The Salvation Army and the Working Class. (1910)

From the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Safety of England lies in her Sunday.”—Guizot.

A Notable Utterance.

At the time this famous bon-mot, was uttered (1848) any one who had travelled much on the Continent of Europe would naturally contrast the mental equipment of the English workers with that attained by the proletariat of other countries. To such an one the witty saying of the “great” French statesman would have been pregnant with meaning. Sunday was the “day of rest.” The tavern and its next door neighbour, the chapel, were then practically the only means of Sabbath recreation open to the worker. This being so, he would be little likely to bother his head with theories about the reorganisation, of society.

Drugged and stupid with heavy doses of “Beer and Bible” Sunday, but little inclination on his part would be evinced to rise in revolt against his masters. The bourgeois could therefore comfortably settle himself in his cosiest arm-chair, and, as he sipped his glass of after-dinner port, purr softly to himself, “God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world!”

Could the shade of the astute middle-class Gaul in this our present day revisit this country, we can well imagine him adding further point to his epigram in some such words as : “and in her Salvation Army.”

Two great assets the masters rely on to keep their wage-slaves in a state of subjection. The armed forces of the nation—which they are able to manipulate to suit their own ends—and secondly the lamentable state of almost hopeless ignorance in which the workers are still steeped.

Chloroforming the Workers.

In fostering and keeping alive this state of ignorance numerous charitable and philanthropic agencies play an ever-increasing and important part. The bourgeois in this our beloved country is a greater adept than his French or German confrere at the gentle art of building temporary bridges across the yawning chasm which lies between him and the proletariat. In the attempt—too often, alas, successful—to hide the running sore of working-class degradation, more time, money and effort are spent in this country than in any other under the sun. Coals, blankets, soup and the visitation of the sick are a very present help whenever it is desired to trail a red herring across the path of the deluded worker.

This, of course, also applies to Continental Europe, but there either the drug is administered in much smaller quantities, or the trick is clumsily performed. Verily, his “charitable institutions” are a tower of strength to the British “employer of labour.” This being so, we shall not have far to seek for one of the chief reasons why the English worker is as yet so unresponsive to the teaching of the Socialist. “Where ignorance is bliss, t’were folly to be wise.”

The Vicar of Hell.

Among the many agencies employed by the capitalist class to bring about this state of affairs, the Salvation Army is one of the most successful.

We have no hesitation in saying that the influence of the Salvation Army on the mind of the working class is wholly evil.

In two ways : Firstly, by its drum and trumpet performances at the street corner, coupled with the exhortations of the “captain” and the “Hallelujah lasses” to “come to Salvation,” a by no means inconsiderable section of the workers is persuaded that “conversion” is the one thing needful, and that the reformation of the individual and the building up of character must precede any attempt to better material conditions.

In this way the worker, being “well saved” “snatched from Satan” (or whatever form of expressive but inelegant cant is used), his eyes turned from his material interests (the only ones that matter) towards a heavenly throne (which doesn’t), is gradually reduced from a potential thinker to a docile, humble and obedient slave.

And that is exactly what the masters want.

The “Great Idea” Fraud.

Thus in a recent issue of a great daily paper [Daily News Dec., 4, 1909] we read the following:

“SALVATION ARMY IDEAL.

In a “foreword” to the annual report of the social work of the Salvation Army—written by Mr. Arnold White under the title of “The Great Idea”—the author expresses “the conviction that in the Salvation Army we have a strong barrier against Godless Socialism,”

“To grasp the Great Idea,” he adds, “is to understand the height and depth of the self-sacrificing devotion, the reason for the common-sense, the resource and readiness of the Booths and their officers, in seeking the rescue of the Lost Brigade. It imparts hope to the man whose failure in the battle of life is due to his own character and conduct.”

Now science knows no such thing as an individual character, apart from social surroundings.

In the second place, the worker’s mind is muddled and befogged by the “Army’s” ministrations to his creature comfort in the shape of “Soup and Shelter.”

Sentimental Slosh.

How often is the Socialist critic met with some such question-begging argument (!) as this ?—”When I was out of work the officer came round and helped my missis and the kids. Don’t say anything against the Salvation Army or I’ll, etc., etc.”

(This, of course, loses sight of the fact that our diatribes are levelled at the “Army” as an institution, not at the inoffensive and often sorely-sweated wage-slaves of that venerable fraud, the autocrat of Queen Victoria Street.)

Or again—”Whilst you fellows are spouting at the street-corner, General Booth and his men are feeding people and giving them shelter from the cold ! Why don’t you do something for the poor? ”

Saving the Rates.

The fact cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the Salvation Army provides the bourgeois with a cheap and effective form of sticking-plaster wherewith to cover up the hideous ulcer which is eating out the vitals of our class. For are we not told by Mr. F. A. McKenzie—the “Army’s” spokesman for 1908—that “it is the business of the Salvation Army to help and reform. And where I have worked out costs on both sides the Salvation Army does for £1 what costs the Guardians £3.“—”Waste Humanity,” 1908, p. XVIII. (The italics are ours.)

This is letting the cat out of the bag with a vengeance !

We are well aware that the workers in other capitalist countries enjoy the blessings of the “Army’s” efforts to please, both on the religious and the material side. Stray items of news do sometimes filter through from “foreign parts” to show that the rate-saving dodge is not confined to British soil. The following paragraph will serve as an illustration.

