Still chasing the tanner (1989)

From the January 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1989 workers' backs are to the wall. Who will be the next for the chop in the ongoing economic terrorism known as rationalising the economy? Union bureacrats in posh offices are thinking up new cliches to put in their tired old speeches to those who pay their salaries To be sure without unions workers would be exploited even more — they are our best defence against the class who buy our labour power and milk us for profit. But all the militant rhetoric in the world will not disguise the fact that unions can only do what the capitalist system will let us get away with. And in 1989 the bosses will be getting away with murder.

What a difference a century makes. Back in 1889 the workers were on the move. For the first time unskilled unions were being formed, organised by working men and women with a growing political consciousness of their class position. The New Unionism, as it was called, was a major development in the thinking and activity of British workers

The gas workers showed the way to do it. Back in 1872 the gas stokers — unskilled workers who had not been welcome in the old skilled, craft unions — formed the Amalgamated Gasmen's Association. When union members were sacked and scabs brought in to do their work at lower rates in plants at Beckton, Stepney, Bow, Hackney, Bermondsey and Fulham, 2,000 workers came out on strike. More scabs were brought down from Yorkshire and Lancashire to fill their jobs. Five of the Beckton stokers, alleged by the bosses to be the strike organisers. were arrested and sent for trial at the Old Bailey for breach of the Masters and Servants Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act. They were sentenced to a year s hard labour. In 1884 and 1885 two further attempts to unionise were crushed by the parasites who owned the gas plants but never produced any gas, save for that emitted in defence of the great "freedoms'' of the profit system.

On 31 March 1889 the gas workers held a mass meeting in Canning Town to organise a union. Will Thorne, a member of the Social Democratic Federation and an employee of the Gas, Light and Coke Company at Beckton, addressed the meeting At the end eight hundred men voted to form a union. Two weeks later the union's membership stood at 3,000: its motto was “Love, Union and Fidelity". These workers did not know much about the class war, except that they were poor and the bosses were rich and the bosses were rich because the workers were poor. Thorne himself, an unskilled labourer with a wife and five kids, was taught to read and write by Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor, who threw her full support behind the striking gas workers.

Under capitalism you don't always win even if you fight hard. The system is weighted in favour of the capitalists, and it takes a lot of hard struggle for workers to win battles in the class war. But the gas workers understood what the "new realists" of the modern trade union movement have yet to learn: if you don't fight hard you won't win. The gas workers fought for eight-hour shifts and double rates on Sundays. Within a month the bosses were on their knees. The strike was won. Unprecedentedly, these unskilled workers had shown the capitalists the power of labour united.

That was in the spring a hundred years ago. By the summer an even greater strike of unskilled workers took place, the only strike of the last century which, in Ben Tillett's words, "has the dignity of capital letters": The Great Dock Strike. On 14 August unskilled labourers in ten London docks formed the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and Labourers' Union of Great Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands. They started with 800 members and went on to recruit 150,000. Their demand was 6d. an hour (less than 3p. in modern money). It became known as the fight for the dockers' tanner. 30,000 workers marched through the streets. Not for them the "new realism" of sitting in smoke-filled rooms doing deals with the bosses. They went out and took their message to their fellow workers, not just in speeches, but in song. To the tune of "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching", the dockers sang

Strike boys, strike for better wages!

Strike boys, strike for better pay!

Go on fighting at the docks.

Stick it out like fighting cocks

Go on fighting till the bosses they give way!

Not a chorus to be heard that often around the table of the General Council of the 1980s' TUC. In Hyde Park on 1 September, 100,000 workers gathered to listen to speeches, many from socialists, in support of the striking dockers. There was no Norman Willis there to counsel caution; no Kinnock to condemn the dockers for getting the working class a bad name.

A significant feature of the Great Dock Strike was the solidarity shown within the working class. Workers seemed to feel, politically limited as their knowledge was, that an injury to one was an injury to all. So the money flooded in. Throughout London street collectors asked workers to contribute their pennies. The loafers in the gentlemen's clubs gave not a farthing, but the wage slaves collected a magnificent £11,732. The other trade unions sent donations amounting to £4,234. But solidarity was expressed not only by British workers. 1889, after all was the year of the formation of the Second International. Useless as that body subsequently proved to be, back in 1889 it rallied support from workers in France, Belgium, Germany and the USA, who managed to send over £100 to the strike fund. But most inspiring of all was the effort of the Australian trade unions who, quite unexpectedly, managed to send over £30,000 to the dockers. The capitalists may have been divided into competing national gangs, but the workers showed that they were not. No struggle under capitalism can be won by a movement which is broke, but the dockers did not stand alone and the strike ended with the employers conceding enough for the union to return to work as victors in the battle. (In fact, the dockers' tanner was not won, although 5d. an hour was granted. Other demands were met and, perhaps above all, the capitalists knew just how mighty a force the workers they exploited could be).

There is nothing like victory to give workers confidence. Without doubt, the Great Dock Strike showed what could be achieved by united class action. As Engels observed at the time.

That these poor famished broken down creatures who bodily fight amongst each other for admission to work, should organise for resistance, turn out 40-50,000 strong, draw after them into the strike all and every trade of the East End in any way concerned with shipping, hold out above a week, and terrify the wealthy and powerful dock companies that is a revival I am proud to have lived to see.

Socialists like Engels were not alone in seeing the dockers' struggle as an awakening of our class. On 24 September 1889 these lines from a working-class poet were published in the East End News:

O, this is the turn of the night and the tide.

