Lengthening Our Ears. (1917)

Book Review from the October 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whenever the master class lecture we ignorant workers upon the subject of education we are treated to a goodly smattering of nonsense. There is, seemingly, no exception to the rule in the case of Viscount Harberton, whose book, "How to Lengthen Our Ears’’ has just. been described by the “Daily News" (20.8.1917) as “entertaining.” The Viscount, is said to have concluded that “modern education is ridiculous.” La Rochefoucauld, however, reminds us that: “Mediocrities usually condemn everything that passes their understanding." Perhaps a perusal of two specimens of the Viscount’s deductive drivel will serve to show what noble products are being sent forward by “our" public schools and universities. It may also show how and why our masters sustain such crushing reverses in public delate whenever they venture upon the public platform to attempt the overthrow of scientific Socialism, expounded by members of the working class: Try this:

  “Educated England," says the author in a severe passage, “is not represented by Herbert Spencer, but by Viscount Milner, Dr. Macnamara, and George R. Sims."

That the dear Viscount is unable to extract any material good from Spencer’s “Principles of Sociology,” or his “System of Synthetic Philosophy,” is quite understood, for here we find a disposition to shed light through the lying, romancing medium of antiquated capitalist teachings. But to bracket Spencer with Milner. Macnamara. and the “Tacho” man is surely running to the limits of present-day stupidity.

A further extract, in fairness to this new philosopher, will serve, not only to enlighten us, but additionally to point out from whom we should take pattern :

  Of the late Mr. William Whiteley the author says “a nation could more easily dispense with Gibbon, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Swinburne than such productions as Whiteley's.',

Poets have not done much to encourage a correction of long-endured economic and political superstitions, but the present scribe does think they have contributed more essentially to the fruits of this life than a hundred thousand "universal providers.”

If one were not actually aware of what university and public school teaching consists one might think the Viscount bereft of common sense, but knowing that some three-quarters of a million pounds are annually expended almost exclusively to the upkeep of what is described by Lankester as “two huge boarding houses,” one is not astonished. These classical colleges are only open for twenty-one weeks in the year, yet the majority of so-called public appointments are reserved for graduates of the universities and “public” schools.

Our noble viscount is purely a product of present-day capitalist thought. For such folk the teachings of the Roman poet Lucretius, or those of Epicurus, have no charm or significance. They are beyond his own limited reasoning. He is not concerned with cultivating the brain, but merely, as the title of his book shows, with lengthening the ears. Small wonder, then, that our viscount hands out the laurel wreath to Whiteley of Westbourne Grove, secure in the knowledge that at. least the trust merchant “made good" even though it did accrue from other people's brains.

No! I do not think our Spencers, our Huxleys, and our Darwins, need turn in their graves by reason of this puny attempt at ridicule. Education in this country — and it has had some terrific buffeting since war commenced— has not reached that stage, more especially from a capitalist standpoint, wherein the semi-taught are calculated to hold the lamp of knowledge in criticism over the geniuses of science, art, and literature. Huge tombstones may be erected to the idle capitalist bosses, but as one great wit has said : “If some men could rise front the grave and read the complimentary lines on their tombstones a goodly number would think they had gone into the wrong holes. 

B. B. B.

Realities: Present and Future. (1917)

From the October 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

We Socialists are often replied to by those to whom we expound oar political and economic principles and beliefs: "Yes, no doubt Socialism would be a very fine thing if it coold only be brought about, but it cannot—it is only a beautiful dream."

We accept such statements as a challenge from all those who hold those ideas. I hope in this short article to confront doubters with facts and shatter once for all their dreamy mis-conceptions of Socialism by dealing with realities. I believe they do not understand Socialism because they do not primarily understand the present system: capitalism.

The vast majority of the people in every capitalist country in the world belong to a class who have to work for their living. But a proportionately very small class are free from such necessity. Why? Simply because they can obtain all they need without work—from the labour of the workers.