"COUNCIL SEEKS ARMY’S AID. 

The Helsingfors Town Council has again turned to the Army for a solution of its unemployment problem. Numbers of out-of-works had adopted a threatening attitude towards the authorities, and demanded 10,000 Finnish marks from the council for food and clothes.

In their dilemma, the authorities approached The Army and handed over the sum of £200 (half the money demanded), with the request that we should find some of them work.”—War Cry, Feb. 12, 1910.

But it is in Britain and “our” colonies that the operations of this gigantic many-sided fraud can best be observed from the point of view of working-class economics.

The “Army” and the Public.

Articles and paragraphs criticising the Salvation Army have from time to time appeared in various magazines and newspapers. We nevertheless believe that no detailed attempt has yet been made to approach the subject from the Socialist point of view. Even Mr. John Manson’s monumental work on the subject [“The Salvation Army and the Public,” by John Manson. Routledge, 4½d] (to which we have gone for many of the facts and figures to be herein quoted, and which should be read by all Socialists) deals mostly with the “Army” from the public’s (i.e., the capitalist public) standpoint. We are emboldened to quote, when necessary, from Mr. Manson’s work for two reasons.

First, it is almost impossible for anyone who does not possess an inexhaustible stock of time and patience to gain direct and straight forward information from the Queen Victoria Street authorities themselves. Secondly, although the work above referred to was first published in July 1906—a subsequent and cheaper edition being issued in 1908—General Booth and his assistants have never yet thought fit to make any reply to the charges brought against them, although repeatedly urged to do so by their journalistic supporters in the capitalist Press. The vague and airy nothings of the “General” on this subject can be at once eliminated—e.g.: “These attacks are too silly to need refutation” [General Booth, 1906.] (although a few months previously an interviewer was informed at “Headquarters” that the book was officially admitted to contain “a good deal of truth.”)

(Here let us state that, in accordance with our custom, the columns of the SOCIALIST STANDARD are at all times open to apologists for the “Army,” official or otherwise.)

With the manipulation and management or mismanagement of the Salvation Army’s funds the Socialist is not directly concerned. The money collected is subscribed out of surplus-value, the donations of the workers being, we believe, in proportion to the whole a negligible quantity.

As Socialists our business is first and foremost with the effect the “Army’s” schemes have upon the economic position of the working class. Our enquiry will naturally fall into two divisions.

A. The results of the purely “tradesman” or “shop-keeping” operations of the “Army.”

B. The inception, growth, and present position of the “Darkest England” scheme with its manifold ramifications, viz., Elevators, Farm Colonies, Emigration, etc.

With the first of these divisions: “The ‘Army’s’ Trading Schemes,” we shall at once proceed to deal.

“Fritz”

(To be continued.)

Revolution’s Reply to Reform. (Part 4) (1910)

From the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The answer to “Arms for the Workers: A Defence of the Programme of the Social-Democratic Party.” (E. C. Fairchild, Lon. Organiser, S.D.P.)

(Continued from previous issue)

On a Workingman’s Wages.

Under the above heading Mr. Fairchild tells us that the third objection usually preferred against what he is pleased to call a Socialist programme is that some of its proposals would decrease the cost of living and result in lowering wages to the detriment of the working class. He says that this objection is generally advanced by “those who claim some acquaintance with economic science,” and declares that it “depends upon confusion of the amount of money the employer pays to the workman as wages with the amount or quantity of goods the workman can purchase with that money.” The confusion, however, is with our critic, for when we claim that some of the proposals would cause wages to fall, we do so in the full knowledge of the fact that “The food, clothing, or other things which the workman can obtain for his money” (i.e., wages) “is the real wage paid to him for his labour.” Nevertheless, if the money wage falls and buys less “food, clothing or other things,” the fact remains that “real wages” have fallen, and this notwithstanding that the deficiency is made good by a dole from “the municipal authority or the Government.” An argument which the revolutionary puts forward to show that the workers can be no better off for the so-called palliatives, is met by this bolster of capitalist politics with the retort that they will be no worse off ! What a defence of the palliative programme of the S.D.P. ! What a justification for this modern wandering in the arid Desert of Gobi, that after all the toil and travail of shifting a portion of their cost of maintenance from their employers’ pay-bill to the municipal alms box the workers are no worse off ! Such a defence is a complete surrender to our contention, yet the defence goes no further. An attempt is made, it is true, to exploit the eternal “if,” but the result is ludicrous. “If,” says Mr. Fairchild,

“the money wage paid by the capitalist should fall by 5s. weekly, and the municipal authority or the Government provided the workman with goods or services to the value of 5s. weekly, the workman would not suffer any hardship. If the municipal authority or the Government supplied him with goods or services worth 6s. weekly, the workman would gain, though his wages fall by 5s.”

If, if, if. But if the result of the “palliative” (in this case the “goods or services” supplied by the municipality or Government) is a fall in wages because it cheapens living, it is clear that the effect will be measured by the cause—in other words 6s. worth of “palliation” will be followed by a wage reduction, not of 5s., but, of 6s. There was no logical position for our reformer between absolute denial of the cause and full surrender to the effect, and when, he states that the “third objection” is due to confusion of money wages and “real” wages, and that the loss in money wages is compensated by the dole, he accepts the argument of the cause and effect, confesses that his only defence against the “third objection” is that workers are no worse off, and so doing surrenders, with the worst grace he can, to our contention that they are no better off, and that their efforts have therefore been in vain.

