Answers to Correspondents. (1910)

From the December 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Barber.”—(Wigan.) 1. In Adam Smith’s day 3 per cent. was the usual rate of profit for sound security. To-day L.C.C. stock, second only to Consols, are issued at 3 ½ per cent. In many cases as large rates as ever are made to-day. The Cold Storage Co. paid over 100 per cent., some of the electric power companies have made similar profits, while some of the catering firms pay dividends of 30 to 40 per cent year after year.

The amount of profit apart from the rate, has of course increased enormously with the increased productiveness of labour.

2. Surplus value is the portion of wealth remaining after paying wages, cost of raw material and of machinery used up in the given time. But this as a rule undergoes further deduction for rent for the land, interest, and rates and taxes. The portion of the surplus value that remains is the capitalist’s Profit. Profit, therefore, is only a part of surplus value.

3. What you pay for your tobacco and sugar is their market prices, and taxes are the smallest factor in fixing these prices. The workers only receive sufficient to keep them in working condition, hence have no margin wherewith to pay taxes. See ” S.S.” for October 1904 and June 1905 where the matter is fully dealt with.

4. If you will send particulars of numbers joining we shall be pleased to help you.

5. Yes, old age pensions etc, do come out of surplus value, as shown by answer to question 3.

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E.C.R. asks “How do the S.P.G.B. propose to overthrow the present system of society and establish Socialism on Democratic lines and legislative means without Man and Woman Suffrage?”

The Socialist Party is not opposed to Adult Suffrage, but maintain that the working class have quite sufficient votes at their disposal to effect the revolutionary purpose when the class are sufficiently class conscious to make the time opportune. It is a question of education, not of extensions of the franchise ; and since the line of social cleavage is drawn through classes and not through sexes, there is nothing undemocratic in proposing to proceed even with our present limited male suffrage.

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E. Garvey asks how non-producing workers (instancing insurance collectors) can be exploited.

If 5 hours social labour produces a day’s energy, and the worker is compelled to render ten hours labour for the day’s necessaries which have taken only 5 hours to produce, then, no matter what the result of his labour (and the capitalist will see that it has some tangible result), he is exploited. Apart from this, however, even the so-called non-producing workers are necessary to the operations of the capitalist class, and Friend Garvey must not forget that the workers are exploited as a class since as a class they are deprived of the means of living except through wage slavery.

Replies to other correspondents held over.

Letter: The Socialist Party and Reforms. (1911)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party and Reforms.

[To The Editor.]

Forest Gate, Essex.

Sir,—Recognising your Party’s hostility toward reforms, and being, for the most part, in sympathy with your standpoint in this respect, I still remain without any knowledge as to how such reforms as the following can be considered as being detrimental to working-class interest, and some comment on the matter may, therefore, elucidate your unswerving attitude in regard to any reform whatsoever:

(1) Educational reform (already conceded).

(2) Male suffrage (ditto)

(3) The feeding of school children, from the point of view that it is impossible for children to be effectively educated unless well fed. If they are well fed, therefore, it would follow that as a result of their education they would better understand their position in life than they would if they were ill-fed and mal-educated. Therefore why oppose this reform ?

(4) Secular education— the advantages of which need no comment.—Yours, etc.,

L. A. Bostock

 

Reply:

The S.P.G.B., as distinguished from every other organisation in this country, is the party with Socialism, and nothing but Socialism, as its object. It is, consequently, not to be side-tracked into raising mere hostility to reform or the reverse—into equal importance with its object. Its guiding principle is not hostility to reforms but hostility to capitalism ; and since its aim is Socialism its whole policy in regard to reforms is dictated solely by the exigencies of the class struggle for Socialism, and must continue to he so dictated, whatever changes in the conditions of the fight may intervene.

Wherever needful for its object the Party must, therefore, make use of, ignore, or resist, any reform as determined by the particular circumstances. Consequently it cannot seek support for or advocate any policy of reform or anti-reform, for such must always be sacrificed upon occasion for its object, while such policies might—as seen in other organisations—attract those who do not accept the object of the Party, thus weakening its definite aim. All such matters are considered by it as worthy of attention only in so far as they bear distinctly on the question of working-class emancipation.

This subordination of all means to one end, and of all issues to the supreme one of the conquest of the State for Socialism, is the only logical policy for the Socialist Party. Without it, indeed, the party could not be Socialist.

