Invention: A Capitalist Monopoly. (1905)

From the May 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently in a London Police Court an Engineer was charged with stealing two sheets of drawing paper belonging to his employers. The employers, however, were not so much interested in obtaining the paper as the drawings it bore. Property in drawings on paper is not defined by law, but the right to such property has been frequently asserted by enforcing the right to the paper. In this case the defendant had been sent to inspect the exhibits at Olympia Motor Exhibition, and as the result of these visits “at his employers’ directions and expense” he developed ideas for the invention of a new gear box, the rough sketch of which he outlined on paper, “doing his drawing work in his employers’ time, at his employers’ office, with his employers’ materials.” The magistrate notwithstanding discharged the defendant, it being in his judgment “impossible to say that any invention which might earn £1000 a year belonged to those who paid the inventor £3 a week.”

Now this form of property comes under the classification of “Intellectual Property,” and it will be observed that the right to such property is not legally defined, being, as the plaintiff’s solicitor put it, “as in the dark ages.” Neither did the magistrate give judgment in favour of the defendant as a matter of principle, but solely in consideration of the comparative insignificance of his salary.

Why is the right to intellectual property so ill-defined? Lafargue, in an admirable little pamphlet entitled “Le Socialisme et Les Intellectuals” touches upon this subject. He says :

“Material property, whatever may be its origin, is declared eternal by capitalist law : it is assured for ever to its possessor, handed down from father to son until the end of time, no power, civil or political, being able to lay sacrilegious hands upon it.

. . . . . . .

“Capitalist law has none of these considerations for intellectual property. Literary and artistic property, the only forms which the law protects, have but a precarious duration, limited (in France) to the life time of the author, and to a certain period after his death; 50 years according to the latest legislation. This moment passed, the right succumbs and falls in the public way : so that from March of the present year (1900) publishers can enrich themselves by publishing the works of Balzac, the genius of romantic literature.

“Literary property, if of importance to publishers, in reality not a very numerous class, does not yield any profit to the capitalists as a whole; but it is not thus with the property in inventions, which is of supreme importance to the industrial and commercial capitalists together. Likewise the law extends no protection whatever to it. The inventor, if he desires to defend his intellectual property against the bourgeois plunderers, must begin by buying this right by taking out a patent, which must be renewed annually. One day behind time in paying the tax, his intellectual property becomes the legitimate prey of the capitalist robbers. Even while paying this sum regularly his right is limited to 14 years (in France). During this short number of years, generally insufficient to have his invention completely adopted in practical industry ; it is he, the inventor, who at his own expense must put the legal machinery against the bourgeois plunderers who would seize it.

“The ‘trade mark,’ which is a form of capitalist property, never having demanded any intellectual effort, is on the contrary indefinitely protected by law like material property.

“The capitalist has only grudgingly granted to the inventor the right to defend his intellectual property, because by his right of reigning class, he believes himself master of the fruits of intellectual labour as well as of manual labour, just as the feudal lord arrogated to himself the right of possession over the property of his serfs.

. . . . . . .

“The capitalist-class, the most revolutionary class that has ever oppressed human society, cannot increase its riches but by incessantly revolutionising the means of production by the never-ending introduction of new applications of the mechanical, physical, and chemical sciences to the industrial tool. Its thirst for inventions is so insatiable that it has created factories of inventions. Several American capitalists have associated in organising at Mungo Park, for Edison, the most marvellous laboratory in the world. Here they have placed at his disposition an army of scientists, the aristocrats of labour, and the material means necessary to make and continue making the inventions that the capitalists patent, exploit, or sell. Edison, who is himself one of the sharpest of business men, has, however, taken precautions in order to insure his participation in the profits which the inventions of Mungo Park will yield.

”But all inventors cannot, like Edison, impose their conditions on the capitalists who build factories of inventions to exploit them. The Thompson-Houston Company at Paris, Siemens in London and Berlin, have, side by side with their electrical machinery, workshops and laboratories where engineers are engaged in research work, seeking new applications of electricity. At Frankfort in the factory of aniline colours, the largest in the world, and where the mineral antipyrine was discovered, there are more than one hundred chemists paid to discover new chemical products. Each discovery is immediately patented by the firm, which, by way of encouragement, gives some reward to the inventor.

“To a certain point we can consider all factories and workshops as laboratories of inventions, because a considerable number of improvements in machinery have been found out by the workmen in the course of work. As the inventor has not the necessary money to patent or apply his discovery, the employer takes out the patent in his own name, and thus, as bourgeois justice wishes it, it is he who gathers all the accruing profits therefrom. When the government thinks of rewarding talent it is the employer who is rewarded; the workman inventor, who is but an “intellectual,” continues toiling on as before, and as in this capitalist world one must be contented with little, he consoles himself in his misery, saying that his invention brings profit and honour to his master.

. . . . . . .

“Will the intellectuals yet hear the voice of the Socialists calling them to the rescue to free Science and Art from the capitalist yoke, and liberate thought from the slavery of wagedom?”

P. J. Tobin

Evolution and Revolution. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “New Method” is evolutionist. The “New Method” is reformist. The “New Method” stands above all for legality. In order to fully understand it in all its beauty, in all its power, we must first study its conceptions of evolution, reform, and legal revolution. Let us proceed in this order and commence with evolution.

The partisans of the “New Method”, quite honestly, without doubt, put certain stupidities into the mouths of revolutionists, which naturally appear to them quite in order. The revolutionists, they say, believe that the social revolution will be the result of a coup, a struggle with the police, or, better, to employ the favourite expression of (is it necessary to name the minister?) “the stroke of a magic wand”. The revolutionists are travestied as social magicians or miracle-workers; and the realists of state Socialism — in theory very idealist — never miss an occasion of showing their sovereign contempt for these dreamers of impossible catastrophes. They alone are in complete agreement with modern science, founded on the principle of evolution. The revolutionists are romanticists, Utopians. Has not Bernstein himself said that Marx even was but a common Blanquist?