And Englishmen’s Homes.

The burden of this section is the housing problem. The proposal seems to be to provide the employers with homes for their workers at the expense of the landlord class. It is like the horse siding with his master in a demand for a free stable. But as our author says at the end of his previous section : “the source whence the workman draws his maintenance is a matter of no concern at all. The vital thing is that he gets maintenance.” It is a matter of no concern at all to the workers who pays “the cost of the land . . and also the interest payable to the lenders from whom the housing authority borrowed.” Such charges are in the same category as taxes, which even S.D.P. literature proves are not paid by the working class. The maintenance of the workers as a class in a certain average degree of health and strength and efficiency is the first and indispensable charge upon the wealth produced by the workers. It is the vitally necessary condition without which the workers’ power to produce wealth must cease. This degree of efficiency is determined by the degree of development and general conditions of production itself. The housing problem, then, is a problem for the master class. It is an important part of the problem how to provide the necessary maintenance of the workers with smallest possible call upon the latters’ total wealth production. For the rest it becomes a tussle between the industrial capitalists and the landlords for the plunder of the fruits of the workers’ toil. It is for this reason we find certain sections of the master class proceeding with municipal housing schemes and other sections opposing.

“If the money wages of labour were to fall by a sum equal to the reduction in rent—a decrease only possible if municipal housing was of stupendous magnitude . .” next says the S.D.P. oracle. It appears then that we can have too much of a good thing—even of an S.D.P. “palliative”—and that the time may come when we shall find the reform mongers anxious to get elected to undo their own handiwork, to keep wages from falling by preventing municipal housing attaining “stupendous magnitude.”

It would be interesting to know exactly what “stupendous magnitude” means. Where is the line to be drawn beyond which the reform cannot go without affecting money wages and why ? If one municipal house, through its reduced rent, does not affect wages why should ten ? If ten do not why should a hundred ? If a hundred do not why should a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million ? What is there in the last that is not contained in the first ? Nothing. The difference between one reduced rent and a million reduced rents is simply the difference between one and a million—a quantitative not a qualitative, difference—a matter of multiplication. Hence the effect of a million reduced rents can only be the multiplied effect of one reduced rent. This talk of the wage-reducing effect of certain “palliatives” only operating when the proposals become general, or “of stupendous magnitude” is rubbish, and comes fittingly from those who magnify a few municipally reduced rents into an important increase of “the amenities of the workers’ lives,” because they can see those reductions, but cannot understand an exactly equal and equally insignificant wage reduction because, as our author very felicitously puts it, they cannot know the things they cannot see.

One municipal house in every thousand houses in the London area would mean about a thousand municipal houses. We will not ask Mr. Fairchild if such a ratio would be of “stupendous magnitude.” A two-shillings per week reduction of this thousand rents is a visible movement, because it is concentrated. If it resulted in an equivalent reduction in money wages of the actual tenants of these houses, that would be a visible effect. It would be two shillings a week off the earnings of each tenant if there was one tenant to each house. But if this wage reduction, instead of affecting merely the actual participants in the reduced rents, were spread over all the wage earners of the area, it would mean less than three farthings—not per week but—per annum reduction to each. Of how much more “stupendous magnitude” must this become before our “palliator” can see and therefore know it !

Luxuries a Necessity.

The “mixed thinking” of the reformer is shown by our opponents’ remarks under the above heading. First declaring that “the supply and demand for labour regulates the wage that is paid,” he proceeds to flatly contradict himself in the words : “the employing class . . conspires to fix wages at a price sufficient to maintain the physical efficiency required for the production of average profits, . . .” Wages are the price of labour-power, hence to speak of the price of wages is to speak of the price of a price—which is idiotic jibberish. Again, to regulate a thing is to control its movements, therefore that which is regulated is not fixed. Still again, to attribute control of wages on the one hand to competition, in the labour market and on the other hand to conspiracy by the masters is taking idiot’s license, to say the least. Two flat contradictions and a lunacy in three dozen words is not a bad performance.

Of course, by one who holds that wages are fixed by the conspiracy of a to class yield profit, it is an easy transition to the argument that they can, by the conspiracy of another class, be fixed at such a level as to leave no profit at all (that they have ceased to become wages then need not trouble such free-and-easy economists). The first step toward this is for the workers to want more. “On first awakening,” we are told, “workman demands more bread in return for labour” (how much of the “palliators'” confusion arises from ignorance of the fact that the workman does not sell labour, but labour-power ?) “He will inevitably advance from that position into the struggle to acquire education, and refinement.” So it seems that the source of the workers’ troubles is that they haven’t wanted anything. How then, are we to read the next sentence : “The standard of comfort held by the workers is the result of prolonged conflict with the capitalist class.” If they have not wanted anything what have they been fighting for ? Are we to suppose that their share of the “prolonged conflict” has been resistence to a beneficent capitalist class intent on forcing upon them “luxuries” they have not wanted ?

