Finance and Industry: For the record (1963)

The Finance and Industry Column from the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the record

Britain's industrial revolution was powered by coal and forged in iron. It was the Darby's of Coalbrookdale, a family of ironmasters, who pioneered the technique of first coking the coal which in turn enabled the use of English ores; in less than half a century, coal and iron between them had transformed the face of England. Since then coal has lost ground to oil, but iron and steel continue to dominate the economy of world capitalism.

It was iron that provided a material strong enough to stand up to steam and so paved the way for Watt’s engines. Industry was able to get away from the rivers and streams and its dependence on waterwheels. Hundreds of miles of canals were built in no time to cope with the increased demands of the blast furnaces for coal. Roads were built to carry away the manufactures.

In the I850's, iron gave way to steel with the developments introduced by Bessemer and Siemens of using “blowers” to raise the furnace temperature and get rid of the impurities in the iron. Since then there have been further improvements, using electric furnaces for special steels and, very recently, the use of oxygen instead of air for the blast. At the same time, as the industry has grown bigger and bigger, more use has been made of the integrated plant principle whereby all the processes of steelmaking are concentrated on the same site- hence the growth of the huge complexes which are the dominant feature today.

These installations need vast capital resources. United States Steel, the biggest producer in the world, has a share capital of over £1,000 million and its nearest rival. Bethlehem Steel, more than £500 million. The world is now scoured for iron-ore; mountains of it are literally taken away and transported thousands of miles to the furnaces. Marvels of engineering construction are built to load and unload it and bulk carriers of up to 100,000 tons ply a ferry service across the oceans. More and more, the furnaces are migrating to the coast to eliminate transport costs—the result is the huge new plants at Newport and Dunkirk, and the proposed giant complex at Rotterdam.

In the Darby’s time, a firm was big if it produced a thousand tons of iron a year; nowadays it is in economic danger if it produces less than a million, or even two million, tons. Steel is still one of the pillars of capitalism’s economy—it is still the barometer that can forecast whether the economy is set fair, or there are storms ahead, or just a period of doldrums.

As usual under capitalism, the tendency is towards bigger and bigger units. There are still absorptions and amalgamations going on, and more and more does an annual output of 2 million tons seem the minimum unit for present day efficiency and competitiveness. In the following table, showing the “top twenty” producers in the world excluding Russia and China, the minimum is actually about 2$ million tons a year.

The most striking impression from the figures is, of course, the overwhelming preponderance of the American firms, particularly U.S. steel, which on its own has a greater output of steel than the whole of the U.K. It is also interesting to note the apparently greater fragmentation of the British industry. United Steel is the only British firm to appear, in the table and there is only one other, the Steel Company of Wales, in the next ten, whereas there are three further German companies, three French, and one Japanese.

We hope to take a further look into the international steel industry in a later issue.

Rivalry v. Safety

We do not need to labour the point about the intense competition existing at present in the aviation industry. What with the excitement over Australia’s decision to buy American TFX's instead of British TSR-2's, the race between the Anglo/French Concord and the U.S. Mach 2 airliner; and the current struggle of B.A.C. to get their V.C.-10 into the air commercially before the Douglas D.C.-9; the aeroplane manufacturers must really be having a worrying time of it.

It was thus a major setback for B.A.C. when their prototype V.C.-I0 crashed recently, apparently as a result of trouble with the tail assembly.

As is well known, the V.C.-10 carries on a technique, engines set well back in the rear, that was developed originally by the French company, Sud-Aviation, with their Caravelle. And it is with Sud- Aviation that B.A.C. are developing the new supersonic Concord.

It has also been known for some time that the V.C.-10 has been running into snags with this particular tail assembly—only a few months ago B.A.C. announced publicly that they had had to modify it. Strong rumour also has it that the Caravelle went through similar troubles in its early development stages. What more natural, then, that B.A.C. should ask Sud-Aviation—after all, their collaborators in the Concord—for details of their earlier experiences of putting engines under the tail?

And what sort of an answer do you think they got? A very dusty one, according to an Insight report in the Sunday Times of October 27 -“Sud-Aviation would disclose nothing.”

A few months later, the V.C.-10 crashed, killing all its crew. There may conceivably be other crashes before the makers discover what is happening to the tail assembly.

In the meantime, the Caravelle flies on, with hardly a competitor. And the longer the V.C.-10 takes to get commercially off the ground the longer will Sud-Aviation enjoy this happy state of affairs. Co-operation may be all very well but under capitalism one must be very careful not to carry it too far.

Stan Hampson

Capitalism everywhere? (2025)

Book Review from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Profit: an Environmental History. By Mark Stoll. Polity £17.99.

This volume contains a great deal of useful information, not just about the environment and how production has affected it, but also on the history of technology and industry, and there are many pages of references.

Various kinds of pollution are referred to, such as the massive oil spills from the Torrey Canyon supertanker in 1967 and the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in 2010. But environmental impacts go back much earlier. In the Middle Ages, for instance, silver and gold were imported to Italy to be minted into coins, which led to toxic chemicals being washed into streams and rivers near the mines, in Bohemia and other places. Areas near the mines suffered from deforestation. By the seventeenth century sugar refineries and other industries in the Netherlands emitted vast amounts of stinking coal smoke. In the Americas, growing tobacco depleted the soil, but colonists just moved to extensive uncleared land. In the nineteenth century Britain was the largest producer of copper, which meant the emission of poisonous substances such as sulphur dioxide and arsenic. A lot more material along similar lines is surveyed here.

However, the book has some negative points too. For some reason, the author refers several times to the religious views of various individuals. Does it really matter that Rachel Carson, author of the conservationist classic Silent Spring, was a Reformed Protestant or that Bill Gates used to be a Congregationalist?

More significantly, Stoll has a very all-embracing approach to capitalism, which he sees as an economic system where owners of accumulated wealth invest it for profit in extracting raw materials or producing and distributing goods. There have been various forms of it over the centuries, from incipient capitalism to plantation capitalism in ancient Greece to industrial capitalism and present-day consumer capitalism. He writes: ‘we cannot live with capitalism and we cannot live without it. At best, we can work to ameliorate its worst effects.’ And it ‘is rooted in human nature and human history’. Wage labour gets an occasional mention but does not seem to be viewed as an essential part of capitalism. Nor is it recognised that the way most people made their living has varied enormously over the centuries. Furthermore, his idea of profit goes well beyond the notion of surplus value as an intrinsic part of the employment-and-wages system, since he states that forty thousand years ago people made a profit by exchanging tools they had made for other goods they did not have to make themselves.

From the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism has come to be gradually replaced by consumer capitalism, with its emphasis on advertising and built-in obsolescence. In the US, it seems, a piece of clothing is worn on average seven times before being discarded. The biggest companies sell to consumers rather than manufacturing goods (Amazon and Walmart, for instance).

It is not clear, but Stoll appears to see capitalism as more than just islands of commodity production within a wider economy. The book contains much of interest but its approach to capitalism leaves a lot to be desired, not recognising that the drive for profit is an essential part of a system built on wage labour and production for sale.

Paul Bennett

The Proletariat (The Working Class). By Karl Kautsky. (1907)

From the August 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Specially translated for The Socialist Party of Great Britain and approved by the Author.

I.—The Proletarian and the Handicraftsman.

We have already seen in the previous chapter (See “From Handicraft to Capitalism.”) that capitalist production pre-supposes the divorce of the worker from the means of production. In large capitalist concerns we find on the one hand the capitalist who possesses the means of production but does not himself take part in production; and on the other hand the wage-workers, the Proletarians, who possess nothing but their labour-power, by the sale of which they live, and whose labour alone creates the products of the large concern.

In order to obtain the number of wage-workers necessary to satisfy the requirements of Capital, it was, as we observed, in the beginning essential to rely upon the aid of force. To-day such aid is no longer needed. The advantage the large concern has over the small enterprise suffices to expropriate and throw upon the labour market year by year a sufficient number of peasants and handicraftsmen, who together with the progeny of the already “freed” wage-workers more than satisfy the capitalist craving for “new human flesh” ; and this happens not only without infringing the laws of private property— but on the contrary by relying upon those laws.

