A Look Round. (1908)

From the February 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. W. H. Broughton, a Tariff Reform Lecturer, was publicly challenged by a member of the Social Democratic Federation on December 1st to debate with Mr. Herbert Burrows, S.D.F. Mr. Burrows, however, declined to debate as he has “much more important work to do than of debating with every Tom, Dick and Harry who gets up at the corner of the street,” etc., etc.

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At present Mr. Burrows’ “important work” is to raise a memorial to the late editor of Reynold’s Newspaper, who assisted to side-track the working class by founding the National Democratic League !

* * *

Lecturing at Swadlincote on January 7th the Rev. Conrad Noel said that the ideal of the Church Socialist League was an industry in which there would be no drones and no slaves, where the people would have their liberties and be paid an adequate wage.

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Mr. J. J. Kermode, M.I. Mech. E., states that if the Lusitania were fitted for burning oil fuel she would require only 27 men in the stokeholds, as compared with the 312 necessary with coal. She would be able to carry 4,000 tons more cargo and at least 250 additional passengers.

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And the displaced stokers ? Oh, they don’t count, of course, under capitalism.

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Renter’s Correspondent at Johannesburg telegraphed on January 4th that Messrs. Eckstein are installing 200 Gordon drills. Twenty-five, worked by four whites and 25 natives, were to be started at the Crown Deep Mine in a few days. A native working a Gordon drill in five hours achieved results equal to the average day’s work of 15 coolies or natives. The success of the drills will have a far-reaching result on the labour problem.

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West Ham’s poverty is, perhaps, mainly due to causes over which the public bodies have had little control, admits the Daily Telegraph in its review of the book issued by Messrs. Dent by Mr. E. G. Howarth and Miss Mona Wilson.

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According to this volume, West Ham’s population in 1851 was only 18,817, to-day it is over 300,000. This population is, to an extent which is quite without parallel elsewhere, composed of more or less casual labourers and their families. Nearly all its industries are run on unskilled labour, or skilled labour which boys can easily acquire, and the consequence is that the percentage of hands under twenty-one years of age is very large. When these boys grow up and ask for men’s wages they are turned away, and a new generation of boys is taken on. All this tends to swell the number of casuals.

* * *

In almost every casual labourer’s home the woman has at some time or other to earn money and become the breadwinner ; in fact, she is often more continuously employed than her husband. But such work as she can get is usually shockingly underpaid, and involves cruelly long hours ; and the people who have it to give take advantage of the crowds of hunger-driven applicants and beat down the price to starvation point. Instances of this are given in the volume.

* * *

Rents, we are told, are about the same as in 1888, but rates have almost doubled. It is the lower rents that have risen most, because the poorest people are forced to compete against one another for the cheapest houses, and up goes the price to a height that is positively infamous !

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The authors, of course, have no remedy. It is only the Socialists who have. End the competitive system, abolish private ownership in the means of production and distribution of wealth. Revolution and Revolution alone will suffice.

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The report of the first year’s working of “General” Booth’s Anti-Suicide Bureau must have been unpleasant reading to the teetotal fanatics who trace suicide and everything else to alcohol. Out of the 1,125 cases dealt with only 121 were due to “drink, drugs, and disease,” whilst 609 had their origin in “financial embarrassment or hopeless poverty,” 236 were attributed to “accidents, sickness, and other misfortunes,” 105 to “melancholia, proceeding from loneliness and other causes,” and 54 to “crimes such as embezzlement, forgery and the like.”

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Under the auspices of the Burton I.L.P. Mr O. A. McBrine declared at the Horninglow Schools on January 8th that the General Post Office and the Corporation Tramways are examples of Socialism as far as it can be carried out at the present time. Perhaps Mr. McBrine will read the Declaration of Principles of the S.P.G.B. on the last page of this paper, and then explain wherein either of the capitalist concerns he referred to fulfil any of the conditions necessary to Socialism.

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“Why Manufacturers move to Letchwortb. (Garden City)” is the title of a four page circular issued by the Garden City Company. In the circular appears the following illuminative paragraph, which substantiates the view so often expressed in these pages :

EXTRACT FROM THE ANNUAL REPORT OF A PRINTING BUSINESS.