What is the truth?

Let us first point out that all the great masters of contemporary Socialism, those very men who introduced into it the idea of evolution, and who have in some measure saturated the spirits of man with their ideas, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, Peter Lavroff, were throughout their entire lives convinced revolutionists. It is an incontrovertible fact, and we will prove it.

The social work of Marx has been compared with that of Darwin in the domain of Nature. In fact, his classic work, the "Manifesto," which alone perhaps, of all books of our time, contains in a small space (some thirty pages) so many great and fertile ideas, develops quite a system of evolution in capitalist society. In the "Manifesto" we see Socialism burst forth, as the very consequence of things, from the very entrails of capitalist society. It is capitalism itself which fashions its own “grave-digger”, the proletariat organised as a class party.

The Manifesto concludes with the ultra-revolutionary declaration which follows:

  “The communists consider it beneath them to cloak their ideas and designs. They declare openly that their end cannot be realised but by the violent destruction of the existing social order. Let the ruling classes tremble before a communist revolution. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain”.

Here we are very far from the theory “take care to make fear” (“Ayons peur de faire peur”) which has conducted its author to the ministry of commerce. Yet, Marx put to flight all the miracle-workers, all the manufacturers of little projects put forward as so many panaceas guaranteed to save society from the misery of capitalism. It is true that he had not foreseen the project for the participation of socialists in the central power of the bourgeois state, which renders the revolution altogether unnecessary, and, above all, dangerous. A revolutionary party which does not inspire its adversaries with fear is ripe for government. But, it will never “conquer the world”.

The idealist, Peter Lavroff, was in complete agreement with Marx, the materialist, on the question of violent revolution. Throughout all his glorious life he preached the Revolution in the name of reason, “justice and humanity”. He sought to establish scientifically that “every Socialist who thinks logically must be a revolutionist”. And he always added that the Revolution cannot be brought about without violence. Peter Lavroff introduced scientific philosophy into Russia, thus contributing more than anyone else to the overthrow of metaphysical and theological ideas in his country. He was the sworn enemy of miracles, and understood the miracle of social transformation by the word participation.

The partisans of legality are often pleased to quote a Preface of Engels where he traces a magnificent picture of the growth of the Socialist Party during the legal period. But the rascals forget to add that Engels himself protested against the publication, declaring that his ideas had been falsified through the omission of a conclusion containing an affirmation thoroughly revolutionist.

The statement of Marx is likewise invoked, that in England the Revolution could be achieved pacifically and legally. In his preface to the English translation of Capital, Engels, on including the words of his great friend, wrote: “But he never omitted to mention that he doubted very much if the ruling classes in England would ever accede to a pacific and legal revolution” (Capital. Introduction. 1887). Otherwise stated: the revolution will be superfluous if the dominant classes are in humour for committing suicide. It is perfectly evident that Marx, who thoroughly understood the economic condition of England, wished to say nothing more than that all the material and technical conditions were at hand.

In order to accomplish the Revolution nothing was wanted but the revolutionary lever. “Force is the midwife of every new society”. The pains and violence of birth cannot be overlooked on the grounds that the embryo should be allowed to develop in an easy and regular manner. One might as well overlook volcanic eruptions on considering that modern geology has abandoned the catastrophic theory of the formation of the earth. The new-born will develop pacifically, “legally”, but he comes into being revolutionary. The subterranean forces accumulate slowly, invisibly, but once arrived at a certain degree of intensity, they explode. “Revolutions in history are as necessary as tempests in nature”, writes Malon, whom our good evolutionists do not qualify as “sectary”. In truth, this class of “tempest” does not agree with ministerial combinations. But, since when do the phenomena of nature and history rest on the decrees of ministers, being “out of control”.

In 1887 at the Congress of Saint-Gall, Bebel, who of course is nothing but a romantic dreamer, declared:

“He who says that the final end of Socialism will be realised in a pacific manner does not know the final end, or, mocks us”.

Further. It is only during its scientific period that, based on the principle of evolution, Socialism becomes revolutionary. The great Utopians, Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon were pacific in their methods. They preached the social transformation to make the “revolution” needless.

It was exactly at the time that the social reformers addressed the monarchs, assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, soliciting their “Collaboration” in social reform in the name of “social conservation”. That was also the good old time when the noble dreamer Fourier used to look daily for his “millionaire”, pacific redeemer of suffering humanity.

The triumph of the truly realistic spirit was at the same time that of the revolutionary spirit. None but empiric minds who see no farther than the tips of their noses or who have some interest in cloaking historic truth, believe that revolution is contrary to evolution of which it is, in reality, only the fatal and irresistible outcome. Thus, the Utopian period of Socialism was pacific. The scientific period adopts revolutionary tactics.

Ferdinand Lassalle, who was the promoter of universal suffrage in Germany, a man of immediate action and pacific par excellence, recognised the revolution as a means of achieving any serious reform. He pointed out that many great reforms were brought about only by revolution. For him, as well as for every modern Socialist, revolution is but a moment, a period of crisis in the “normal” evolution of society, an evolution which comes to a head.

The abyss which our ministerialists seek to find between evolution and revolution under its sudden and violent form exists but in their imagination. But there exists an insuperable abyss between revolution and ministerialism.

Translated from the French of Charles Rappoport by P. J. Tobin

The Social Problem and Its Solution by Jules Guesde (1905)

From the February 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link To Part 1

II – Solution

The solution of the social problem is to be found in the problem itself, such as I have just given in a short exposition. The greatest socio-economic evil of today consists in the ever more complete divorce of the two factors in production, labour and property or capital, and consequently the remedy can be found only in their unification.

Under what form ought this unification to be effected?

It cannot be carried out by making the individual worker proprietor of his tool since this would exclude production on a large scale, and the system of labour having become collective consequent upon the introduction of steam and electricity, there can be but collective ownership to go hand in hand with collective labour.