And the sea's coming in, and the sunrise spreads wide.

Who said that these men were too weak to unite?

Who said that wrong should always triumph o'er right?

Who said that the devil should always hold sway?

What matters who said it. They're answered today! 

Who said that we slept, and would never awake?

To see how those suffer who live for our sake 

Such lives that we mean soon that no man shall live?

Are we waking, oh brothers, we cheer you and give 

Our gold, our good word. Now that this fight is won 

The whole world is with you. Take heart and press on.

For the past century the workers have been pressing on. And the capitalists have been pushing back. With their police scab-herders and their anti-union laws and their puppet Judges and their parties of Left and Right who seek to run the wages system, our class enemies have pushed and pushed. The tragedy is that in 1989 workers are still chasing the tanner — still fighting, when we can muster the confidence to fight, for the crumbs from the cake we ourselves bake. We should learn from the events of the last hundred years that it is not enough perpetually to be chasing the tanner. It is the wages system itself which is our enemy; only its abolition will mark the true victory of the working class.

Steve Coleman

Socialist and trade unionist (2015)

Book Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'A Rebel’s Guide to Eleanor Marx', by Siobhan Brown. Bookmarks. 2015

Although marred by the littering of ‘fightbacks’ and ‘downturns’ characteristic of SWP publications, this is not fundamentally a bad booklet. The contribution of Eleanor Marx to the class struggle is satisfactorily documented, both intellectually through her work on women – identifying  socialism as the way to ‘woman’s emancipation’ solution – and practically through her role as a firebrand activist in the New Unionism of the 1880s. Eleanor was not just the daughter of her father but a player in her own right – indeed her union interventions put his own ineffective fumblings in the First International to shame. The boring intricacies of her personal life are, in the main, sensibly avoided.

Little potted biographies of this nature have a valuable educative function regardless of the dubious politics of the issuing organisation. It is a little jarring, however, to be lectured on the undoubted usefulness of trade union organisation, the inefficacy of reformism and the patronising leadership attitude (of Hyndman) by a party characterised by non-industrial, primarily student, recruitment, hugely reformist sensibilities and a thoroughly authoritarian constitution. In the wake of the Comrade Delta scandal, perhaps the most notable thing about the ‘Rebel’s Guide’ series is the attention paid to ‘The Woman Question’. Four of the six in the range have female authors and half are about famous women or women’s issues. Whether there really was any truth behind the allegations or no, there is nothing like putting up a smoke screen.

Kaz.

English Social Democratic Parties (Concluded) (1955)

From the September 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

See Parts One and Two in the series

While the organisations we have been discussing were struggling for recognition they were joined by an entirely different stream.

Old trade union leaders like Thomas Burt and Alexander Macdonald had been elected to Parliament, in theory to represent labour’s point of view; in fact they wore little more than supporters of the Liberal Party who used them as decoys. In areas where there was considerable dissatisfaction with existing conditions the Liberals backed these “working men” candidates; when elected the latter fell in line with Liberal policies. The organisation of the unskilled workers and those outside the established unions during the eighties and nineties thrust a fresh and awkward element into the political arena. This new unionism, based upon the most depressed sections of the workers, was inclined to shed constitutional illusions relating to industrial action, and the strike weapon came to the front again as a means to enforce the workers demands for amelioration of their conditions. Workers who were prominent in this new movement attempted to induce the Trade Union Congress to take more vigorous political action, but their efforts did not meet with much success at first; a few resolutions were carried but the domination of the old leaders was still strong enough to prevent any action being taken on them. The battle between the reactionary leaders and those imbued with the more radical ideas of the new working class political parties became stronger and a violent struggle took place at the 1889 Dundee Trade Union Congress in which the militant group, headed by Keir Hardie, was again defeated.

In the meantime Thorne, Tillett, Mann and Bums, had been busy organising the gas workers and dockers and obtaining the concession of an eight hours day for the gas workers without having to resort to a strike. A few months later the London dock workers struck and were successful in gaining their demands. These successes gave an impetus to trade unionism and also raised the prestige of the new trade union leaders.

At the 1892 Trade Union Congress the efforts of the militant section were rewarded by the carrying of a resolution calling upon the parliamentary committee to report to the next Congress on the question of independent labour representation. At the same Congress a resolution sponsored by the Social Democratic Federation that support should only be given to Socialist candidates was lost by a comparatively small margin. The following year the Congress decided to set up a parliamentary fund, and to give support wily to those candidates who advocated “ the collective ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange,” but an amendment by Keir Hardie on complete political independence was lost. That the majority of the delegates who voted for the resolution had little idea of its implications must be obvious; in all probability the vigour of the militant section and lack of faith in the old methods swept them away. Keir Hardie, one of the leading militants, was secretary of the Ayrshire miners union and had been elected to Parliament in 1892 as an Independent. He was opposed to Marxian historical and economic theories, holding the view that Socialist revolutions had been occurring throughout history since the disintegration of tribal Communism. To him “Socialism, like every other problem of life, is at bottom a question of ethics and morals.” (“From Serfdom to Socialism” 1907, page 35.). His idea of the road to Socialism he explains as follows:

“In like manner it is conceivable that the transference of industries from private hands to the State will be a gradual and peaceful process. Already, in fact, the process has advanced to a considerable stage. The property held and worked and controlled by municipalities already exceeds £500,000,000 sterling in value, and is being added to yearly. This process has but to continue long enough to ensure that every industry will pass under public control, and thus State Socialism will become an accomplished fact, by a gradual process of easy transition.”—(p. 27).