“The change to larger and altogether commodious premises has been of immense benefit to all concerned. The brighter outlook and keener air of Letchworth (Garden City) has a marked effect upon the health, spirits, and enthusiasm of the workers, and the business of the Society undoubtedly feels the effect in the increased out-put and improved work. Indeed, the results of the four months working since the removal, give us cause to anticipate the future with every confidence of far more success than we have hitherto experienced.”

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“The relations now existing between the railway companies and the Board of Trade are of a more friendly character than they have ever been before. This is a striking commentary on the oft repeated wild assertion that the Government is not friendly to capital. It would be difficult to find a President of the Board of Trade who had done more for the protection of capital. The railway companies did a very good thing for themselves in accepting the proposals made by Mr. Lloyd George at the time of the labour dispute.”—Daily Chronicle.

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If the companies “did a very good thing for themselves” where, it may be asked, do the railwaymen come in ?

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“What is it that makes men cry out against society and turn to Socialism for help ? Undoubtedly, poverty, with all the misery it entails, is the chief reason. Look at the conditions in which many poor of our great cities live : insanitary houses, more dilapidated and filthy than pigsties, huddled together in gloomy streets on which the sun shines only to make horrors more apparent. There, scourged by terrible diseases, they pass the term of their existence. If they are fortunate they can earn just enough to buy food, and a few moments of oblivion at the gin shop at the corner. But they are never sure even of the common necessaries of life ; more than ten millions—a quarter of our population—are always, through the insecurity of employment, on the verge of starvation. How, then, can it be expected that men and women living under these conditions, without a hope in the world, will be satisfied with our system of society.”—Standard

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Speaking at the National Liberal Club on January 28th of the present year, Mr. Winston Churchill referred to the Trade Unions of Great Britain as great social bulwarks, and as an indispensable counterpoise and a natural corrective to a highly competitive system.

J. Kay

Has Christianity a Solution for Social Problems? (1939)

From the March 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is its own grave-digger. That is to say it provides and develops the means by which the capitalist social order will be brought to an end. Before historical processes mature thus far capitalism will have virtually buried many of the philosophies and religious ideas which in its day it nurtured. It is almost self-evident that where capitalism is the more developed there religion has the least influence over the minds of the workers. The explanation lies in the material conditions peculiar to capitalism.

Religion had its origin in the childhood of the human race. The farther man’s history is traced back, the cruder his religious superstitions. Each group had its god, which primitive man invested with the miraculous powers of being able to influence tribal fortunes in the struggle for existence. In the workings of nature he saw manifestations of the god’s pleasure and displeasure, of his power to deprive him of his sustenance. Crudely, therefore, he supplicated the gods with offerings and sacrifices. Refined examples of these rituals are practised among Christians to-day.

Tribal man’s god-ideas were related to his material conditions of life and to his degree of understanding of those conditions. As the material conditions changed, so his god-ideas changed. With the growth of larger tribes and confederacies of tribes, the tribal gods disappeared and new ones took their place, which reached maturity in the slave civilisations. Thus the way was prepared for a new conception of the god-idea—the abstract God of Christianity. The slave empires had reached the civilised stage where man’s knowledge of the world, his philosophic speculations upon life, demanded a conception of God which the older religious superstitions did not meet. In the Roman Empire Christianity arose to meet that need. It did not introduce the god-idea, but a particular conception of it, which was a modification of the God-ideas evolved from savagery.