Outside a Count de Mun, hypnotised by the arts and crafts of the middle ages and counting on a miracle for their re-establishment, there are only the anarchists, dreaming of natural rights and an ideal State of nature, who would retrogressively push their Utopia to such an extent as to establish a system of sharing out, of dismemberment and individualisation of modern machinery:

The engine to the driver,
And the dome to the builder,

as they sing in what is for them their “Marseillaise”.

The only possible form, I repeat, is that which is imposed by the modern conditions of production and exchange, not even communal or guild, but social. The mines whose dark caverns are hollowed out beneath the crust of many counties, the railways that stretch their iron tentacles over entire continents, commercial establishments like the Louvre and Bon Marché disposing of the lives of thousands of workers, do not, not one of them, lend themselves to communalisation, no more than the other machinery of production, distribution, or transport. Consequent upon the transmission of force by means of electricity, the waterfalls to-day and the tides tomorrow can be converted into motive powers. With this fact in mind, how is it possible to consider seriously, for one moment, the notion of the monopolisation – I had nearly said confiscation – of these natural powers, now become the condition of all industry, by some localities to the detriment of others?

The guild form is likewise brought into collision with other impossibilities of a similar nature. In fact, both forms, by the competition which would be kept up between the various productive groups, here guild, there communal, would bring in their train the same murderous anarchy as exists to-day under capitalist society.

It is only collectively that the workers, comprising the entire nation, can and ought to possess the means of wealth (mines, railways, canals, factories, etc.) socially operated. Capitalist evolution itself supplies the necessary elements, material and intellectual, of this APPROPRIATION and of this PRODUCTION BY AND FOR SOCIEY now become a vast co-operative commonwealth.

MATERIAL ELEMENTS: The concentration of capital that is effected every day in the spheres of industry, commerce and agriculture—the great manufactories just as the no less great commerce and agriculture of to-day being impelled to swallow up the middle capitalists in the same way as the smaller ones have been already swallowed. From 1870 to 1880, when in the United States the number of spindles increased from 7,131,818 to 10,678,526 and the number of spinners from 157,310 to 227,156 with an increased value of from 562,825,164 francs to 831,127,472 francs, the cotton manufactories fell from 959 to 751. It is the function of finance, by continually absorbing the surplus incomes, to hurry on this accumulation under the pretext of democratising capital.

INTELLECTUAL ELEMENTS: The concentration of all physical and mental activities in the non-possessing class or proletariat from the fireman and greaser of the wheels to the scientist such as Claude Bernard, including chemists, engineers, managers, etc. The organisation of labour: the entire army of labour, officers and men, comprising all outside the capitalist class, is already encamped in complete order on the patrimony of mankind which alone is to be exploited — in the technical sense of the word — and it is now only a question of the complete restitution to society by the very same process which has served for its dispossession, namely: by expropriation.

It is well to understand that we Socialists have by no means invented the classes and their destructive class-war than we have invented the process of expropriation, which is the law of all human progress.

It was by the expropriation of the artisan from his tools at first, from this technical skill after, then from his domestic hearth, despoiled of wife and child, that private or capitalist property was established, to say nothing about the expropriation of the product of his toil which is accomplished daily by the operation of the law of wages. The expropriators will themselves in their turn be expropriated—it is as Gambetta would say, “imminent justice” — and they will all the more easily be expropriated under the company and share-holding system of to-day, they having become so completely estranged from all direct interference in production that their total severance might take place tomorrow without a perceptible check to industry.

This economic expropriation — which would allow to the expropriated full participation in the benefits accruing from social appropriation — must be preceded by a political expropriation, the establishment of the Socialist Republic being only realisable by a proletariat master of the State and acting in conformity with the law, since it itself will be and make the law.

It now only remains for me to point out the principal consequences which will result from this transformation of capitalist property into social property.

(1) There will be an end to all class distinction and consequently an end to the class-war. The workers are for the future their own capitalists, or to put it better, all the members of society are at once and with equal title co-proprietors and co-producers. The State, in the oppressive sense of the word, will cease to exist, it being nothing more than a means of maintaining artificially, by force, order that a system of society, founded on the antagonism of interests would naturally give birth to. The government of men gives place to the administration of things. It is the reign of social peace, daughter of universal harmony.

(2) Commercial production of exchange-values with an end to realising profit will disappear, and be replaced by the co-operative production of use-values for consumption with a view to satisfying social wants. In place of robbing and exploiting one another, we will all help one another. Homo domini Deus, “Man is a god to man”.

(3) Liberty, which until now has been but a word for the great majority of mankind, is henceforth a great and living reality, this liberty of which Socialism, according to our enemies, was to have been the tomb, will, on the contrary, blossom forth into the fullest perfection when reared in the uncontaminated atmosphere of the Socialist State. Liberty provides the means of accomplishing our will and therefore of satisfying our wants. These means will from now forward exist for all, multiplied by social labour, which, in point of productivity, stands in the same relation to modern capitalist industry as this does to small primitive industry. At the same time the effort to be made by each member will be reduced to a minimum.

The socially necessary labour-time to be furnished by each capable member of the Socialist State will likewise be reduced:

(a) By the suppression of slack seasons, which are the rule to-day in some many trades during periods from three to six months per year, as well as stoppages which doom to enforced idleness hundreds of thousands of workers, men and women, giving them over to the bitter pangs of starvation. These slack seasons and stoppages are the result, as Prof. Durkheim of Bordeaux very well puts it, of “this too great diffusion of the economic functions which under Socialism will be transferred to the organised community”.

(b) By the disappearance of the parasitical class, and not only of that alone but also of the sub-parasites who live on this class. In France there are more than two million persons of both sexes employed in domestic pursuits, without counting the numbers of prostitutes and parsons, police, magistrates, and soldiers;

(c) By the employment in work of a socially necessary character of all the human and technical forces now used in works of a destructive nature (cannon, guns, torpedoes, etc.) or socially useless (in superfluous display, or even of simple journeying of capital from the pocket of Peter into that of Paul);

(d) By the utilisation of all the energy at present wasted, lost, or reduced to nothing in the midst of unbridled competition;

(e) By perfecting “automatising”, the machine which each one will be interested in developing as far as he can, since it will be so much the more leisure or well-being realised both for himself and the community in general.

