The Salvation Army and the Working Class III. (1910)

From the May 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part II.

The Social Scheme.

 The indirect features of the scheme must not be such as to produce injury to the persons whom we seek to benefit.

While assisting one class of the community, it must not seriously interfere with the interests of another. In raising one section of the fallen, we must not thereby endanger the safety of those who with difficulty are keeping on their feet. . . . It is no use conferring six pennyworth of benefit on a man if, at the same time, we do him a shillings worth of harm.

—”In Darkest England,” page 81.

The Book that Made a Stir.

General Booth, when launching onto a sea of controversy his now celebrated book : “In Darkest England and the Way Out,” told his readers that, from calculations he had made himself and from the figures supplied by various authorities on the subject, in these islands fully one-tenth of the population was hopelessly submerged. Hopelessly that is, so far as all previous efforts on their behalf were concerned. This section of the people he nicknamed with his cant phrase “the submerged tenth.”

The purpose of his book was to arouse the public interest in these “lost ones,” and to obtain financial support for the starting of his “social scheme.”

We were shown at great length how hopelessly inadequate to cope with the evils of want and destitution had been the efforts of well-meaning reformers who worked in connection with various “charitable” agencies.

“It is no use trying to bale out the ocean with a pint pot,” said he (“In Darkess England,” page 253). What was wanted, we were told, was an all-embracing plan. “This scheme changes the circumstances of those whose poverty is caused by their misfortune. To begin with it finds work for the unemployed. This is the chief need.”

The Legion of the Lost.

The way in which our octogenarian professor of philanthropy proposed to go to work may best be set forth in his own words :

“The Social Problem presents itself before us whenever a hungry, dirty and ragged man stands at our door asking if we can give him a crust or a job. That is the social question, what are you to do with that man? He has no money in his pocket, all that he can pawn he has pawned long ago, his stomach is as empty as his purse, and the whole of the clothes upon his back, even if sold on the best terms, would not fetch a shilling. . . He asks for work, which he will set to even on his empty stomach and in his ragged uniform, if so be that you will give him something for it, but his hands are idle, for no one employs him. What are you to do with that man ? . . . To deal with this man is the problem of the unemployed. To deal with him effectively you must deal with him immediately, you must provide him in some way or other with food, and shelter, and warmth. Next you must find him something to do, something that will test the reality of his desire to work. This test must be more or less temporary, and should be of such a nature as to prepare him for making a permanent livelihood. Then, having trained him, you must provide him wherewithal to start life afresh. All these things I propose to do. My Scheme divides itself into three sections, each of which is indispensable for the success of the whole. In this three-fold organisation lies the open secret of the solution of the Social Problem.

The Scheme I have to offer consists in the formation of these people into self-helping and self-sustaining communities, each being a kind of cooperative society, or patriarchal family, etc. 

These communities we will call, for want of a better term, Colonies. 

There will be

(1) The City Colony,

(2) The Farm Colony,

(3) The Over-Sea Colony.”

(Before proceeding to our dissection of results we have troubled to quote Booth at some length, in order that those of our readers to whom ”Darkest England” is inaccessible may gain a clear and definite idea as to what his main object was when he set out to conquer “the powers of evil” and bring about “a new heaven and a new earth.”)

The “City” Colony.

By the phrase “City Colony” was meant a number of institutions which were to act as “Harbours of Refuge.” Into these havens were to be gathered all who had been “ship-wrecked.” Food and shelter were to be provided in return for work. Employment found for him, the mariner wrecked on life’s stormy sea was to be rescued and “reformed.” He was then to be restored to the joyful bosom of his happy family, or (in case the wild happy family were not having any) he was to be passed on to the Colony of the second class.

The second stage in this new Pilgrim’s Progress was intended to work out as follows :

Farms for the Famished.

The Salvation Army would buy land near some great city (the neighbourhood of London being chosen for the first experiment). Buildings would be erected and a farm stocked. The “wretched outcast” having passed through the refining fires of the city shelter and workshop, was then to be dumped down into a real live farm—there to be taught the whole art of husbandry.

In fine a regular “Garden City” would arise wherein our friend the W.O. would work out his economic and moral salvation.

Just here we may note a significant remark of the General’s when discussing the prospects of this portion of his scheme. (“In Darkest England,” page 249.)

“As the scheme progresses, it is not irrational to expect that Government, or some of the varied Local authorities will assist in the working out of a plan which, in so marked a manner, will relieve the rates and taxes of the country”.

(The last passage was not originally italicised.) 

In our examination of the actual, every-day working of this famous scheme, we shall have occasion to again refer to this pious hope that the “authorities” would patronise the concern. He then goes on to say: “From the Farm, as from the City . . . large numbers would be restored to friends up and down the country. Some would find employment in their own callings” (thereby pushing others out and lowering the rate of wages), “others would settle in cottages on a small piece of land that we should provide, or on Co-operative Farms which we intend to promote ; while the great bulk, after trial and training, would be passed on to the Foreign Settlement, which would constitute our third class, viz., the Over Sea Colony.”

As the last-named section of the Scheme has up to the present failed to materialise, we shall not let it worry us.

The Return of the “Golden Age.”

The Scheme, in its entirety, was, in the General’s own words :

“To draw up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth . . . forwarding from the City to the Country, and there continuing the process of regeneration, and then pouring them forth on to the virgin soils that await their coming in other lands . . . Why not ?”

And Echo—after twenty years of scheming and planning, with money poured out like water ; after twenty years of “food and shelter depots,” Elevators, City and Farm Colonies, et hoc genus omne ; after twenty years of bluff and brag in the capitalist Press, self-denial weeks and special collections—shouts across this awful waste of time, “WHY NOT?”

The Answer.

The answer must be because the whole “Darkest England” Scheme from top to bottom has proved a gigantic fraud and failure. In our detailed examination of the actual working of the Scheme, reviewing the various divisions in their due order as set forth by Booth in his Vade-mecum, much damning evidence in support of our statement will come to light.

At the base of the “Social Scheme” were to be the food and shelter depots of the City Colony.

It was proposed to establish in connection with every Food and Shelter depot a workshop or labour-yard (ominous term) in which any person who came destitute and starving would be supplied with sufficient work to enable him to earn the 4d. needed for his bed and board.

The Salvation Army’s official figures for 1908 tell us that nearly six million meals were supplied at cheap food depots, and over two million cheap lodgings for the homeless were provided.

Specious and Misleading Advertisements.

Judging from the advertisements which appear under the “Army’s” aegis daily in the papers—of which the subjoined taken from the Westminster Gazette is a fair sample—anyone not in the know would naturally imagine that the 6,000 poor referred to had only to present themselves in all their abject misery at a Shelter, and lo and behold—they would be welcomed with open arms.

“STARVATION AND MISERY

are found on every hand among the Poor and Outcast by the Officers of the SALVATION ARMY who live among them, and are qualified to help them in the most economical and able manner. PRAY SEND HELP for so needy a work. £150,000 annually needed for the Army’s Central Funds alone. Over 6,000 Poor sleep in the Homes nightly. 170 Branches of Social and Relief work; are in operation.

Please address cheques (crossed “Bank of England, Law Courts Branch”) to GENERAL BOOTH, 101, Queen Victoria-street, London. Balance-sheets forwarded.”

In reality nothing of the kind takes place. “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” Yes, but there’s an if. The tune they play at the door is “The Absent Minded Beggar” with its haunting refrain of “Pay ! Pay ! Pay !” There is no work test applied at these “poor men’s hostels,” and the “crowd of hungry, desperate wretches, without even a penny in their pouch, demanding food and shelter”—over whose woes twenty long years ago William the saintly waxed so tearfully eloquent—unless they can furnish the needful coin of the realm, are met with that sternest of all arguments on a winter’s night, a closed door !