By ‘State Socialism’ Hardie meant that Nationalisation and Municipalisation with which we have become familiar, under which the Capitalists as a class own collectively, living upon the interest they draw from their bondholding.

The idea of building up an independent working class party on a large scale was now in the air. At the instigation of the progressive groups a conference was held at Bradford in 1893 representing all kinds of labour groups, including the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society. The Socialist League had fallen to pieces in 1890 when it turned Anarchist and Morris, Eleanor Marx, Lessner, Bax and Aveling had left it and returned to the S.D.F. At the Bradford Conference the Independent Labour Party was formed and rapidly absorbed the provincial groups of Fabians. The Social Democratic Federation affiliated to it for a few months and then left. One of those who took part in forming it was Robert Blatchford, who founded the Clarion as a weekly periodical in 1891 and had written a book “Merrie England,” published in 1893, that had a very wide circulation and was a popular propagandist booklet for many years; its appealing style was mainly responsible for this.

The Independent Labour Party soon made headway displacing the Social Democratic Federation in popularity. Frederick Lessner and other members of the latter party joined it, as also did Ramsay Macdonald and members of the Fabian Society. It had for its object “To secure the collective ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange,” and its programme was made up of the principal reforms that figured in the programmes of the older parties including “Taxation to extinction of unearned incomes,” “Remunerative work for unemployed,” and “Substitution of arbitration for war and the consequent disarmament of the nation.” The Fabian element was, and remained until recent years, the prevailing influence in the Independent Labour Party. Keir Hardie became the President and Tom Mann the General Secretary of the new party.

The further development of the Independent Labour Party was merged in the development of the Labour Party. The majority of the early Labour M.P.’s were members of it. Although it still lingers on the 1914-1918 war Coalition Government, the rise of the Communist Party and Labour Government, practically killed the Independent Labour Party as well as the Socialist Democratic Party. Born in confusion, tied up with reformist policies and supporting all that they thought was “progressive” they finally sank in the morass of “ practical politics.”

Gilmac.

Tussy - Eleanor Marx and the Early Socialist Movement in Great Britain (2012)

Eleanor Marx

From the Marx, the Cold War and the Spooks blog

In January, 1855, Karl and Jenny Marx, their daughters, Jenny and Laura, and their son, Edgar, were living in two rooms at 28 Dean St. Soho Square, London. In 1851, a third daughter had been born, but only lived for one year. But in January, 1855, a fourth daughter, who they named Eleanor, was born. In March, however, much to Karl and Jenny Marx's distress, the nine year old Edgar died. Nevertheless, the arrival of Eleanor was a great joy to them. "Tussy", as she was later called, was soon the "idolised darling of the whole house". And of her, Jenny Marx wrote in a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer in America, on the 11th of March, 1861:

"The child was born when our poor little Edgar died, and all the love and tenderness we bore him was transferred to his little sister, and the older girls looked after her and nursed her with almost motherly care. But then it would really be difficult to find a more lovable child, as pretty as a picture and sweet tempered...the child has learned German, and speaks it with remarkable accuracy and grammatical precision, and , naturally, she has learned English as a matter of course. The child is Karl's favourite, and her laughter and her merry chatter dispel any of his worries". 

Karl Marx was a great lover of children. He was no authoritarian. The girls treated him more as a playmate than a father; and they called him "the Moor", a nickname given to him on account of his jet-black hair and dark complexion. "Children must educate their parents", he would say. And during this period he remained completely aloof from all political activities, and concentrated on his studies and journalism.

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Marx would take his three daughters, Jenny, Laura, and young Eleanor, for outings into the country on Sundays; their favourite destination being Hampstead Heath, with a magnificent view of London, and the hills and valleys surrounding the city, from Jack Straw's Castle.

At home, Marx would read to Eleanor the stories of Bluebeard or Rumpelstilzchen by the brothers Grimm. And he would recount his version of the life of Jesus, in which he depicted Jesus as a poor carpenter's son who had been unjustly executed by the rich and powerful. In 1856, the Marx family moved to Grafton Terrace, Haverstock Hill, near Hampstead Heath.

When Eleanor was sixteen, a French radical, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, who later wrote a history of the Paris Commune of 1871, in whose ranks he fought, fell in love with her , courted her, and proposed marriage. Eleanor seems to have been favourably inclined towards Lissagaray; but Karl was doubtful about his reliability, despite Eleanor's mother, Jenny, approved the match, and in the end, after much hesitation, nothing came of it. Eleanor was obliged to remain at home. As she got older, she became her father's secretary, and conducted much of Marx's correspondence with the International Workingmen's Association. Eleanor Marx loved to recite poetry and to act, and her father encouraged her to take dramatic lessons. In 1875, the family moved again, to Maitland Park Road, in the same area.

In autumn of 1878, Marx's wife Jenny, became dangerously ill. She was suffering from incurable cancer. In June 1881, Karl went down with a violent attack of pleurisy, complicated with bronchitis and pneumonia. Eleanor nursed them both. She wrote:

" Mother lay in the big front room and the Moor lay in the little room next to it. The two who had grown used to each other, whose lives had completely intertwined, could no longer be in the same room together. The Moor got over his illness once again. I shall never forget the morning when he felt himself strong enough to get up and go into my mother's room. It was as though they were young again together - she a loving girl, and he an ardent youth starting out together through life, and not an old man shattered by ill-health and a dying old lady taking leave of each other for ever"

And on the 2nd of December, 1881, Karl Marx's wife, Jenny died. There was no ceremony at her funeral, although Frederick Engels spoke at the graveside.