Even to-day when no one of these conditions is either fulfilled or capable of being so, an English statistician, quoted by Domela Nieuwenhuis in his pamphlet on the First of May, has calculated that with the machine at its actual stage of development and taking into consideration the point we have reached in technical skill, one hour and twenty minutes of daily labour would suffice to provide for the material wants of all.

One more fruit of Socialist society and I have done: that is the end of religious or supernatural idea current amongst men. The religious idea, far from vanishing before the forward development of modern science, has taken a new flight. Thus it is that in the age which has seen the prolific genius of Lavoisier, Laplace, Darwin, and Edison, we have witnessed the birth of new religions. Why? Because other and still more complex phenomena have arisen in the place of natural phenomena already explained and controlled once and for all by man. The phenomena of which I speak belong to the economic order which in the individualist atmosphere of to-day escape from man’s control and dominate him. God, chased out by one door, the door of nature, has re-entered by another, the social door. Therefore, as long as the productive forces which crush us individually will not have been mastered in the only way that they can be: by bringing them within the administration of society, man, a prey to misery, the plaything of chance, will bow low before the “unknown” – and will deify it.

It is only when the economic elements have been tamed as have been the natural elements, when society has become a providence for each one of its members, then and then alone will men cease to search for a providence beyond the skies, because then – contrary to the christian legend of God becoming man – man will have become God.

Translated from the French of Jules Guesde by P. J. Tobin

The Social Problem and Its Solution by Jules Guesde (1905)

Jules Guesde

From the January 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

I—Problem

The problem that Socialism sets itself to solve is to be found in a fact, of which it can be said as of the sun: he is blind who does not see it. It is the divorce between the means of production and the producers.

Neither are the mines in the hands of the workers underground who give them value at the daily peril of their lives; nor do the railroads belong to those who have been called the slaves of the iron-way; nor do the weavers who work the looms, the spinners who toil at the spinning machine, the smiths of the blast furnaces, etc, possess the smallest title to call their own that which they create and which occupies the greater and best portion of their lives—lives spent in barriers and useless sacrifice; and, the economic development of Society tends to generalise this state of things by destroying naturally and necessarily the small industries, founded on the ownership of the means of production by the producer.

Next to industry, properly so-called, we find commerce and agriculture, on the expropriation of the little tradesman and peasant proprietor, organised on a large scale and monopolised by the non-producers.

Labour is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital.

It is this separation between the two factors of production which produces all the evils, all the disorders which afflict not only wage-workers but Society as a whole.

The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

Labour, which is inseparable from the workman, is in effect nothing more than a commodity—like old bags, bicycles, bones or biscuits—submitted to the laws which rule the prices of commodities and drag it down through the ups and downs of supply and demand to the mere expenses of living and reproduction of the species—food and maintenance; and, these expenses tend constantly to further reduction, because, to derive an advantage from the markets, capitalists, whatever their personal sentiment—had they the heart of a Saint Vincent de Paul or a Louise Michel—are obliged to reduce to a minimum their net cost which includes all labour, material and mental.

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

Another cause by virtue of which wages cannot rise—whatever may be the productivity of human labour—above the immediate wants of the working class is that the supply of labourers tends ever more and more to outrun the demand.

The increase of supply results from the forcing into the ranks of the proletariat of the expropriated small industries, little tradesmen, shopkeepers, all reduced, in their turn, to selling their power of doing work—their labour-power—in order to eat.

The decrease in the demand for labour results from the introduction of machinery and its extension. The non-human labour power (steam, electricity, etc) replaces and renders more and more useless human labour power. Here is what we call progress in the economic system: the never ceasing reduction of the sum of labour necessary to a given production.

The economists pretend, it is true, that this reduction in the field of human labour-power (the only means of existence of a class) is but temporary. Following a better market, the produce, more in demand, would bring in its train an increasing flow of production and a new demand for labour-power. But the economists might just as well say that the mechanical manufacture of coffins would multiply the need for coffins. Is not the mechanical production of bottles and casks dependent on the production of wine, beer, etc., and is not the output of rails or boilers limited by the number of factories and the development of the means of communication? On the other hand, neither the agricultural machinery (steam ploughs, sowers, mowers, binders and thrashers) nor the cranes on the quays multiply the products; they simply displace manual labour. But even in the industries where the machine has resulted in an extraordinary increase of manufactured articles, the demand for labour has diminished. Example: The cotton industry in England, in which the productivity has increased 1231 per cent from 1819-22 to 1880-82, while for the same period the number of those employed fell from 1/37th of the population (445,000 out of a population of 16,500,000) to 1/50th (686,000 out of a population of 34,000,000). Another example: The boot and shoe trade of the United States carried from 70 million pairs in 1845 to 448 millions in 1875, while the workers employed have fallen from 1/414 (45,900 out of 19 millions population) to 1/1145th (48,000 out of 55 millions).

Under the system of non-possession of the working class of the instruments with which they work, all progress, no matter what its nature, is turned against them, making greater their misery, their slavery; accentuating the insecurity of their existence; in a word: making unavoidable their exploitation – their robbery.

I spoke just now of the machine. Can it be possible that it could not have released suffering humanity from over-toil, troubles; could not have given us liberty? On the contrary, it has aggravated man’s hard labour by setting up in competition with him women, transformed into toilers, and children. From the very moment that it permitted the employment of feminine and infantile arms, it was necessary that the woman should enter the factory, leaving behind her health, her dignity; compromising even the very race itself, attacked by the foul virus of capitalism while yet a foetus in its mother’s womb. The effect of this competition let loose between the different members of the worker’s family has been still a further lowering of labour. Thus the legend of the well-being of the family enforced by more bread-winners does not hold good even before a Jules Simon. When the woman and the child were not industrialised, the wages of the husband had to suffice for the maintenance of all. To-day, for the same price which the single labour-power of the man was bought, the employer buys the threefold labour-power of the man, the woman, and the child.