Fritz.

(To be continued)

Cooking the Books: Wages for housework? (2026)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The BBC News website carried an article on 9 December headed ‘A wage for housework? India’s sweeping experiment in paying women’ which described schemes in various Indian states under which some poorer women were given a regular monthly payment by the state. The International Wages for Housework campaign trumpeted this as a victory for their campaign, issuing a media statement that ‘after more than 50 years of campaigning, wages for housework is becoming a reality – in India and elsewhere’.

They date the beginning of their campaign to when Selma James raised their demand at a women’s liberation conference in Manchester in March 1972 but went further back to ‘the work of Eleanor Rathbone, the Independent MP who won Family Allowances (now Child Benefit) in the UK’. The payments under the Indian schemes are not ‘wages’ at all but, like family allowances and child benefits, a handout from the state. The whole ‘wages for housework’ campaign is basically a campaign for this social reform; not necessarily a bad reform, as paying the money directly to the woman rather than her husband is an advance. Even so, it is still a social reform and, as with all reforms that involve the state paying workers money, one that has unintended consequences.

When, during the last world war, a scheme for family allowances became practical politics thanks in large part to Eleanor Rathbone, the Socialist Party brought out a pamphlet Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis which argued that ‘family allowances will lower the workers’ standards of living instead of raising them’. This was based on what wages are and what ultimately determines their level.

Wages are a price of what workers have to sell: their mental and physical energies. Their amount reflects the cost of buying the goods and services required to produce and reproduce this. In the days before family allowances, this included an element to raise future workers and so covered, at least partially, the cost of maintaining a ‘housewife’ and bringing up children. The economic effect of paying family allowances would be to reduce the amount that the employer needed to pay workers to reproduce their labour power and raise a family. As the pamphlet put it:

‘Once it is established that the children (or some of the children) of the workers have been “provided for” by other means, the tendency will be for wage levels to sink to new standards which will not include the cost of maintaining such children’.

Thirty years later we made the same point in commenting on James’s pamphlet Women, the Unions and Work. Her demand for ‘wages for housework’, the May 1973 Socialist Standard said, ‘seems a little naive’:

‘Wages are the price for which workers sell their labour power. That price will be generally sufficient to keep a worker, and his family, at a socially accepted standard. Payment made for housework, like family allowances or free transport, would act as a brake on wages’.

The payments to poor women in India are likely in time to put a brake on wages too, even if, through being paid directly to women, they represent an improvement for the women concerned in making them less dependent on a man.

Selma James had been a Trotskyist (though of a group that recognised that Russia was state capitalist) and quoted Marx, but Marxian economics was not her strong point. Marx would have advised her to change the reformist slogan ‘Wages for Housework’ to the revolutionary watchword ‘Abolish The Wages System’. Then both men and women would have access on the same basis to what they needed to live and enjoy life.

Letter: "Municipal Politics." (1908)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Suspicions arising as to the genuineness of the following letter, a communication was sent to the address given. It was returned through the post marked "Not known." Though it is unusual to take notice of anonymous correspondence, an exception is made in this case since the matter may be of some interest to our readers.

"Municipal Politics."

Jan. 18th, 08. 

Socialist Party of Great Britain,

Gentlemen,—In The Socialist Standard for January an article appeared under the heading “Municipal Politics." In regard to a candidate becoming elected to a municipal body you state that he will of course work to wrest from the capitalist class any possible present amelioration although he did not seek suffrages for this, but for Socialism. Since amelioration is of no use whatever to the working class as long as the exploiting class remain in power, why should he waste time on this since he did not seek votes to obtain amelioration, but to bring about Socialism? Also since he was appointed by a class- conscious electorate one would think that they would not expect any reforms to be advocated by him. Hoping to see a reply to this in your next month's issue, I remain.

Yours fraternally,

J. R. Smith.

409, Oldham Rd., Manchester.

Reply:

To say, as does our correspondent, that “amelioration of any kind is of no use to the working class so long as the exploiting class remain in power” is entirely absurd. It is saying that an amelioration is at the same time not an amelioration. It implies that the workers if able to obtain a rise in wages should refuse to take it on the ground that it would be of no use to them!

The only point upon which there can be intelligent discussion is, not whether an amelioration is of use, but whether or how any amelioration is obtainable under capitalism; and if Mr. Smith had used the whole and not a half of a sentence he would have seen that the other half states that neither the Socialist member nor his "electors are under any illusions on this head, for he has made plain how little is to be hoped for from the enemy while entrenched in power."

If Mr. Smith will read the article in question he will see that its whole burden is that any wide spread or important amelioration is impossible under capitalism, and that to obtain even any partial or temporary benefits that may be obtainable as sops from the master class, the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism is the only effective way. And in this struggle for Socialism the workers will take all they can get, and will use every coign of vantage, not to patch up a rotten system, but to strengthen, educate, and organise the working class army in the task of abolishing capitalist exploitation.

As distinct from the reformers who adapt themselves to bourgeois interests, the Socialists must always—as stated in the article—formulate working-class interests and so make clearer in contrast with capitalist interests the polar antagonism that exists and which can only be dissolved by Socialism. Nothing can be considered by a Socialist as being in working class interests that helps to perpetuate a system of oppression, but everything will be welcomed that can be used effectively as a weapon by the Socialist army in ending the capitalist system.

When the Socialist workers control a municipal council, are they, as according to Mr. Smith, to do nothing because they cannot do all? Limited though the local powers are, yet, obviously, they must be used to the utmost. It would, indeed, be folly to contest a local election if the workers were not prepared when in a majority to use the organisation of the municipality as a base of operations in the revolutionary struggle, by aiding and strengthening the workers in revolt against the system. While to refrain from using the electoral machinery where such can be of use to the Socialist workers would be treachery.

Social reformers seek votes in order to patch up the present system, but the Socialist seeks only the conscious co-operation of the workers for its abolition. Hence with the Socialist all else is subordinate to this end, and is only of use in so far as it is a means thereto. By revolution alone can permanent and substantial benefit accrue to the workers. Consequently, even for substantial and lasting amelioration, the first and essential step is, as stated in the article to which Mr. Smith refers, "the control by the workers nationally and locally, and this must be made plain ; and when the workers are the ruling class, lists of reforms suited to the continuance of capitalism become stupid, and entirely different revolutionary measures of transition become the order of the day. Thus reform programmes not only scatter and render mutually antagonistic the workers' efforts, but they obscure and prevent concentration upon the essential step."

So, Mr. Smith, we do not advocate reforms.

We may, then, conclude by further quoting for our correspondent’s benefit from the article in question, whose contents he seems to have unaccountably overlooked :

"It must, therefore, be clearly understood, (1st) that any reform worthy the name from a working-class standpoint involves the conscious taking from the capitalist class of, at least, part of the power and proceeds of robbery, and thus genuine reform is conditional on working-class supremacy. (2nd) That to wield in the workers' interest even the limited and paltry powers allowed by the central government to the local bodies it is first necessary to control the local bodies by a Socialist majority."

"Consequently to promise ‘immediate reforms' that cannot be granted until the revolutionary step has been taken leads to confusion, disappointment and apathy, while it means a vote worthless for Socialism followed by desertion. But to insist upon the futility of reform, and the primary necessity of capturing political power, means a sound vote, a solid backing, and a sure and steady growth of the class-conscious and revolutionary army."

And that, Mr. Smith, is why we do not advocate reforms.

F. C. Watts

The Socialist Forum: The £150 election deposit. (1931)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader asks if we would favour the abolition of the £150 deposit which Parliamentary candidates have to find before being allowed to run, and if Socialists in Parliament would try to secure its abolition.