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In June, 1881, a small book, England for All, was published. It was written by Henry Myer Hyndman, who claimed it to represent the programme of an organisation called the Democratic Federation, which he had just formed. This annoyed Marx, as much of the book consisted of English translations of extracts from Marx's Capital, together with a few summaries of Marx's ideas; but Hyndman mentioned neither Capital or Marx, and merely commented at the conclusion of the Preface that he was indebted "to the work of a great thinker" for much of the material. Marx broke off all relations with Hyndman.

Following his wife's death, Karl Marx's health again deteriorated; his daughter, Jenny also died on the 11th of January, 1883, and in the afternoon of the 14th of March, whilst sitting in his easy chair, Karl Marx fell asleep for the last time. As with his wife, there as no ceremony at the funeral, but again Engels spoke at the graveside. Laura had married Paul Lafargue in 1867.

Eleanor Marx was now alone. She, therefore, soon became more socially and politically active. Shortly after the death of her father, Eleanor met Beatrice Potter (later to become Mrs Sidney Webb) who was involved in charity work and freethinking. In 1883, W.G. Foot, the editor of the The Freethinker, was jailed for blasphemy. Eleanor was, in the words of Potter, "very wrath". It was useless argueing with her, she noted in her diary:

"She refused to recognise the beauty of the Christian religion. She thought that Christ if he had ever existed, was a weak-headed individual, with a good deal of sweetness of character, but lacking in heroism...The aim of socialists was to make people disregard the mythical next world and live for this world, and insist on having what will make it pleasant for them."

Potter added that Eleanor Marx "lives alone, and is much connected with the Bradlaugh set". Charles Bradlaugh, although not a socialist, was a well-known radical, republican and freethinker. But within a year of Karl Marx's death, Eleanor had entered into a "free association", or liaison, with one of this "set", Dr. Edward Aveling, a physician and, at the time, a teacher of science, who with Bradlaugh and Annie Beasant, was a leading secularist. Eleanor had by then a secretarial job in "a better class boarding-school"; but when she openly announced the situation, they said that they regretted to have to sack her. "I need work much", she informed Havelock Ellis, " but find it difficult to get. 'Respectable' people won't employ me"

A number of Eleanor's friends tried to discourage her interest in Edward Aveling, but without success. But following their association, Aveling became active in the emerging socialist and social-democratic movement, and, in fits and starts, became a lecturer and writer, and later on a translator of some of Karl Marx's writings. But according to Edmund Wilson there was something odd about Aveling:

"...he was extremely undependable about money::he not only skipped out of hotels without paying the bills, but he borrowed money from his friends right and left, and even when he knew they had little, without ever paying it back; and he did not hesitate to use for his own purposes the funds which had been given to the cause"(To the Finland Station)

At one time, Aveling tried being an actor;he wrote several one-act plays, in which he and Eleanor acted. He also had luxurious tastes

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Eleanor Marx joined the Democratic Federation in 1883, as did William Morris who hoped that it would become a socialist organisation. And in August, 1884, at its conference, the Democratic Federation became the Social-Democratic Federation. Its "ultimate" objective was:

"The establishment of a free condition of society based on the principle of political equality with equal social rights for all and the complete emancipation of labour"

To this ultimate objective, the Social-Democratic Federation added a number of immediate demands which it called "palliatives"; these included the abolition of a standing army, free compulsory, secular education, and the means of production, distribution and exchange to be treated as collective or common property. But neither the SDF's immediate or ultimate objective included the abolition of the wages system as proposed by Karl Marx as early as 1865.

Edward Aveling had also applied for membership of the [Social-]Democratic Federation; and, although the Executive Council, and Hyndman, did not want him in the organisation, they deferred to pressure by Eleanor and a number of her French and German friends, who wrote letters to the Council on Aveling's behalf, and he was admitted. They, together with William Morris, Robert Banner, E Belfort Bax, and a number of other members of the Council, soon came into conflict with the autocratic leader, Hyndman, whom Frederick Engels called an "extreme chauvinist"

The break with Hyndman, and the Social-Democratic Federation, came at a stormy meeting on the 27th of December, 1884, at which Morris read out a statement which , in part, read:

"...We believe that to hold out as baits hopes of amelioration of the condition of the workers, to be rung out of the necessities of the rival factions of our privileged rulers, is delusive and mischievous. For carrying out our aim of education and organisation no over-shadowing and indispensable leader is required, but only a band of instructed men, each of whom can learn learn to fulfil, as occasion requires it, the simple functions of the leader of a party of principle.We say that on the other hand there has been in the ranks of the Social-Democratic Federation a tendency to political opportunism, which if developed would have involved us in alliances, however temporary, with one or other of the political factions, and would have weakened our propagandist force by driving us into electioneering, and possibly would have deprived us of the due services of some of our most energetic men, by sending them to our sham parliament, there to become either nonentities, or perhaps our masters, and it may be our betrayers. We say also that among those who favoured these views of political adventure, there was a tendency towards National assertion, the persistent foe of socialism; and it is easy to see how dangerous this might become in times like the present.Furthermore, these views have led, as they ere sure to lead, to attempts at arbitrary rule inside the Federation;for such a policy as above demands a skillful and shifty leader, to whom all persons and opinions must be subordinated, and who must be supported (if necessary) at the expense of fairness and fraternal openness...
....our view of duty to the cause of socialism forbids us to cease spreading its principles or to work as mere individuals. We have, therefore, set on foot an independent organisation, the Socialist League, with no intention of acting in hostility to the Social-Democratic Federation, but determined to spread the principles of socialism by the only means we deem effectual."