Mr. Bostock is, therefore, completely in error in assuming that in showing the unsatisfactory nature of reforms in themselves, and their utter futility as solutions of what is called the “Social Problem,” the S.P.G.B. is necessarily hostile toward all reforms, and considers them as being in every case inevitably “detrimental to working-class interest.”

Even were the capitalists omniscient and of one opinion on. every point, it would still remain a fact that they are compelled by economic development to weaken their stronghold. Our enemies are forced, as it were, to dig their own graves, and it is by no means our policy to prevent them doing so. We should, indeed, be traitors to our cause did we not endeavour to make it profit by every mistake and every point of weakness of the enemy. There is danger only in allowing any consideration whatever to influence the policy of the party other than its object and the conditions of the struggle necessary to its attainment. Socialists, in short, must beware of being scared or cajoled either to the right or the left of the scientific way to Socialism.

With regard to the reforms enumerated by our correspondent, our attitude results inevitably from the position outlined above. All of them have been dealt with in these columns. Let us, however, briefly notice them here.

(1) The Education Acts were not motived (despite declarations to the contrary) by any wish on the part of the ruling class as a whole to benefit the workers, but to benefit themselves and to obtain cheap and efficient wage workers. It should be noted that the paltry measures of working-class “education” now in force stop short even of this despicable ideal. Therefore the Socialist has certainly no feeling whatever of gratitude toward his exploiters when he takes the fullest advantage of this reform for the furtherance of the workers’ cause.

(2) Male suffrage does not exist. We take the greatest useful advantage of the present property suffrage, and would not consider Adult Suffrage “detrimental to working-class interest.” Socialism is the interest of the many, not of the few ; its method, therefore, is that of democracy. But since Socialism is greater than all means, we would not bargain with our enemies, or bate one jot or tittle of our object or principles for any extension of the franchise, much less for a more promise. We have, moreover, seen the dismal folly of supporting an individual or a party that is utterly opposed to us on every vital point because of some minor point of utility. The grain of good is overwhelmed by a flood of harm.

(3) We do not oppose, and never have opposed, the feeding of school children. We have adversely criticised certain proposals for State maintenance, which would mean the taking of children from their parents to be reared in barracks by the State, pithed with anti-working-class ideas, and given the mentality of the flunkey. We have further pointed out the economic effects of such a measure on the labour market, where feeding here, is often counterbalanced by more misery there, and where, owing to the worsening trend of economic pressure, every attempt short of Socialism to stem the tide of increasing working-class poverty must fail. And we have pointed the inevitable Socialist moral.

It is, further, a fallacy to assume that the class-consciousness of the worker has any definite relation to the amount of food he gets. The flunkeys are probably the best fed and the least class-conscious. The slum-proletariat is the worst fed, and is hardly more class-conscious than the wage-slaves of flunkeydom. We rely neither on feeding nor on starving, but upon ripening economic conditions, together with sound Socialist propaganda.

(4) As to Secular Education under Capitalism, it may well prove a mare’s nest. Its advantages may possibly be non-existent. Only when religion has lost its efficacy as a working-class drug will it be abandoned by the ruling class in the schools. But what will take its place ? A scientific curriculum ! Or superstition in even worse forms, such as cunningly devised capitalist ethics, or a deadlier patriotism ? Hence the peculiar wisdom of the classic phrase “Wait and see! ”

Reforms usually take away with the left hand what they offer with the right, and the last state of the reformed is often worse than, his first. There is a vast difference between the vague proposal and the final measure. The latter may in its own. cunning clauses more than neutralise the grain of good originally proposed. Let the capitalist class, therefore, take entire responsibility for its handiwork. Our lack of enthusiasm and severely critical attitude toward all reforms of whatever colour is, inconsequence, fully justified. Not only do we regard them as mere minor and relatively insignificant incidents in the class war, but we know them to be, in the main, fraudulent in themselves.

SOCIALISM can no more come by an accumulation of reforms than a new and up-to-date boiler can result from an accumulation of patches on an ancient one. It presupposes the conquest of. political power by the Socialist working class —the SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

A program of reforms is not only superfluous, Its existence proves that the party possessing it has taken reform for its object instead of Socialism. It is, moreover, a fraud upon the toilers, for until they are supreme their party can pass no reforms —these are grants by the capitalist class, to be considered only in so far as they can be made use of for the cause—and when the working class is triumphant reforms will be entirely redundant, for Socialism will be here.

W.

Not so democratic (2024)

Book Review from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. By Martin Wolf. Penguin £12.99.