That the number of Proletarians continually increases rapidly is so obvious that even those who would like to make us believe that Society is governed by the same conditions that prevailed a hundred and more years ago, and who are painting the future of small enterprise in the rosiest colours, do not venture to deny it.

Just as in production the large capitalist concern has become the dominant form of industrial enterprise, so in State and Society has the industrial wage-worker taken the most prominent place within the working class. This position was occupied four hundred years ago by the peasant, and a hundred years ago by the petty bourgeois.

The industrial wage-workers are already in all civilised countries the largest class ; it is their conditions and views, which increasingly determine the mode of life and thought of the other sections of labour. But that means a complete revolution in the prevailing conditions of life and forms of thought among the great mass of the population; for the conditions of the wage-workers, particularly of the industrial Proletarians (and under the capitalist mode of production agriculture becomes also an industry), differ totally from those of former categories of labour.

When the peasant or handicraftsman was the free owner of his means of production he commanded also the full product of his labour. The labour-product of the wage-worker, however, does not belong to him, but to the capitalist, the purchaser of labour-power, the owner of the necessary means of production. It is true that the wage-worker is aid for his labour-power by the capitalist, but the value contained in is wages by no means equals the value of his product.

When the industrial capitalist purchases the commodity labour-power, he naturally does so with the intention of utilising it in a profitable manner. We have seen that a certain amount of labour creates a certain amount of value. The more the worker labours, the greater (under otherwise equal conditions) will be the value he produces. If the industrial capitalist would let the wage-worker, whom he has hired, work only so long as to produce a value equal to the wages he receives, the employer would make no profit. But even if the capitalist would like to pose as a benefactor of suffering mankind, capital calls for profit, and the capitalist does not turn a deaf ear to this call. The longer the worker toils in the service of capital beyond the labour time necessary for producing the value of his wages—that is to say, the greater surplus there is left—from the total product created by him after the value equivalent to his wages is deducted, the greater is the surplus value (as this excess value is called) the greater is the exploitation of the worker, which finds a limit only in the exhaustion of the exploited and—in the possible resistance offered by him to the exploiter.

To the wage-worker private property in the instruments of production meant therefore from the outset something altogether different to what it signified to the handicraftsman or peasant; for while to these two it was originally the means of securing to them the complete ownership of their product; it has been for the wage-worker, and ever will be, nothing else but the means of exploiting him, of depriving him of the surplus value which he has created. The wage-worker from that standpoint is anything but a lover of “private property.” And in this connection he not only distinguishes himself from the property-owning peasant and handicraftsman, but also from the handicraftsman of precapitalist times.

These journeymen formed the transition from the master handicraftsman to the Proletarian, just as the concerns in which they were employed in larger numbers form the transition from petty enterprise to large industrial concerns. Yet how different they were to the Proletarians !

They were treated as members of the master’s family and they had the prospect of becoming masters themselves. But the wage-worker is only a hireling and condemned to remain a wage-worker. In these two points is summed up the cause for the difference between a handicraftsman and a wage-worker.

As the journeyman belonged to the family, he ate at the same table and slept in the house of his master, and the question of shelter and food did not exist as far as he was concerned. His wages in money were only a part of what he received from his master for his labour-power. The wages served less the purpose of satisfying the most necessary wants (which, as has been pointed out, were supplied by living with the master) than for the purpose of obtaining comforts or of saving, of accumulating the means required for setting up as master on his own account,

The journeyman worked together with the master. When the latter extended the hours of labour unusually, he was himself as much affected thereby as his assistant. There was therefore no strong desire on the part of the master to extend the working hours to the point of exhaustion, and even where that was the case, such intention was very easily restrained. Whenever the master endeavoured to make his own conditions of labour as agreeable as possible, the journeyman too, benefited thereby.

The instruments of production, which the small master required, were so few and simple that the craftsman did not need considerable means to set up as master. Every handicraftsman consequently had the opportunity of becoming a master; in fact, he already anticipated that position, and as he had to save in order to obtain the means to this end, he was as decided a defender of private property as the master craftsman.

It is necessary to point out that here the conditions of handicraft are being considered as they originally arose in pre-capitalist times.

Let us now compare with them the conditions of the wage-worker.

In capitalist industrial concerns wage-workers and capitalists are not active together; and although, in the course of economic development the industrial capitalist has acquired a separate identity from the merchant proper, and although the capitalists of commerce and those of industry have become two distinct sections, the industrial capitalist, strictly speaking, still remains a merchant. His activity as capitalist— as far as he at all plays an active part in his undertaking—is limited, like that of the dealer, to the market. His duties are to purchase as suitably and cheaply as possible the necessary raw material, auxiliary materials, labour-power, etc., and to sell as dearly as possible the goods produced in his concern. In the sphere of production he has to do nothing else but to see that the workers perform the largest amount of work possible for the smallest wages possible; that the largest amount of surplus value be squeezed out of them. The longer they work, the better for him. He does not get tired if the working hours are too long, he does not perish if the mode of production becomes a murderous one.

The capitalist is therefore far less considerate concerning the life and limb of the worker than was the master handicraftsman. The prolonging of the working day, the abolition of holidays, the introduction of night-work, the compulsion to work in damp or over-heated workshops, or places filled with noxious gases, etc.: these are the “improvements” which capitalist industrialism has brought to the worker.

The introduction of machinery has still further increased the dangers to the health and life of the worker. He is now chained to a monster which seizes upon him with gigantic strength and maddening speed. Only the closest, never-faltering attention on the part of the worker attending such a machine prevents his being caught and crushed by it. Safety arrangements cost money, and the capitalist does not introduce them, unless he is compelled to do so. Economy is above all the main virtue of the capitalist; and that demands his limiting the space in his factory and finding room in it for as many machines as possible. What does it matter to him, if by so doing he endangers the workers’ safety. Workmen are cheap ; but large, commodious premises are dear.

But the capitalist method of applying machinery changes the conditions of the workers in yet another manner for the worse.

The tools of the handicraftsman were inexpensive, and seldom required such considerable alterations as would have caused them to become altogether useless. It is different with the machine. That costs money, much money. If it becomes prematurely useless, or is not worked to its full capacity, it will bring the capitalist loss instead of profit. But the machine wears out not only in use, but also when standing still. On the other hand the increasing application of science upon the economic domain, resulting as it did, in the invention of the machine, has the effect of continually producing new inventions and discoveries, sometimes of greater, sometimes of less significance, and constantly causing, now one, now another kind of machine, at times even the entire plant of a factory, to become incapable of keeping up with competition, and thus to lose their value before having been completely used up. Owing to this uninterrupted evolution in the technical aspect of machines, every one is in danger of becoming valueless before being used up. This circumstance affords the capitalist sufficient ground for using up every machine from the moment he purchases it as speedily as possible. That is to say, the application of machinery in production is a spur to the capitalist to extend the hours of labour, to carry on if possible, an uninterrupted production, and to introduce the succession of day-and night-shifts, which means that the abominable practice of night-work becomes a permanent institution.

When the application of machinery first began, some idealists declared that the millenium had come, that the machine would relieve the worker from his labour and make him a free man. But in the hand of the capitalist the machine has become the most powerful lever for the purpose of making the labour-burden of the proletarian a crushing one, and his servitude unbearable and murderous.

But it is not only in respect of the hours of labour that the wage-worker under the capitalist mode of production is worse off than the handicraftsman. The wage-worker does not eat at the table of the capitalist nor live at his dwelling-house. He may dwell in most miserable quarters, feed upon refuse, why, even be in a starving condition, yet the comfort of the capitalist is not in the least disturbed thereby.

The meaning of the terms “starvation” and “wages” used to exclude one another. Then the free worker could only fall a victim to starvation if he was unable to find work. Everybody who worked had also to eat. The capitalist mode of production merits the distinction of having reconciled the two contradictions,—”starvation” and “wages”—and of having made “starvation-wages” a permanent institution, and even a mainstay of present society.