These fortunate individuals who are not under the necessity of working for their living amass wealth in ever-increasing accumulation. In contradistinction the position of the wealth producers generally does not improve, in fact, it tends to become worse. December 31st of any year finds them, in spite of wise expenditure, frugality, temperance, and all the enforced wisdom of economic stress, no better off than on January 1st of the same year. And all their laborious lives are spent in wealth production, yet, as abundant statistics prove, they live and die in poverty—often as paupers. Their “earthly pilgrimage" is like nothing so much as the toiling existence of a beast of burden compelled to go round and round in the same allotted circle, grinding corn. In the fact that they receive just sufficient to enable them to perform their task, the workers are exactly like these animals They, too, are looked upon by the owning and ruling 'capitalist class simply as wealth producers, to be exploited in every sphere of labour, and, when it is necessary, to be forced to defend their masters' interests against those of rival exploiters, even at the cost of their lives. In fact, in a very real sense, not only the means of existence, but even the very lives of vast multitudes, are owned and controlled by this small but extremely powerful and dominant group of non-producers whom we call the capitalist class. They possess the land and all the means and instruments of wealth production, distribution, and exchange. Not only that—they sit in the “seats of the mighty," completely control the making of the laws—which, of course, are always enacted to conserve their own class interests—and thus economically and politically are, in every sense of the word, the Master Class.

The masses have to live, and having nothing to operate in their own interests, owning no means of production, possessing only their power to labour, they are compelled to sell that labour-power to those who possess the means through which alone it can be productively used. So they must work under the terms and conditions dictated by their masters.

They who with their labour produce the whole of the world's wealth, have given back to them on an average about a third of the amount they produce. Their portion is called wages. The remaining two thirds are appropriated by the idle capitalist class in the form of rent, profit, and interest. These latter are the means by which parasitic non producers of all kinds are enabled to live in luxurious idleness. Financiers, dividend holders, capitalists, and all who live on the labour of others, exist on the wealth they themselves have no share in producing.

The consequence is this system of wage slavery produces a host of social evils of the most appalling type, such as unemployment, sweating, prostitution, poverty, starvation, disease, and untimely death.

Consider! All the marvellous mechanism, tools, and means of production that exist to-day—means that enable wealth of all kinds to he produced in prolific abundance—have been made by and are operated by the workers. Yet we continue to see the damning indictment of the present system daily—starvation in the midst of plenty; overwork for those who starve, ennui through unbroken idleness for those who possess the world; unemployment side by side with sweating; abundant opportunities for all-round development for the favoured class, and deprivation of access to all that life should give them for the workers, whose lives are compulsorily wasted by the all-compelling exigencies of a vicious system. All the channels of knowledge, the wisdom of the ages, the finest triumphs of man in the domain of art, literature, music, and science should by right be available to them, for it is they who produce the material foundation from which all these spring.

Alas, the workers are wage slaves! The wealth stolen from them has been the means of their enslavement. The capital which is used against them to produce wealth and also yet more capital they alone produced. Now they are slaves of the machine. They are poor because they are continually robbed; they are continually robbed because this social system, founded upon their robbery, continues to exist. They are only sellers of their labour-power, enriching others at their own expense, forever sacrificing their own desires, interests, aye, existence, that the exploiters may exploit them, and the plutocrat continue to plunder them! What irony! And yet non-Socialists say it will always be so!

But will it? Let us examine the facts. We have considered the realities of the present system. Hear now the claim we as Socialists make.

We claim that we are the only people who show the workers that they hold the key of their emancipation in their own hands, that they alone can set themselves free.

The present system of production tends, as fact after fact goes to prove, to produce its own undoing. The rich as a class grow richer, the poor ever poorer. The more labour-saving machinery is in operation the more wealth is produced by a given number of workers. Consequently an ever greater number of workers are thrown out of employment through “over production." The pressure of these unemployed tends ever to depress wages and the conditions of labour. Less successful people of the small capitalist ranks are gradually forced into the proletariat, and so capital is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, making ever more uneven tho ratio between the exploited and the exploiters. As Capital wields greater power the conflict of class interests grows ever stronger, and Labour consolidates its forces and the struggle becomes more class conscious and bitter.