The first point to consider is whether or not the obligation to deposit £150 is a barrier to the spread of Socialist knowledge. It certainly is true that the present law does prevent the Socialist Party from running candidates at Parliamentary elections, but the importance of this disability must not be exaggerated. If there were any constituency in which Socialists had become so numerous that they were somewhere in the neighbourhood of a majority, there would be no risk of losing the money and the problem of finding £150 for a few weeks would not be insuperable. The extent of the disability is, therefore, that we are at present deprived of an opportunity of putting forward a candidate and thus making the most effective use of the elections for propaganda purposes.

The second point concerns the actions of Socialists in the House of Commons towards the abolition of the present restriction. But surely it begs the question, since the Socialists in Parliament could only have got there by showing that the obstacle of the deposit can be surmounted. By that time some of the capitalist parties will, perhaps, be feeling the pinch and want the deposit abolished, not for our sake, but for their own.

Letter: Political and Social Reforms. (1933)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political and Social Reforms.

Clapham,

September 24th, 1933.

Dear Comrades,

Seeing that the S.P.G.B. claim that, in this country, at any rate, at the present time, the only known course open to the workers to capture the seat of Government is the vote, that being so, one can logically claim that the franchise is a social reform that will eventually fundamentally benefit the working class.

The reason I express this point of view is that, was one of your speakers correct when he asked an audience to name one “ social reform ” that has fundamentally benefited the working class?

Now, Marx, writing on the Chartists, said : “But universal suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat form the large majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground, civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class, and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more Socialist measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent. Its inevitable result here is the political supremacy of the working class.” (New York Tribune, August 25th, 1852. Quoted by Labour Monthly, December, 1929.)

Your speaker took the opposite viewpoint, saying “that the workers had recently returned the Nationalist Government. Also that the ruling class Had given further suffrage to the women.” Quite so, that is because the workers are not mentally equipped with the necessary Socialist knowledge, and, therefore, is not a condemnation of the "social reform,” namely, “the Franchise,” which Marx agrees is a Socialist measure. Your reply to my letter, re “ The Vote,” in September, 1927, said, “We would strongly urge them (black workers) to agitate for the franchise.”

Yours fraternally,

T. W. C.

Reply.

Our correspondent has, we think, completely misunderstood the speaker whose remarks he quotes.

It is usual to refer to changes in the machinery of Government as “political" reforms, and to keep the phrase “social reforms” for such measures as old-age pensions, health and unemployment insurance, etc. The speaker in question would therefore not expect his statement, that no social reform had “fundamentally benefited the working-class," to be understood as meaning that the franchise is useless.

Our correspondent falls into a second misunderstanding when he fails to separate the present misuse of the franchise from its future correct use. It is true, as Marx said, that the franchise will inevitably result in the political supremacy of the working class. It is also true to say (as our speaker is reported as saying) that the workers have used their votes to return a capitalist Government to power. Our speaker would therefore have been quite correct if he had also said that the franchise has not yet been used by the workers in such a way as to be of fundamental benefit to them.

When they become Socialists the working class will know very well how to use the vote.

Ed. Comm.

Correspondence. (1906)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

To the Editor.

Sir,—In The Socialist Standard for July, Mr. Anderson states in the Debate on Trade Unionism and Socialism, “he agreed with Kautsky that the political organisation must dominate the economic.” If the political forces dominate the economic forces, would Mr. Anderson have us believe that all reforms in the past have been brought about by political and not economic influences ?

Can Mr. Anderson point out where one Act of Parliament for the benefit of the workers has been initiated inside the House of Commons ? Are not all reforms brought about by agitation, such agitation being the result of economic pressure and not political force ?

If we were to have political freedom, we should still have economic slavery. But were we to have economic freedom we should not have political slavery.

Yours faithfully,

Printers' Machineminder. 

Clapton, N.E.

The Plaint of the Palliator. (1905)

From the December 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

A resident in Watford has written me calling my attention to an article by Mr. H. W. Lee (whose name was recently brought into some prominence in connection with the Camborne affair), and suggesting that I offer an opinion upon it. He seems to have had some discussion with another local gentleman who thought, in opposition to my correspondent, that the proposals made in the article should be adopted by a Socialist Party, and that the reasons given were satisfactory and convincing. I should have preferred that an abler pen than mine dealt with the matter, but as it is one that strikes me as not over difficult for any professor of Socialism with a moderately efficient knowledge behind the Socialism he professes, to handle, I gladly avail myself of the opportunity of contributing something that may help those who are anxious to occupy a right and logical position to that end.

Mr. Lee’s article is briefly an argument for Socialist concentration upon two palliative (?) proposals which he names. He says, “The question I wish to bring under the notice of English Socialists … is whether the time has not arrived when they should formulate a vigorous demand for some or all of the political measures I have indicated” (he only indicates two, viz., Payment of Members and Election Expenses, and the Second Ballot) “with a view of using them to the advantage of Socialist candidates.” He adds, rather naively, “Twenty years ago that kind of political agitation might have been safely left to the Radicals of that day.” Well, as a Socialist resident in England, I thank Mr. Lee for bringing this question under my notice, but after due deliberation I must regretfully say that I have come to the conclusion that I don’t think much of his proposals. But then my outlook appears to differ from Mr. Lee’s in a very essential particular.

Unlike Mr. Lee, who, it seems, is quite ready, and even anxious, that his candidate should be returned to political office by a class unconscious vote if need be,—to use his own words, “as the lesser of the two evils at the second ballot,”—I am only concerned with success at the poll, for any candidate upon clearly defined lines and by a class-conscious working-class vote. Because I know, and I should be surprised indeed if Mr. Lee did not know also, that no real contribution can be made to the solution of the poverty problem unless the men who have taken possession of the machinery of government have done so in the interests and under the instruction of the working-class intelligently organised upon the basis of their class interests. In other words, the elected person must go to his duties as their delegate, not as their director. The emancipation of the working-class must be the work of the workers themselves, and he who thinks by coercion or cajolery to hustle them along a road down which they cannot see is, if he is honest, voluntarily stretching himself upon a rack that will lacerate him painfully before he is free of it.

Of course the argument is that

THE POSSESSION OF PUBLIC OFFICE

enables the occupant to educate the more effectively. But in that case the course to pursue would be to whittle the candidate’s programme down as near as possible to nothingness in order that no question might arise in the minds of the untutored electorate to give them pause in their blind or semi-blind voting. That would surely be the most effectual method of procedure assuming the honesty of the candidate could be relied upon—although Mr. Lee would be hard put to it to create a confidence in the honesty of an elected person who as candidate was guilty of most culpable dishonesty. Mr. Lee, I take it, would not urge such a course, although his suggestion amounts to the same thing. He argues that the political activity of the Socialist Party should be concentrated upon two specified political reforms. Which means that these two are to be brought out in bold relief while all other proposals are to be set well away in the background. For the time being the Socialist is to take his stand on the same ground that any Radical occupies. Any number of Radicals or Liberals (I never did know where the Liberal left off and the Radical began) will agree that Socialism is a good thing, but as practical politicians, seeing that Socialism is without the range of possibility until at least certain political reforms (of the type of Payment of Members, and Second Ballot) have been achieved, they think the best course is to concentrate upon that achievement, which it seems to me, is Mr. Lee’s position, only he will probably protest that his Socialism is not so far in the background as the Radical’s—a difference of small moment, seeing that both Mr. Lee and the Radical are agreed that

SOCIALISM SHALL BE IN THE BACKGROUND

anyhow, and that the foreground shall be occupied by one or two or a dozen reforms.