Blogger's Note:

It was the German SPGBer, Hans Neumann, who translated Kautsky's writings from the German into English for the SPGB.

What has capitalism ever done for us? (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some who read Marx’s seminal work Capital are quite surprised, or even shocked, to encounter the great revolutionary extolling the virtues of the capitalist mode of production. We even encounter reactionaries using this to somehow justify their faith in the contemporary version of capitalism and its corrupt and destructive nature. They seem to believe that this shows even capitalism’s greatest enemy to be complicit in their admiration for exploitation, inequality and injustice.

For socialists this merely illustrates their ignorance of the evolution of the productive forces and the historical context it creates. Just as the Left continually point to the promotion of the state ownership of industry in The Communist Manifesto as still being relevant as a policy today we see a complete misunderstanding of how history proceeds and how it decides what political strategies are relevant at a particular time and place and not the ideological needs of the radicals of either the Left or Right.

It goes even deeper than this because for many, and unfortunately this includes the great majority, it is inconceivable that although humanity has created the economic systems we cannot control them – they control us. Just as in nature the evolutionary forces are beyond the control of any particular species so the cultural and economic manifestations of human productive activity have been a matter of mystery and so elude those who seek to understand and so control them. Ironically, we only realise this now because economic evolution’s current historical context has made this possible. Marx wasn’t born with a specific genius to understand capitalism but capitalism created the possibility that someone like him could understand it. Everything depends on historical context – and here’s why.

The success of our species is entirely due to our technologies – from bone axes to nuclear power and from the invention of language to its abstraction called writing our frail bodies have been protected, to a great degree, from the murderous rigours of nature. The eventual symbiosis of humanity and its technologies evolved into a total synthesis where it became meaningless to speak of one without the other. An understanding of humanity and its cultural evolution became the study of modes of production and the specific classes that became politically dominant because of this.

Any dissection of the propaganda/ideology of these dominant groups always reveals an economic foundation. In this country in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the struggle between capitalism and its representatives and the reactionary forces of feudal autocracy was bloody and without pity. The superficial religious ideologies of either side were promoted as the cause of the conflict but we see it now as the climax of a great class struggle created by emerging and old forms of production and their economic and political prerequisites. We also see that the attempted establishment of socialism by the True Levellers or Diggers was premature and only happened because of the political anarchy of the time. Not only were Cromwell and his bourgeois followers extremely successful at war but also at commerce, trade and exploitation. With the exception of a brief attempt at a counter-revolution in 1688, which was easily crushed, capitalism was established and the liberation of the productive forces was unleashed.

This ‘Industrial Revolution’ is what Marx refers to in his praise of capitalism. To him the creation of an educated working class together with the explosion of production (which made such education necessary) were the requisites of socialism. Capitalism was, for him, just a stepping stone towards socialism. Those who thought that socialism could be imposed without going through this capitalist stage have only to look to the tragedy of Bolshevik Russia to find their answer.

Today after unprecedented acceleration and change we find that capitalism has developed to a stage where automation, computerisation and organisation have the potential to liberate humanity from hunger, disease, ignorance, superstition and cultural isolation but instead we see food destroyed because it cannot be sold at a profit, medicine being priced beyond the means of those who need it most, systematic subversion of education into ideological conditioning, rising religious intolerance and the turning of information into fake news on the internet. Why? Because capitalism, like feudalism before it, has become a fetter on production. Production for profit necessitates buying power to create viable markets but also partly negates this consumerism by continually seeking to hold back the wages of those who produce the commodities that they are obliged to buy back! Today’s historical context renders capitalism irrational and anachronistic.

In the movie Kingdom of Heaven the character Balian asks Saladin: ‘What’s Jerusalem worth?’ The Saracen leader turns and says ‘Nothing’ but after a pause he turns again and says, with a smile, ‘Everything’. The same reply would be relevant to the question that is the title of this article. Capitalism and socialism are not involved in an eternal struggle resembling positions of ‘right or wrong’ or ‘good or evil’ but rather one of the recognition or otherwise of historical inevitability. The tiny parasite class and their ideological lickspittles of the mass media would still have us believe that in the midst of economic crises, war, pandemics, poverty, racism, genocide and crime that capitalism is still ‘the best of all possible worlds’.

Wez.

Noblesse Oblige (1942)

Quote from the May 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arnold Toynbee (“Industrial Revolution,” p. 232) put in a good word for Lord John Manners and his kind “The landowners, like all men possessed of power for a long period, have had noble traditions as to its exercise, and where their own interests were not touched, they tried to use their power for the good of the people.”

Does capitalism reward inventive genius? (1927)

From the June 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent celebrations held in Lancashire to commemorate the memory of Samuel Crompton, a Bolton weaver and inventor, who died 100 years ago, call to mind a question often asked of the Socialist. How about the inventor under Socialism?

Ironical as it may seem, it is such inquiry that throws a lurid light upon the treatment that Capitalism has meted out to genius and ability. When this is understood, the position of all under Socialism will present no difficulty. We do not claim that exceptional ability can exist apart from the social conditions which give it birth. We propose to show that it is those who can exploit such ability to-day who reap the reward which the labour of others makes possible. Without the discoveries in the remote past of such now apparently simple things as the wheel, the lever, the ratchet, all the machinery of to-day would be unthinkable. Without the skill and dexterity of the workers, past and present, all the inventive genius ever born would have remained sterile. The cotton industry of to-day is one to which a number of fundamental inventions have been applied during the last century. Their application, with its operatives, has increased its productivity far beyond the effective demands of the world’s markets, but under the present system these operatives live in poverty and suffer years of short-time working through their very productivity. What insanity ! And what of those who did so much to make such output possible. One of these was John Kay, inventor of the “Fly Shuttle,” one of the most important inventions made toward the improvement of the loom. He was a man of whom it was said he invented “everything.” But his ideas were shamelessly stolen, and he died in poverty and obscurity somewhere in France. Another, James Hargreaves, saw a spinning wheel overturned which caused him to reflect upon certain improvements. He invented a machine as a result of which 20 to 30 spindles could be attended by one person. He died in Nottingham Workhouse. Richard Arkwright invented the water-frame. He appears to be one of the few who gained financial reward, yet, strange he is one about whom there are doubts as to his originality. He was assisted by Kay, who declared “the water-frame was no device of Arkwright’s,” but of another obscure individual. Whether this was true or not he, like others, had to contest his patent rights, and had at one time as many as nine law-suits going. Samuel Crompton invented the “mule,” a combination of Hargreaves spinning jenny and Arkwright’s water-frame, which, with Watts’ steam-engine revolutionised the cotton industry. He was a man of gentle and sensitive nature, made a violin, taught himself to play, and earned eighteen-pence a night in a Bolton theatre while working in his spare time on his invention. His machine was such that any mechanic who saw its finished condition could carry away its leading features ; crowds gathered round his house, and he was often afraid to go out lest it was stolen. A few months, he says,

“Reduced me to the cruel necessity of destroying my machine altogether, or giving it up to the public. To destroy it I could not think of, to give up that for which I had laboured so long was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying it I gave it to the public.” (National Dictionary of Biographies, Vol. XIII.)

For using his invention, 80 firms and independent manufacturers gave him a document possessing no legal validity, in which they agreed to pay him certain sums. As a result, he received the handsome reward of £67. Sir Robert Peel offered him a partnership, but he declined. Like so many of his type, he possessed little business acumen. Making fortunes possible for others, he reaped little or no pecuniary reward himself, and died in poverty, embittered with his experiences. A like fate has awaited in the past composers, artists, scientists, poets, writers, public performers, etc. It is the Capitalist reward and fitting tribute to a rotten system. Mankind will ever crave to approbation of his fellow-man. When, with the coming of Socialism, security and a full life is made possible for all, those who show exceptional ability will not need to give of their talent to serve the profit of the idle few, but will add to the comfort of the whole race —whose best interests will be identical with their own.