The discovery of gas, this creation of human industry, of a midnight sun to prolong and complete that of day, has not been less fatal than the machine for the working-class. It has given place to night work; the slaughter-house of the night.

And the instruction that is being extended – and which we are the first to applaud as a new element for the destruction of existing Society – what consequences do you think it is going to introduce for the proletariat as long as this Society exists? In perfecting the human tool, which produces more and better, it will create new stoppages, longer slack seasons. One instructed workman will be sufficient where formerly two ignorant workmen were necessary — and occupied.

We hear “profit sharing” much spoken of as a remedy to heal all social sores, to reconcile labour and capital. If the cure were applicable, profit sharing would only remove the field of battle to a conflict over the profits to be shared. But without insisting on this point, in urging the worker to produce the most possible, it would only oblige him to do in two days the work of three, concluding consequently in the multiplication of the already too numerous days of no pay or stoppages. From the hell in which the dispossessed productive class struggles and writhes there is no redemption – “abandon all hope ye who enter here!”

The social consequences of the rupture, ever more complete, between labour and capital are no less terrible. First, we have the struggle of all against all.

It is the fashion amongst the adversaries of Socialism—through ignorance or enmity—to charge us with fomenting the class war. Just as though we had invented it! We do nothing but state it and make it serve, which is better, to its own ends. We know that the first condition which imposes itself on a doctor who is called to combat a disease is to examine it in order to understand it. It is not by shutting our eyes to the war which divides and exhausts humanity that we shall arrive at the desired peace. The war of every moment is threefold:

War between the proletariat and the capitalist for their respective shares in the produce; on one side, wages, on the other, profits; each side exerting itself to carry off a maximum. Man becomes a wolf for his fellow-man. It is a question of eating one’s brother or being eaten by him.

War between workers and workers for the sharing of wages.

War between capitalists and capitalists for the sharing of profits.

On the other hand, all the marvels of human genius, all the conquests over nature, of which I have pointed out already the homicidal results to the working-class, do not strike less mortally at the other classes of Society. The colours of aniline, coal extracts, so extensively used in the dyeing industry, have ruined whole districts which lived on the cultivation of the madder root formerly employed in this industry before the discovery of chemical dyes. Tomorrow, as has been recently foreshadowed, means may be discovered for the direct manufacture by electricity of metal-castings, and then the blast-furnaces, their fires extinguished, will leave to the millionaire of yesterday nothing but eyes to weep. All discoveries are condemned to operate only through revolutions, leaving behind them victims by the million, at the top as well as at the bottom of the social ladder.

It is, according to the admirable expression found in the programme of the German Social-Democracy: General insecurity becomes the normal condition of society.

What shall we say, in conclusion, of the overproduction which goes on increasing and multiplying and which nothing can stop? When industry was yet confined to one or two countries, in order to reduce the frequency of these crises born of the ever growing division between the unbounded productivity of human labour and the limit put to the reward of the workers, outlets were furnished by exportation to those parts of Europe remaining agricultural (Italy, Germany, etc.). To-day, having become in their turn industrial, these same nations are confronted with over-production, and Africa and Asia are “opened up”– civilized – to supply markets for this too great store of commodities. Here you have an explanation also of the crimes of Colonial policy, Colonial wars, etc. which are the order of the day with Capitalist Governments. But after? They will only have stepped back in order to jump the better.

Thus more and more has Capitalist Society proved its horrible failure to produce anything from a superabundance of riches; of means of consumption and happiness, but misery, suffering, ruin and death!

Translated from the French of  Jules Guesde by P. J. Tobin

Link To Part 2

Bebel’s Answer to Jaurès on “Political Tactics”. (1904)

From the September 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

International Socialist Congress 1904

(Translated from El Heraldo de Madrid, by P. J. Tobin)

When the German Social-Democracy discussed at the Dresden Congress the proposition that is being now debated, nobody thought of bringing it before the International Congress. Nevertheless I am pleased that the Parti Socialiste de France have submitted it to the consideration of the bodies which form the great International Socialist Party, because, contrary to the opinion of Jaurès, this proposition is applicable, in the same manner as it is to Germany, to Belgium, France, Holland, and all other countries.

When Kautsky and Singer drew up the Dresden proposition they took into consideration not alone the conditions under which things exist in Germany, but also certain circumstances that are inseparable from the social ambient created by the system of capitalist production in all the countries where it reigns.

Jaurès pretends that there is such an enormous difference between Germany and France that it is absolutely impossible that an International Congress could adopt rules of Socialist conduct practised with success in one of these nations so as to apply them to the other. Jaurès suffers from a sad error, because although there are differences between France and Germany, they are not so great as he supposes.

I must point out that in the treatment of this question I do not consider it from a particular standpoint which the country where I live supplies me with, but from a general standpoint. All nations may see themselves very soon attacked by this illness that we want to put an end to now, Switzerland as Holland—

Troelstra (Holland): We are not ill.

Bebel: You are not, but you could be so tomorrow, and it is necessary to avoid this happening.

Two perfectly defined tendencies exist in the German Social-Democracy. The two were discussed in the Dresden Congress, and afterwards the proletariat decided in favour of that one which it considered as having best hit the mark. Once the subject was resolved upon, nobody has been found wanting in respect to what was agreed, nobody has produced disagreements in our great party. In France the situation is very different; between Socialists there are serious disputes which do not exist in Germany.

Jaurès admits, like ourselves, the class war, and considers its antagonisms as irreducible; but he also believes that the proletariat ought to work with the radical elements of the middle class, to ensure its own emancipation, if these elements lend themselves to help them in their struggle for liberty. These words of Jaurès enclose a censure for those who do not march in unison with the so-called “progressive” forces of the middle-class, since we spurn a means of serving the cause of the proletariat.