Now it will be seen that this system automatically produces it own opponents—the proletariat or propertyless working class—and also the incentive for the latter to wrest from the capitalists the power to exploit and oppress.

Now here is the crux of the whole question: how are the master class to be stripped of their terrible and oppressive power? Other things bring equal, the men who succeed best in accomplishing their purpose are those who know exactly what they want to do and how best to do it. First of all, then, the victims of the present social system must find the answer to the question, how are they to emancipate themselves from their servile position?

Clearly, since that position arises from the private ownership of the means of production, the first thing that emerges is that such private ownership must go. The only alternative to the private ownership of the means of production by the few possible to-day, with the present stage of development of those means, is social ownership—ownership by the whole community. With the means and instruments for the production and distribution of wealth owned and controlled by the whole community there can be no other object in operating them but to produce wealth FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE COMMUNITY. The means of living belonging to the whole of the people, none is outside their ownership, nor, on the other hand, can any person have ownership in these things as an individual, but only as a cell in the social body.

As a consequence of this the whole social fabric must reshape itself. The only means of productively applying it belonging to the community, labour-power must come under communal control. No man can purchase it because, in the first place, he has no means of exploiting it, in the second place, no worker would desire to sell his labour-power to another since be has the opportunity of exercising it through the communal means, and thirdly, since the whole of the wealth produced under such a system belongs to the community, there is no exchange within the community, and therefore money— the means of exchange—loses its function and its value, and becomes useless for the purchase of labour-power or anything else. The sale of labour-power for wages, then, must disappear with the abolition of private property in the instruments of labour. The whole wages system, in fact, must collapse with the change in the property condition, and a new set of relations must arise between social units, in which the relations of master and man can find no place. The class division, by which the people of every country are divided into exploiters and exploited, employers and employed, masters and slaves, rich and poor, according as they are propertied or propertyless, must vanish with the rest, giving place to a unified community of workers, socially equal because equal possessors in the economic basis of society—the means and instruments of producing the social wealth.

How can the workers accomplish this splendid end ? We claim that the fundamental means to achieve this is to capture the political machine. Capture and control that, and we capture and control the governing machinery of the State. The armed forces of the oppressing class will then no longer be a menace to the workers, but an instrument for their emancipation. The whole of the people will be ruled by the will of the people. Democracy will have become a reality at last.

Wealth will be prolificly produced for the use and enjoyment of ALL by the marvelous modern means of production, and with the minimum of effort. Thus abundance of opportunity for all-round culture and development will be accessible to all. Art will have an undreamt of renaissance. Science will no longer be slave to death-dealing purposes, but put to living, helpful useB for the human race.

Socialism is inevitable. Capitalist, exploitation forces the workers on the road toward it, and is itself a mighty means of education. But nevertheless, the need is imperative upon all who desire Socialism, to do all that they can to educate their fellow workers, and to awaken in them a like desire.

G.

Editorial: Our Coming Harvest. (1917)

Editorial from the October 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

In these uncertain times there is one thing that is as certain as the demand of the landlord—the war cannot last for ever. Some time before it comes to the turn of the heroic editor of our unsavoury contemporary, the “Weekly People,” to seal his faith with his blood, of the occupants of other “heroic chairs” in and about Fleet Street to take their turn in the uncomfortable and unsafe task of “licking Germany,” and of certain politicians to dip their hands in their pockets, not for the last shilling of sacrifice, but for the first, we shall have that condition of affairs which we are wont to call peace. Our masters and butchers are already getting ready for it. That is the meaning of all their talk about “reconstruction,” all their humbug about franchise and housing reforms, all their vague verbiage about improving the condition of the workers—after the war.