The basic argument here is that market capitalism and liberal democracy belong together, albeit in a difficult relationship. Both supposedly involve equality of status: the right of people to a voice in public affairs and to buy and sell what they own. Market capitalism drove economic growth, we are told, and led to pressures for ‘universal suffrage democracy’. But in recent decades increasing inequality and personal insecurity mean that democracy has become fragile and been partly replaced by ‘demagogic autocracy’, as populism becomes more influential. Yet both democracy and capitalism can be renewed, resulting in a bright future again.

There is a great deal of useful information here, and Wolf sometimes reveals the true nature of capitalism. For instance, between 1980 and 2016, ‘the real incomes of the global top thousandth rose by 235 percent’, while real incomes have been stagnant for large parts of the population. Most people are just ‘one disaster away from ruin’, with very little by way of savings. Companies ‘possess enormous economic and political power’, and there is a ‘huge imbalance of power between footloose corporations and local workers’: this last refers specifically to multinational companies moving jobs abroad, but in fact applies far more widely.

The rise of the market economy is said to have led to pressures for election-based democracy. But there is nothing about ruling-class resistance, with no reference to Peterloo, Chartism or the suffragettes, for instance. Universal suffrage arrived fairly late, first in New Zealand in 1893, in the UK in 1928 and the US only in 1965. The valid point is made that democracy is a continuum, not an either–or matter, but it implies more than just the ability to vote, and capitalism has an inherent imbalance of power between the owning class and the working class. And has market capitalism (with competition and private economic initiative) really been the predominant version of capitalism over the long term? Wars were fought to open markets in other countries to Western trade, and slavery played a crucial role, as did protectionism. There was supposedly an era of ‘mixed economy’ from the 1950s to 1970s, which changed to free markets from the 1980s (with a concomitant increase in inequality, as noted above), but in reality the state always interferes in some way, in defence of the interests of the ruling class.

Unfortunately, Wolf has no idea about alternative systems. He thinks that socialism means state control over the economy, and the idea of degrowth is dismissed with little argument, since it could only be implemented by a global dictatorship and would supposedly mean reversing centuries of human history. His solution is to use ‘piecemeal social engineering’ to achieve aims such as a rising and sustainable standard of living, equality of opportunity, and the ending of special privileges for the few. But of course the last of these would not mean an end to the wealth, power and influence of the one percent, as the power of the capitalist class is built into all varieties of capitalism, a system that can never be truly democratic.

Paul Bennett

Aspects of the “Woman Question.” (Part 3) (1929)

From the September 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 2.

(Based on Notes of a series of Lectures on “The Sexes in Evolution.”)

It is not surprising, perhaps, that during the ages when no scientific knowledge existed, when nothing was known regarding the development of life on the earth, that man should have regarded himself as an infininitely superior being, possessing mental and physical qualities which were peculiarly “masculine.” Neither is it remarkable that woman, who was supposed to have appeared later on the scene as the result of a surgical operation performed upon him, should have been regarded simply as an adjunct, a being created to satisfy the requirements of the masculine nature. But when the scientific age dawned, when it became possible to trace through the ages the evolutionary development of the human race, it might be thought, especially in the light of modern knowledge, that these antiquated prepossessions would disappear. This is by no means the case.

When man was compelled to turn his attention to the crude agricultural pursuits which woman first of all developed, the so-called superior qualities which he possessed —acquisitions of war and the hunt—enabled him gradually to improve on these rudiments. The changeover from matriarchal to patriarchal forms necessarily involved changed conceptions of relations, both sexual and political, and man’s power over woman received the necessary sanction of custom and law. And there it has stood, with slight variations, ever since, with the blessing of the Church behind it. Even when we turn to the most advanced scientific writings we find that the old prejudices are by no means eradicated, and any discussion of the sex question still reveals traces of the old prepossession of man’s superiority over woman. Scientists have even, on occasion, gone out of their way to justify the subjection of women

Now that suffrage is practically universal, there are those who deplore the extension of the franchise to women on the grounds that as women outnumber men they may sweep the board at any and every election in the Labour interest, since the majority of women belong to the working-class. On the other hand, Labour politicians are jubilant, believing it to be a likely consummation. Strangely enough, the Conservative Government, which conceded this “power” to the women, depended upon them to support their class out of gratitude for the concession. At the time they pointed out that they were democratic enough to recognise and appreciate what the women had done for the country. Since women worked and suffered and paid exactly as the men did, it was only right and proper that the same rights and privileges should be extended to them. Selah ! In other words— women had proved their worth as citizens, which, by the way, apparently implies that up to that point they hadn’t.