The censure is not just; we avail ourselves of all means for bettering the condition of our comrades the workers. We do not spurn reforms; but what we do refuse, and that in the most explicit manner, is the coming to an agreement with any faction whatsoever of the middle-class, no matter by what name it may go. An agreement of this kind cannot be of any other consequence than to make Socialism responsible for the oppression which the capitalists exercise over the masses of the working-class. Besides, this agreement would give rise to an error that being persevered in by the workers, would lead them to abandon the saving camp of Socialism to throw themselves with closed eyes into the abyss of anarchism. The policy adopted by the French Socialist Party has had two effects: to throw from its bosom the best elements for the fight, the most self-denying, and give entrance to those who accept the attitude of this party in relation to the Minister Combes in order to reach high political posts. As you see, the results of the Revisionists’ policy could not be more disastrous.

In the most flourishing period of French Ministerial Socialism, France has given spectacles which incite the passions of all those who feel the flame of Socialism burning in their breasts. Millerand, the Socialist Millerand, who received, as the most correct of courtiers, during his occupation of the Ministry, kings and queens visiting Paris on the occasion of the Exhibition of 1900, did not remember that an international Socialist Congress was about to be held at approximately the same date; more, he consented that the free exercise of the right to public demonstration should be denied the Socialists, a thing that was permitted to them in 1889. Strange paradox. The Liberal Ministry of Waldeck-Rousseau did not permit in 1900 the exercise of an individual right which the Conservative Ministry that ruled France in 1889 authorised! I cannot understand [with great indignation] how all the delegates did not uprise possessed of the same anger, to protest against the cynicism of those governors that call themselves “democratic”—

Adler (Austria): If you refer to what occurred in the Père-Lechaise demonstration, I must state that the Congress had already concluded its tasks.

Bebel: That is true, but it does not matter; the delegates who were still in Paris and the French Socialist Party ought to have formulated that protest.

Jaurès, in order to explain his reasoning on the diversity of proceedings that should be applied in France and in Germany, tells us Germans: You cannot compare your situation with ours. You live under an Imperialist regime, while the regime to which we are subject is the Republican. The observation is correct. We must confess that did it depend on us, the Imperial Government of Germany would not have another instant of life. But this does not justify the attitude of the Ministerial Socialists, because the proceedings of the French Republic are so dull and arbitrary that I find myself in the sad necessity of becoming an advocate of the Monarchy.

In Germany we have liberty of union and of association, which the Authority respects. In our strikes armed force never intervenes. On the other hand, in France the liberty of union and association is constantly being trampled upon, and in all strikes, and under any pretext whatever, the Government sends infantry, cavalry, and even artillery to the field of action. Now, before this conduct which shows how great is middle-class precocity, I ask Jaurès: How is it possible to explain that a Government which proceeds in this manner has included amongst its number an individual Socialist, and now has the aid of a Parliamentary minority?

The exterior clothing with which the Monarchy clothes itself does not hide its pretensions. At first sight all of us know what a Government of the capitalist class symbolises. Nevertheless, sometimes conscience pricks, and abandoning being logical with itself, realises acts of justice to the workers, which injure the masters.

The bourgeois Republic decks itself out in raiment which cajoles the masses, lulls them with fine words, makes them promises which are on the lips but not in the heart, and this acts so that later, when workmen are assassinated in Châlons-sur-Marne, in France; in Colorado of the USA; or in Vale, of Switzerland, the cynicism, the shamelessness and criminality of these actions appear in greater relief. As you can observe, there is not the difference that Jaurès establishes between the Monarchy and the Republic. And this, I say, in reference to the economic system, takes place as well with militarism, clericalism, and other problems.

After acts such as those I have related do not be astonished that I deduce that there is an absolute incompatibility of the office of Minister to a capitalist government with the character of a militant socialist.

The force of working-class emancipation has taken root in the class-consciousness that the workers possess. I remember very well when on a certain occasion Marx and Engels were asked how was it that England being a country where industry was so developed and having so liberal and progressive a Government, how was it that under such conditions Socialism was so little evolved? They answered that the English middle-class was so astute and intelligent, that they had arranged everything so that historic and social acts were mystified, introducing confusion and division into the ranks of the working-class.

I think it to be my duty to affirm that in questions of greater importance, in those of more interest for public life and national prosperity, Germany has nothing to envy France; on the contrary, in what concerns the navy and colonial question, etc which affect the productive classes in so great a manner, France has made no concession whatever, and in Germany, yes. Further, in the fiscal system, the income tax in Prussia is an ideal compared with what exists in France.

Although it may appear strange, on account of what is now going on in France, the capitalists will never destroy clericalism, because it is an arm which in crucial moments can be used against the workers. I agree and applaud the work now being accomplished in France, but it must not be forgotten that in thirty years’ time nothing worthy of note will have been done in this sense.

If a fight of this nature were undertaken tomorrow in our country we would assist with vigour, but we would take good care not to contract any compromise that might diminish our independence, and would not abandon the defence of working-class interests, not even in moments when the struggle may be hottest. The Jaurès method is of use only in making anarchists.

It cannot be denied that this Congress is competent to give judgement on the question of tactics. Jaurès himself maintained this opinion when the Kautsky resolution was voted upon at the Congress of 1900. Moreover, if we can discuss protection and free-trade, the general strike, etc, why cannot we treat of tactics?

With respect to the design which guides us in asking that the Dresden Proposition be voted upon, everyone who knows us will say what is true, that we do not attempt to whimsically impose an opinion, but to give an advice, to furnish a rule of conduct that is the outcome of thirty-six years of experience.

Tactics may be modified, but the idea will never disappear which inspires the Dresden Resolution, an idea that the proletarian will never abandon, because it is the only one capable of carrying it to the close of its day’s labour—the expropriation of the dominant class.