W. E. MacHaffie

The Iron Horse (1960)

From the April 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Transport and the Growth of Industry (4)

The railways of Britain are continually under review and observation. It may be modernisation, the closing down of branch lines, poor time-keeping, dirty trains, high fares, or vile concoctions conjured up in the dining cars. In a few years we in this country will see the end of steam traction, a change already effected in other countries. No more shall we or our children be thrilled by the fierce glow from the fire box, with pungent swirling smoke as an express thunders through a station at night. Ours is no sentimental journey, however, but a short trip into the history of this form of transport, now an accepted part of our daily lives.

During the 18th century, production of coal and minerals as well as manufactures rapidly increased. Ships sailed away to distant lands and returned with new and precious materials; new areas were being opened to trade and settlement. The peasants, driven from the land by enclosures and poverty, swarmed into the industrial towns. A new type was appearing in Europe and North America; men who had engineering and technical skill, architects, scientists and chemists. The birth and growing-space of our capitalist world gave rise to a spate of bridge building, tunnels, docks and port installations, lighthouses and large public buildings. All of these works were necessary to the industrial revolution of commodity production.

One most noticeable feature of this age was the change in transport. Stage coaches ran to time tables and canals criss-crossed Europe and the North Eastern States of America. The industrialists were faced with problems of which the foremost was to keep up the supply of raw materials to feed and maintain the constantly improving machines. Another factor was that the act of buying and selling was ceasing to be the leisurely affair of the country market. People engaged in business had to move around and visit other lands, and competition demanded speed and time-keeping.

Coal had been conveyed in trucks on rails for centuries, since it had been found that horses and men could haul heavier loads if the wheels ran on tracks. These early rails were made of wood, and they wore out fairly quickly. To overcome this, iron plates were laid over the wood (hence the term, platelayers). Another method was to lay the plates in troughs or ruts, the wheels fitting into the depression. The problem here was that the rut often became full of earth and coal. In 1788 William Jessop invented a flat rail with a flange, the basis of our modem permanent way.

First Public Railway

The first public railway ran from the Thames at Wandsworth to Croydon (Surrey Iron Railway, 1803). The rails were the older rut type, as there were not many flanged wheeled vehicles at that time in London. In 1805 a horse hauled 38¾  tons, a distance of six miles in I hour 41 minutes, on this railway. That overworked horse certainly showed the value of railways to our profit and cash-conscious forebears.

Steam was the motive power in the new factories and it slowly killed the older water wheel. Steam powered factories could be built away from streams, right in the towns, provided coal and coke was available. Cornwall was enjoying a tin and copper boom and such names as Newcomen and James Watt took the stage in steam development. During the 1770/80s Watt and Boulton's great beam pump engines enabled miners to burrow deeper and overcome the ever-present problem of water in the shafts. There were many others in numerous countries that played their part in the development of “Steam Heat." A most important study was made of the practical application of metal compounds, so essential to enable boilers to withstand increased pressure of steam.

It was inevitable that some clever engineers would try to convert these stationery steam engines to a mobile form of power, to replace the horse and the sail. In America a steamboat ran for a short period, and in 1819 a ship using steam crossed the Atlantic, but the white wings of sail held their own for many years. In the Cornish mines a young man, “Captain Dick” Trevithick made a small working model, steam driven, which ran around his room. By 1801 he had made his first steam carriage, which ran along the lanes at Camborne. Man had made his first Iron Horse. These steam coaches later ran in conjunction with the stage coaches and, from the prints of the period, strange-looking cumbersome vehicles they were. Trevithick later tried his hand at building a steam locomotive for the Penydaren Iron Works in South Wales. Financed by Homfray, the Merthyr Ironmaster, the Cornishman built a one cylinder locomotive. On the trial day, February 21st, 1804, Trevithick wrote: “We carried 10 tons of iron, 5 wagons and 70 men.” Alas, the weighty machine was too much for the primitive tracks and the iron plates broke under the pounding.

Trevithick, with his versatile restlessness, moved on from one project to another; in London in 1808 he ran a train around a circular track at Torrington Square (prophetically near to where Euston Station was to be built in 1837). Steel, one of his co-workers, built another heavyweight failure for Wylam Colliery, Northumberland: not important in itself, but Steel was a friend of an obscure working man, George Stephenson. Between them the findings and failings of steam locomotives were discussed at great length. Others went on building failures —and improvements. Monsters were even conceived which, their inventors fondly thought, would prance along on legs like a cast-iron Arab charger.

One cannot discuss railways without acknowledging George Stephenson and his son Robert. The elder man was born in 1781 at Wylam in poor conditions; he worked on farms, but by the age of 14 was assistant fireman at Dewley Colliery, earning one shilling a day. By 1812 he was colliery engine wright on the pumps at Killingworth High Pit, repairing clocks and boots at night to supplement his poor wage. His son Robert went to school in Newcastle, and George, helped by the lad and a young friend, overcame his illiteracy and managed to study some works on engineering.

Stephenson, cut off from great wealthy architects like Telford and Rennie, had to spend his time discussing problems and theories on pay nights with his workmen friends. In those times there was an extreme shortage of mechanics, and engineers had great difficulty in getting their machines made in a reasonable time.

The man who brought Stephenson into the light was Nicholas Wood, a distinguished mining engineer. He noted Stephenson's keenness on machines and his interest in haulage and locomotive design. When Killingworth went in for steam traction to the coal docks on the Tyne, Stephenson secured the financial support of Lord Ravensworth, and built his first locomotive. From then on he and his son moved into prominence in the new world of railways, for not only were they engineers, but also had a broad mastery over architectural and surveying problems.

Stockton and Darlington

The best remembered work executed by the Stephensons was the 1825 Stockton and Darlington Railway which carried coal from the new pits near Bishop Auckland to the docks on the River Tees. Horse-drawn trucks were still the principal motive power on this line. The owners of the newly-built railways were still uncertain as to the value of the locomotives, and some leaned towards cable haulage. However, the Rainhill trials on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1829 not only secured a victory for Stephenson with his Rocket, but showed that the technical infancy was past, and the Iron Horse had become a healthy adolescent.

The 1830/40s produced a crop of railway celebrities, such as Ericcson, Vignoles, Gooch and Locke. It was the Great Western, pushing out from Paddington to Bristol, that gave such a tremendous outlet for the versatile genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Hanwell viaduct in West London, built in 1837, remains untouched from Brunel's day, but the trains look down on a very different world, the world of  the internal combustion engine. Vast improvements in track laying took place, most noteworthy being the use of steel rails. Signalling evolved, as traffic increased, from the natural arm movement of the Railway Policeman, to the use of electricity and complex semaphores and coloured lights. In the 1840's the electric telegraph was being used lo a limited extent by the Great Western and Midland Railways. The foundation of modern control was laid by John Saxby's interlocking and block device in the 1850's.

Railways were a social product: Victorian capitalist society needed them, and railways needed this same capitalist expansion for their very existence and development. They were and are part of the arteries of our society. From Great Britain the technical knowledge soon spread over Europe and N. America, and the improvements in engines, rolling stock, tracks and signalling became universal, interchanging and adapting to suit requirements.

The early engineers had to face hostility from older entrenched groups. They also suffered from a lack of surveying instruments, and poor ordnance maps. The mass illiteracy of the times often delayed the use of improved signalling methods, a problem felt by all the early industrialists. The greatest evil has been the insatiable thirst for profit. Sound ideas have been modified or rejected in order to keep within a profitable margin or even solvency. As a result of this, hundreds of lives have been lost in dreadful accidents (although the casualties are small compared to our current road toll).

Towns were able to expand, as it was no longer necessary for employer or worker to live near the office or workshop. The steam train with its modern offspring—Underground Subway, Metro or Suburban, brings thousands each day into the centre of the cities, under tinned- sardine conditions.