In presenting what is, after all, merely a rough outline of the position of the sexes in society, the interpretation can, of necessity, only be a sketchy one. In the opinion of the Socialist the hopes and fears engendered by the extension of the franchise to women are by no means justified. The Liberal and Conservative Parties seek the support of the women, because they believe they can be bluffed. The Labour Party counts on the women’s support also, believing they now possess what the men have long possessed—political liberty—and that the moment has now come when woman will assert herself and strike a blow for social freedom. It is quite true, of course, that the employing class has always opposed any “rights” for women, probably actuated by fear that the labour market might suffer, and that, by and by, through a possible extended organisation on the part of men and women an end would come to class rule. Though their fears, at the present stage of working-class political education, are groundless, it was probably this aspect that the Liberal and Conservative Parties had in mind when they solicited the support of the enfranchised women. The mistake made by the Labour Party has been to assume that women were politically intelligent to a certain degree. They are not— for how can women be expected to attain a condition which men have not yet reached after years and years of agitation and education? The sad fact remains—the majority of men and women of the working-class are positively indifferent to the political an industrial welfare of their own class. Many there are—men and women—who have fought for years to improve the conditions under which workers live, and have given of their best to the end, that some day the workers would wake up and take what was rightly theirs. But ask them—has the task been an easy one? Have they perceived any tangible change in the workers’ attitude ? Have they received any encouragement even?

It might be asked—did the Socialist not see any usefulness in the extension of the franchise, since the vote is the only sensible weapon with which the working-class can emancipate itself? To which the Socialist might retort—the franchise for a great many years gave the males the power to effect any purpose, but so far it has been utilised to maintain their masters in political power. That means that workers have used their votes against their own interests. Why? Because of political ignorance. The vote is a mighty weapon, used intelligently. But in some respects it is like a razor—one can shave or cut one’s throat with it. So that the importance of the vote lies not in the securing of the vote itself, it is in the way it is used. What matters most is the recognition, by men and women alike, of their class position. That can come only by education and study along Socialist lines.

Much of the credit for the women’s “victory” has been claimed by those who support what is euphemistically termed the “women’s movement.” But a more obvious factor was a Government facing disaster. And when a Government, facing the probability of defeat, introduces complete enfranchisement, it can only be because they count on swelling the total number of votes to such an extent as to increase their chances of victory, knowing, as they do, that the already existing electorate is anything but politically wise.

It has been called “The Awakening of Women.” If that is true, then God help the men !

Tom Sala

(To be continued.)

Editorial: The “Reform Bill”. (1912)

Editorial from the July 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

After long years of promise the Liberal Party have drawn up a Suffrage Reform Bill. With a long sham fight about “Home Rule” and “Welsh Disestablishment” in front of them, the measure seems to have had its last and first reading.

Although a majority of the Liberal Members of Parliament have “won” their seats by reason of their sympathy (real or feigned) with “Woman Suffrage”, that proposition is left entirely out of the Bill! Many of the Liberal employer M.P.’s are now opposing female franchise on the grounds of “unfitness”, calmly ignoring the fact of the millions who are “fit” enough to make huge fortunes for Liberal masters in the factories and mills. But such hypocrisy is in keeping with Liberal traditions!

The fraud of the Bill, though, is plainly shown in its fancy franchise for men. According to Mr. McKenna himself in his introductory speech, the total number of males over 21 in the United Kingdom is 12,032,000. The number of voters at present is 7,409,986, and of the 4½ millions would remain he computes that about half will be entitled to vote.

The measure stipulates for an eight month’s residential or occupational qualification – that is, you must be at an address from December 25th to August 1st.

If the Liberals were in earnest even about this question of suffrage they could quite easily have given a vote to every man instead of leaving 2½ millions out in the cold. The long residential conditions in these days of a drifting working class, make it result that those who, because of deepening destitution, need a voice most are deprived of a vote.

Another typically peculiar Liberal decision is that their Reform Bill only applies to Parliamentary elections, not to those concerning local bodies.