Women Workers in Japan. (1904)

From the November 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

(From Le Socialiste. Translated by P. J. Tobin.)

It is quite a common thing to ask Socialists : "Are you for Russia or Japan?" To this question, as to many others which usually crop up when two cut-throat thieves attack each other under our modern social system, we have only one reply : "Above all, we are for the proletariat of every country." This does not, however, prevent us from stating objectively in the case of the Russo-Japanese war, that the victory of the Japanese forces would mean as an inevitable consequence the political emancipation of Russia: it's almost certain deliverance from the home enemy—we speak of Czarism, hangman, and knout-beater.

In the meantime, let us study the situation of those who interest us most in both countries— the proletariat. We begin with that of Japan, the least known and most exploited. Take, for instance, the Japanese working woman.

The development of the great industries has gone on increasing and aggravating the economic slavery of woman.

In modern Japan we find as many workwomen as workmen. The cotton spinning mills employ more women than men : in the mills of Kanegafendji, they number 2,700 as against 300 men; in those of Boseki, 3,000 against 500—that is, six, and even nine, women for every man. In the extensive Mourai tobacco factories of Kyoto, they are 2,500, forming five-sixths of the entire staff. The match industry employs almost exclusively women and children. Even in the Imperial Printing Works the women are much more numerous than the men.

Under the preceding social system they were put to work at the roughest employments. Today under the capitalist regime they are employed in the most trying industries.

In the linen spinning mills of Hokkaido they live during entire weeks at a time in a stuffy atmosphere. In the paper mills of Odji they carry heavy baskets, filled with stinking rags, into smoky rooms. At the mines of Muke they not only work at the surface, removing earth or dragging coal, but even in the very bottom : mothers often descending into the pits with children on their backs.

Capitalism in Japan gives a better example than another countries of the tendency to replace male labour by female and child labour; a tendency so well analysed in the first volume of "Capital" by Marx. The proportion of women employed in the great industries, according to the statements of Wenlersse, continues on the increase, and we find it stated in the official report presented at the Chicago Exhibition that in the little town of Souva there are more than 40 silk manufactories employing hundreds of women. The women earn more working in this manner than if they were employed as domestic servants. It is, moreover, very difficult to obtain them for domestic purposes anywhere in the neighbourhood of a factory.

In the cotton spinning mills the average proportion of women to men was in 1880 only two to one; in 1897 it had increased to more than three while to-day it has attained a figure of five, six, and even more.

The Japanese woman is considered much more able at certain work than the man. Wenlersse says that in the Imperial Printing Works women are employed in counting bank notes, in stippling sheets of stamps, and gumming the backs ; and with what rapidity do they not make their fingers travel; how they run from one machine to another, making their wooden sandals clatter on the stone flags—quite little people, like,white mice, in their great large linen robes !

The nimbleness of the tobacco factory girls is surprising. They wrap up as many as 100 packets of cigarettes in tin paper per hour—1,000 in a day. Those who fold up the large boxes are still more dexterous; the girls employed in the match factories paste 60 labels per minute on the little boxes, and continue thus for nine consecutive hours; while, in the spinning mills, they re-knot the broken threads with a rapidity and daintiness not to be equalled by a man.

The reasons for which the capitalist in Japan prefers female to male labour are the same as in Europe. In the first place, the woman is docile, and in order to get her better under his thumb, he has her brought from the most distant provinces.

The poor country-people make scarcely any opposition to delivering up their daughters to the recruiting agents of the great manufacturers. In order to get the children and parents to make up their minds these agents have recourse to falsehood. Here is what Saito Kashiro, an official employed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, says :—

"I have been speaking with an old workwoman in the cotton spinning mills of Kanegafendji at Tokio. She has told me that the company's agent said to her, before the engagement, that the work was very easy, the pay considerable, and that before settling down to her duties, she could visit all parts of Tokio, see the theatres, listen to the concerts, all that she wished ; eating and drinking the best to be had in the finest restaurants."

As the greater part of these women are peasants, completely ignorant of the world and its ways, they easily consent to any proposals which will give them the pleasure of seeing the many novelties abounding in the great city. So off goes our little peasant girl without more ado. However, the day following her departure with the agent, she is limited to a plate of vegetables and rice both for breakfast and dinner ; and all such expenses are put down to her, as also the cost of travelling. On arriving at Tokio she was certainly conducted to the principal places of interest in the town, not forgetting the restaurants, as had been promised, but everything was duly chalked down to her account. Not having sufficient money to defray those outlays, a certain proportion was each month deducted from her wages. Now, the work was hard and the wage small: 6d. per day. Consequently, she could not support this intolerable condition and left the factory one fine day on the pretext of taking a walk—such a trick being possible only in the most exceptional cases, while the swindle just recounted is quite the rule.

Women allow themselves to be very easily exploited by the employers ; they are the complete dupes and victims of the capitalist system. Their most elementary interests demand that they should wake up to this fact and organise— in Japan as well as in Europe.

Moreover, female labour is preferred above all, for the reason that it is more profitable. Eleven hours of solid work per day is exacted and obtained from the Japanese workwomen— sometimes even eleven and a half. If an hour is granted to them during the day for eating, it is on condition that the machines are kept going; they must make an arrangement among themselves whereby they go to meals in such order that the factory always has its complement of workers. Sunday is unheard of; two days' rest only are allowed each month, and even such "days" consist of but a few hours. During the entire year they have scarcely five holidays, and those for the purpose of repairing—the machines, more precious to the capitalist than that other human machine which can always be readily replaced in the event of a breakdown !

No law has so far been passed on the limitation of the women's working hours ; just as the men, they work night and day indifferently. Their wage is beneath contempt. In Japan we are still in the stages of "primitive accumulation" thus styled by Karl Marx, the Dante of the regime under which we live. 