That being so, the question immediately arises as to whether any present need for a Socialist organisation exists at all. if Socialism is not possible unless and until these reforms have been attained, and if to attain them Socialism is to be obscured, as it must be, why waste strength in a separate organisation ? Why not unite in one great and powerful Radical faction, and with the strength that comes of unity, strike the blow that shall shiver the barriers erected by Reaction (with a capital R) between the forces of progress and their political objective. Or something like that. If the immediate necessity for the propagation of the principles of Socialism is conceded for the prosecution of a vigorous agitation on behalf of these reforms, then the necessity for the propagation of the principles of Socialism retreats to a secondary position and the necessity for the present existence of a Socialist party retreats with it.

To me there seems no escape from this conclusion. Mr. Lee will protest that for the Socialist, Socialism does not retreat that it is in the first position all the time. Which is quite true. But then a Socialist would not advocate the concentration that Mr. Lee advocates upon

A COUPLE OF PALLIATIVE (?) MEASURES

the realisation of which will not necessarily land us a step nearer Socialism. The point in this connection (and it is a point that Mr. Lee and those who think with him are concerned to labour at other times) is that palliatives are only of utility when they are achieved by a working-class consciously organised as such. How often has Mr. Lee and his friends pressed the objection with unanswerable force that the whole Newcastle programme—which included Payment of Members by the way—can be granted by a capitalist state without endangering itself, and as a matter of fact has been so granted ? Then why this Volte Face ? Is there any special virtue in Payment of Members or Second Ballot’ ?. Under present conditions there is no advantage to the Socialist in the Second Ballot, and Payment of Members cannot be regarded as anything like an unmixed blessing. Certainly neither of them nor both, even from their best aspects, can compare in importance with the propagation of Socialism.

It is fatuous for Mr. Lee to suggest that while Socialists are concentrating upon these two palliatives they are at the same time maintaining Socialism in its pre-eminent position as

THE REAL AND SOLE OBJECTIVE.

You cannot concentrate upon something short of, and not necessarily germain to, your real objective and at the same time concentrate upon that objective itself. Besides, Mr. Lee has himself urged as a strong reason—as a fact it is his strongest reason—for the adoption of his method, that a large number of Radicals and what not, who are opposed to Socialism itself, would support an agitation for the palliatives. They are opposed to Socialism but yet will work for your palliatives—why ? Because, largely, they do not understand Socialism. The Socialist is concerned that they shall understand Socialism. And how shall the Socialist affect his purpose by putting his Socialism behind his back and going down to the position of the anti-Socialist—retreating twenty years in order to take up the agitation that Radicalism of that day dropped ? And this at the same time that Mr. Lee and his friends are pointing to the countries where the proposals it is suggested should be agitated for, have been realised without any effect at all upon working-class conditions and I will assert without perceptible effect upon the local Socialist movement. Mr. Lee must go back if he will, but he will not take one Socialist back with him. The Socialist will stay to show

THE FUTILITY OF RADICAL AIR-BEATING ;

to prove to the Radical how deplorably unproductive must be any effort not directed toward the attainment of the only thing that matters—Socialism.

I repeat again—it cannot be too often repeated—that there is no point in securing palliative measures apart from the manufacture of Socialist opinion that alone can use them. And this Socialist opinion must be manufactured first. And it will only be manufactured by Socialists who, refusing to go back twenty years or one year to the propagation of reforms, persist in the heavy educational spade work that still requires to be done. For Mr. Lee to suggest as he does, that the time is now ripe for Socialists to secure some reward—meaning office—for the work they have done in the past, is simply to proclaim that they are tired of the work that still remains to be done. There is no reward for the Socialist except the satisfaction that comes of the knowledge that he has faithfully discharged the duty laid upon him and by which alone he justifies his existence. Administrative power will come presently, when an electorate of enlightened producers moulded to class-consciousness by the work of the Socialist educationalists who have emphasised

THE PURPORT OF ECONOMIC CHANGE

and insisted upon the re-organisation of industry upon the basis of common ownership in the means of life as the only antidote to the hardship and suffering such economic change involves for the wealth producers—when this class-conscious electorate shall have translated their appreciation of their distinctive class interests into logical political action. The power will come as a result of working-class enlightenment, and. it will be working-class power, therefore, not the power of persons elected upon a class-un-conscious—that is, an ignorant—working-class vote. I hope that is fairly clear. It is working-class power the Socialist wants to increase. And no working-class power is possible outside working-class enlightenment. And the Socialist propagandist is one of the important factors in that effort towards enlightenment—the Socialist propagandist, the propagandist, that is, of revolution, as distinguished from the palliative propagandist, the propagandist of reform. The only justification for the Socialist’s existence therefore is

THE PROPAGATION OF REVOLUTION.

As to whether better educational work could be done by a person who, having shed the Socialist coat to secure election, or who, having been elected upon some issue other than Socialism, dons his coat again or revives his Socialism after election, is a question that to me can only be answered in the negative. A Socialist can do, as an elected person, exceedingly little. Certainly he can do nothing that will have any material effect upon working-class conditions. His election must have been secured upon this understanding if he is to maintain the following that he has created. That is to say he must have been elected as a Socialist if he wishes to keep the adherents to his views as numerically high as they were at the moment of his election. Because, otherwise he will have been elected by persons who will look to him to realise certain reforms (a possibility only when a majority of Radical representatives favourable to those reforms have been elected—sufficiently large an order to start with) because those reforms are in one way or another to benefit them (the persons electing him). But as I have said, Mr. Lee and his supporters are at times quite ready to deny that reforms can make any appreciable difference to working-class conditions, and are able to point in evidence to concrete cases where, in practice, these reforms have so failed; and as it is mainly upon

A WORKING-CLASS VOTE

that any person is elected, it follows that Mr. Lee’s Socialist Councillor or whatever he may be, will hardly realise his reforms in the first place, and in any event, will be unable to show appreciable effect as a result of those reforms. Wherefore his following will tail off until it is reduced to but little more than the converted nucleus with which he set out, and who would have expected the more or less barren results that the elected person would have to show. This is not hypothetical at all. The record of a thousand cases will bear the conclusion out. The whole history of reform movements can be called up in evidence. The latter end of every reform agitation presents the unhappy spectacle of great bodies of tired, dispirited men and women whose discontent, that once had urged, them so insistently to action, has turned to apathy hi the wreck of their high hopes.

Mr. Lee can not deny this without at the same time undermining the whole ground for the existence of Socialist organisation. And yet he would have us go back to the position of Reformers of 20 years ago and he talks of the advantages of the Second Ballot in which Socialists might stand a chance of election as, to use his own expression, “the lesser of the two evils” !

Which, I mean to say, is,

VERY SHORT-SIGHTED AND VERY SILLY.

Does Mr. Lee deny that the working-class have at the present moment sufficient political power to do what they like ? Then why all this blethering for more political power ? The only question which concerns the Socialist is why the working-class should not like Socialism and why they do not return Socialists to power. And the only answer to that of course is, working-class ignorance. Very good. Let Mr. Lee, if he is a Socialist, start in to dispel the ignorance and not waste so much time and energy in pressing for more political power when it is not wanted. The worst of these young men in a hurry is that they will be forever attempting to take short cuts to the Social Revolution against the advice of maturer and more reflective minds. There are no short cuts. There is only a long, straight line. If that’s too monotonous for Mr. Lee to follow he must, until he is tired of it, keep up his pleas and little game of running round in a circle. But he must not expert Socialists to run round after him ; they have more important work to do.

Alec J. M. Gray

The Plimsoll Line. (1929)

From the September 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Only the older generation remembers the long struggle conducted by Samuel Plimsoll—to whom at last a memorial is to be erected on the Embankment Gardens—to make legal his famous safety load line, now marked on the sides of every British Ship.”—(Daily Chronicle, August 16.)