The first two signatories to the statement were those of Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx.

The Socialist League was formally founded on the 30th of December, 1884. Following the "To Socialists" statement, partly quoted above, " The Manifesto of the Socialist League", which as largely written by William Morris, was published in The Commonweal, which as edited by Morris with Aveling as sub-editor. The Manifesto set out in some detail the ideas of not just Morris, or Eleanor Marx, but the emerging, still contradictory, socialist movement of the 1880s in Britain. Its main arguments and conclusions are worth quoting.

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It begins :

"We come before you as a body advocating Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society - a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.

As the civilised world is at present constituted there are two classes in society: the one possessing wealth and the instruments of production, the other producing wealth by means of those instruments, but only by the leave and the use of the possessing class.

The two classes are necessarily in antagonism to one another. The possessing class, or non-producers, can only live as a class on the unpaid labour of the producers - the more unpaid labour they can wring out of them, the richer they will be; therefore the producing class - the workers - are driven to strive to better themselves at the expense of the possessing class and the conflict between them is ceaseless."

And the Manifesto of the Socialist League continues:

"All the means of the production of wealth must be declared treated as the common property of all...Nationalisation of land alone, which many earnest and sincere persons are now preaching, would be useless so long as labour was subject to the fleecing of surplus value under the capitalist system.

No better solution would be State Socialism, by whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to make concessions to the working class while leaving the present system of capital and wages in operation: no number of merely administrative changes, until the workers are in possession of all political power, would make any real approach to Socialism

The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisation of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows that this can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation...

...To the realisation of this change the Socialist League addresses itself with all earnestness. As a means thereto will do all in its power towards the education of the people in the principles of this great cause, and will strive to organise those who will accept this education...."

At the same time as the Manifesto of the Socialist League was written, a draft constitution was prepared, with encouragement by Engels, by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling. It committed the Socialist League to "striving to conquer political power by promoting the election of Socialists to Local Governments, School Boards and other administrative bodies". Their draft, however, was rejected by a majority of the membership at the League's first annual conference in July, 1885

Despite the Socialist League's official policy of the working class conquering "political power", and opposition to "palliatives", or what socialists now refer to as "reformism", the organisation soon demonstrated that, among its active members, were anarchists whose main concern was the destruction of the state, and reformers whose policies included the passing of the Eight Hour Bill. Furthermore, the Socialist League was not entirely opposed to the idea of nationalisation; and socialists such as William Morris and Eleanor Marx, and the socialist movement generally, had not, as yet, completely rejected the notion of leadership as a principle, although they ere opposed to the "arbitrary" leadership of people like Hyndman; this was partly understandable at the time, and was due to the fact that many workers, including active Trade Unionists, were still illiterate or , at least, only semi-literate. Another weakness of such people as Eleanor Marx, William Morris and Edward Aveling, was that although they had left the Social-Democratic Federation, and formed the Socialist League, they had "no intention of acting in hostility to the Social-Democratic Federation". It was twenty years before socialists realised that a party organised solely for the establishment of socialism would have to oppose other parties, including the SDF.

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The Socialist League appeared to get off to a good start; indeed, just before its founding, Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky that Ernest Belfort Bax and Edward Aveling had "the best intentions and learn a lot too; but everything is confused and by themselves these literary people can do nothing; they are both thoroughly sound, intelligent and sincere although needing great assistance". However, by 1886, Engels noted that Bax was strongly influenced by the anarchists. Indeed, Engels wrote in April, 1886, that "...the anarchists are making rapid progress in the Socialist League". The main arguments were between those who considered that the working class, through a socialist organisation or party, could, or should, use parliament as a means to emancipation, which included Eleanor Marx, and those such as the anarchists, who did not. Morris attempted to reconcile both camps, writing in 1887:

" I am trying to get the League to make peace with each other, and hold together for another year. It is a tough job." 

Edward Aveling had already resigned as sub-editor of Commonweal early in 1886. He had been encouraged in this by Eleanor, who, by 1887, was calling the League "a swindle". And Bax, whom Engels had accused of being influenced by the anarchists, and who had succeeded Aveling as sub-editor of Commonweal also resigned, and supported the policy of the League contesting elections. William Morris was concerned with "making socialists", and considered that the only time that socialists should enter parliament was when a majority had become socialists and parliament should be abolished or "broken up". Morris was also opposed to the Socialist League advocating palliatives [he changed his mind some time later]

By the time of the 1888 conference, the various factions within the League had grown even more irreconcilable. However, while the various factions were tearing the League apart, working-class discontent was growing. John Quail comments:

"In the Trade Unions a sharper, more militant note was being struck. At the TUC conference the young Keir Hardie clashed with the Liberal's lap-dog, Broadhurst. A determined attempt to get an Eight Hour campaign under way in the Engineering Union and the TUC was made. John Burns and Tom Mann were active in this campaign. New organisations in the provinces, the Labour Federation on Tyneside and the Knights of Labour in the Midlands, proved surprisingly effective and grew rapidly. New organisational attempts also met with some success among the seamen. This new militancy was both spread by socialists and proved responsive to them" (The Slow Burning Fuse)

Not surprisingly, this included Eleanor Marx.