The bill is essentially and undisputably a mere shop window affair. It is drawn up and announced for the specific purpose of enabling its authors, the Liberal party, to win bye-elections. The prevailing “labour unrest” and the only-to-be-expected, but nevertheless dirty and despicable part played therein by the Government is slowly but surely making many working men to doubt their so-called Liberal friends, and this latest Liberal fraud is brought in in order to make a fresh show of democracy – and this in spite of the fact that the rich man, in accordance with the capitalist commandment, is always more sure of his vote than is his “poor brother”.

The suffrage for women, too, seems to have been left out of this Government measure in the hope that will help to keep the fires of controversy burning – and perhaps to sufficient effect as to cremate the Bill.

One way or another we are no deeply interested parties. We know that Socialism includes democracy, and can only come when a majority of the working class voice their will and desire in favour of it. But this Bill does not provide the democracy which is to be such a vital part of Socialism. Already Liberals and Tories alike have spoken about all kinds of amendments making even more fanciful the paltry provisions of the measure. We have seen very often the difference between the first appearance and the final form of Government Bills. The Shop Act was boomed as a sixty hour Bill, but when Liberal and Tory shopowners had completed their dirty work the sixty hour clause was as dead as a “Labour” leader’s conscience, and instead it provided that those under eighteen could not be employed more than seventy-four hours a week. Those over that age could be worked as many hours as the profit-grinders desired!

To us as Socialists the vote itself is not the thing. Millions of working men have had the vote for forty years, but lacking knowledge of how to use it in their own interest, they have steadily voted their masters into power; voted the continuance of the system that keeps them poor.

We know that there are enough working-class voters to-day to defeat the capitalist class – but it wants intelligence behind the vote. Our work, therefore, is to convert the workers from supporters of capitalism into fighters for Socialism. And as the vote is extended by our masters, pushed by the development of their system, so, too, our work will still be needed, for the workers, voters and non-voters alike, to-day are against Socialism.

We are not advocating reform, whether Reform Bills or Adult Suffrage. We want to enlist a membership for Socialism, to build up a party of men and women who realise Socialism to be their only hope. When the Revolutionists are strong enough to elect one of themselves to Parliament, then he will have behind him a solid body of men and women who mean Revolution. He will voice their interests, expose the bunkum bills of the workers’ enemies, and drive home the Socialist position upon every question that arises. He will occupy his seat wholly as a fighter for Socialism, and will regard all his activities from the standpoint of their helpfulness to the speeding of Socialism.

Hence, although we are necessarily and without any qualification democrats, we do not, and never have, and never will, support such swindles upon the working class as the Liberal Reform Bill.

Editorial: The Suffragist Debate. (1910)

Editorial from the August 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The two day’s Parliamentary debate on D. J. Shackleton’s Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill was of considerable interest and we find in it much support for the stand we have taken in opposition to the Women's Suffrage Movement. Winston Churchill showed with great force that its effect would simply be to multiply fagot votes for the wealthy—not that he is so immensely concerned for the political representation of the workers as for the electoral success of the Liberal party. The whole trend of the debate too, showed plainly enough how essentially undemocratic is the spirit of the Women's Suffrage Movement and the measures it proposes, as witness the remarks of Messrs. M'Laren and Balfour for and of Mr. Lloyd George against the Bill. The attitude of the latter is curious as compared with his plea for his Pensions Scheme. His excuse for the paucity of this ratepayers' Godsend was that one must necessarily begin with a small instalment, but now we are told that the "Women's Bill" is to be condemned because it is a small instalment! The humbug of the whole process was demonstrated when a large majority for the second reading was converted into a large majority for its relegation to the Parliamentary dusthole.

We have no quarrel with the abstract proposal that women should have an equal part with men in the arrangement of the common activities, i.e., politics; but that is a very different matter to advising working women to join a franchise agitation at this time of day. And more than ever is the stupidity of their participation demonstrated in face of such proposals as those of Shackleton, Pankhurst, Snowden and Balfour.

New Pamphlet: The Road to Socialism (2018)

Pamphlet Review from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our Companion Party in India has just published a new pamphlet, History of Universal Suffrage: The case for turning universal suffrage into human emancipation.

These days it would be difficult to find any intelligent person in the developed world opposed to universal suffrage. However in nineteenth century Britain, universal suffrage (the right for all adults to vote in elections) did not exist. Extending the franchise (those allowed to vote) was opposed by notable Tory politicians including both Prime Ministers William Pitt the Younger and the Duke of Wellington (who quelled the Chartist rebellion), Edmund Burke, but also erstwhile Liberal Lord Palmerston.