Though we do not advocate dependence on others where workers’ interests are at issue, and though we are not hero-worshippers, we can appreciate the sterling worth of men like this champion of the seamen’s cause. Inseparable from the history of Plimsoll’s struggle is the record of a dastardly deed worth recounting, inasmuch as it shows the mercenary nature of capitalist society. Plimsoll was no mere notoriety seeker, but one of the men of his day who could rise above place and pelf. He had a wholesome respect for the working class, especially that hard-working and long-suffering section who sail the seas. In his book, “Our Seamen,” he says :—

“Riches seem in so many cases to smother the manliness of their possessors . . . their sympathies are reserved for the sufferings of their own class and also the woes of their own class. They seldom tend downward, and they are far more likely to admire an act of courage than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British worker’s life—and of the workmen all over the world as well.”

Entering the House of Commons in 1871, Samuel Plimsoll met with bitter hostility from the vested shipping interests and was ejected from the House for denouncing the ship-owners as “cold-blooded murderers.” Hear the words of an eye-witness on the occasion :—

“Most of the house and most of the front benches were as ignorant as bull calves of the ways of the merchant service.

Mr. Plimsoll was a very quiet and quaker-like man. Perhaps there was not a fighting man in the house to back him except half-a-dozen Irishmen. Did he sit down in silent funk? Did he admit that the lives of British seamen were of no urgent importance? I can see the brave man now as I saw him then. In half-a-dozen strides he was in front of the mace at the table. With clenched fist and furious voice he threatened and he denounced, “Were the sailors to go down in coffin ships during another winter’s storms when the Bill could be passed this session. By God! It must be passed, though all the murdering insurers of rotten ships were there to stop it.” It was no use shouting, “Order, order,” or “Send for the Sergeant-at-Arms”; Samuel Plimsoll all along meant to save the sailormen and he called out to all England to have the Plimsoll mark made law.”—(Quoted by the Sphere, August 17th, 1929, from the writings of F. H. O’Donnel, 1913.)

As a result of this agitation, and the consequent feeling aroused, by one man mark you, the Government was forced to push through a temporary bill. So strongly did the vested interests resist the interference with their “right” to murder helpless seamen that it was not until 1890 that the Load Line was fixed by Act of Parliament.

And now for the dastardly deed referred to. In 1906 came the great Liberal Government, with 54 Labour members, and Lloyd George, President of the Board of Trade. Among its wealthy members and supporters were the following shipping magnates :— Lord Pirrie, director of Harland & Wolff’s, White Star Line and other shipping companies ; Lord Furness, director of six shipping concerns; Sir Owen Phillip, Mark Palmer, Lord Joicey, Lord Rendel, Sir Walter Runciman, Sir William Bowring, R. D. Holt, Lord Mulburnholme, Russel Lea, Hon. J. A. Pease, and so on, and so on, profit without end. Now will you need to ask why David Lloyd George, ambassador of God Almighty Capital, amended the Merchant Shipping Act, permitting vessels that could least afford to load deeper to do so, to the extent of 7 and 8 inches. The object was to save the ship-owners from the expense of building extra vessels, and the result was very soon apparent in the number of founderings and the consequent enornous loss of life. Numbers of ships went out to sea and were never heard of again. But in this day there was no Samuel Plimsoll, though there were 54 Labour members, who, for the most part, sat silent through it all. Greatly to their credit the late Keir Hardie and H. M. Hyndman carried on a vigorous campaign of protest, the latter even challenged Lloyd George to prosecute for the accusations he levied against him, but the Welsh lawyer was too busy “climbing.” We live in a commercial age, and the object of these lines is to call attention to the rottenness of a society in which the noble deeds of the dead can be turned to account, and even honoured, by those who batten and fatten on the living.

W. E. MacHaffie

Answers to Correspondents. (1904)

From the December 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

F. M. (Hamburg). — Your note to hand. Shall be pleased to hear from you further at any time.

C. F. (Kentish Town). — Hardly suitable, but try again.

H. C. (Canning Town). — You are quite mistaken in supposing that we should not welcome the provision of adequate maintenance of all school children. Nothing which we have ever said or written could bear any such construction. What we do believe is that nothing in the shape of adequate free maintenance will be given by any section of the capitalist party, and that anything short of adequate maintenance is not worth fighting for. When we have the working-class of this country organised on a Socialist basis and as a Socialist political party, we shall deal with all these matters as part of a regular revolutionary programme, but at present we can gain nothing by soliciting reforms and favours from a class against whose material interests it would be to grant them. We shall treat of this matter fully in a subsequent issue.

A. M. (Manchester). — 1. We think you will find the matter discussed at length in Giffen’s “Essays on Finance.” 2. Mulhall covers too short a period. We hope to be able to furnish the figures in some future issue when we have time to work them out.

J. C. T. (Birmingham). — 1. The facts may be as stated but the source is so very unreliable that you cannot quote without some independent evidence. 2. We can afford to display indifference.

J. B. (Plymouth). — We shall consider the matter.

R. T. (Newhaven). — Anyone can join The Socialist Party of Great Britain by signing our Declaration of Principles as shewn on page 7. We can send form to anyone who wishes to join. It is, of course, more interesting to have a Branch in the locality to which you can belong, but failing this, you should belong to the Central organisation pending the formation of a Branch. We shall be pleased to furnish any further information either direct or through our columns.

Letter: Socialists and Reforms (1942)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent (S. E. K., Braughing, Herts.) writes asking the following question: —

Editorial Committee, S.P.G.B.

Dear Sirs, 

I do not quite understand your viewpoint on the reform question, but if a member of the S.P.G.B. were elected to Parliament would he oppose or support a measure or bill in favour of Family Allowances ?

A reply in “The Socialist Standard” would help many readers, as I get different answers from different supporters of your party.

Yours faithfully, 

S. E. Keyte.

Reply.

There are several aspects of the question of Reform and Reformism. The first is that the S.P.G.B. is opposed to the policy of putting forward a programme of reforms in addition to the objective of Socialism. It has sometimes been argued that a Socialist Party can usefully have a programme of reforms or immediate demands, consisting of measures to improve the workers’ conditions under capitalism. The objections to this are many. One is that such a programme inevitably attracts the support of people interested in the reforms but not interested in Socialism. This leads, as experience has shown in the past, to the Socialist objective being pushed into the background, and to the Socialist membership being swamped by the reformist element. A second objection is that the party which adopts such a policy finds itself advocating reforms which are part of the programme of openly capitalist parties—which causes confusion in the minds of the workers and leads to a demand by the reformist element of the would-be Socialist Party that it should co-operate with capitalist parties in order to put the reforms into operation.

A further objection is that no matter what reforms are introduced capitalism will still remain. It will frequently nullify the temporary improvement brought about by each reform and at the same time produce other evils which in their turn demand still more reforms. The only solution of the workers’ problem is the introduction of Socialism, and this can be brought about only when a majority have been won over to an understanding of Socialism and have organised to achieve it. All the time and effort spent on reforms is time and effort lost to the propagation of Socialism.

As regards the question of voting for individual measures in Parliament it is not denied that certain measures may, at least temporarily, alleviate the hardship of some group of workers. In such a case, if the effect of the proposal was clearly beneficial, Socialist M.P.s would be instructed by the Party to vote for it while pointing out its limitations. They would, of course, in no case invite support or elections on such grounds.

It should, however, be observed that most of the proposals put forward are not beneficial at all. It can be said, for example, that the past Acts of Parliamenl extending the franchise were useful to the Socialist movement, as also Acts providing and extending education. These cases are fairly clear but a proposal to introduce family allowances would in effect merely have the result of redistributing wages as between workers with young children and workers without.