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In 1883, in his The Historical Basis of Socialism, H.M. Hyndman explained his, and to some extent the SDF's, view of Trade Unions. he wrote:

"The waste of the Trade Union funds on strikes or petty benefits to the individuals who compose them is deplorable. Enormous sums have been lost, directly, or indirectly, in consequence of strikes which, if applied by Unionists to active propaganda against the existing system...would long since have produced a serious effect."

However, others, including Eleanor Marx, held a view that workers should resist the attempts by employers to depress their standards of living and, here circumstances were favourable, improve them, yet at the same time they should, through a political organisation or party, strive for the abolition of the system, capitalism, which exploits them.

Nevertheless, a "new" unionism was beginning to take over from the "old" unionism; the general from the craft. In 1888, the mainly female workers of the match factory of Bryant and May went on strike, which was largely successful. The dock strike of 1889 was probably the most dramatic conflict of th period, as it was a struggle of the most depressed section of the working-class who, hitherto, were considered unorganisable. The victory of the dockers was a victory for elementary Trade Union rights which led to a vast movement among both skilled and unskilled workers. The Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' Union was formed out of the strilke. Even agricultural workers revived their unions.

During the dock strike of I889, writes Tom Mann,

"Offers of clerical help were numerous during the strike. One of these volunteers who rendered valuable service was Eleanor Marx Aveling, the daughter of Karl Marx, a most capable oman. Possessing a complete masterly of economics, she was able alike in conversation and on a public platform, to hold her own with the best. Furthermore, she was ever ready, as in this case, to give close attention to detailed work, when by doing so she could help the movement" (Tom Mann Memoirs)

The Gasworkers and General Labourers Union was the first of the "new" unions for mainly unskilled workers. Formed in 1889, by sheer eight of numbers, the union exchanged their twelve-hour shifts for an eight hour day without a strike. Although, they subsequently lost it again, the old hours were never resumed. Shortly after the union's founding, Eleanor Marx became a member and, later, as a member of its first women's branch became a member of its Executive. Will Thorne, the union's general secretary, had no education as a child; and he recounted ho Eleanor helped him to improve his reading and writing, "which was very bad at the time"

In 1892, a Preamble To The Rules of the GGLU as drafted by Eleanor Marx and probably Edward Aveling. It reads:

"Trade Unionism has done excellent work in the past, and in it lies the hope of the workers for the future; that is the Trade Unionism which clearly recognises that today there are only two classes, the producing working-class and the possessing Master class. The interests of these two classes are opposed to each other. The Masters have known this a long time; the workers are beginning to see it, and so thay are forming Trade Unions to protect themselves, and to get as much as they can of the product of their labour. They are beginning to understand that their only hope lies in themselves, and that from the masters as a class they can expect no hope; that divided they fall, united they stand...the interests of all workers are one, and a wrong done to any kind of labour is a wrong done to the whole of the Working Class, and that victory or defeat of any portion of the Army of Labour is a gain or a loss to whole Army, which by its organisation and Union is marching steadily and irresistibly forward to its ultimate goal - the Emancipation of the Working Class - that Emancipation can only be brought about by the strenuous and united efforts of the Working Class itself. Workers Unite!

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Eleanor Marx was not, however, blind to the limitations of Trade Unionism; nor to the necessity of workers studying the economics of the system that exploited them. Far from it.

From the 16th of August, 1856, to the 1st of April, 1857, Karl Marx wrote a series of articles, under the title of "Revelations of Diplomatic History of the 18th Century" for the Free Press. These articles were later edited by Eleanor Marx in a book, "Secret Diplomatic History of the 18th Century" was published in 1899. Eleanor also published, under the title of the "Eastern Question", a series of articles Marx wrote in 1855 for the New York Tribune.

More importantly, from the working-class viewpoint however, was the debate that Karl Marx had with John Weston, a member of the General Council of the First International, in 1865, in which he read a paper on wages, profit, prices, value, labour and labour-power, and the production of surplus value. At the time, Marx did not agree to its publication, as he had not finished his studies on Capital. The manuscript was then forgotten until after Engel's death in 1895, when it was discovered by Eleanor Marx, who edited it, with assistance from Edward Aveling, under the title of Value, Price and Profit; and it was published early in 1899.

It was in the ultimate paragraph, and well-known to Eleanor, that Marx had expounded his view on Trade Unions, wherein he wrote:

"Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces a a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system"

It was during the mid-1890s that Eleanor Marx, again with some assistance from Aveling, conducted economics classes. These, or at least some of them, were held at 337 Strand, London, which at the time was the head office of the SDF. (see, for example, Eleanor's letter to Mary Gray, a prominent member of the SDF, dated, 25.9.96, regarding "classes" ) Indeed, it was at such classes that Jack Fitzgerald and two or three other younger members of the SDF, who later founded the Socialist Party, first learned their Marxian economics in general and the theory of value in particular

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Frederick Engels was devoted to "Tussy", as he called Eleanor, and often continued to entertain both Eleanor and Edward Aveling when other guests told him that if Aveling came they would not. Edward Bernstein seems to have found Aveling "very clever", and that he and Eleanor were of "great service to the socialist movement"; but Olive Schreiner wrote to Havelock Ellis, saying "I am beginning to have a horror of Dr. Aveling. To say I dislike him doesn't express it at all. I have a fear and horror of him when i am near. Every time I see him this shrinking grows stronger...I love her, but he makes me so unhappy".