This pamphlet is a wide-ranging overview of both the history of this and a socialist polemic making the case in favour of universal suffrage. There is a focus on Britain, but there are also chapters on universal suffrage in America and India and reference to suffrage in other countries around the world. Marx and Engels’ writings on the subject are excerpted too.

In 1831, out of a population in Britain of 24 million, only 478,000 were allowed to vote. Mainly these were landowners with property worth at least forty shillings rent a year, a law dating back four hundred years. Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester had no MPs, and electoral corruption was rife. Women could not vote on the same terms as men until 1928.

What prompted the franchise to be extended was not a benevolent change of heart, but rather the legacy of the French Revolution, events such as the Peterloo massacre and the popularity of the Chartist movement for electoral reform.

It is fair to say movement towards universal suffrage was welcomed by Friedrich Engels. Engels called it ‘one of the most powerful weapons, particularly in the sphere of organization and propaganda. Universal suffrage provides us with an excellent means of struggle’.

Engels however was careful to add a cautionary caveat ‘universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state; but that is sufficient. On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know where they stand.’

Karl Marx regarded participation in parliamentary elections as imperative for socialist parties. He helped draft the programme adopted by the predecessor of, and retained by, the French Workers Party which included the statement: ‘such organization must be pursued by all the means which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation.’

It is also worth mentioning that in the US women did not achieve equal suffrage until 1920 and the experience of discrimination faced by African-Americans in relation to voting until 1965. In what is now the world’s biggest democracy, India, new property restrictions to voting were introduced in 1935 and universal suffrage achieved only in 1948. The pamphlet correctly observes that ‘our ruling class did not gift universal suffrage to us.’

The pamphlet is broad in scope and liberally peppered with useful quotes and references. Suffragettes were lightly covered and one Socialist Standard article that was not quoted was ‘Suffragette Humbug’ (June 1908, also appearing in Socialism or Your Money Back). It contained the excellent quote ‘The Socialist is in no quandary as to why the many are poor … Democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to an end; and for us that end is Socialism. And were the workers to understand rightly their position and their policy, the political freedom they now possess would enable them to achieve their emancipation irrespective of sex.’

DJW

(To order a copy send a cheque for £4, postage included, made out to ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain’ to Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN; or by Paypal to spgb@worldsocialism.org).

The Franchise Fiasco. (1913)

From the February 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “After years of promise the Liberal Party have drawn up a Suffrage Reform Bill. With a long sham fight about ‘Home Rule’ and ‘Welsh Disestablishment’ before them, the measure seems to have had its last and first reading.”
    “The suffrage for women, too, seems to have been left out of this Government measure in the hope that it will help to keep the fires of controversy burning—and perhaps to sufficient effect to cremate the Bill.”

So wrote we in our issue of July last upon the introduction of the now cremated Bill. We wrote the truth because we know the history of this party of cravens—of their contemptible cowardice in the past. We never expected them to do more than dress the political window to catch the eye of the voter in bye-elections.

It is the old, old story—ever new to the politically blind—the story of ’32, ’67, and ’92. Hypocrisy writ large over the actions and speeches of the “leaders of the People.” Just as King Edward conveniently died to prevent them “doing things” to the House of Lords, so now something turns up to help them out of the ditch.

“The Speaker” discovers that if Asquith keeps his promise and allows the Bill ‘‘to be widened in its scope,” it can’t go through. So Asquith pronounces its funeral oration.

They never dreamt of such s thing as the Speaker doing that! Oh, dear, no! Eminent lawyers, too, most of them! The very men, moreover, who make and maintain the laws of procedure in the House of Commons! What a sorry tale of bluff!

It was ever thus with them. They don’t want j to see a wider franchise. They fear its possibilities. They are afraid of political changes—they might lose their jobs. As the passing of a Franchise Bill is coincident with a General Election, they don’t like to take their chances. The story of the fight for the franchise is a story of Liberal and Tory betrayal of the working class. Both parties made use of the Chartist movement, and both helped to smash it. Persecution and broken promisee were the weapons then used, and they served their purpose well. After a generation had passed that grand old humbug, W. E. Gladstone, promised the workers the franchise, but, true to his kidney, he wobbled when the time came. So they went on. Parliament after Parliament voting down franchise Bills.

Yet to-day, relying upon the working class short memories, the lying Liberals boast of having given the toilers the vote.