Editorial Committee.

It pays to subsidize. (1927)

From the August 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Playing fields for the nation’s children. Pardon—the workers’ children. Now that’s sensible and benevolent, and costly, too—a million pounds, think of it. Surely our hard-faced masters must have repented, surely the land of Hope and Glory is about to materialise. It has been said of the Socialists that they are very distrustful men and women. They seem to have cultivated the method of the eternal why and wherefore. Yes, it does invariably happen that when highest hopes are raised, that here at last is “somebody that will do something,” that they search and supply the why and wherefore from their opponents’ own statement. How annoying. Hope deferred again. We are to have playing fields because :—

“No surer antidote to Bolshevism and discontent could be prescribed than a proper provision of playing fields for the Nation. . . . Games are cheaper than ill-health ; money spent on sport means money saved in hospitals. It may also mean money saved in the elimination of industrial disputes, and the hundred and one distractions which beset a C3 nation” (“Saturday Review,” June 4, 1927).

In vulgar parlance, it is money for jam. We do not object, of course, to the capitalists giving the workers’ children part of “our” country for open spaces for healthy recreation, it becomes to them a necessity owing to the growth of industrial centres, it is as necessary, as was at one time, giving the workers education, or the vote. On their own showing it is the cheapest method for them, and even that at the eighth of the cost of a single day’s war. There’s benevolence for you ! Despite all the reforms and the boasted benefits of civilisation, they cannot prevent the spread of conscious restlessness. Sanitation, trams, electricity, sports, cinemas, all fail to avert seething discontent. Wants and desires of the workers will continue to grow as a result of their increasing knowledge that they prepare for others a sumptuous feast, at which they are the locked out social outcasts.

W. E. MacHaffie

Letters: Reforms and Reformism (1989)

Letters to the Editors from the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reforms and Reformism

Dear Editors,

I am unable to sympathise with your views on “reform" movements. I realise that reforming capitalism cannot alter the world considerably, and that the only way many of the world’s problems can be solved is through socialism. However, could reforms not produce a base from which establishing socialism is easier?

Could reforms not aid the plight of the homeless, the people suffering on NHS waiting lists or countless others? Would not a Labour government improve things in Thatcher's Britain?

I see how energy can be (and has been) wasted in efforts to reform society, when the only answer to many problems is socialism. But. do you oppose the use of the little energy it takes to vote for reformists. even if it means a choice between "the lesser of two evils"?

GS, 

Cumbria

Reply:

We can understand why people might want to use election time to register their rejection of Thatcher and all she stands for, but doing this by voting Labour (or any of the other non-Tory parties) is to assume that the problems people have had to suffer under Thatcher have resulted from the evil intentions of one woman and her ministers rather than being an inevitable consequence of the way the capitalist system works.

If Thatcher has clobbered wage and salary earners this has been because she is the prime minister of a government of capitalism and because any government of capitalism has no alternative but to preside over the operation of a system that can only work as a profit-making one in the interest of profit-makers and to the detriment of satisfying needs.

Those who remember the various Labour governments of the sixties and seventies can testify to the fact that the Labour Party in power behaved in basically the same way — they froze wages, they opposed strikes, they cut social benefits, they imposed health charges, they kept and developed nuclear weapons. The only difference was one of style: the Labour ministers clobbered the workers with reluctance (or so they said) rather than with relish like Mrs Thatcher, but the end result was the same. If in many respects the anti-working-class measures taken by capitalist government since 1979 have been harsher this has been because the economic depression has been deeper in this period.

So, no, a Labour government would not "improve things in Thatcher's Britain". It would merely represent a change of government personnel — a reshuffle of ministers — that would leave unchanged the capitalist system that is the real cause of problems such as housing, health, education, transport, pollution and the threat of war. After all, didn't Kinnock tell last year's Labour Party conference that a future Labour government would retain the market economy (that is, the capitalist economy) and to try to make it work better than the Tories. Making capitalism work, however, inevitably means putting profits before needs (as all previous Labour governments have done) and opposing trade union action — the only effective response workers can make to protect their interests under capitalism.

While some reforms might be able to alleviate, at least temporarily, problems facing some workers, they will never be able to solve any of the multifarious problems from .which workers suffer under capitalism. This is because reforms are aimed only at treating effects while leaving the cause (capitalism) unchanged, and as long as capitalism continues it will create problems for those who depend for a living on working for an employer for a wage or a salary. More accommodation might indeed be provided for some of the homeless but the housing crisis would remain. As our correspondent accepts, the only lasting solution lies in the establishment of socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production with production for use not profit and free access to consumer goods and services according to self-determined needs.

We cannot agree that reforms could “produce a base from which reforms of capitalism that have been sustained have been those which contributed to the more efficient operation of capitalism as a profitmaking system. Better schools to provide a better trained workforce; a national health service to patch up sick workers and send them back to work quicker; suburban rail or underground services to get workers to work more rapidly, and so on. In fact, capitalism, being a system that constantly changes as new profit opportunities open up (and old ones disappear), needs to be reformed all the time. In this sense bringing in reforms is part of the job of any capitalist government. So, a strong case can be made for saying that reforms are necessary to capitalism and help keep it going. Not that this is a reason for opposing them if they bring some marginal and temporary benefit to some workers, but it is a reason for rejecting the idea that reforms could somehow help towards the establishment of socialism.

Editors.

Interest rates 
and living standards

Dear Comrades,

In the February Socialist Standard it is stated that millions of workers will suffer a fall in their standard of living because of the rise in interest rates, including mortgage interest rates, and that since coming into office Mrs. Thatcher has hoped that home owners would “abandon traditional working-class demands for higher wages and salaries".

Such statements could encourage readers to accept the mistaken belief that working class standards of living are determined by movements of prices and interest rates. What governs working-class living standards is whether capitalism is in a phase of expansion and profitability, or the reverse, and the ability of the unions in a period of expansion and profitability to interrupt the flow of profits by strikes and thus get concessions from the employers.

With regard to the first statement, when interest rates rise lenders are as better off as borrowers are worse off. and among the lenders are those workers who have savings on deposit in building societies and banks.

More importantly, whatever Mrs. Canute Thatcher may have hoped, workers, whether home owners or not, have defied her orders and have gone on pressing large wage claims during the recent years in which production and profits have been rising fast. In such a period, as Marx pointed out, "wages rise generally and the working class actually get a larger share of the annual product intended for consumption”.

In every year since 1981 total wages and salaries have risen by more than the rise of prices on the official index (which includes mortgage interest and other housing costs). When production and profits slacken off and start to fall no doubt the working class will lose part of what they have gained, as happened in 1980 and 1981.

Tony Dobson for Camden Branch

Reply:

We were talking about effects in the very
 short term.

Conference Discusses Reforms (1971)

Party News from the May 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 67th Annual Conference was held in London over Easter. Among the items discussed was the Party’s attitude to reforms. Comrade D’Arcy (Camden) said that all reforms had to be paid for out of profits. Those who argued that the workers should struggle for reforms as well as for higher wages implied that what the workers had failed to get through the front door (wage bargaining on the industrial front) they could get through the back door (reforms on the political front). But capitalists did not bring in reforms under political pressure from the working class; they introduced them only when the reforms the workers wanted coincided with capitalist interests. In other cases, they stated that the economic situation did not allow them to introduce the reform and were able to persuade workers to accept this since the workers were themselves capitalist-minded.