A most fertile source of confusion is this spectre, “Standard of Comfort.” Behind it lurks the idea that it is all to do with the resistence of the workers, and they have only to wish for and strive for a higher “standard of comfort” in order to get it. This is far from the truth. In all their long struggle with the master class the workers have never for a moment forgotten their appalling poverty, have never for a moment been without a desperate and feverish longing for a higher standard of living. If desire could have endowed with “luxury” the working class would be redolent of comforts. As a matter of fact all their powers of resistence are necessary to enable them to realise for their labour-power its plain, naked value, without any reference to the adjustment of that mystery of mysteries, the “standard of comfort.” This resistence is common to all owners of commodities. They all sell as dear as they can, and according as the market is favourable to or against them, they now get a little more, anon a little less, than the value of their goods, but in the long run neither more or less than that value. Yet no one dreams of saying that if commodity-owners desired more for their goods they could get it. The same with the commodity labour-power. The owner’s resistence, his determination not to part with it for less than the most he can get for it, is the presupposed condition which enables its value to find expression. The “standard of comfort,” on the other hand, is one of the conditions of the determination of that value. The value must exist before it can find expression, therefore the conditions determining the magnitude of that value must come before conditions which enable the value to find expression in (in this instance) the wage. To say then, that “When no longer required to devote the same proportion of his wages to the purchase of absolute necessaries, the workman . . . can be trusted to follow the methods of the middle and upper classes, who spend more when they have more to spend,” is to take hold of the wrong end of the stick. The workers can never keep the suggested surplus because they have first satisfied “absolute” needs, but only because they have made “luxuries” equally with the so-called “absolute necessaries” a first charge upon their wages. And this they can only do when their environment has rendered those “luxuries” so necessary that they are prepared to go without food rather than abandon them, and then they have become “absolute necessaries” in the cost of producing labour-power, must therefore be embodied in its value, and eventually in wages.

All this is to say that the “standard of comfort” is merely the level of subsistence determined by the general conditions of production and the social and natural environment. “The gradual lowering of the cost of living,” therefore, must leave the standard of living unchanged. The gradual lowering of the cost of working-class living is a constant factor in capitalist society, and it is accompanied by a steady decrease in the proportion of the product of their toil which goes to the workers.

And if “the gradual lowering of the cost of living” does result in “the growth of new desires,” what are these but new miseries to be endured, new whips to scourge them into submission, new chains to bind them to their benches and desks ? The anxiety of the threatened is in proportion to the loss he is threatened with, and new wants can only add to the horrors of insecurity. Not all, not even the worst, perhaps, of the evil of the working-class position is contained in their actual poverty. Its most awful aspect is the utter insecurity, the growing precariousness of their hold upon the means of subsistence. To talk of “new desires . . . leading them to resist wage reduction” is to ascribe the workers’ present awful plight to the lack of desires. Heaven knows they have desires and needs enough, and are sufficiently conscious of them, to make such insulting mockery quite superfluous. The peculiar position of the working class decrees that necessity must precede means, hence the question of luxury can never arise for them.

A. E. Jacomb

To be Continued.

The origin and rise of capital. (1910)

From the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

While to-day, in the domain of natural science, the theory of evolution is generally accepted as the basis of research, the reverse is the case in the field of political economy. The reason is that natural evolution can be “squared” with individualism, but social evolution cannot. Natural organic development can admittedly be evolutionary without interfering with the “God-and-creation” idea which attributes the privileged position of the few to Omnipotent favour. Social development along evolutionary lines must, if logically and persistently traced, demonstrate more clearly that all men are social products and economic positions, therefore, merely the result of necessity and not of choice.

While orthodox political economy at the bidding of the possessing class, is at all times concerned to prove that capital and wage labour have existed through all history, the historic and economic teachings of Karl Marx, particularly the “Materialist Conception of History” and the “Theory of Surplus Value,” supply ample evidence that capital and wage-labour are conditions of a social system of production forming but a comparatively small link in the great chain of social evolution.

In the “seventies” and “eighties” the orthodox political economists who set out to demolish the “pernicious” theories of Marx had not yet acquired the craftiness of present-day “economic experts”, and therefore contented themselves with mere fairy tales to explain the origin of capital and wage-labour. Thus Wilhelm Roscher, professor of political economy at the University of Leipsic (until his death in 1894) wrote (Principles of National Economy, Stuttgart, 1874., Vol, I. p. 423) : “Let us imagine a fisher folk without private property and capital, naked and living in caves, gaining their sustenance by catching with their bare hands sea-fish left behind by the tide in pools on the shore. All workers may here be of an equal standing, each catching and consuming 3 fishes a day. Now a wise man limits for 100 days his consumption to 2 fishes a day and uses the 100 fishes accumulated in that way to devote his labour-power for 50 days to the production of a boat and a fish-net. With the aid of this capital he commences in future to catch 30 fishes a day,”

To-day, at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the origin of and justification for the employment of capital are no longer ascribed by the economic prize-fighters of capitalism to the thriftlessness and laziness of the many and the thrift and industry of the few. No, the mighty annihilators of Marxian theories of the Mallock school have to their own satisfaction, adopted the more profound explanation that it is the “directive ability” of the few and not the mere labour of the workers which creates the greater portion of capital and is the most important factor in wealth production; and, strange to say, they draw the deduction that this factor can be and is supplied by the capitalist class alone. But European history from the 14th century explains the primitive accumulation of capital in quite a different way. Some bourgeois historians have described it from the standpoint essential to the glorification of capitalism. It was left to Karl Marx to explain it from the standpoint of the proletariat.