Socialist teaching is not concerned with controversies which favour one god concept against another: it is concerned only with god-ideas in themselves and how they arose. This approach is in conformity with the Materialist Conception of History, which holds that, broadly speaking, the ideas of any particular epoch are related to, and can only be explained by the material conditions then prevailing. This approach religionists find devastating. To deny its fundamental correctness would seem like denying what appears to be self-evident. Yet its logic explodes the basis of Christian teaching. The Christian conception of the revealed God, eternal and unchanging, is destroyed by history’s revelations. The Christian god-idea is shown to be just one of the manifested forms through which the god-idea has evolved. The idea of an independent, all-powerful god, laying down laws and precepts which hold good for all time, is just a man-made myth. True, Christianity has persisted beyond the times which gave it birth, but only by adjusting its teaching to changing conditions. Protestantism appeared when Feudalism was breaking up and expressed in a religious form the antagonisms of the new capitalist class to the old regime. No theologian can explain why the Reformation arose in the fifteenth century and not the fifth. To simple minds the amours of Henry the Eighth might seem a sufficient explanation—but that cannot explain its rise in Germany, France and Holland. Nor, except by the material conditions, can it be explained why the Christian god-idea arose in the days of Rome and not in the period of savagery. God-ideas have changed and have become modified as society has evolved to higher forms and man’s knowledge has increased. Capitalism has brought into existence and has developed scientific knowledge of the workings of the world in which we live. Manifestations of nature, which man understands and can explain, are less attributed to the unseen activities of a god. Hence the modern tendency to the abstract and the impersonal in the god concept among many modern Christians. Yet modern Christianity and savage superstition are fundamentally alike: in both the god-idea has its basis in ignorance.

Socialism and Christianity, therefore, are opposites. The one arises from a knowledge and understanding of the material world and the other from ignorance of it. Socialism is based upon science, Christianity upon faith. It is the refined equivalent of savage superstition. Its ritual has features common to the Pagan and earlier savage practices with which they have a common origin. Christian-Socialism is a meaningless phrase. Yet capitalism has produced movements which claim adherence to both ideas. In the early nineteenth century, Charles Kingsley was a prominent advocate of Christian-Socialism. Kingsley’s “Socialism” expressed nothing more than a compassionate interest in the worst evils of working-class poverty. He gave no support for, and, indeed, had no conception of a social order in which class society did not exist. To the workers he was condescending, conventional and pious: he was as sincere as his Church training permitted him to be. Kingsley’s successors in the Christian-Socialist tradition conformed more or less to type. There is, however, one movement which claims deviation from the type. It is a movement within the Church of England which describes itself as the Catholic Crusade. They pose Christ as the militant and revolutionary agitator, opposed to the tyranny and oppression of his day. They claim that general acceptance of Christianity will end oppression and class society; would, in effect, bring about what Socialists are working to get: though they call it the “Kingdom of God on Earth.” It is a pretty theory and adds just one more to the countless |varieties of “true” Christianity.

But it does just not bear critical examination. The Crusaders have the usual Christian habit of giving Biblical extracts just that twist which suits their purpose. Thus they quote such excerpts from Christian writings as “He shall drag the mighty from their seat and shall exalt the humble and meek,” as though such exhortations were intended to have worldly significance. They can bear no such interpretation. To early Christians they meant nothing more than an adjustment in the next world of the inequalities and sufferings endured in the earthly life. It could not have meant adjustments in this world: for the very good reason that the world had not then reached the stage where it was ready for classless society. The idea of Socialism had not, and could not, have shaped itself in the mind of man. Any “dragging down of the mighty from their seats” might have clothed in religious form the antagonisms of the oppressed slaves of the Roman Empire for their particular ruling oppressors, but it had no connection with the idea of society organised without a ruling class. Society then could not have been organised in any other way than on a class basis. The Christian ethic was the opposite of what some of its modem unorthodox interpreters imply it to mean. It offered compensation in the “next world,” not in this one. It exalted poverty and submissiveness. The ruling class of the Roman Empire adopted it because it made the slaves more contented. With modifications it has been adopted by subsequent ruling classes. To the slave, compensation in another world was attractive, because the material conditions of this world did not show a way out of their miseries. It is different with the modern working class. The system of society in which they are the subject class, the wage-slaves, shows the material social forms through which their oppression and poverty can be ended. True working-class consciousness of its purpose is incomplete, but the unmistakable evidence that it is moulding itself is everywhere.

The duty of the Socialist is clear. The material world demands critical analysis in order that social problems are understood. The solution to those problems must be explained in unambiguous and practical fashion. Working-class problems are material; their solution, Socialism, consists of material proposals. To countenance the clothing of those proposals in the mystic garb of a dying superstition does not assist working-class understanding and would be a disservice to the Socialist movement.