He also made Eleanor unhappy; but she did not desert him. In 1893, the "disretable" Edward Aveling joined the newly-formed Independent Labour Party. Engels was, by then, living in London. He would have nothing to do with Hyndman, who he accused of taking money from the Tories. However, Engels enjoyed his remaining years in London; and he entertained freely. But by 1894, he was aware that he was suffering from cancer of the oesophagus, and was unable to speak, but could still write. He died on the 5th of August, 1895.

Aveling was unfaithful to Eleanor. Every so often he disappeared. Towards the end of 1897, he disappeared again. On the 24th of January, 1898, Eleanor Marx wrote to Mary Gray, in which she said:

" I would have been to see you, but as you know, Edward has been dangerously ill. He is now at Hastings, but though the lung trouble seems better, it seems certain that he must soon - in a year or so - undergo a most dangerous operation...the operation is so dangerous that there is the utmost danger. But without the operation there seems no hope at all."

Eleanor nursed him following his operation until he was well, although she was, by then, aware that he was in love with another woman. Aveling informed her that, during the time that he has been away in Hastings, he had - his first wife having in the meantime died - married a young actress. On receiving the news, Eleanor Marx committed suicide by taking poison. Aveling inherited the small amount of money that Engels had left Eleanor, and went to live with his new wife. A few months later he too died - in an easy-chair, in the sunshine , reading a book.

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Just four years after the death of Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, Jack Fitzgerald, who had been one of Eleanor's students at her economic classes, together with a number of other London members of the SDF, rebelled (they also had been, like Eleanor Marx holding economic classes!) and, by early 1904, had either been expelled or had resigned; and, together with around 150 others former members of the Social-Democratic Federation, founded the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which opposed the advocacy of reforms or palliatives. It adopted an object and declaration of principles, largely drawn up by Fitzgerald. It was socialism - and nothing else!

Peter E. Newell

Hours, Wages and Profits (2006)

From the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The struggle to reduce the length of the working day is the embodiment of class struggle in capitalism. Although class struggle in pre-capitalist society took on different forms, class conflict between those who monopolised the means of producing wealth and those who laboured to produce surplus product was a constant feature. In these societies the producers were openly compelled not only to provide the means of their own subsistence but also that of the owner of the means of production. This expropriated labour took on different appearances in different societies. In slave society the slave master owned the slaves entire day and maintained the slave in much the same way as the prudent factory owner might look after his machinery. In feudal society the serf was tied to plots of land, which were cultivated in return for unpaid work or surplus product.

Capitalism turned human labour power into a commodity something bought and sold. As feudalism gave way to the wage labour of early capitalism, the surplus product so obvious in feudal society became hidden by the apparent freedom of the workers to sell their labour power to an employer who would pay the highest wages. But while this arrangement has the appearance of a fair days work for a fair days pay it actually hides worker exploitation that is the source of alienation.

When capitalists buy a workers labour they buy the workers capacity to work for a full day. Wages are set, however, like every other commodity, by the value of labour-power needed to reproduce them, which in the case of labour is the value of food, clothing, etc. needed to keep the worker in a fit condition to work. But the value of labour power is different from the value created by the workers labour and this difference, called surplus value, belongs to the capitalist.

The working day under capitalism therefore divides into two parts; necessary labour when the workers actually earns what they are paid in wages, and surplus labour which is the time spent producing surplus value for the capitalist employer. Naturally, it is in the interest of the worker to earn a wage sufficient to purchase the necessities of life in the shortest possible time. Conversely, once the workers wages have been paid, it is in the interest of the employer, the purchaser of labour power, to make the worker work as long as possible. Accordingly, in early capitalist society the owner always looked to expand working hours and keep the worker working to the limits of human endurance.

Where the length of the working day is reduced the natural tendency of the capitalist is to increase the intensity of the working day. The capitalists endeavours to get more work from the workers in order to maintain or increase the level of surplus value which is the source of their profit. Accordingly, in many cases the reduction in working hours over the last 200 years has been achieved by intensifying work and making the employee work harder to earn their wage.

Factory Laws

The factory system transformed the way people worked. Under a system of wage labour workers were forced to submit to the regimentation of factory life where the division of labour and pace of work were set by power-driven machinery with fixed hours, six days a week. Improvements in machinery encouraged the substitution of women and children for men to reduce the price of labour power, and by 1816 a working day of 16 or 18 hours, regardless of age or gender, was common in conditions that were cramped, airless, deafening and dangerous. Parliament, representing the interests of the ruling class, was naturally attached to the doctrines of a laissez-faire political economy where social problems were instinctively ignored.

As early as 1810, Robert Owen, the philanthropist industrialist, raised the demand for a ten-hour working day, which was instituted on his enterprise at New Lanark. By 1817 he was calling for an eight-hour day under the slogan Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest. His demands came to nothing and it wasnt until the 1830s and 1840s that a movement for shorter working hours developed into agitation for the ten-hour working day for children who were often taken by mill owners from parish workhouses in batches and treated as slave labour. The short time movement coalesced around the Leeds Tory evangelical, Richard Oastler, who headed the Yorkshire Factory Movement that organised public meetings and mass marches, including that in York on Easter Sunday 1832. It also delivered a petition to parliament where another evangelical, Michael Sadler, gathered parliamentary support for the reduction of child working hours.