They fear that the day of peace will be also a day of reckoning, and they are getting their red-herrings ready in order to get the workers, smarting under a sense of unparalleled outrage, running on false scents, and sniffing round any casual and profitless garbage instead of tracking down their quarry. They realise, do these reeking, red-handed agents of our ghoulish masters, that millions of young men who have been torn from their homes and forced to spend the best years of their lives in the misery of the trenches, will want to know, when they come back to their wage slavery, their threatening face-grinders, their bullying foremen, their dreary toil, their winter unemployment, their scowling landlords, their filthy slums, their sad, drab lives, will want to know of the war’s potbellies why their lives have been clouded over by awful memories they can never forget, why they have been compelled to butcher men they had never met, why their comrades have been slaughtered by hundreds of thousands, why their healths have been ruined by their terrible privations. And knowing this our wily masters are preparing schemes to throw dust in their eyes, and to make them think it is not the same old country wherein they were everywhere trespassers that they have fought and bled and suffered for, and the battle over a farthing an hour they have returned to from their battles for Potbelly’s millions.

And the day of peace must be a day of reckoning. We must see to that. The opportunity will be unique. The stupendous crime of the international capitalists will come fully home to their victims when they find that all their sacrifices have left them simply where they were, facing the old familiar evils, whose only change is their aggravated form. Capitalist politics and politicians, then, from the Liberal and Tory super-lords to the “labour leaders” prosperously reeking in their treachery, will be ripe for utter discredit. Our day will be come—our harvest will be ready for the garnering The place, therefore, of all those who are with us in mind, more now than ever before, is in our ranks. Let us have every ounce of our strength organised for the coming struggle.

Begbie Answered. (1917)

From the October 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article entitled “Democracy in Flood” (“Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper,” Sept. 2) Harold Begbie unloads his mind. After admitting the unhuman conditions of existence of a large section of the working class of the North (it might be information to him to be told that these conditions are not confined to one section or to the North, but to the whole working class, North, South, East and West), he says, with astonishment expressed in every word, that the pitmen of a certain Northern town are eager for lectures on a subject of real intellectual interest. In this town there are gatherings of 3,000 men every Sunday in a large hall, and Mr. Begbie says : “I am assured that these quarrymen, pitmen, turners, fitters, shipwrights, are debating the whole question of human existence. Industrialism is now recruited from the ranks of a partially educated democracy which is determined to become more educated, which sees that education is not only a means of improving their social position, but a means of spiritual evolution.”

The latter part of which prepares us for the introduction of the Holy Spirit and his partners, God and the Eternal Will. Mr. Begbie continues:

   They want not only food for their bodies, but better sustenance for their minds ; they would be loyal to the immortal spirit within them, those longings for growth, knowledge, and spiritual power, the denial of which brutalises the human race. They are conscious of sinning against the Holy Spirit in resting satisfied with their life as it is.

These working men are too hard-headed says this canting humbug, to dream of revolution. “Constitutional evolution” is the thing. Unfortunately he does not tell us what he means by “constitutional evolution.” But seemingly it is a high sounding name for some lure for drawing the workers from what should be their real object: the only one that the master class and their touts fear—revolution.

Let me quote further:

  War has revealed to them [the workers] the power of the State; this of itself is the greatest revolution [he means “constitutional evolution,” surely] in the history of the world, this realising by democracy of the almost boundless powers of the State action, i.e., co-operation.

Here we have either the confused mind of the sentimental Harold or a deliberate attempt to cause confusion by writing of the State as if it represented the people. From Frederick Engel’s “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” we glean the following :

  The State is simply a product of society at a certain stage of evolution. It is the confession that this society has become hopelessly divided against itself, has entangled itself in irreconcilable contradictions which it is powerless to banish.
  The State is the result of the desire to keep down class conflicts. But having arisen amid these conflicts, it is as a rule the State of the most powerful economic class that by force of its economic supremacy becomes also the ruling, political class and thus acquires new means of subduing and exploiting the oppressed masses. The antique State was, therefore, the State of the slave owners for the purpose of holding the slaves in check. The feudal State was the organ of the nobility for the oppression of the serfs and dependent farmers. The modern representative State is the tool of the capitalist exploiters of wage labour.