Harry Waite

Letter: Crusader Magazine. (1922)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sir,—Referring to the allusion on page 63 of the Socialist Standard to the "Crusader," will you allow me to say that Mr. Wellock, who is quoted, no longer contributes to the "Crusader," and that his withdrawal from our regular staff was due to differences on the very points raised by your contributor. The charge of inconsistency therefore fails. There is an article in our current issue in which our standpoint is made clear. Referring to a book by Maurice L. Rowntree on Social Freedom, our reviewer says :—

  "It is unfortunate, too, that once more the impressions should be given that the Social Message of Christianity rests ultimately on the teaching of Jesus instead of on the basic facts of revelation—i.e., the incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection of Christ. When St. Paul wished to impress on his readers the need of cultivating the spirit of service he did not refer to the teaching of Jesus but to the fact that He Who was equal with God "humbled Himself and became obedient unto death." For those who regard Jesus only as a supreme prophet, Mr. Rowntree's method may seem satisfactory, but for those who hold the Christian Faith nothing less than that Faith will serve as a sufficient foundation and guide for their social programme."

It may interest your readers that Conrad Noel, Vicar of Thaxted, is now contributing to the "Crusader" his "People's Life of Jesus."

Yours sincerely,

Stanley B. James.

Reply:

Mr. James states that Wilfred Wellock, from whom I quoted, has left the "Crusader." I wrote, however, at the end of September, more than a month, I believe, before Wellock left.

I had not made a specific charge of inconsistency, but I will certainly make it now. It is inconsistent to have conflicting opinions published side by side without one or the other being accepted as an official view.

It does not seem to me that the "Personal Divinity of Christ" touches on the question of the emancipation of the working class, but the offering of Christian slave ethics to a subject class whose end can be achieved only through a bitter struggle, does touch on it—dangerously.

Incidentally, there is in a recent issue a repetition of this idea. 

  "Christians . . could become helpful critics of the trade unions. Were they alive to the ultimate and deathless realities of love, justice an equality, they would bring alert criticism from inside when material questions of wages were obscuring the spiritual question of revolution." (30th December, 1921).

The question of revolution is not a spiritual one. Its means is the wresting of political control from the Capitalist class, and its object the freeing of the workers from economic subjection. It will be met with hatred, and has nothing to do with abstract justice. The expropriation of private property will in fact be, for the present owners, a most unjust proceeding. Capitalist equality, that is, the equality before the law, of Capitalists in the exploitation of the workers, is desirable—for the exploiters. Might not right will prevail against them.

Edgar Hardcastle

Snap Shots. (1908)

From the January 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speaking at the Manchester Coal Exchange, the Rev. Conrad Noel said there were times when it would be perfectly right for Socialists to be Tariff Reformers. Socialism was an international movement and a tariff would be quite justifiable if a nation put up a barrier against the importation of sweated goods manufactured in another country.

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An international movement! And yet the producers in one part of the world are to put up tariffs to protect themselves against the producers in another part. Try again, Mr. Noel.

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“I ask them (the Labour Party) where would they have been but for free trade, education, Chinese labour, etc. Many of them were elected by Radical enthusiasm. Liberal votes and trade union funds.”

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Thus spake John Burns at Leeds on December 9th. Does he fear the Labour members will prove ungrateful to their Liberal allies?

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“The problem of Socialism is what to do with the unemployed rich.” That may be the problem from the Rev. Conrad Noel’s point of view, but as under Socialism there will be neither unemployed nor rich, all being employed and well- to-do, it is no problem for us.

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One more of Mr. Noel: "I think that possibly spending my time trying to urge stupid people to reorganise Society on a just foundation is productive work ; at any rate it is the very bed-rock of the work of a priest of the Church of England.

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The stupidity and cupidity of people are the parson’s opportunity, of which he takes full advantage.

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Politicians here, writes the London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, are greatly interested in the prospect held out by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald of the union between the two Labour parties in Parliament. But not much alarm has been caused by the announcement.