The literary advocates of the bourgeoisie at times described the rise of capitalism correctly in order to impress upon the workers the bourgeois standpoint that the struggle of capitalism against feudalism was a struggle against tyranny and privilege – a fight for liberty and equality. These capitalist scribes then rightly point out that industrial capital could not rise without “free” workers – workers who had ceased to come under the domination of chattel-slavery, serfdom, or the craft-guilds. They also emphasise the fact that capitalist wealth production had to be freed from the fetters of feudalism, from the clutches of the feudal lords. Socialists have no reason to detract from the importance of that struggle, considering that the capitalist class are most anxious to deny its character when they hear us now proclaiming the need for social revolution.

While a number of bourgeois writers contributed considerably to the records of the history of primitive accumulation, it was left to Marx and his life co-worker, Engels, to point out its significance from the working-class stand-point. It was they who laid stress upon the fact that  this accumulation spelt the creation of the proletariat and of capital itself. Marx, having already given in The Poverty of Philosophy some indications of the conditions that in England – the motherland of capitalism – prepared the way for primitive accumulation, furnished a full and lucid history of it in his great work, Capital.

That fascinating history teaches us that, apart from the craft-guilds in the towns, the greatest hindrance to the rise of capital was the common ownership in the soil by village communities. While such property existed proletarians in large numbers were impossible. Fortunately for capitalism, its development was considerably assisted by the feudal nobility. After the Crusades the production of and commerce in commodities, developed by leaps and bounds, increasing greatly the demand for goods made by the craftsmen and sold by the merchants of the towns for money. The feudal nobility, dependent for their existence upon the direct services of, or goods supplied by, their peasant dependents, began to develope a craving for money. The military power of the towns and princes precluded all possibility of robbing or extorting money from the merchants or craftsmen, while the very poverty of the peasants did the same in their direction. Hence they determined to become producers of commodities like the townfolk – to produce wool, corn and other products for money instead of for their own use only.

Such a change could only be brought about at the expense of the peasantry. These, reduced to serfdom, could now be driven from their homesteads, which were added to the adjacent territory of their lords and masters. And to complete the ruin of the peasants, the communally owned land of the villages standing under the suzerainty of the feudal lords, was turned into the latter’s private property. At that time wool was much in demand by the textile undertakings of  the towns. But the extension of wool production necessitated the turning of arable land into sheep runs. To accomplish this end a great number of peasants were driven from their farms by legal or illegal means, that is, either by economic compulsion or by the use of physical force. (For confirmation of Marx’s statements on these points see H. de Gibbins’ Industrial History of England, pp. 40-57.) With the growth of the textile industry the number of expropriated and evicted peasants increased continually. Besides, the nobility dissolved their retinues, which had under the changed conditions ceased to be a source of power, but on the contrary had become a decided source of financial weakness. The Reformation, too, favoured the rise of capitalism by depriving the old sub-tenants of their holdings of Church property, driving them out, in order to hand the same over, almost for nothing, to speculating farmers and citizens, thus forcing these sub-tenants, like the inmates of the suppressed monasteries, into the proletariat. (See de Gibbins’  Industrial History of England, p. 83, for confirmation on this point.)

By such means a large proportion of the country population was divorced from the soil, from their means of production, with the result that an army of proletarians was created – proletarians compelled, in order to live, to sell their labour-power to the highest capitalist bidder. The feudal lords were thus instrumental in paving the way for agricultural commodity production on a large scale, while at the same time supplying the capitalists of the towns with the wage-workers they so urgently needed.

The consequence of the wholesale expropriation of the peasantry in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe, was general vagabondage, which threatened to overwhelm society, and, as a deterrent., cruel and heartless punishments were meted out to vagabonds and paupers, such as whipping, branding, slicing off ears, and even death. Marx sums up the horror of this treatment as follows (Capital, p. 761) :

 Thus were the agricultural people first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.

But while more workers were thus set “free” than capital could employ, the supply of efficient workers fell behind the demands of capital, as during the period of actual manufacture proper, which led to a division of manual labour, production depended upon workers who had gained a certain proficiency (in many cases taking years to acquire) in the various part processes. Besides, much more capital was needed for wages than for tools and materials. Hence with the accumulation of capital the demand for wage labour grew rapidly, while the supply of competent workers proceeded in much slower ratio. Skilled workers were very scarce, and in great demand. The fact that they still retained the high notions of handicraftsmen made the wage-workers during the infancy of capitalism independent, defiant and often rebellious against the hard discipline and wretched monotony of capitalist production. Therefore, to obtain submissive workers, the capitalists had to introduce the same powerful authority by whose aid the peasants were expropriated, the land made private property, and the vagabonds and paupers tortured and murdered  – the authority of the State. The most stringent legislation was enacted to fix a maximum wage, extend the working day, and prohibit combination of the workers. (See Capital, Karl Marx, pp. 761-765; also Industrial History of England, de Gibbins, pp. 71, 106 and 118.)

And how hypocritical was the cry of liberty, fraternity and equality of the French industrial capitalists at the time of the French Revolution was proved by the fact that as soon as they had conquered political power (mainly by the assistance of the workers) these “just” people instituted a bitter campaign for the abolition of the remainder of common land and for the strictest prohibition of any kind of labour combination. (Capital, pp. 765-6.)