Comrade Zucconi (Lewisham) stated that the mark of a genuine Socialist movement was that it did not advocate reforms. The Labour Party and the ILP had at one time professed Socialism as an aim, but were swamped by non-socialists because they concentrated on advocating reforms. There was a real difference between the struggle for reforms and the struggle for higher wages. The wages struggle, as Marx had pointed out, was one the workers had to take part in if they were ever to be fit to conduct the political struggle for Socialism. It was an industrial, not a political, struggle. Reformist action, on the other hand, was necessarily political and involved trying to gain political power in order to introduce reforms. As such it conflicted with the struggle to win political power for Socialism.

Comrade Hardy (Camden) said the Party had never been opposed to reforms as such; we were neither for nor against them. Measures which reduced the workers cost of living, as most reforms aimed to do, did not benefit the working class because their effect was to reduce wages, as Engels had pointed out when he described them as “so-called social reforms”. Such measures also tended to divide the working class, as happened over Rent Control when politicians were able to exploit the feelings of jealousy against controlled tenants amongst workers in uncontrolled houses.

Comrade Steele (Birmingham) said that the Party’s view was not that a Socialist party should not say it supported reforms, but that it should not seek support on the basis of reforms. The German Social Democratic Party had Socialism as an aim, but it went reformist because it admitted reformists to membership rather than because it supported reforms. The traditional industrial/political distinction was breaking down with the emergence of new kinds of working class pressure groups like tenants’ associations and with trade union actions more and more harming other sections of the working class. An increase in the rent was just as much a cut in living standards as a wage cut, and it was inconsistent to say that the only kind of non-socialist working class action Socialists should support was wage-bargaining. In any event, the most we can now do about reforms is to analyse them and show what their overall effect, favourable or unfavourable, might be on the working class.

Comrade Rab (Fraternal Delegate from the World Socialist Party of the United States) said that with the growing role of the State in the economy the unions had increasingly to negotiate with the State. But such negotiations over industrial matters were political only in form; in essence they were still part of the class struggle.

The Conference carried Resolutions re-affirming previous policy statements on reforms (that the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not advocate reforms, but is not opposed to reforms as such and supports the industrial struggle).

Prison Reform and the Class Struggle. (1922)

From the September 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Owing, partly at least, to the large but not surprising increase of crime which has, followed the close of the war, much interest has of recent months been shown in prison treatment and punishment generally, and a fine opportunity has been afforded to reformers to prove that the present penal system has failed to reform the criminal or check the growth of crime. Their humanitarian demand for a new method has gained the more attention, because of the demonstrable failure of the old.

Retired military officers, deprived of the twin joys of bullying their subordinates which their rank gave and of walking on “niggers,” which is the white man’s privilege in the outlying parts of “our” Empire, conspire equally sincerely with amiable old ladies of the upper class to clamour for the all round application of the lash as a cure for what appears to them to be lack of discipline.

The interest has been maintained by press stunts about the Home Secretary’s alleged discrimination between poor and wealthy prisoners, and by the publicity given to various persons (including the C.O.’s) of a type not previously well represented in jail; while the “Daily Herald,” without intentional humour, announces that it opposes capital punishment because ”vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay” (7th July, 1922). Also an informative report has been issued by a Committee of the Labour Research Department.

While extensive knowledge of the facts is certainly possessed by many who have helped in the agitation, there has been a noticeable ignoring of important economic and class aspects.

The case made out against the present prison system is, considered alone, overwhelming. Experience shows that a very large percentage of first offenders who are committed to prison return again and again and become “habitual criminals.” Yet in seeming paradox we have the testimony of many investigators that there is no special criminal type. Thomas Mott Osborne, prison reformer and sometime Governor of “Sing-Sing” and other American jails, writes that there is

  “no radical difference between the minds of men in prison and mine. We are all, I discovered, potential criminals” (Daily Herald, July 1st, 1922).

Conditions make criminals and while some respond to degrading influences more readily than others, habitual criminals are in the main those who through prison treatment and associations have been prevented from regaining their lost positions, poor though these may have been.

Prison reformers have to combat a popular misconception which holds twentieth century prisons to be havens of rest. Lack of knowledge and the equally important lack of sympathetic imagination, make it hard for the average person to believe that imprisonment can still be incredibly cruel. He has probably read of the state of order and cleanliness which prevails, and of the good and sufficient food supply. He knows too that actual physical discomfort, whether of corporal punishment or of living conditions, have been largely abolished as part consequence of the efforts of an earlier generation of penal reformers. What he does not know, and finds difficult to accept, is that the sufferings which now exist are no less real, though apparently less tangible, than those which have been removed. Incidentally it is a signal mark of the futility of philanthropy that Howard and others who gave their lives to the work of destroying various evils should themselves have been responsible for the creation of others equally outrageous. These people observed that in the old debtors’ jails the prisoners were herded together indiscriminately, with results far from beneficial to the less hardened and more impressionable. They agitated successfully for the institution of the cellular system which condemns each prisoner to the drab confinement of his own cell for by far the greater part of the day, never realising that severance from the friends and interests of the outside world was the most intolerable of the burdens prison imposed, and that for those who were in a position of helplessness and hopelessness the company of fellow prisoners did at least create an illusion of comradeship and help to make the isolation less galling. A writer in the “Manchester Guardian” (30th June, 1922) remarks that the

  ”physical filth and barbarity that characterised our gaols little more than a century ago have been replaced by a system that, in its mental and moral effects upon the prisoner, constitutes but a more refined form of cruelty ” ;

and Dr. Starkie, a police doctor, who has suffered imprisonment (he alleges innocently) and who has written on his experiences, describes prison with a strong journalistic flavour, but not inaccurately, as a “Living Tomb.”

Another writer reviewing the above mentioned report, says : —

 

“Even a few months of imprisonment appears to be sufficient in many, if not most, cases to produce an effect upon memory, concentration, and the power of will. In the case of the long sentence prisoner, this process of deterioration may lead to premature senility, or a childish weakness of mind which renders him almost incapable of resuming normal life in any efficient capacity.” (Reynolds, July 2nd, 1922.)

Perhaps it is unfair to say that the prison authorities do nothing to help their charges. After lack of education, bad surroundings, poverty and insecurity of livelihood have combined to produce the criminal; and after confinement, the denial of recreation for the mind, and the brain-numbing prison tasks imposed, have reduced him to a state of acute mental anguish or stupidity, harmful busybodies are permitted to provide him with the pestilential literature of some religious tract society in an endeavour to reclaim his soul for the Lord.

In summing up, the “Manchester Guardian” writer quoted above, holds prisons utterly condemned by their

  “depressing bareness, their perpetual silence, their monotonous uniformity, and the obtrusive and military discipline,”

and affirms of imprisonment that

  “if conceived with the express object of unfitting a man for subsequent freedom, it could not have been more cunningly devised.”

Yet it must be emphasised that while these charges are hardly capable of serious question, they do not go to the root of the matter.

The others who would make prison life more nearly what it was in the “good old days” are equally wide of the mark. Those who would reform the criminal by kindness and those who would flog him into virtue alike fail to understand the problem.

The truth is that neither of these groups has sought to explain the origin and existence of crime. Dr. Starkie says :—

 

“as a doctor, I know that the cures for crime are the same as the remedies for all social disorders,”

and he correctly adds that the problem, which has to be solved, of removing bad living conditions and providing proper education, makes the subject really a political one. Again, T. M. Osborne admits that

“anything done to improve social conditions will reduce crime,”

and it is a fairly widely recognised and easily understood phenomenon, that unemployment and distress are always accompanied by numerous crimes, especially by robbery.

Let us briefly examine the nature of the various things gathered under the one word crime.