The movement faced bitter opposition. Radicals, many of them factory owners, citing the laissez-faire doctrines of Jeremy Bentham, justified opposition to a reduction in the working day by asserting that state intervention was inappropriate because it interfered with the natural workings of the market. Mill owners were hostile to the Ten Hour Movement because a shorter working day for children would inevitably result in a restriction on adult working hours. Cheap child labour, they argued, maintained adult workers productivity and if working hours were restricted it would reduce profits and make it uneconomic to keep the workplace open beyond 10 hours simply to employ adult labour. As well as reducing profits a reduction in working hours would lead to unemployment, they claimed, because better working conditions and shorter working hours would raise production costs and make goods less competitive on foreign markets.

This reasoning was supported by eminent economists, notably Nassau Senior, the Oxford professor of Political Economy, who made the claim, ridiculed by Marx (and by what happened when working hours were reduced), that the entire profit from industry was generated in the last hours work each day and therefore any reduction in the working day would eliminate profit altogether. Other apologists for child exploitation claimed that the employment of child labour for long hours was acceptable because it had occurred in agriculture for centuries and even suggested that long working hours occupied otherwise idle children and kept them from becoming a social nuisance. Too much leisure time for the poor was seen as a dangerous and undesirable development.

Set against this background it is hardly surprising that early legislation to restrict child labour, including the Factory Acts of 1819, 1831 and 1833, was weak and ineffective. Despite the commitment in the Factory Act of 1833 (piloted by Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury) to reducing child working hours to 8 hours for 9-13 year-olds and 12 hours for young people of 14-18, it was never effectively enforced and applied only to cotton mills. The Act appointed four inspectors to supervise the Act but mill owners responded by introducing the relay system of child labour so that factories could still remain open from 5.30am to 8.30pm. The 1833 Act was also passed at the expense of the short-time movement that advocated shorter working hours for all workers.

Further legislation followed but it wasnt until 1847 that the reformer and Chartist sympathiser John Fielden introduced a parliamentary bill to limit the working day to ten hours for all women and young persons up to the age of 18. It was accompanied by massive demonstrations and marches throughout the north of England and passed through parliament without amendment. This Act was a consequence of an alliance between the Chartist movement and the representatives of the landed aristocracy, the Tories, against the rising industrial bourgeoisie, who in 1846 had succeeded in the repeal of the Corn Laws. Although the textile industry was suffering a trade depression and most factories were already on a ten-hour day, manufacturers hindered the implementation of the 1847 Act by cutting wages in order to encourage opposition to the legislation on the grounds that workers needed to work the longer hours.

Three years later, the Factory Act of 1850 reduced factory opening to 12 hours each day, with the provision that factories must close at 2pm on a Saturday. The Act also reduced the working day for women and young persons to ten and a half hours, which in practice meant that male working hours also started to be restricted. As the reduction in working hours was introduced, the intensity of work increased, which meant that in many cases the anticipated fall in production did not occur and output actually increased. But the regulations only applied to textile mills and the next struggle was to extending the coverage of the Act across industry, finally achieved in 1867.

In the next decade, the 1874 Factory Act reduced the working day to ten hours for women and young persons. Almost immediately agitation for the Nine Hours Movement began and won a reduction of hours in the engineering and building industries. Trade Unions, which received full legal recognition in 1876, joined the struggle for a reduction in working hours through collective bargaining and strikes, especially in the north east of England. By the 1880s the movement began to gather around the demand for an eight-hour day.

Reversal of improvements

But the defeat of the New Unionism (the organisation of the unskilled) in the 1890s gave new leverage to the employers and further reductions in working hours were halted and sometimes reversed. In 1906 the factory working week still averaged 54 hours and by the 1920s had only reduced to 47 hours. Not until the late 1960s did a 40-hour working week became the accepted standard. The 8-hour day was accompanied by a real increase in holidays and pensions, achieved largely, however, by increasing the intensity of work.

Since the 1970s the struggle to reduce working hours has disappeared and improvements in working conditions have gradually been reversed. The weakening of national constraints on the movement of capital from country to country has meant that investment focuses on short-term profit through share prices rather than on long-term dividends. This has increased pressure on employers to make more profit and intensify the working conditions of their employees. Jobs have similarly moved from country to country in search of lower costs and new technologies begun to make it cheaper to invest in machines instead of people.

The security of life-long employment has been abandoned and replaced by short term relationships, where workers are expected to periodically migrate from job to job and undergo regularly retraining. The correlation between economic growth and improving social welfare has been cut and part-time working, which often denies bargaining power or employment benefits, has been expanded. Part-time working has also released capitalism from the need to provide a living wage, forcing working people to rely on multiple incomes from a variety of jobs. Unpaid overtime has become widespread and pensions and the retirement age are under attack.

In capitalism, struggle to defend and where possible improve working conditions, as generations of workers did to reduce the length of the working day, is important. But no amount of reform will eliminate the irreconcilable clash of interest between the capitalist and the working class, even if the working day were to reduce to an absolute minimum. It is only in a society of common ownership where production is for use not profit and where exchange, labour as a commodity and the wages system have been abolished that work will become a creative and rewarding experience. In such a society the distinction between work and leisure will disappear and because work will be voluntary, freed from the alienation of wage labour, the concept of working hours will cease to have meaning.

Steve Trott