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Why should there be any alarm? One Labour party will be quite as harmless to the master class and quite as useless to the working class as two or two hundred.

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As to the Labour Party, they had every reason to be proud of those who had been sent to Parliament. They had done their work loyally and fairly, and he did not regard the Labour members as by any means the most dangerous section in the House of Commons. Colonel Kenyon-Slaney M.P.. at Liverpool. Sept. 24th, 1907.

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Mr. W Crooks. M.P, who has signed the L.R.C. declaration, was present last month at a dinner at the National Liberal Club to mark the revival of "Progressive" activity in London affairs. Other Liberals present included Lord Carrington, Dr. Macnamara, etc.

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Messrs. T. Glover and W. T. Wilson, both L.R.C. M P.’s, supported the National Liberal Federation at a meeting held on December 14th at the Memorial Hall, Manchester, to explain the provisions of the Small Holdings Act.

J. B.

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

Some Shoddy Thoughts of a Superficial Mind (1922)

From the July 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is G. K. Chesterton’s opinion that Mr. A. J. Penty is “one of the two or three truly original minds of the modern world.” When therefore Penty applies himself to criticism of Marx one expects something brilliant. It turns out however to be as shallow as any of the stuff written by numbers of critics who make no claim to genius, and the original mind appears to be just like an ordinary one.

Writing on “Christian Communists” in the “Crusader” (26 May, 1922) he begins well with the confident assertion that “there is nothing in common between the Communism of Christianity and the Communism of Marx but a name which conceals differences that are fundamental.” This is a refreshing change from the attitude of the discontented religionists who “sympathise with the Labour movement ” on the one hand, and from the fogginess of the half-converted Communists on the other. The former fancy they see in the working class movement a blind groping heavenwards, and encourage the view, very useful to the capitalist class, that a little more soulfulness and a little less grasping after material things will right all wrongs, and incidentally make the movement fit for Christians to live on.

Just as the churches are learning that it does not pay to drive away its congregation by too forcible opposition to trade unionism, and safe enough to give benediction to sane Labour Leaders, so also may self-styled Communists recognise the advisability of turning a blind eye on the implications of "their own teaching when applied to religious superstitions. Thus we have the “Workers Dreadnought” (4th June, 1921) agreeing with the Rev. Conrad Noel that the true interpretation of “the teaching of the Nazarene is Communism ” and that Christ, if he really did exist, “was a Communist without doubt.” Again, Francis Meynell, as Editor of the “Communist,” while admitting in a letter to an enquirer (2nd June, 1921) that the “ materialist conception of History . .  . cannot be reconciled with any form of supernatural belief” had to excuse the unsound and illogical attitude of the Communist Party with the evasive remark that the logical proletarian “is even more rare than a white blackbird”; the specious apology of every purveyor of quack nostrums. If the public doesn’t know and doesn’t like what is good then give them what they like even though it is bad. If the workers don’t like the correct attitude toward religion, suppress it; if they don’t like Communism give them something else. In what other way can a “mass” party be built up?

But although Penty recognises the impossibility of reconciling Christianity with Marxism, he soon shows that his knowledge of the latter is hardly sufficient to support the emphatic opinion he expresses.

He says of Marxians that “in practice, as the Bolshevik regime demonstrated, they are Industrial Conscriptionists; for there is no avoiding the conclusion that Marxism leads as inevitably to the servile state as Fabianism.” He assumes that his conclusion is so obvious as not to need proof: but is it? If the Bolsheviks made the mistake of thinking that Russian conditions would permit the establishment of Socialism, does this make Marxists responsible for policies imposed on the Bolsheviks by economic necessity? If the Bolshevik Government, acting at the outset with insufficient knowledge of the world situation, were compelled by the failure of their hopes and the critical position in which they found themselves to adopt emergency measures, does this make Marxists Industrial Conscriptionists?

To hold Marxists responsible for the Russian Government’s actions is absurd: the Bolsheviks themselves are hardly responsible. They are only taking Hobson’s choice.