The human race has inherited from its animal ancestors, and has acquired during its early condition of perpetual struggle with nature, certain fundamental characteristics or instincts. The continuance and development of the race depended on these and they have persisted with little real modification under conditions of civilisation. These impulses, such as self-preservation, the need for food and for protection against the elements, have taken different forms under widely varying conditions, and, given a long period of prosperity and comparative peace, it may have seemed that the cultivation of the arts of civilisation had altered man’s savage nature. But let passions be stirred by war, fear be roused ‘by disaster, and the threat of hunger or death and it is soon seen how little man has changed in this respect.

Other important characteristics have also been acquired. Men are by nature gregarious ; it is natural for them to associate in communities. They have developed cooperation in production to its present far advanced stage, and in periods and empires of comparative stability, truly wonderful cultural edifices have been built on this foundation. In those primitive societies where social co-operation in production obtained, and the means of living, simple though they were, were held in common, this social solidarity and the human need for food and shelter were in conformity ; but this condition long since ceased to be. The means of wealth production have become privately owned; and slave and slave owner, feudal proprietor and serf, and finally wage-worker and capitalist have faced each other in conflict. The savage and his tribe, self-interest and the loyalty of kinship, were one; individual interests and thoughts of isolated existence were alike impossible. The various classes which have been dominant have had interests in opposition to those of their subject class, and their interests, their ideas, their codes of morality and ethics have prevailed throughout the particular society. The sense of social solidarity still shared by the oppressed has formed a useful buttress for their own oppression and at the same time has hidden the force on which ultimately it rested.

Not the community, but the capitalist class now owns the machinery of wealth production. This class lives on the proceeds of the robbery of the workers who, by their property-less condition, are compelled to operate that machinery for its owners, in return for doing which they receive as wages only part of the product. The capitalists, as a prime need, require to be maintained in possession, and that need is met by the State which controls the forces of society. Now crime consists roughly of two kinds of acts. Firstly those which are anti-social in the sense that they would conflict with the smooth working of any society, such, for instance, as murder and other attacks on persons; and secondly the more numerous and at present more important crimes which are actions detrimental to the interests and stability of the dominant class.

It has to be recognised that crime is a matter of definition in written law, or of the interpretation of custom, and not a questioning of the breach of some external and everlasting moral standard. The law itself arises directly out of, or has been adapted to, the needs of the ruling body. Vengeance is, in fact, not the Lord’s, but the prerogative of the capitalist class.

This should not be confused with improper and prejudiced administration. While some Judges may, more or less, consciously allow their opinions to influence their decisions, this is probably rare and matters but little. It is the law, not its administration, which reflects its class origin. As Anatole France says :—

  “the law, ‘in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ “

But the millionaire just doesn’t need to, because his living is assured by the robbery of workers whom he pauperises.

Those who do not look below the surface are struck by the apparent inconsistency of the law. They point to the fact that men are hanged in peace time for killing their fellows, but that C.O.’s were imprisoned and threatened with death for refusing to kill; again, that there is only a difference of degree between ordinary robbery and the brigandish exploits of every civilised Empire against the territory and property of its civilised neighbours, or preferably, because it is safer, against the backward races. We, however, realising the supreme need for the ruling class to maintain their dominance, recognise that they can consistently, and in fact must, do all these things. Class government rests on force, and no government can or dare tolerate defiance from a minority, or even from one single individual, when such defiance threatens their supremacy. This is a rule to which there is no exception. No government can ignore it with impunity. The natural desire for food in hunger clashes with the property rights of the owners of the land and other means of food production. Thus it is easy to see how crimes against property have a direct economic basis and motive; but that is not the whole of the result of private ownership.

Not only does the starving man steal bread to allay his hunger, but through other disadvantages from which he as a worker suffers, his entire outlook on society may be distorted. The denial of proper education, decent living conditions, and opportunities of self-development produce indifference and actual hostility towards the restraints imposed by convention; and the consequent misdirection of instincts and desires denied proper outlet, gives rise to numerous other crimes, not themselves directly to be explained by the desire to live.

Most forms of crime then, other than those to which men are driven by poverty, owe their existence, or at least their aggravation to the numerous disadvantages suffered by the under dogs of society. The present crime wave is therefore an instance of the chaos which has followed the rise of class division in society and the resulting conflict between the human needs of one section and the economic interests of the other. In this conflict the dispossessed class has to meet not only the might of the possessors but also the force of the accepted social regulations which, while appearing to have universal validity, really serve one class only.

Much of the activity of any Government must be devoted to regulating the day-to-day intercourse between its own subjects,, for without such guarantee of security, trade and commerce would become impossible. Crimes against property by masses of striking workers or by individuals must be suppressed. This is true of democracies as of autocracies. It is imposed equally on the lately “rebel” Government of Ireland, as on the Bolsheviks; the Australian Labour Government has had to use State forces against strikers and maintain intact the prison system; and the Labour Party here, if it gets into power, must do the same or forfeit its right to govern. This necessity will remain while private property and consequent class government remain.

Faced then with the problem that many workers are seldom in a position of security or of employment at all, the Government must devise means of deterring them from turning to crime as a way out. They must make their places of detention for criminals worse than conditions outside. They have had fair success. Just as the military authorities undoubtedly succeeded in making military prisons and detention camps so hellish that few men would exchange the trenches for them, so the civil authorities have aimed at convincing the workers that semi-starvation is better than imprisonment.

Both the people who opposed the removal of the more barbaric army punishments and those who advocate greater severity in the-treatment of civilian prisoners, are logical; but the latter fail because their method is, now proving ineffective. The force of the conditions which induce to crime is so great that the old methods no longer serve. The war and the general loosening of restraints have had their effect. The ruling class must endeavour to solve this problem by changing the method; but most reformers forget that the problem they are considering is not the one which faces those who have the power to act. Not sympathy for the prisoners, but increased knowledge is behind the move of the capitalist class.

Mr. Osborne for instance ‘.—

“believes in sending men to prison for crimes. Society could not allow them to throw monkey wrenches into its machinery. . . . I’m just a hard-headed business man who can’t bear seeing good material going to waste anywhere. Society needs protection, and if society were protected by killing or putting prisoners in chains, I would advocate these methods. But it isn’t.”

Dean Inge puts his class position in a nutshell when he says :—

  “With the exception of political criminals, whom I would treat with the utmost rigour, I advocate a determinist attitude towards crime. The treatment at first ought always to be curative.” (Daily Herald, July 14th, 1922).

In other words, political prisoners are men who deliberately attack the class privileges of Dean Inge and his kind, and must he beaten into submission. Ordinary criminals act blindly and may, many of them, be induced, if given the opportunity, to enter the “honest” occupation of providing profits for an employer. Reason dictates that a differentiation should be made, especially in view of the little result and high cost of maintaining prisons.

Experiments have shown that there is no need for the capitalist class to have to support a large “criminal” population. Many of those who have constantly returned to jail are there only because their record or their treatment has prevented them from entering the labour market on equal terms with other workers. Without therefore in any way lessening the deterrent nature of imprisonment, much of the great expense of keeping these misfits in prison can be got rid of if with proper training they can be made to starve submissively outside. This the capitalists can do, and in time will do. 

The Socialist does not concern himself with it because it is not an agitation the workers can usefully support. His unconcern proceeds not from lack of sympathy for the victims, but from the knowledge that while the capitalists remain in power they will solve their own problem in their own way, and that the wider problem they cannot touch. Property crimes can be removed only by the removal of private ownership of the means of life and the political question of providing the education and surroundings without which self-restraint and social loyalty are impossible, can also be solved only by the preliminary conquest of power which shall enable the organised workers to set about building a new class-less social order. The efforts of penal reformers are in the meantime not only futile for the end in view, but are also a hindrance to the Socialist propaganda which alone can remove the barriers to the very progress these reformers desire.

Edgar Hardcastle