individual, forgetting the inter-dependence of each worker resulting from social production.

Adolph Kohn

The soul of Oscar Wilde (2021)

From the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

I had often seen Oscar Wilde described as a socialist for his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, but I’d never read it. So when it was published in a recent selection of Wilde’s works (Oscar Wilde. In Praise of Disobedience, edited by Neil Bartlett, Verso, 2020), this seemed to me an opportunity to fill that gap. I was more familiar with the works Wilde is much more famous for – his plays (e.g. The Importance of Being Earnest), his poetry (e.g. The Ballad of Reading Gaol), and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and of course with his spectacular fall from grace when he was imprisoned for sodomy in an age that criminalised homosexuality and brought the writer to poverty and exile before he died in 1900 at the age of 46.

In a beautifully written introduction to this collection, the editor describes ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ as ‘the writing of a man who knew all about being wounded, worried, maimed, and in danger’. And there’s no doubt that this is a tormented piece of writing. Its main theme is the quest for better social circumstances in which artists and all people can express their being freely and openly and without fear of outraging existing norms or incurring interdiction or punishment. But, given the essay’s title, I was rather surprised that a good deal of it is not specifically about socialism or indeed about any kind of politics at all. As much as anything else it’s about the role of art in human society and in particular the position of artists in Wilde’s time and the problems they faced. The connection of this to socialism is that, in what Wilde sees as a socialist society, artists would not have to abide by the strictures and constraints imposed on them in his own society. So we can agree with the editor of this volume that what we have here, at one level at least, is ‘an aesthetics of radicalism’.

But what is the ‘socialism’ of the title that Wilde sees as being necessary and through which man’s true ‘soul’ would be capable of free expression? In many ways it does seem strikingly close to the Socialist Party’s version of socialism – a world of common ownership, voluntary cooperation and free access – summed up as follows early in the essay: ‘Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting cooperation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of each member of the community.’ There is much else along these lines – from ‘the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible’, to ‘it is only in voluntary associations that man is fine’, to ‘the true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is’, and ‘when private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist’. On issues like authority and human nature too, Wilde is strikingly ‘modern’ in his thought: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised’ (…) ‘The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes’.

But Wilde also has another axe to grind, one which at first sight may seem to run contrary to the vision he initially outlines. He tells us, repeatedly, that he prizes above all what he calls ‘individualism’. In a different context this could of course appear a way of describing the ‘every man for himself’ ethic which is at the heart of capitalist society. But Wilde sees ‘individualism’ not as the war of each person against the other, but rather a way of realising and releasing human energies in each individual to allow them to fulfil their personal potential in building a free cooperative society, a society in which ‘every man must be left quite free to choose his own work’. In Wilde’s view ‘private property has set up an Individualism that is false’, crushing true individualism, which for him is not egotism, since ‘the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that’. But, he goes on, ‘when man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously’. And his exaltation of individualism ends on the most exalted of notes: ‘With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy, Individualism. No one will waste his life in accumulating things and the symbols for things’.

This is Wilde’s vision, but what of the means to achieve it? As the editor of this collection quite rightly points out, ‘the thing (…) that will surprise a modern reader most – given its title – is that it proposes no political or politicised action of any kind’. In other words, it contains no prescriptions on how the ‘adjustments’ to the society Wilde advocates would take place. So though he seems to be advocating socialism in the Socialist Party’s terms, he does not follow the Socialist Party’s proposal to achieve it, i.e. through political action via the spreading of socialist consciousness followed by democratic action through the ballot box. But though Wilde proposes no specific means of achieving socialism, he does make clear that he is not looking for the ‘socialism’ of state control (‘It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do.’). And so of course in adopting such a position, Wilde would not have found favour with many of the so-called ‘socialists’ of his day, for example the Fabians, who advocated state legislation to change social conditions. It must be said, however, that there is some residual attachment to the state in Wilde’s thinking, perhaps stemming from the same kind of failure of the imagination to be found in many of today’s ‘anti-capitalists’, a failure to imagine radically enough. In Wilde’s socialism, the state still does seem to have an existence, not apparently as a governing body, but, as he puts it, ’a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities’. But, there again, this may be a question of terminology and what Wilde is describing is socialist organisation under another name.

So, what was my impression on reading this much-mentioned work for the first time? Was I enthused about Wilde’s vision of socialism or was I disappointed? Definitely more the first than the second and, especially given the time at which the work was written and the circumstances of that time, I would want to forgive certain flights of fancy by the author (for example something of an attachment to Christianity or at least to the figure of Christ), a tendency towards sweeping statements (part of what the editor describes as Wilde’s ‘firework display of opinion’) and the occasions on which he does not seem to entirely share the vision of a socialist world and how to achieve it of other socialists of his day (e.g. Marx or William Morris), a vision which continues to be entirely relevant today.