Penty goes on in similar strain to accuse Marxists of objecting not to capitalism but to the “private ownership” of capital. For proof he refers to, but does not quote, Lenin’s speeches. That Marx advocated state ownership is untrue and the suggestion from one who could so easily find out what he did advocate somewhat childish. It is doubtful too, whether Penty could produce evidence from Lenin’s speeches. That Lenin states as a fact that Russia cannot escape the capitalist stage of development is not a sufficient reason for the assumption that he desires nothing else.

It may be said in his defence by those who have high opinions of Mr. Penty that the “original mind” does not have to trouble about evidence for charges made, but those who don’t know Mr. Penty will only notice that this particular controversial trick is played by so many ordinary people—dishonest people.

I would certainly like to know one thing from Mr. Penty: that is, from what source he learned that Marx “did not propose to abolish capitalism but to superimpose communism over it.”

Mr. Penty evidently extends his originality to his use of the King’s English, for we are told that Marxians “do not quarrel with modernism as a conception of life, but only with the fact that it is limited to the few.” I can only speak for myself but I cannot imagine Marxists quarreling with anybody because “Modernism as a conception of life ” is “limited to the few.” I don’t know what it means but I should be prepared to take the risk and let the few keep it and wish them jolly good luck as well.

Mr. Penty next tells us that Marxians quarrel with the implications of materialism, but not with materialism itself. He omits however to say what the implications are and again leaves me in the dark as to his meaning.

He attempts to state the Marxian theory of social revolution and succeeds well enough while closely following the original, but once he leaves the book and begins to comment, his failure to understand becomes apparent.

He says that “if the forms of social organisation were nothing more than the reflex action of the forces of production, then the millenium ought to arrive by an automatic process without any conscious effort on the part of man.” I don’t know how “the forms of social organisation” can be the “reflex action” of anything, but assuming Mr. Penty meant something else, I am at a loss to understand where he obtained this notion of Marxism. He then pretends that this difficulty of his own creation was likewise discovered by Marx. “But Marx felt instinctively that such could not be the case.” This is another quite common trick..

Penty foists on Marx something he did not say and then argues that because Marx really did say something different that he was either contradicting himself or had changed his mind.

Now having initially misrepresented Marx and started him out on a course which has existence only in Penty’s fertile brain, this has somehow or other to be sustained.

He pretends that Marx had to find some driving force, and having cut out love, “he was driven to make use of the power of hatred. Hence the advocacy of the Class War by which he hoped to generate a force capable of overthrowing the existing order of society."

This is sheer nonsense. Marx did not and Marxists do not “advocate class war.” Marx from a careful study of the capitalist organisation of society made certain generalisations as to its structure and the lines of its growth and decay. He gave the explanation of its origin and of its position in the chain of social systems, and it is the aim of Marxists to spread this knowledge among the workers in order that it may be the means of hastening the overthrow of capitalist domination. Foremost in this is the recognition of the fact that capitalist society takes its form from the fundamental division into the owners of the means of production, and the wage earners who work but do not own. The Socialist no more advocates class war than does a doctor spread disease who asks that its existence shall be recognised and its nature studied as a prelude to its removal. While disease, physical and mental, was regarded as a punishment for sins, no headway could be expected in the treatment of lunacy or epidemics; while the criminal is regarded as a conscious and deliberate enemy of society instead of a product of the system no headway will be made in the removal of crime. While the class nature of capitalism is unrecognised by the workers, its abolition cannot be hoped for.

Those who endeavour to gain recognition for the fact that class struggle exists, are accused by Penty of fermenting hatred just as those who urged the development of medical and sanitary sciencies were accused of encouraging immorality, and those who urged the study of criminology, of fostering crime.

Those who have knowledge of the structure of capitalism based as it is on exploitation, and of the possibility of its replacement by a society in which class divisions shall no longer hamper the use by all of the natural resources and the highly developed means of wealth production, have no need of hatred as a motive force. Knowledge is a much more potent weapon in the hands of the organised working class.