George Stephenson once said: “The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot." We could hardly expect him to have looked forward to the day when transport would be regarded as necessary to the function of society, to be organised without the necessity for making a profit or hankering after subsidies. That will be the day when the men and women who work the railways will not have lo argue before tribunals for their livelihoods Railways, railwaymen—all the resources of society - will be devoted to the betterment of the whole of society.

Jack Law

Economics and ideas. Their influence on political institutions (part 5) (1925)

From the August 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month).

Ideas and the Wages System.

We have now seen how the bourgeoisie established a form of government peculiarly suited to their needs, based upon the “rights of property” and in which the propertied class ruled directly through chosen representatives under their control. The further developments of the bourgeois state, however, in which it tends more and more towards universal suffrage cannot be understood without considering a factor of the greatest significance—the mental outlook of the working class under the present system.

The modern proletariat is the counterpart of the chattel-slaves of Ancient Civilisation and the serfs of the Middle Ages. In economic function there is little or no distinction between these forms of exploitation. As economic relations, however, they have distinct differences which among other things determine the respective attitudes in the three systems, of the exploited class towards the social order that enslaves them. The slave’s attitude may be generally summed up as “ineffective opposition,” that of the serf as “passive acquiescence,” whilst that of the modern wage-worker is the apparently extraordinary one of “active support.”

It is often declared that this attitude of the mass of the workers under capitalism is the result of capitalist propaganda. The truth is, of course, that it results from the conditions of society as a whole—propaganda forms a part of these conditions, but its seed cannot take deep root and flourish, except it falls on fertile soil.

Let us contrast the historic modes of exploitation, paying especial attention to the peculiarities of the wages-system. The chattel-slave, the serf and the wage-worker are all compelled to labour and to surrender all the wealth they produce, except on the average that required for their own maintenance at the customary standard of living. Here, however, the resemblance ends for the social machinery whereby the exploitation is effected differs in each case. The kind of pressure used is different—with chattel-slavery it is naked force, the fear of the lash or torture; with serfdom it consists largely of the overwhelming power of custom and tradition, whilst with wage-slavery it is “economic need”—the fear of starvation.

Under chattel-slavery and serfdom the workers were an openly subjected class having a definitely inferior legal “status.” The chattel-slave had no legal rights, the serf had only those of the serf “status.” Moreover, between the subjected and the dominant classes there were usually definite barriers of culture and often of race, language and religion. All these facts combined to make the class separation a fixed one and to prevent any interchange between the classes. The facts of slavery and exploitation were clear and undeniable. No slave or serf could make any mistake about it—if he did give way to the illusion that he was a free-man—he was promptly and painfully reminded of his true position.

The condition of the wage-slave is very different. His is not a personal servitude. He and his fellows are subjected as a class solely by being excluded from the essential instruments and materials of production. Between he and the capitalist there is no difference in legal status, no essential cultural distinction and none of race or religion. There is but one essential mark of distinction between the classes—the ownership of capital.

Now this talisman “capital” that divides exploiter from exploited has two important characteristics that make it unique as a class barrier and produce social and intellectual results that were impossible and inconceivable in previous slave systems. First, capital—the “giver of power”—is not a factor inherent in and inseparable from its possessor, but is something external and accessory to the individual that can be acquired, transmitted from person to person, and can be lost. Secondly, it is a quantitative thing. In practice it implies sufficient money to carry on profit making. Now, two sums of money can differ only in quantity. A quantitative change can, however, produce a qualitative difference, and the exploited wage-worker possessing a small sum of money has only to perform a multiplication sum to “see” himself a capitalist, and has only to make that imaginary increase a fact to become one in reality, and achieve, the distinction of living without working by the exploitation of his erstwhile fellows.

By the very nature of the class-barrier under capitalism it is possible to surmount it—and in both directions. A member of the exploited class may become one of the exploiters and one of the leisured may be “dropped” into the ranks of the toilers. However exceptional in the nature of things such interchanges necessarily must be, they can happen, do happen, and may even occur overnight without the knowledge of the individual and from causes altogether outside his control.

Such economic relations by their very nature deny the ancient traditional belief, inseparable from the older systems, that classes are based upon inalienable class rights and distinctions and that social status is a divinely ordained thing and unalterable, whilst just as obviously they must tend to promote the view that all men have equal “natural rights,” a dogma that to-day is almost universally accepted and is the basis of bourgeois political philosophy.

Furthermore, with the rise of capitalism and the extinction of the village and family as productive groups, the workers became isolated units individually contracting for employment. This and the further facts that under capitalism a person’s welfare depends upon the amount of wealth he can acquire, and that workers as well as capitalist must engage in a competitive struggle to obtain such wealth or increase it, necessarily breeds the attitude of “individualism”—”each for himself.” Now when the idea of equal social rights merges with that of individualism the outcome inevitably is the raising to a moral ideal of “liberty”—liberty to “make the best of circumstances,” to “get what one can,” to do what one wills with one’s own—limited only by the equal rights and liberty of other men. “The law of right social relationships” is “that—Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man,” says Spencer, the supreme theorist of bourgeois individualism, in his “Social Statics.”

These ideas are, of course, precisely those of the revolutionary philosophers of the eighteenth century who attacked feudal rights and absolutism. What was new in the nineteenth century was that ideas of “equal rights” and “freedom” began to infect and take deep root in the heads of the workers and that they used them not to attack the dead-horse of feudalism, but against the legal and political inferiorities under which they laboured in the youthful capitalist state. Eventually they achieved the removal of these disabilities, and thus of the contradiction between the facts of the political system and the political ideas necessarily flowing from the relations of economic life.

The workers demand the franchise.

In the early years of the new factory-system—when the hand workers were dying out, when the machines were new and appeared as devilish instruments of death, when the workers, men, women and children, were forced from field and home into the new factories to grind out their lives for the new lords of industry—there was no shadow of pretence at equal rights for rich and poor. To the cultured upper-classes the restless, stirring workers were a dangerous mob, a horde of barbarians in the heart of a civilisation, a “swinish multitude,” as Burke in an outspoken moment called them. The industrial masters candidly regarded and spoke of their labourers as beings inferior to themselves, fit only for a life of labour. In them the idea of “status” lived on in a caricatured form and, transferred now to the economic field, “directive genius” was its alleged basis in place of ancestral prestige and “blue-blood.”

The savage rebellion of the tortured workers again and again broke out in violent rebellion that filled the ruling class with the fear of general insurrection. This fear was intensified to panic by the “Jacobinism” of the French Revolution. Military were taken from the old garrison towns and distributed over the industrial areas. Pitt himself clearly stated, in the Commons, February 22nd, 1793 :

 “The circumstances of the country, coupled with the general state of affairs, rendered it advisable to provide barracks in other parts of the kingdom. A spirit had appeared in some of the manufacturing towns which made it necessary that troops should be kept near them ” (Hammond’s “Town Labourer,” p. 84).

Every political and legal device was used to suppress all signs of revolt amongst the “lower orders.”

  “The Law, set in force by every kind of trickery, including the use of unscrupulous characters as spies, was administered with a brutality that stamped the working classes as a population amenable to no influence but that of terror ” (p. 75).

   “The magistrates and their clerks recognised no limit to their power over the freedom and the movements of working men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supersede the entire charter of an Englishman’s liberties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working class who seemed to the magistrates an inconvenient or disturbing character. They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against anyone who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable.”

    “A parson magistrate wrote to the Home Office in 1817 to say that he had seized two men who were distributing Cobbett’s pamphlets and had them well flogged at the whipping-post under the Vagrancy Laws ” (p. 72, “Town Labourer”).

(To be continued.)

R.W Housley

Economics and Ideas. Their influence on Political Institutions. (Part 4) (1925)

From the July 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued front last month).

The Machine Age.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were then three powerful states in which the class with free bourgeois property, alone or, in England, in conjunction with a commercialised landed-class, ruled society.

It is well to bear in mind the economic stage that had been reached. A majority of the population still lived either wholly or in part on the land. All industry was on a relatively small scale with tools that were individually operated. Production for sale was widespread, but not universal as it is to-day. The supply of materials and the marketing of the product was largely in the hands of merchants and great trading companies. The merchant capitalists had a powerful hold over industry, but the genuine industrial capitalists were few and relatively unimportant.