So now, after years of promise, they deliver their still-born Bill. But just as Household Suffrage was inevitable, so now we believe that in the march of events Adult Suffrage is bound to come. But, true to their historic methods, the Liberals will try it in instalments. A small portion at a time in order to reap the kudos on many occasions. They will go warily, lest they alter the complexion of political life.

We, however, do not regret the death of this Bill. As we pointed out in July last, there was nothing democratic about it. But the way it has gone shows what a fund of ingenuity these cunning lawyer politicians can bring to tbs bluffing of the working class. And is it not significant that we were able to foretell this six months ago ?

Adolph Kohn

Britain as Marx's political model (1980)

From the November 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British census of 1851 revealed that for the first time the town population exceeded that of the country. Agriculture, in other words, had become a minority interest. In any event, most of those working in agriculture were wage workers so that even before this time the bulk of the active population were propertyless wage earners. With the progress of industry and the factory system, the proportion of wage workers in the population grew ever larger. Britain in Marx’s time was already a capitalist country with a working class majority, as he himself was well aware. England, he wrote in a letter on behalf of the First International to its French-Swiss Federal Council in 1870

is the only country where there are no longer any peasants, and where land ownership is concentrated in very few hands. It is the only country where almost all production has been taken over on a vast scale under capitalist bosses. It is the only country where the large majority of the population consists of wage-labourers. It is the only country where the class struggle and the organisation of the working class into trade unions have actually reached a considerable degree of maturity and universality. Because of its domination of the world market, it is the only country where any revolution in the economic system will have immediate repercussions on the rest of the world. Though landlordism and capitalism are most traditionally established in this country, on the other hand the material conditions for getting rid of them are also most ripe here (The First International and After, Pelican, p. 115).

Marx attached great importance to this fact that the working class made up the vast majority of the population in Britain. For it meant that the extension of the right to vote there would put political power potentially in the hands of the working class.

As early as February 1848 Marx had realised that universal suffrage in Britain (with its working class majority) would have a quite different social significance than on the Continent (where it was one of the slogans of those who merely wanted to see established a bourgeois democratic Republic). As he wrote in a German-language paper published in Brussels where he was then living:

We believe . . . that the English Charter, if it were to be put forward not by individual enthusiasts for universal suffrage but by a great national party, presupposed a long and arduous unification of the English workers into a class, and that this Charter is being striven for with quite another purpose and must bring about quite different social consequences than the Constitution of America or of Switzerland ever strove for or brought about (Deutsche-Brusseler Zeitung, 13 February 1848, Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 539).

At this time, as illustrated in an article he published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung at the beginning of 1849, Marx did not believe that the Chartists would be able to win universal suffrage without an armed insurrection, a perspective shared by a minority of the Chartist leaders themselves (Julian Harney, Ernest Jones and others) with whom Marx and Engels were in contact.

After coming to England Marx did not change his mind about the social significance of the Chartist demand for universal suffrage in a country where the working class were the majority of the population, even if he had now come to believe that this could now be achieved by peaceful mass agitation. In an article he wrote on the Chartists for NYDT of 25 August 1852, he wrote:

. . . Universal Suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms 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 only landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of Universal Suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more socialistic 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 (Marx-Engels, Articles on Britain, p. 119).

Marx returned to this question of the different significance of universal suffrage in Britain as compared with the Continent in an article published in the Neue Oder-Zeitung on 5 June 1855: 

After the experiments which destroyed faith in the universal suffrage of 1848 in France, the continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English Charter. They overlook the fact that two-thirds of French society are peasants and over one-third townspeople, while in England more than two-thirds live in the towns and less than one-third in the countryside. In England the results of universal suffrage must thus be in the same inverse proportion to its results in France as town and country are in the two empires (Articles on Britain, p. 233).

Since 1842, when “a last but futile attempt to formulate universal suffrage as a common demand of the so-called Radicals and the masses of the people” was made, Marx went on

there has no longer been any doubt as to the meaning of universal suffrage. Nor as to its name. It is the Charter of the classes of people and implies the assumption of political power as a means of meeting their social requirements. That is why universal suffrage, a watchword of universal fraternisation in the France of 1848, is taken as a war slogan in England. There the immediate content of the revolution was universal suffrage; here, the immediate content of universal suffrage is the revolution (Articles on Britain, p. 234).

Universal suffrage, in other words, would place political power in the hands of the working class who Marx expected (over-optimistically, as it turned out) would soon use it to carry out the socialist revolution, dispossessing the capitalist and landlord classes and instituting a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production.