Since therefore Marx did not advocate class war and did not expect that he through class hatred would generate a force capable of “overthrowing the existing social order” (by the way Mr. Penty has just told us that Marx did not aim at overthrowing capitalism) it is hard to see how Marxians could be disappointed because “it does not work out as expected.” Again, “working class solidarity ” has never been a reality and could not therefore, owing to the alleged instruction of the workers in suspicion have become a “myth.”

It would finally be interesting to know the identity of the “middle class socialists” who, through suspicion of their genuineness, have been lost to the working class movement to the latter’s detriment. I know of none. I have heard of people who have made the workers stepping stones to their own advancement, and then to conceal their own meanness when they deserted those who had provided means to their ascent, had to make pretence of being martyrs to suspicion. Penty may mean these, but their value is open to doubt anyway. Their contempt for the workers appears to have been developed more or less consciously, but Penty’s judging by the careless and misleading views he gives to his Crusader readers seems to be real; doubtless another attribute of the original mind.

In view of Penty’s rather miserable show it would be helpful if G. K. Chesterton would give us the identity of the third original mind so that we may know his calibre too.

Chesterton we know. He finds his vocation in writing excellent drinking songs; Penty, with his fine vein of imagination, and his lofty disregard for mere commonplace accuracy should transfer his talent to new fields. He might try Romantic Ballads on other historical figures, preferably those legendary ones about whom no awkward records exist. Anyway he might leave Marx alone.

Edgar Hardcastle

“Class-Consciousness” (1906)

From the July 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

No point in the Socialist philosophy arouses such controversy as that of the “class-struggle” and “class-consciousness.”

The confusion prevailing is only intensified by the use of these phrases by those who, while claiming to be Socialists, have altogether failed to grasp the meaning of the term. For example, the Rev. Conrad Noel recently filled the better part of a column in the Daily Chronicle with a criticism of that “over-insistence ” upon the “Marxian Dogma” which has “done the cause of Socialism so much harm.”

This criticism formed part of an article on the S.D.F., and the one thing the Rev. Conrad most objected to was the use of this term “class-consciousness.”

“In the mouths of S.D.F. speakers it always means ‘artizan-consciousness,’” he argued. This may well be—but it only proves, what readers of THE SOCIALIST STANDARD know quite well, that the S.D.F. speakers do not understand the Socialism they profess. The S.D.F. uses Marxian phrases and fails to comprehend them; it employs the words of Revolution and the tactics of Reaction—the language of the proletariat and the deeds of the bourgeoisie.

[And it is as well to note that the Rev. Conrad Noel has since announced his intention of applying to become a member of the S.D.F.—“though not a ‘class-conscious’ one.”]

His objection to the word “class-conscious” is twofold.

Firstly, it is, he thinks, impossible to reconcile the conflicting interests of the various sections of the working-class (clerks, artizans, labourers, &c.) and secondly, that “converts to Socialism from the ranks of the upper and middle-classes are a trifle puzzled—of what class are they to become conscious?”

The point here raised is crucial. Those who hold to the conception of the class-struggle logically deduce therefrom their revolutionary policy; those who deny or (what in practice comes to exactly the same thing) fail to comprehend it must adopt the attitude and policy of Reform and Compromise. What then is the meaning of this term “class-consciousness?”

At a certain stage in the life of every individual he acquires a “consciousness” of personal identity. He becomes aware of his distinctiveness, physically and mentally, from the external conditions which progressively stimulate his susceptibility to impressions, and possessed of a power to recall, combine, and analyse by successive stages of mental presentation these said impressions and emotions.

This sense of individuality, this power of ordered thought (briefly “consciousness”), is the result of the development of the requisite brain-organ; and, as each individual from conception to maturity successively reproduces the stages through which the species as a whole has passed, by comparison we can ascertain the relative degree of development reached by any individual.

When an individual has become “conscious”—has, that is, arrived at that stage of growth at which he perceives both the distinction and relation between himself and the rest of creation—he has acquired a power of reacting upon his environment; a power (limited but real) of “self-determination,” within, of course, the possibilities set by his physical powers and the said environment.

Society is an organism progressing through stages of development.

The present stage is that in which classes have been differentiated within the Social organism: the propertied bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat.