The workers—the “common people”— were illiterate, inarticulate and unorganised. For the most part they accepted without question the lowly position and toil to which Providence for its higher purposes had consigned them, and they looked upon the affairs of government as the natural and rightful monopoly of “their betters,” the “gentlemen,” the “people of quality,” elegance and education.

But into the apparently stable, easy-going complacent world of eighteen-century England burst an economic tornado that was destined to sweep the whole “bag of tricks” into the museum of antiquities and to create a new civilisation. This power was that child of science and economic necessity—the industrial revolution.

As machine-production extended itself to an ever wider sphere of industry, the whole complexion of social relations was transformed. Of little significance hitherto, the class of capitalist factory-owners now waxed fat in wealth and importance. But at the opposite social pole there gathered an ever-swelling multitude of propertyless wage-earners, factory hands, machine-driven and disciplined, separated entirely from the soil and herded, amid unprecedented squalor, into dismal industrial towns scattered over the coalfields.

The slow, steady controllable methods of the age of hand-tools were replaced by the uncontrolled production of commodities en-masse, by a ceaseless effort to cheapen production and by a wild competitive scramble to sell. In an industrial anarchy without parallel the only regulation and order came through the blind balance of the market, through the inexorable operation of economic forces. “Economic law”—that made and unmade—became the “divine principle” of a new philosophy of social life. Its prophets were the “economists.” They endeavoured to convince the workers as they had succeeded in convincing themselves that the wealth of the rich and the destitution of the poor were due to the “natural,” “eternal” laws of wealth creation that could neither be avoided, controlled, nor—with safety—interfered with.

The bible of the new thought was the “Wealth of Nations,” by Adam Smith, one of the most practically effective books ever written. In it was put forward not alone the economic theory of unbridled competition, but its natural, ethical accompaniment, that the general happiness of society is best secured by the assiduous devotion of individuals to their own interests. In the turmoil of the economic scramble, unlimited wealth and power seemed open to the man of initiative, nerve, organising ability and—capital. Competition, emulation, struggle, were elevated to the dignity of moral principles. The duty of “getting on” was proclaimed. “Hard work” became a virtue par excellence—though not always practised by its preachers. The conviction that the individual is superior to, and can dominate the “fell clutch of circumstance,” gained a hold upon men’s minds.

The idea of “progress” as an accepted moral principle dates from this dawn period of industrialism. For the first time in history men could see society being transformed before their eyes—not the mere outward change of political forms or the disruption due to war, but a steady, unceasing progression in one constant direction. For the first time men in general could predict the certainty of development in the future. Men no longer worshipped the past—the “good old days”—they looked ahead, and let their imaginations play tricks. To stand still, to stagnate, became a moral evil—to move, to progress, a moral excellence.

Amongst the political adaptations to the economic needs of the new era the most outstanding were those resultant upon the doctrine of “laissez faire”—the freedom of production and trade from legislative interference, expressed in the “liberalism” of Cobden and the “Manchester School.” The old restrictive Navigation Acts and the Corn Laws were abolished and all fetters removed upon the perfect liberty to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. Upon the principle of “unfettered production” the fullest exploitation of the worker, regardless of life or health or age or sex, was justified, and it was nominally on the ground that they were “restraints upon trade” that the early trades unions were declared illegal in the Combination Acts of 1799-1800, and thus the attempts of the workers at organised resistance forcibly repressed by the State.

The politics of the “new age” were soon also violently complicated by the struggle of the new capitalists for political power. The necessity of the conflict sprang largely from the fact that the industrial revolution had transferred the mass of production and population to the north and west, areas hitherto thinly populated and economically of little importance. Large industrial towns, such as Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, were entirely without representation in Parliament. A further factor of importance, however, was that the new industrial conditions had produced a large, politically conscious body of lesser capitalists with an intense appreciation of the rights and privileges of property—their property, and intolerant of political control by the landlords and merchant princes.

The great reform struggle lasted some forty years and was bitterly contested by the ruling oligarchy. In the hope, encouraged by the bourgeois reformers that they stood to gain, large masses of the workers were drawn into the conflict which again and again reached open violence. At length, amid intense public excitement, the Reform Bill of 1832 was passed, which redistributed seats in accordance with existing economic facts and extended the franchise to some half-million large and smaller property owners. This was the final victory in England of free property over landed privilege—of the precious yellow metal over “precious” blue blood.

R. W. Housley

(To be continued.)

The Steam Ship (1960)

From the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Transport and the Growth of Industry (5)

Steam did not easily conquer sail. Although potentially the more powerful method of propulsion, it had a hard fight to establish itself. As early as the 15th and 16th centuries, for example, men were investigating steam power. But the idea was defeated by the lack of the necessary metal alloys, steel and so forth. It was the Industrial Revolution, bringing the social need for new techniques, which solved the problem and established the new motive power.

The first application of steam was to the driving of factories and the pumping-out of mines. The early engines were heavy affairs, expensive consumers of fuel and capable of only low horse power. The engineers therefore turned their attention to boats, which with their displacement of water. and ability to carry the heavy engine promised to be a profitable method of applying steam.

In the early 1800's, the Europeans were using a conventional type of vessel which had changed only slowly: the Victory, a first ship of the line, was over 40 years old at Trafalgar. The Americans, on the other hand, were untrammelled by old shipbuilding traditions, had plenty of first class timber and attracted the venturesome and radical mechanics and immigrants. Thus they could improve the style of sailing ships.

After the Napoleonic Wars, immigration to the Americas increased, the bulk of it being carried by the Yankee clipper ships, running the first advertised liner service. The Americans were the leading shipbuilders, with transatlantic cargo boats of 1,200 tons against the British average of about 250 tons. They also built the faster ships, with an increased ratio of length to beam. All this improvement in sail was preparing the ground for the adoption of steam.

The first steam boats, because of their heavy fuel consumption, worked on short river journeys. In the early 19th century, Symington invented a steam boat for use on the new canals, but the canal owners neglected his work. In the United States in 1807, Fulton built a ferry, successfully steam driven. Steam river and harbour boats turned up in odd corners of the earth: in Italy in 1824, Java in 1811, India in 1820, and as packet steamers in the Irish Channel. But it was in expanding America, where the rivers and lakes were the principal method of communication, that the real development took place. Wood was a plentiful—and therefore a cheap—fuel. A fast marine engine was developed to overcome the swift river currents. So successful was this development that by 1833 there were about 300 paddle boats in use in America. In many ways, this concentration on opening the interior led the Yankee shipping interests to lose their supremacy in the development of the Atlantic steam boat.

The Industrial Revolution had made Britain a great iron and machine producing nation; this proved to be a trump card in their bid to regain supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific. The Americans tried to muscle in, building the Savannha, but this was a half-hearted effort: they later removed Savannha's engines. The 1830s and 1840s saw many types of vessels coming onto the Atlantic, with men like Sam Cunard and Isambard Brunei prominent shipbuilders. British investors were eager to support the steamships—Liverpool and Glasgow, for example, raised some £270,000 in a few days for one of Sam Cunard’s ventures.

Of course, the steamships had their problems, being expensive both to build and to run. The first Cunarder cost some £45 per ton to build, against £15 for every ton of a sailing vessel. The Britannia of 1840 could carry only 225 tons of cargo—and for this needed 640 tons of coal. The steamers could make more runs to a regular timetable, but much of the extra profit which this brought was eaten up by the costs of building and running. This made them concentrate on the busy and more lucrative routes; the British shipowners were always very keen to get the Government mail contract, as the payment was a form of subsidy. The expansion of British commerce sent the steamships on routes other than the Atlantic. Anderson and Wilcox opened the Spanish trade and later, when they got the mail contract to India, formed the famous Peninsular and Orient Line. Regular services were in operation to the principal South American ports—this under the eye of the Admiralty, who were interested in the use of steam for warships.