Marx not only supported, through Ernest Jones and the People’s Paper, the campaign of the Chartist rump in the 1850s for universal suffrage, but also, through the First International, the similar campaign of the Reform League in the 1860s.

The Second Reform Act of 1867 by no means provided for universal suffrage, but it did create a situation where the majority of voters in the towns were members of the working class. The experience of the 1868 election—which returned a Liberal government and in which no working class candidate, not even those standing for the Liberal Party, was elected no doubt tempered Marx’s earlier optimism about the “immediate” content of universal suffrage being “the revolution”. But if it was no longer the immediate content, it was nevertheless still a longer term one. Now that the working class was a majority of the electorate it could, if it chose to, use the vote to gain control of political power peacefully, by sending to parliament socialist MPs mandated to institute the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In a speech in the Hague after the Congress of the First International that had been held there in September 1872 Marx declared, according to a report in the French paper La Liberte:

The workers will have to seize political power one day in order to construct the new organisation of labour . . . We do not claim, however, that the road leading to this goal is the same everywhere. We know that heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such as America and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may attain their goals by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour (First International and After, p. 324)

That a peaceful capture of political power was a possibility under certain circumstances remained Marx’s view for the rest of his life. It was not his view, however, that the conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole of society would necessarily be carried out without any violence whatsoever, even in Britain. Although he believed that the extension of the franchise had given to the working class the possibility of winning political power legally and peacefully, he still expected that they were likely to meet resistance as soon as they began to use this political power against the capitalist and landlord classes.

Political power

In Capital Marx had carefully recorded how the capitalist class had resisted the implementation of the Ten Hours Act passed by Parliament in 1847; and he had also observed how the slave-owners of the Southern States of America had preferred armed resistance to the possibility of Congress voting a Bill to emancipate their slaves. Marx expected a similar “slaveholders’ revolt” once the working class began to use the political power they had captured peacefully to legally dispossess the capitalists and landlords. In other words, it was Marx’s view that, in the end, the working class would have to use the full power of the State machine, including the employment of actual physical force against a recalcitrant capitalist minority, in order to establish socialism. This employment of force would, of course, be quite legal, as it would be employed by a State which had come to be controlled, after democratic elections, by a socialist working class majority. It would be the recalcitrant capitalist minority that would be acting illegally in resisting the democratically-expressed will of the majority for a classless society to be established.

In a letter he wrote to H. M. Hyndman (the man who was later to be the moving force behind the formation of the Social Democratic Federation in Britain) on 8 December 1880, Marx declared, using the word “revolution” too loosely, if we may say so, to mean “violence”:

If you say that you do not share the views of my party for England I can only reply that that party considers an English revolution not necessary, but—according to historic precedents—possible. If the unavoidable evolution turns into a revolution, it would not only be the fault of the ruling classes, but also of the working class. Every pacific concession of the former has been wrung from them by “pressure from without”. Their action kept pace with that pressure and if the latter has more and more weakened, it is only because the English working class know not how to wield their power and use their liberties, both of which they possess legally (Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, pp. 313-4).

In other words, the working class could capture power peacefully if it made intelligent use of the vote and the freedom to organise politically.

So Marx’s final considered view on this question can be summed up as: possibility of a peaceful capture of political power by the working class; probability of some violent resistance on the part of the capitalists to the use of this power to legally dispossess them. As Engels put it in the preface he wrote in 1886 to the first English edition of Capital, which was published in 1887, four years after Marx’s death:

. . . the voice ought to be heard of a man whose whole theory is the result of a life-long study of the economic history and condition of England, and whom that study led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a “pro-slavery rebellion”, to this peaceful and legal revolution.

Britain thus served for Marx, not only as a model for capitalist economic development, but also, with its majority working class and after the extension of the franchise, as a model for political development.

If this lesson which Marx drew from English experience has been largely neglected, this is due to Lenin, who disagreed with Marx on the possibility of a peaceful working class capture of political power in Britain—or, rather, who put forward the absurd view that this was perhaps the case in the 1870s but not later. In actual fact, the circumstances which Marx considered made for a peaceful capture of power—a numerically superior working class, a wide suffrage, stable representative institutions—have become more, not less, widespread since Marx’s day, and not only in Britain. And they have gone so far as to make even Marx’s expected “pro-slavery rebellion” by a capitalist recalcitrant minority a more and more remote possibility.

Adam Buick