In the above Engels answers men of the Begbie type, and I hope that the working class will gather understanding from history, ancient and modern, and not be led astray by sentimental talk about the "rich and the poor” being “of one mind and one spirit.” Beware of men who talk about reconciliation between the working class and the master class. That is impossible. The only firm ground upon which the working class can successfully stand is the full recognition of the class war and the determination to fight on to the end—the Social Revolution ; the inauguration of Socialism.

E. J.

"Murder Will Out". (1917)

From the October 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is curious what strange instruments truth at times will find by which to express itself. This reflection is strengthened by a letter in that “organ of the Democracy,” “Reynolds's Newspaper" (Sept. 3rd.) from “Recruiting Sergeant" Ben Tillett to the members of the Docker’s Union.

This budding field marshal is reported to have said, among other things, in reference to the proposed International Conference:

  We are of the opinion that before any meeting it possible the organised Labour of each belligerent country should first of all define its attitude by democratic vote, that its representatives should be purely Labour representatives,and under no Government patronage, with a view of free expression of opinion.
  That this Conference upholds the rights of democracy to its share of representation in determining peace settlement, and invites the democracies of all the belligerents to co-operate with a view of ending the tragedy of the war.

“General" Tillett it greatly concerned that the labour representatives shall be “purely" labour representatives. This, to start with, knocks out all the “labour" members of the Government, and also all those who, during the period of the war, have assisted the Government—directly or indirectly, officially or unofficially—in the task of roping in the workers for war purposes, including Henderson, Hodge, and of course, Tillett himself.

As for the suggestion that the Conference upholds the “rights of democracy to its share of representation in determining peace settlement," the governing class will allow the workers as much voice in the peace settlement as highwaymen allowed their victims in the matter of their robbery.

But seriously, the desire of the labour “leaders” to take part in the function of cutting up the swag, shows that they either do not understand the slave position of the working class, or that they deliberately misrepresent it. In the first case they are fools, in the second case rogues, and in either case they are of no use to the workers.

It is the mission of the propertyless class— instead of seeking to participate in the division of the spoils—to see to it that there shall be no spoils. To do this they must put an end to the exploitation of the producers by the non-producers, i.e., the capitalists.

It is the duty of the workers to achieve a real peace—a peace guaranteed by the identity of interest of all the members of society in contrast with the “peace" hitherto prevailing. Such a peace can only be obtained by the realisation of the Object of the Socialist Party.

We are further told that “We can only end the war by striking at militarism” (not capitalism). But here comes the gem of the letter: “The genuine working-class movement must take its affairs out of the hands of political adventurers and parasites, take its destinies in both hands, and ask organised Labour in all lands to war against militarism, repression, and annexation, and to be prepared to enforce this should occasion arise."

This is a brilliant example of the devil rebuking sin, for what are Tillett and his colleagues but “political adventurers and parasites," out to lead the workers up a blind alley, where they may be the more easily victimised and exploited? Evidence of this can easily be found in the various issues of this journal, and also in our Manifesto.

An additional instance of this is furnished by Tillett himself in the final sentence of his epistle, in which he advocates the use of the “industrial and economic weapon," ignoring the political weapon.

It is reported in the “Daily Sketch" for September 1st 1917 that the Australian Government had suppressed the I.W.W. in Australia, and imprisoned some of its members. Can a better object lesson in the necessity for political action by the workers be needed ?

In a series of interviews during the T.U.C. Mr. Tillett is reported to have said re Stockholm, “How can there be democracy without a defined policy?” This, from a man of Tillett’s record, is almost Gilbertian, or would be if it were not so tragic.

Is it necessary to recall the famous prayer on Tower Hill, when Tillett hoped that “God" would strike the late food controller dead, and to compare that with his attitude since the war? During this period we find him using his energise to the utmost in the dirty work of getting other people to fight and kill each other, taking on this job under the auspices of a government a prominent member of which was his one-time enemy. Lord Devonport.

Is this Tillett’s idea of a “defined policy” ?

However, such contradictory actions are common to all reformers. Forever chasing will- o'-the-wisps, they are forever getting deeper into the mire of capitalism.

Hutch.