The foregoing historical survey explains how the proletariat, and subsequently a “surplus” number of wage-workers, were created and how they made possible the development or capitalism, which in its turn reproduced to an ever larger extent the proletariat and a “surplus” of wage-workers. Another important question remains: whence originated the wealth which provided the nucleus of industrial capital? The usurers’ and merchants’ capital inherited from ancient society played an important part in the middle ages. Ever since the crusades commerce with the near and far East had expanded, with the result that the merchants’ capital had become concentrated in few hands. But usury and commerce were not the only sources which supplied the nucleus of industrial capital. Readers desirous of an explicit exposition of the historical development bearing on this point should study the brilliant chapter relating to primitive accumulation in Marx’s Capital. Here a quotation from that work (p. 775) summing up the  various methods of this accumulation must suffice:

  The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, etc. 

  The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

The foregoing brief outline of the brilliant history of the origins of capital demonstrate beyond doubt that primitive capital was the result of robbery, murder and rapine, and that therefore it is only to be expected that the orthodox political economists, the cat’s-paws of the capitalists, should lie and shuffle to the utmost degree in order to prove that capital is the outcome of thrift and industry, or the result of the “directive ability” of the capitalists. And there is no reason for surprise in the fact that, in the face of the overwhelming evidence as to the origin and development of capitalism furnished by Marx, the present orthodox school is averse to accepting the theory of evolution as the basis of its research. For pinned down to the glaring facts of history, it loses every vestige of argument against Marx’s theory of value and his explanation of the origin of capital. Unfortunately the misrepresentations and lies levelled by the bourgeois economists, politicians and diplomatists against the sound and irrefutable teachings of Marx, are still swallowed without much hesitation by the workers of this country. But we Socialists, as evolutionists and revolutionists, know that the failure of the capitalist quack remedies for the great social evils of to-day, must, in the long run, convince the bulk of the proletariat that their salvation is to be found in Socialism alone.

Hans Neumann

Editorial: The Great Hoax. (1910)

Editorial from the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “great fite” between the Lords and the Commons is over “ bar the shouting." We may be reminded that bar the shouting it was never commenced—which, of course is perfectly true. We will therefore correct ourselves and put it this way: the bottle of political pop which the Liberal politicians uncorked—after vigorous preliminary agitation to bring it up “heady"—with such ostentation a few weeks ago, has got nearly through its effervescence. It has boiled and bubbled and toiled and troubled; it has frothed and foamed and raged and spluttered and spat fire; it has looked daggers and thunder and threatened plague, pestilence and famine; it has raved of red ruin and revolution and so frightened us with forewarning of volcanic eruption and sudden death that we have forgotten all about the comet. But if it frightened us it really meant no harm: it was a quite good-natured modicum of shandy-bluff, whose nature it is to be a little boisterous while it may. Now it has given up the gas and wants nothing more 1 than a quiet corner in which it hide its relic.

Well, it has fulfilled its mission—let it die. So say those who uncorked it; so said we ere yet it was uncorked. But it was so beastly easy to prophesy in such a case that we are almost ashamed to remind our readers of the circumstance. Well, let it die ; and let its miserable undertakers of the Liberal and Labour party find oblivion for its little ditch water corpse. It has served to carry the Liberals into power; it has served to bribe a way for those emasculates of the Labour movement, those eunuchs of capitalism—Barnes, Hardie, Thorne, MacDonald and crew—a path to the vicinity of the flesh-pots of Egypt, and nothing more was required of it.

As for these Labour mumpers, some of them were inclined to set up a howl when the fraud of the “Lord’s veto" was deliberately exposed to the view of the swindled electorate. In their anxiety to preserve their countenances they yelped. But their masters’ eyes were upon them and they very soon shook off their distemper. They slept the night on it, and in the morning were foremost in finding excuses for the swindle. What else could they do? Disobey their Liberal masters and refer the case to their Liberal constituents? Not likely! They had been at some pains to solve the poverty problem— for themselves and in their own cases —and are no great believers casting their bread upon the political waters. So they turned to covering up their Liberal masters’ treachery— which, by strange coincidence, was the only way of hiding their own. It was one of those “odd jobs in the Literal workshop” it is their special function to execute with neatness and despatch.

And now we simply ask those to whom we have given warnings in abundance, to watch these leeches who are battening upon their life’s blood, and if their own eyes and ears will tell them nothing, then we may draw the blanket over ours and sleep— for they are helpless.

Party Paragraphs. (1910)

Party News from the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our SIXTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE will be held at Easter and promises to be satisfactory in every respect. A splendid suite of rooms consisting of two halls, cloak rooms, etc., have been secured at 

FAIRFAX HALL,
PORTLAND GARDENS,
STANHOPE GARDENS,
GREEN LANES,
FINSBURY PARK,

for Friday and Saturday, 25th and 26th March. Conference will commence each day at 10.a.m. On the Friday evening a SOCIAL EVENING will be held (doors open 7.30, commence at 8) and our North London Comrades guarantee a triumph.

The Hall adjoins Harringay Park Station (Midland), and is a 1d. tram ride from Finsbury Park Stations (Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Tube, and Great Ninth and City Tube).

Teas will be provided at the Conference at 6d. each, and catering will be continued throughout the evening.

* * *

Socialists willing to join the proposed Kennington Branch are invited to communicate with

W. McCartney,
20, Manor Place,
Walworth Road, S.E.

* * *

Socialists in Croydon who desire the formation of a branch of the Socialist Party in that district, are requested to communicate with 

P. G. Barker,
7, Corporation Road,
Woodside.

* * *

The debate between Mr. P. Alden, M.P., and our comrade Anderson has been arranged to take place on Friday, April 1st, at the Earlsmead Road Schools, Tottenham.