Indeed, it was the need of the British capitalist class to maintain a large navy to protect their far-flung interests which forced the steady flow of design and skill to be used for both naval and mercantile purposes. In contrast, the European powers lagged behind. North Germany was still a tangle of small states and free cities, with capital in the hands of a few families who were reluctant to take the necessary steps of widening ports and deepening channels. The Dutch were in no better state. It was well into the 1850’s before the French started anything like a regular steamship service.

Sail not Finished

The 1850’s saw the screw replacing the paddle amongst the larger sea-going vessels. Over the previous 40 years there had been great development; engine had become more complex and efficient, using less coal in relation to their increased power. Brunel’s Great Eastern was not typical of the ships of the day, but it was a signpost of things to come. By 1862, Holt had 3,000 ton steamers in operation, whose engines used 2¼ lb. of coal per horse power each hour (to work up a pressure of 60 lb. per square inch). Compare this with the 10 lbs. of coal used in the 1820’s to generate 56 lbs. per square inch.

But sail was by no means finished. Sailing ships were cheaper to run, which made them attractive to the trumping, coasting and whaling trades. It also enabled them to cover the cost of delays in the ports of the newly developed lands, where lack of loading aids and dock construction meant weeks of waiting whilst cargoes were man handled ashore. For this reason, sailing ships were extensively used in the South American fertiliser and chemical trade. They were also used for the Australian immigration trade in the 1860’s, which was denied to the steamships by the lack of coaling stations. It was this run which led the Aberdeen builders to modernise (or Americanise) their design, making the famous ships which often grace calendars and other pictures. Typical of these was the Cutty Sark.

There are few things which catch the imagination of the romantic so much as a clipper at full sail. There are, of course, a number of facts which the romantics overlook. Sailing ships had to be towed out of ports by steam tugs—without this assistance, it was not unusual for them to spend days trying to get out of the English Channel or the mouth of the Elbe. The clippers were difficult to handle and were only kept afloat by the crew's intimate knowledge of sea and sail. Seamen's conditions were poor compared with those on the steamships; it was, for example, quite usual in bad weather for men to be flung overboard from the rigging. The competent crews began to leave the sailing ships and this was one of the factors in their slow decline.

By the 1880's the European powers were able to offer a real challenge to British control of the Atlantic. Germany was united and, expanding, warlike and naval conscious, built large and powerful liners. Belgium was one of the many countries where American shipbuilding money was invested; the Dutch, French and Italians were also in the struggle. The Scandinavians were becoming the Carter Paterson of the sea.

Thus the steamships, like the railway and the motor car, became part of capitalist development, part of the commercial bloodstream in the body of private property. The machine caused the mercantlile powers to overhaul the system of maritime training. This meant the end of the illiterate sea captain and the brutal seamen, their heads full of unwritten sea lore which they passed on by word of mouth. Seamen became like factory workers and, like their landlubber cousins, learned to organise in trade unions to improve their conditions. When they are in demand—as in wartime— they are made much of, but they are often the first to suffer in times of a trade slump.

In sea transport, capitalism has played a typical role. It has developed, organised and divided. The ships, the men who make them and the men who sail in them, have all been changed by it.

Jack Law

Robert Owen – Utopian Socialist (1971)

From the May 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the savage world that was the Britain of the Industrial Revolution, when Blake’s dark satanic mills were a reality, and not just a sentimental romantic conclusion to the last night of the Proms, one figure stands out — Robert Owen. Born 200 years ago on 17 May, Owen had a career that would have been phenomenal in any age, but that he should have had this in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries makes his story even more remarkable.

Owen was born in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, the fourth surviving child of a saddlemaker and ironmonger. Very little is known of his early family life, and this is not surprising for he left home at the age of ten. We do, however, know that he attended a school run by a Mr. Thickness where he excelled at “games, dancing and lessons”, so much so that at the age of seven Mr. Thickness “applied to my father for permission that I should become his assistant and usher, as from that time I was called while I remained in school”.

Owen left school at the age of nine and engaged himself to a Newtown neighbour who kept a “superior shop” for the sale of haberdashery and drapery, and after a year’s apprenticeship he felt ready to seek his fortune elsewhere. In 1781, with his parent’s goodwill and a present of forty shillings from the people of Newtown in his pocket, Owen set out for London. Later he began to read extensively, searching, he said, for the “true religion”, with the result that he was forced to reject all religions:

  My reason taught me that I could not have made one of my own qualities, — that they were forced upon me by nature; — that my language, religion and habits were forced upon me by society; and that I was entirely the child of Nature and Society; — that Nature gave the qualities, and Society directed them. Thus was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to Man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity.

After returning to London, where he stayed for another year, Owen moved to Manchester which was to be his home, more or less continuously for the next fourteen years, and was to see the start of his industrial career.

He went to work as a manager of a cotton factory employing 500 men, women and children: “When I arrived at the mill”, Owen tells us, “I found myself at once in the midst of 500 men, women and children, who were busily occupied with machinery, much of which I had never seen before.” Besides being expected to superintend those 500 at work, he found that he was responsible for buying their raw material, for increasing production, and for keeping the accounts, in fact everything except the marketing of the finished product. So over-awed was he at first that “I did not give one direct order about anything”, he said. However, after six weeks of watching, listening and carefully studying the working of the machines his old confidence returned and “I felt myself so much the master of my position as to be ready to give direction in any department.”

At this time Owen married Caroline, the eldest daughter of David Dale, the owner of the New Lanark Mills. Owen eventually became the manager of these mills and devoted the next twenty years to reorganising the community of two thousand workers on strikingly original lines. To fully appreciate his efforts at this time one must understand the sufferings of the workers in the early nineteenth century; hours were long, pay at starvation level, and housing grim beyond belief. But the evil that stands out above all was the treatment of small children, treatment which called forth the jibe from American slave owners that their slaves were better off than the children in the cotton mills of Lancashire.

Owen not only favoured a limitation of the working day in theory, but actually introduced the ten hour day in his factory. As Marx points out, this was laughed at as a communistic Utopia, so were his “Combination of children’s education with productive labour”. The first Utopia was soon to become a Factory Act, and the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory Acts. Combined with this reduction of working hours, Owen improved housing, opened a shop in which good quality goods were sold at relatively low prices, and started schools and day-nurseries. He was not concerned to use education to inculcate beliefs or theories, nor with happenings conceived in an abstract way, but sought to educate children as human beings capable of applying their reason to nature and society and of enjoying all aspects of life. In New Lanark these ideas were translated into practice. Though at first restricted by his partners, who intended to build up a profitable enterprise, Owen had put an end to the practice of employing pauper children and had withdrawn all children under ten from work. Later he was able to limit the hours of adults to twelve and then to proceed with his plans for education and improvement of home life and surroundings of the younger generation.

Such was the fame of the New Lanark Mills that hundreds of visitors went to the factory, and as Engels said:

 As long as he was simply a philanthropist he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honour and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he stepped forth with his communistic theories, then that was quite another matter.

Throughout the 1820’s Owen turned to the formation of co-operative villages, some of which were already being run on Owenite lines in Scotland, Ireland and Hampshire. He himself set up such a community in America, but the project failed, with four-fifths of his entire fortune being lost in the venture. Following the failure of the co-operative villages he entered into the trade union field, and his road to the New Moral World he now saw through the organisation of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, which within a few weeks of its formation in 1834 had enrolled more than one million members. This too collapsed in 1834, following the deportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and Owen continuously fought for their return to England.

His other work was within the field of Co-operative Societies, something which he came to support — he was not a founder, as many today would suggest. Co-operatives flourished at this time, but by then Owen was old and concerned more with lecturing than administration. Indeed Marx rather bitingly observed that even as early as the 1870’s the Co-op’s were being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug. Furthermore, as G. D. H. Cole points out in his biography of Owen

   . . . although Co-operators pay tribute to him as the founder of their system, it is more than doubtful whether Owen, if he could revisit the earth, would recognise his progeny, or take more than a passing interest in its growth.