The more dexterous weavers of Osaka earn only about 10d. daily, which is the maximum, the minimum amounting to but 4 1/2d. The women who gum the labels on matchboxes receive 3 1/2d. in a working day. In the cotton spinning mills the adult women get from 6 1/2d. to 1s., while where men and women are employed at the same work, the latter are paid from a third to a half less than the men.

How do those "galley slaves" of the Japanese factory bear such conditions of labour? It opens sometimes with an idyll such as would make the aesthetic Pierre Loti (author of "Madame Chrysanthemum") and his fair readers rub their hands with joy, but it closes in quite another fashion—here is a picture :

  "The spectacle give a in the port of Nagasaki is still more singular and interesting. There you see the women coalporters with their sugar loaf hats of brown straw adorned with white and blue cambric, below which peeps out bunches of jet black hair. To see their sparkling eyes, their cheeks all rosy and tanned from the sun's rays, that air of sweetness spread over their features, is quite a pleasure. With what an unembarrassed step, without the impediment of skirts and not fearing to allow their legs to be seen, do they not carry the large bamboo cane to which are attached heavy black baskets . . . .
  They laugh, push, and tickle one another as they pass, and offer no objection whatever to being encircled round the waist by some young men working in the same gang . . . But these pretty white legs soon waver, and on the planks which stretch trembling from the quay to the ship, a little fright and very much fatigue close those lips in pain, which, but a short time since, expanded in a dazzling smile . . ." 

And all this for a few pence a day! Among every eight Japanese workwomen we find one prostitute. Under the conditions which she lives her "erring sister " is not the least intelligent nor the most to complain. She is but a rebel anyhow, an escaped slave of the capitalist compound.

And this they call "Civilisation !"

Revolutionary Reform (1905)

From the June 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two tendencies, apparently contradictory, manifest themselves in Socialist tactics on the subject of reforms.

On one hand, the very principle of Socialism is found in opposition to democratic illusions. Instead of seeing the solution of the so-called “social question” in the expansion of liberties, in therealisationof an ideal of Justice, in the perfecting of the republican regime by means ofuniversal suffrage, Socialism declares that all the social phenomena of our days are the results of capitalism, manifestations of the class war, which will cease only with the disappearance of classes. Therefore the Socialist Party is a party of class and of revolution.

On the other hand, the desire for some immediate bettering of his lot is too well engendered in the heart of man for him to lose hope, even against all logic. Logic is weak against the power of an instinctive desire. The political parties promise reforms to their electors just as a nurse promises the moon to a child.

The Socialist Party is thus caught between the logic of its scientific principle and the universal desire for an immediate amelioration - ”something now”. It cannot betray its principle, but it is likewise impossible that this party- of men - can escape this human desire for reforms.

This contradiction is, however, not without a solution, if we discriminate between the conditions of fighting and the conditions of existence of the working-class.

(. . . . .)

The conditions of existence of the wage-workers depends upon their wages. It is not determined by the legal law, but by the economic law of supply and demand.

The condition of existence of the wage-workers is determined in each corporate body, by the progress of the development of machinery, the concentration of capital, the proportion of the unemployed industrial reserve army, and the stock-in-trade of merchandise.

Social realities are outside of parliaments. The crowd of ambitious folk who jostle one another in the unhealthy atmosphere of the Houses of Parliament can do nothing -  absolutely nothing - to modify the real wage of the workers.

The legal law is of straw; the economic law is of iron.

Why change the tax-gathering plate if you do not change what is put into it?

Why agitate against clericalism if clericalism is a social necessity? You do nothing more nor less than substitute idolatry of the flag for that of the cross.

To dream of bettering the conditions of existence by political means is Utopia.

(. . . . . )

Although the bettering of the conditions of existence by way of political reform is impossible, it is not the same as regards the conditions of fighting, and it appears to us to be possible to make easier the struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist middle-class.

We do not here make a specious distinction. To distinguish between the conditions of fighting and the conditions of existence is not to split a hair. The difference is real.

When a soldier marches under a shower of rain, you better his conditions of existence in giving him an umbrella which protects him from getting wet, and you better his condition of fighting in supplying him with an up-to-date rifle instead of a stone-slinger.

By the very fact of capitalist production the proletariat is at war with the bourgeoisie. This struggle is sometimes hidden, at other times visible to the eyes of all, but it is without truce. Far from becoming less evident, conflicts increase daily. Some reforms would render the attacks of the proletariat more powerful, those of its adversary weaker, and would make the effort easier and more efficient.

One reform which is considered above all others as an amelioration of the conditions of carrying on the proletarian struggle is the reduction in the hours of labour.

The reduction in the hours of the working day makes the workers mentally and physically stronger and better equipped for carrying on the social struggle. Rebels are not made of the starved and wretched: rebellion is a luxury.

The reduction of the working-day facilitates the concentration of capital, thereby hastening the disappearance of the middle-class, making clearer the social struggle.

That is the revolutionary reform par excellence.

It is not an amelioration in the condition of existence. Applications of the reform already made in England and America prove that the amount of labour furnished is sensibly the same: labour-time diminished, work becomes more intense. The proportion of surplus labour is perhaps greater: the 8 hours day probably increasing the relative surplus-value would thereby increase the capitalist profits.

The 8 hours day is an amelioration of the conditions of fighting - nothing more. It is an immense gain.

(. . . . . )

The moment the Trade Unions take up the agitation in favour of the 8 hours day, of which Socialism hitherto took the initiative, when “labour” elected candidates will have introduced themselves into ministerial combinations and lose all thought of economic realities in the reforms pourrire of which the Radicals are so prodigious -the Socialist Party cannot, in my opinion, but find it profitable to direct its efforts towards the reduction of the hours of labour.

Without seeking to discover to-day what is the value of Parliamentary action to obtain this revolutionary reform, we will attempt to show in another article how it is possible to draft a law effectively reducing the working-day, because the difficulty does not consist in having a law passed, but in having it applied.

A. Bruckère in Le Socialiste

(Translated by P. J. Tobin.)