* * *

Our Tottenham comrades are again contesting two Wards in the forthcoming District Council Elections and will win—ultimately, of course.

* * *

Our exposure of the Social Democrats in our February issue seems to have caused a more than usually lively flutter in their camp, and while the truth of our statement is not denied, the endeavour is being made to discredit its worth by shouting “Tory newspaper ! ” It may therefore be as well to state that the “Coventry Sentinel’’ which we quoted is no more a Tory paper than is “Justice,” the “Clarion” the “New Age,” or the “Labour Leader.” The following, taken from its leaderette on the S.D.P. will make this clear.

  “Our readers will share the regret we feel that a wing of the Socialist party which once wielded a fair amount of influence has suffered the humiliation of rejected proffered services. In attempting to run in harness with a Liberal at Northampton, Mr. Quelch and the Social-Democrats have made an unwise step. Their resolve not to fall from grace again comes too late. . . . Jealous as we are for the honour of the movement, we deplore the decadence of the S.D.P., which appears to be due to a determination to secure office at any price.”

—“Coventry Sentinel,” 25.12.1909.

* * * 

The receipt of a copy of this paper is an invitation to subscribe.

Kropotkin on the French Revolution. (1910)

Book Review from the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kropotkin’s work on the French Revolution, just issued in its English edition, professes to be written from the point of view of the “common people”. The author says: “The Parliamentary history of the Revolution, its wars, its policy and its diplomacy, has been studied and set forth in all its details. But the popular history of the Revolution remains still to be told. The part played by the people of the country places and towns in the Revolution has never been . . . narrated in its entirety.” (Page 4.) Kropotkin claims that his work, to a certain extent, fills the gap which previously existed. “the people,” he says, “long before the Assembly, were making the Revolution on the spot; they gave themselves, by revolutionary means, a new municipal administration.” (Page 108). Further: “The Assembly only sanctioned in principle and extended to France altogether what the people had accomplished themselves in certain localities. It went no further.” (Page 125.) Again, the middle-class Brissot said: “It is the galleries of the Convention, the people of Paris, and the Commune, who dominate the position and force the hand of the Convention every time some revolutionary measure is taken.” (Page 357.)

We know to-day that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, that from the assembling of the States General to the days of the Directory there was a succession of bourgeois assemblies, and that, above all, fear drove the Royalist party to cede first one point and then another, and further, that the bourgeoisie, once in unstable control of the State, was compelled, in order to keep the allegiance of its own lower ranks and the help of the incipient proletariat, to grant measures of relief, of political and legal reform. And, of course, a plentiful crop of promises. As Meredith puts it: “The rich will not move without a goad – I have and hold – you shall hunger and covet – until you are strong enough to force by hand.”

The French revolution was, then, a bourgeois revolution, made by a wealthy class, a class which, having gradually attained a position of economic advantage, determined on the grasping of political power as the proper safeguard of its interests. There can be little doubt that the English Revolution of 1640 and the great French Revolution were enacted by such.

But Kropotkin does not adopt the Marxian view that the root of historic change is to be found chiefly in economic development. He says that “It is always ideas that govern the world”, and he contends that two currents made the French Revolution. “One of them, the current of ideas, concerning the political reorganisation of States, came from the middle classes; the other, the current of action, came from the people,  . . . who wanted to obtain immediate and definite improvements in their economic condition.” (Page 1.)

There have been many attempts to explain the French Revolution in other than economic terms. Kropotkin thus largely attributes it to the work of the philosophers and teachers who preceded the Revolution, but after all his concept differs but little from that of Louis the Sixteenth, who, when he encountered the works of Voltaire and Rousseau in the library of the Order of Malta, referred to them as the source of all his misfortunes. Other historians have spoken of the whimsical and unbalanced character of the French people as the cause of the great Revolution, and this is surely as plausible as an explanation as the “idea” hypothesis of Kropotkin. Frederic Harrison, in his essays on the Meaning of History, gives a long and remarkable list of economic changes which the Revolution made, and Kropotkin himself recognises this when he says: “Before all this (i.e., the Revolution) could be realised they (the bourgeoisie) knew the ties that bound the peasant to his village must be broken. It was necessary that he should be free to leave his hut, and even that he should be forced to leave it, so that he might be impelled towards the towns in search of work.” (Page 8.) “As to the real authority, that was to be vested in a Parliament, in which an educated middle class, which would represent the active and thinking part of the nation, should predominate.” (Page 7.)

I remember once seeing an advertisement in an American magazine puffing up a well-known brand of revolvers. It was illustrated with a picture full of meaning. A paymaster stood behind a wire screen doling out wages. A few dozen piles of coins were laid in a row, and behind the screen were a few dozen rough looking men waiting for their wages. Within easy reach of the paymasters’ hand lay a revolver; one, as the advertisement grimly said, reputed for quick, accurate work at short notice. The revolver was emblematic of force, but here is the rub – what was there to prevent the men themselves likewise possessing these weapons celebrated for quick and accurate work? I think we can safely say that in the majority of cases it was the “idea” deeply imprinted on the minds of the men that the paymaster had a right to his piles of gold. Not that the illustration stops here, or we should be idealists; but this servile idea that property is sacred, a test of virtue and ability, had been sedulously instilled into the minds of those men by the paid orators and quibblers of the capitalist class. It is our work, we who are conscious of the working of class society, to combat that idea, and in this work we are aided by economic conditions; whilst the economic environment existing at the time of the great French Revolution was not adapted to the social ownership of the means of production and distribution. We Socialists, just as much as the hired hacks of the capitalist class, are products of our time. We move along the line of the law of things; to-day insecurity of existence for the many, production concentrating into monopoly, our vigorous propaganda, these are the elements which make for Socialism.