Whether they are aware of it or not their interests are conflicting. The workers fulfil the function of production, i.e., their associated labour adapts all natural resources to human use; the Bourgeois or Propertied Class retain ownership of the tool of production, appropriate the products and control the function of distribution.

Hence the social function of production the prime necessity for social existence and development is fettered and hampered by the survival of the obsolete Bourgeois system of exchange—Bourgeois control of the social function of distribution.

Just as the chicken developing within the shell is compelled as a condition of further existence and development to burst the shell which had till then served as a necessary condition of further growth, so the working-class will sooner or later become conscious of this hindrance to their development—become conscious that they are the only useful class and progressive force in Society—conscious that they are potentially, the Society of the Future, and bursting the shell of Bourgeois political control and consequent economic domination, act themselves (and Society) free to commence a new and higher stage of evolution.

In a word: when conditions are ripe the working class will acquire, with the recognition of their place in Society, and of their constraint and that which constrains them, and a perception of the vital organic force impelling them to struggle, their consciousness as a class—their power of “self-determination.”

To make the working class thus “conscious,” it is necessary to make it understand the relation between it and the rest of (i.e., the other classes in) Society.

To achieve this result in the class, an effective of the individuals composing it must acquired the capacity of seeing, behind apparent diversity of interests (as clerks, spinners, hammerers, and diggers) their real community of interest as a class—must have recognised their common subjection to the necessity of selling their abilities in a common labour market; their consequent common exploitation, and their common interest to emancipation as a class.

Such distinction as still survives between “skilled” and “unskilled” labour is being rapidly abolished by the extension of education on the one hand and the introduction of machinery on the other. And few know this better than the “skilled” workmen themselves.

Hence Conrad Noel’s objection concerning the diversity of interests among the working class has no foundation. With regard to the vague use of Marxian terminology by Reformers posing as Revolutionists it must be noted that the stage at which a worker is brought to recognise that he is exploited by his particular employer, or he and his fellow-workers in their particular industry by their particular group of employers, is not the stage of class-consciousness—it is but the stage of class instincts; the rudimentary possibility of subsequent consciousness.

Class-consciousness on the part of any one worker thus entails the recognition by him of his place as a unit in a class, at present politically ruled and economically enslaved, whose historic mission it is to carry Society forward into a higher stage of development: the recognition that the interests and therefore impulses of the individuals composing either ruling or ruled classes respectively are mutual and those of the two classes antagonistic, and consequently that the development of Society more and more produces a class-struggle for the possession of political power as a necessary pre-condition on the one hand for rule and on the other for emancipation.

The working-class-consciousness will express itself in a political organisation for the purpose of accomplishing this emancipation. That worker is class-conscious who has seen the duty of enlisting under the banner of Revolution—in the Political Party of the workers —the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

With regard to the Rev. Conrad Noel’s second objection little need be said. The Capitalist-class will only be converted to Socialism by the Social Revolution; the middle class by the Official Receiver—any isolated individuals from these classes who may enlist under the banner of Social Revolution by so doing desert their own class-standpoint for that of the working-class. They must accomplish the feat of lifting themselves intellectually above their own class-environment to the height from which, comprehending the process of social-development as a whole, they can foresee the inevitable triumph of the despised proletariat—a feat that few have the intellectual power to accomplish.

The middle-class man “converted” to Socialism is generally a source of grave danger to the working-class movement. Fastening upon the cruder manifestations of working-class instinct—he gives this instinct a Bourgeois Reformist turn and so hampers its growth. As “breadth of thought” and “toleration” he conceals the shallowness and superficiality common to his class: under the name of Socialism he preaches State-Capitalism. In place of Revolution he urges Reform. Upon the half-hearted and partially conscious efforts of the workers to organise the political party of their class he fastens as a “leader”—and all development is arrested.

Hence we are not concerned about “middle-class converts” to Socialism.

Socialism is possible when the workers, organised in the Socialist Party, proceed to establish it. When they do that, the whole of the “upper and middle” classes will be powerless to prevent them. Without the workers so consciously organised nothing can be done.

The first thing then is to make the working-men “class-conscious.”

T. A. Jackson