How then should we regard Owen in this bicentennial years of his birth? First and foremost he must be judged within the context of his time. He was an early advocate in this country of town planning and of a green belt; in education he was quick to demand, and to set up, nursery schools; and to recognise the function of play in education and to suggest that teachers should be trained, if necessary by the state. He told his fellow employers, in an age of a scramble for profits and pared costs which we call the Industrial Revolution, that the human machines they used in their factories would repay careful treatment and upkeep as much as did the inanimate machines, and he appreciated the need for economic planning. Long before Henry Ford was born, Owen preached “the economy of high wages” to a master class which had yet to realise the possibilities of a home-market among the lowly paid. He declared, ninety years before Beatrice Webb produced her Minority Report on the Poor Laws, that relief of destitution ought to be a charge on the resources of a state, and in an age when people were still being hanged or deported for petty theft he denounced the retributive theory of punishment. Such acclaim may seem surprising when one considers that so many of his projects failed, but it should be remembered that Owen did not intend his ideas to be a universal panacea for all social ills, but only a first step towards a far more radical transformation of society.

Ronald.

Words and Men. — Part 5 (1934)

From the February 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 4

The romantic revulsion against industrial and commercial society had also a political aspect. Wordsworth expressed sympathy for the Jacobins and wrote in favour of the theories of the French Revolution, at least for a while; Byron was always ready to defend the underdog and in fact died fighting for the independence of Greece; Shelley never tired of attacking despotic and repressive politicians like Castlereagh. In France Lamartine was a prominent Reformist speaker and delivered fervently humanitarian orations; Victor Hugo attacked oppressive measures and red-tape officialdom, and was ultimately exiled for his denunciations of Napoleon III. These men were none the less Romantics; they were imbued with lofty and generous feelings, but those feelings were, on the whole, an avoidance of thought, not a means to it.

The Victorian age of English literature (about 1840-1880) marked the era of definite bourgeois ascendency. Industrial capitalism had found its feet and was at last firmly enthroned. The horrors of the Industrial Revolution were fading, and the god of Things as They Are could settle complacently on his throne, conscious that after all everything was for the best in the best of worlds.

This facile optimism pervades all Dickens' work, notwithstanding his exposure of bad conditions and appeals for reform. Though his characters are diverting and his novels full of entertaining scenes, he remains, from a social point of view, a charity-monger. Ruskin, who couched his hatred of ugliness and of unbridled competition in finely resonant prose, also trusted to charity or to philanthropic legal enactment for “the betterment of mankind." In poetry the great exponent of Victorian complacency was Tennyson, “the Lullaby Laureate"; although at times he could write melodious verse, he was also responsible for some of the most jingoistic ballads in the language. Browning also was in the main satisfied with the existing order, but he has far more scope and virility than Tennyson. The Jeremiah of the new order was Carlyle, an old-fashioned Tory soured by the changes of the Industrial Revolution. Thackeray, fascinated by social success but disillusioned with regard to human beings, produced vivid descriptions of town society tinged with satire.

In France, as capitalism developed, the pendulum swung from romanticism to the most fervent realism. Balzac, in the many volumes of his "Human Comedy" (1829-1850), attempted a vast canvas portraying every nook and cranny of contemporary bourgeois life. Flaubert sprang into instant fame in 1857 with his “Madame Bovary," one of the finest reproductions of small-town inanities, petty-bourgeois aspirations, and feminine neuroses ever written in novel form. In poetry Leconte de Lisle led the impersonal school which carried anti-romanticism to its highest peak with flawless descriptions of animals or scenery, sedulously avoiding any personal or individual reference. This was to a large extent an automatic reaction from the exuberances of Hugo and Lamartine; it had its roots in the increasing pace of production and sub-division of labour which were rapidly sapping the individuality of the mass of mankind.

Personal poetry, however, soon reappeared in the morbidly introspective, quiveringly sensitive, neurotically complex works of Baudelaire. “Flowers of Evil" appeared in the same year as “Madame Bovary," and caused an even greater scandal. The book is a perfect illustration of the emotional chaos and intellectual agony that ensue when an acutely sensitive and highly intelligent man finds himself unable either to conform to, escape from, or even comprehend a society which thwarts and dazzles him by turns.

Victorian smugness was followed by a colourful attempt to counteract the “filth of civilisation" by the pre-Raphaelite movement; there was one poet among them—Swinburne. He is chiefly noteworthy for his unrestrained abuse of the Church and his glorification of Garibaldi. Thus once more the irony of history turns things upside down: the hatred of developed capitalism takes the form of supporting those nationalist movements which are prerequisites to capitalist development.

Apart from attacks on capitalism in general, a swing away from conservatism made itself felt in Meredith—writer of novels, many of which pay little heed to social problems but yet do not take even high society circles over-seriously—and in Hardy, whose grimly realistic description pairs oddly with his mystical, brooding fatalism. Hardy attacked conservatism on the field of morals, and fled from the problems and squalor of industrialism to those of a well-nigh extinct peasantry.

One of the greatest enemies of capitalism in English literature was William Morris; although, perhaps, it is not his literary work that chiefly commands respect, it is important in that it bears throughout the imprint of his passionate detestation of all things capitalist and his unshakable conviction that the mass of men had in the past known happiness and would know it again, but to immeasurably fuller extent, under Socialism. Morris's influence in literature has been considerable, but not always fortunate. His Arts and Crafts movement, virile in his own hands, was emasculated when dissociated from an understanding of history and society.

Towards the end of the century the short story became popular in France with de Maupassant’s vital cameos of petty bourgeois society. Many of them are spicy, yet almost insipid. There is a hollowness about them as there is about the drawing-room life with which they deal. de Maupassant’s technique has never been bettered: he is a byword for economy of style—“everything that is necessary and nothing that is not.” At the same period Zola thrust the working-class into literature. Although he is often called a realist, for careful accuracy of description and vivid characterisation Zola ranks far below Flaubert and Balzac; he surpasses them, however, in his social vision, seeing society as a whole rather than in a series of pigeon-holes. He knew there was a class-war, and ranged himself with the exploited. “Germinal” and “Earth,” his best novels, deal with the aspirations and struggles of the miners and farm labourers respectively. Emotional about them he may be, even sentimental, but here is no charity-monger, nor a romantic flying to a Utopian past.

One of the greatest literary figures of this age, whether in France or England, was that delightful satirist, Anatole France. Scholarly, but never pedantic; restrained, but always pregnant with meaning; passionate without heat or violence, his polished sentences flow irresistibly over the whole field of human endeavour and submerge it in unquenchable irony. Ultimately his outlook is defeatist: he conceives man's stupidity to be ineradicable; but his delicate analysis of social movements, of historical incidents and of individual psychology, makes him rich and delightful reading for all critics of modern society. He has the venom of a Swift, the malice of a Voltaire, the delicacy of a Jane Austen, tempered by the experience of history and given enormous range by the complexity of modern life. “Penguin Island,” his masterpiece, was undertaken in order to “debunk” the Dreyfus case, but developed into a complete parody of French history. Its sly allusions, illuminating anecdotes and subtly ironical comments crowd too thickly upon the pages to be fully savoured at a first or even second reading. 

We have now considered English and French literature from the tenth century to the close of the nineteenth. Later and contemporary works will not be dealt with here. This is not a detailed history but a survey of tendencies exemplified by typical authors. Many figures of great interest must be excluded, for reasons of space. Moreover, in order to make known authors who are often passed over in spite of their significance, relative prominence has been given to men of earlier periods, as compared with recent writers with whom most readers are familiar.

Literature is essentially an outcome of human personalities. Personality itself is the action and reaction between a human physiology and its social environment—complexity reacting on complexity. Hence literature has room for an infinity of gradations and modifications. When we state that literature reflects the movements in society to which its economic basis, the mode of production, gives rise, we do not mean that they are reflected with the precision of a mirror, but rather as in the ruffled surface of a pond: the reflections may be shimmering and irregular in outline, but their main substance is unmistakable.

Stella Stewart

Concluded