Howard Moss

A Strikebreakers Charter (1985)

From the July 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent controversy in the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) which led to the resignation of its general secretary. Larry Gostin, over whether or not the right to work during a strike is a fundamental "civil liberty", showed up the unreal legalistic world in which civil libertarians imagine we are living. “Civil and religious liberty" was one of the slogans under which the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which resulted in political power passing into the hands of the direct ancestors of the present capitalist ruling class, were carried out. This was based on what has been called, appropriately, the theory of possessive individualism in which human beings were seen as originally free and independent individuals who had set up social and political institutions as a way of preserving and furthering their individual interests and rights. This was a revolutionary doctrine at the time as it provided a justification for opposing political regimes left over from feudalism as illegitimate, which denied individuals their supposed nature-given (or god-given, as some put it) right freely to pursue their own self-interest in the economic field. Today this ideology is somewhat anachronistic (the Orange Order parades under it each year in Northern Ireland) and leads to bizarre conclusions when applied to modern-day capitalism.

If we are to take this ideology literally, the fundamental activity of any society — the production of wealth — is achieved today by certain members of society freely contracting to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary to certain other members of society. As this is a contract freely entered into by individuals it can also, according to the ideology of civil liberty, be just as freely ended at any time by one or other party. For instance, if the seller of labour power recognises that the buyer (the employer) has not fully respected their side of the bargain, or if he or she simply wants a better deal, then they are free to refuse to work; they can go on strike. Thus civil libertarians are prepared to recognise a right to strike as a fundamental civil liberty possessed by all individuals in a "free" society. But equally, those like Larry Gostin argue, an individual has the liberty not to strike if he or she so chooses, even if the rest of their work colleagues have decided to exercise their individual right to strike. Hence, for them the right to strike-break is also a civil liberty, just as fundamental as the right to strike.

This whole theory is based on a number of myths, above all that the wages contract is a bargain between free and equal individuals. This is not at all the case since one side (the employer) has the whip-hand by virtue of being a member of the class which monopolises the means of production; that is to say, the means of life. This results in the rest of society being able to live only by selling their ability to work to an employer. They have no choice about this — they are forced to sell it as a condition for obtaining some access to the things they need to live. But this is not all; the employers only agree to buy the ability to work of individual members of the excluded class if they think they can make a profit out of selling what they produce. In other words, the class which monopolises the means of production in effect uses its position to hold the rest of society to ransom by extracting a tribute from them as a condition for allowing them to use the means of production.

So the fundamental social activity of wealth production, far from being achieved through free contracts made between individuals as civil libertarian theory assumes, is in fact achieved through the economic and political coercion of one class in society by another. Social relations at the point of production are relations of coercion, domination and exploitation, in which individual rights are overridden and where might is right. This places strikes in a completely different light. They are a means resorted to by members of the excluded, exploited class to resist and mitigate their oppression and exploitation by the monopolising, employing class. They are part of the class struggle built into the capitalist society which the revolutionary civil libertarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped to usher in.

To be effective, a strike needs to involve as many members of the workforce as possible, ideally all of them, since in their struggle to resist the downward pressure from their employers the only weapons the workers have are their members, their determination and, above all, their unity. That "unity is strength" is something workers have learned by bitter experience. Strikes can — and have in the past — been the work of a determined minority imposing their will on a majority of their colleagues. This can work, but experience has also shown that a strike has much more chance of success if it has the approval of at least a majority of those concerned. This is why it has become a working class tradition to take strike decisions democratically, whether by a show of hands, a delegate conference, individual ballot, or some other way. A unanimous decision would be ideal, and sometimes this is achieved, but more normally the decision to strike is a majority decision. From the point of view of class interest of the workers involved, it is reasonable that this majority decision should be binding on those who voted against strike action as, if the minority were allowed to go to work, the effectiveness of the strike would be undermined. A strike is a trial of strength, a battle in the class war in which unity is an important, in fact the key weapon on the strikers' side. So for naive civil libertarians to intervene in such trials of strength by proclaiming, in accordance with some abstract principle, the right of individual members of the minority to go to work, is to weaken the strikers' side and so, objectively, to strengthen that of the employers. No wonder the trade union members of the NCCL voted against the right to work during a strike as a fundamental liberty. And no wonder Gostin and the others won the support of the media, Tory and SDP Members of Parliament and other opponents of the working class and their trade unions.

We will give Gostin the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is sincere but naive (rather than a conscious agent of the employing class), but this episode well illustrates the unreal view civil libertarians have of the world in which we are living. Present-day society is not a community of free and equal members but a society divided into classes with irreconcilable interests, an antagonism which manifests itself from time to time in strikes. Rather than proclaiming the right of strikebreakers to work during a strike, civil libertarians would be advised to examine whether the fact of a minority monopolising the means of production to the exclusion of the rest of society is not a much more fundamental infringement of the principle they proclaim of an individual's right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". For the class monopoly of the means of production means wage-slavery and the denial of free access to what they need to live and to enjoy life to the majority of the members of society. This is a major denial of liberty today, one whose removal would usher in a really free society of equals in which legal guarantees to protect the rights of the individual would be unnecessary since all individuals would be free. As a matter of fact, with the abolition of class society strikes would no longer happen because the antagonism of interests of which they are a manifestation would have disappeared.

The right to strike is not a characteristic of a free society; on the contrary, it is the hallmark of an unfree society since strikes are only necessary when society is divided into antagonistic classes, one of which exploits the other. Having said this, what is called the right to strike (but which is in reality the might to strike) is important to the wage and salary earning class as long as class society lasts.

Adam Buick