Kropotkin, however, gives us some acute criticism. He deals with the Communistic conception of Babeuf in a manner which is capable of application to our would-be sociologists of the I.L.P. Altogether Babeuf’s conception was so narrow, so unreal, that he thought it possible to reach Communism by the action of a few individuals who were to get the Government into their hands by means of a conspiracy of a secret society. He went so far as to put his faith in one single person, provided this person had a will strong enough to introduce Communism and thus save the world! (Page 491.) And so to the “Socialists” previously named it seems possible to reach Socialism by anticipating the workers’ class-consciousness, by “giving” the proletariat something; promising them amelioration with their enemies in power, and being so near sighted as to imagine that the crux of the problem lies in getting the suffix M.P. at the end of their leaders’ names, whilst the Socialist democracy is still in the making.

Kropotkin, on page 391 says: “Either there will be in the revolution (of the future) a day when the proletarians will separate themselves from the middle-class  . . . or this separation will not take place, and then there will be no revolution.” Now Kropotkin gives a detailed account of the position of Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre was the tool of the third estate, the instrument of the newly wealthy, who were satisfied with the position they had obtained. He was not their hypocritical, conscious tool, for he was noted fir his rectitude and sincerity. But he was doing their work, nevertheless, when he was annihilating the Herbertists and Montagnards; for during the Terror, Louis Blanc tells us, out of 2,759 executions only 650 were wealthy people. Robespierre guillotined his “more advanced” co-workers. Then the “more conservative” of the bourgeoisie soon despatched Robespierre.

Liebknecht, in his short treatise No Compromise, says that the German Social Democrats have used opponents against opponents, but have never allowed their opponents to use them. Whether that be true or not, Kropotkin shows how during the French Revolution the proletariat were used by the bourgeoisie. At critical moments the poor were brought into the streets to fight and terrify the royalists. But when the terrifying was done they were sent back to their hovels to be patient and starve, and when the royalists had been beaten, the bourgeoisie did all that was possible to destroy the proletarian organisation in the sections. When the armies returned from the frontiers the men of the Faubourgs were surrounded and disarmed.

Kropotkin also brings out beautifully the work of the unknown toilers in the Revolution, the unknown organisers in the sections, of the type of the Communard of eighty years later, who died fighting at the barricades shouting, “For the solidarity of Humanity”. The Positivists set aside a day for the worship of “All the Dead”, of all those heroes by whose efforts and sacrifices, hopes and ideals, a better world has been made possible. Is it too sentimental to suggest that we also, amidst times of hoper and gloom, should give more than a stray thought to all those unknown comrades whose individual minute but collectively massive efforts have made Socialism something more than a Utopian dream?

John A. Dawson

Review: The True Story of Jack Cade, by Joseph Clayton (1910)

Book Review from the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The True Story of Jack Cade, by Joseph Clayton. (Frank Palmer. London. 1s. net.) 

It it a great pity the volume under notice is not the work of a Socialist; one acquainted in some degree with the materialist conception of history. As a careful monograph upon the doings of a little known personage it has distinct value and is certainly corrective of the travesty of Cade set up by the immortal William, in "Henry VI." But—the inevitable but — Socialists would have welcomed a fuller reference to the material causes of the insurrection in preference to the simple narration of events. The evidence adduced by Mr. Clayton would appear to indicate that it was far from a rising of labourers, although the author himself is manifestly of the contrary opinion. Of Cade's ancestry and position little is known, but as Mortimer (as some called him) was "a good name for the rallying of the gentry,” and as the squires took the lead in calling the men to arms, employing the parish constable for the purpose; and as further, Sir John Cheyne, Robert Poynings (uncle to the Countess of Nottingham), eighteen squires, seventy-four country gentlemen, many a yeoman and some five ordained church ministers, followed the camp to Blackheath, we are compelled to believe that Jack Cade's rebellion was another of those instances, dotted throughout history, where the toilers were called upon to break one another's heads in the interests of their lords and masters. This view is lent considerable colour by the fact that the period dealt with was that known as tbs “Golden Age of Labour,'’ when in spite of the infamous Statute of Labourers, the wages of labour rose above the attempted restriction by legal enactment The celerity with which the men of Kent disbanded and returned to their homes is also a noteworthy fact.

One hint we are given of a material basis for the rising, as thus : “Kent, too, had its grievances. Piracy swept the English Channel unchecked, and the highways were infested with robbers Moreover, its trade was passing. Formerly there had been no better wool than that of Kent, but now the sheep of Lincolnshire and Shropshire, and of the Cotswolds, was found to give a better article.” (Italics ours.) To which we would add Verb Sap.

One makes the interesting discovery in perusing the volume, that at least two of the "immediate demands" of the modem labour crowd were anticipated in the fifteenth century. We refer to Payment of Members and Graduated Income Tax. Ye gods! Nearly five hundred years ago and yet some people treat them seriously. Shall we call this condition of mind political atavism or does it masquerade under the plausible patronymic of “possibilism"?

W. T. Hopley