William Godwin, Shelley and Communism (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just over a hundred and fifty years ago died William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, one of the seminal works in Britain of radical criticism of existing class society. Godwin had been born in 1756, the son of a nonconformist preacher, as he himself had been for a few years before coming to see through religion as untrue. The first edition of his Political Justice appeared in 1793, his contribution to the ferment of social and political ideas sparked off by the French Revolution, then still in progress. In 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneer feminist work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Godwin was also the author of a number of novels expressing his views, one of which—Caleb Williams—has been a television serial. In addition his Of Population, written in 1820, was the classic contemporary refutation of the nonsense peddled by Malthus.

Godwin has been described as a “utilitarian anarchist”. This is not an unfair description since he was very much in the Age of Reason philosophical tradition which saw humans as isolated individuals pursuing happiness as a measurable quantity and he could be described as an anarchist insofar as he looked forward to the “euthanasia of government”.

In Political Justice Godwin set out to examine what form of society would have to be established to conform to the principles of justice as laid down by Reason. Defining government as “regulated force”, he came to the conclusion that this would have to be “a simple form of society without government”. What he envisaged was the division of a country like Britain into self-administrating districts which would run their own affairs without the need for laws, or prisons, or “regulated force” in any form and which would send delegates to a central confederal assembly in the rare event of any situation requiring co-ordinated action on a national scale. It is this proposal for a “society without government” that has led to anarchists regarding him as one of their forebears.

But Godwin was not simply an advocate of a society without government. He was also an advocate of “equality of conditions”, “a state of equal society” as he called it. “Equality of conditions”, he wrote, “or, in other words, an equal admission to the means of improvement and pleasure, is a law rigorously enjoined upon mankind by the voice of justice” (All quotes are from 1976 Pelican Classic edition). His argument went as follows:

Human beings are partakers of a common nature; what conduces to the benefit or pleasure of one man will conduce to the benefit or pleasure of another. Hence it follows, upon the principles of equal and impartial justice, that the good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.

In every society, the produce, the means of contributing to the necessities and conveniences of its members, is of a certain amount. In every society, the bulk at least of its members contribute by their personal exertions to the creation of this produce. What can be more desirable and just than that the produce itself should, with some degree of equality, be shared among them?

This was a familiar argument with advocates of an equal society in place of existing unequal class society. It led some of them to advocate “a community of goods to be maintained by the vigilance of the state” as Godwin described one such proposal current in his day. Naturally, as an advocate of a society without government, he strongly rejected this speaking of “how pernicious the consequences would be if government were to take the whole permanently into their hands, and dispense to every man his daily bread”.

What, then, did he propose? How did he envisage goods being distributed in his “free and equal state of society”? Here a misunderstanding has sometimes arisen due to the fact that, in Book VIII (“Of Property”), Godwin defends a right to property. He distinguishes three “degrees” of property. The first is property in the goods an individual uses personally. The second is property in the product of an individual’s own labour. The third is property which entitles the beneficiary to appropriate the labour of others.

For Godwin, this third type of property was unjust as it involves exploitation:

All wealth, in a state of civilised society, is the produce of human industry. To be rich is merely to possess a patent entitling one man to dispose of the produce of another man’s industry.

Privilege entitles a favoured few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons.

This “monopoly of property”, exercised by both landlords and capitalists (Godwin actually uses the term), should simply be abolished by the state ceasing to uphold it. The other two types of property should remain inviolate. Nobody, neither another person nor the community, had a right to deprive a person of their personal effects nor the produce of their own labour. This is where the misunderstanding has arisen, with some misinterpreting this defence of a right to property as meaning that Godwin was not a “communist” but merely a “leveller”, somebody who did not want to abolish property but merely to equalise property holdings within the framework of a commodity society.

But this was not at all what Godwin meant. For although he argued that no-one, not even the community as a whole, had the right forcibly to deprive someone of the product of their own labour, he argued equally forcefully that it was the duty of everyone to make available to other people the products of their labour over and above their own needs. In other words, instead of selling their surplus produce for money and accumulating wealth from the proceeds, they ought to make it available free for other people to satisfy their needs. Godwin did not go into the practical details of how this would work but he was quite clear that buying and selling would not enter into it. Discussing the division of labour, he wrote:

Shall each man manufacture his tools, furniture and accommodations? This would perhaps be a tedious operation. Every man performs the task to which he is accustomed, more skilfully, and in a shorter time than another. It is reasonable that you should make for me that which perhaps I should be three or four times as long in making, and should make imperfectly at last. Shall we then introduce barter and exchange? By no means. The moment I require any further reason for supplying you than the cogency of your claim, the moment, in addition to the dictates of benevolence, I demand a prospect of reciprocal advantage to myself, there is an end to that political justice and pure society of which we treat.

And in The Enquirer, a collection of essays he published in 1797, he was even more explicit:

Were the members of any community sufficiently upright and disinterested, I might supply my neighbour with the corn he wanted, and he supply me with the cloth of which I was in need, without having recourse to the grovelling and ungenerous methods of barter and sale. We might supply each other for this reason only, because one party had a superfluity and the other a want, without in the smallest degree adverting to a reciprocal bounty to be by this method engendered; and we might depend upon the corresponding upright and disinterested affections of the other members of the community, for the being in like manner supplied with the commodities of which we were in want.

So Godwin resolved the problem of who, in his “free and equal state of society”, was to distribute goods according to people’s needs by saying that it would be the producers of particular goods of their own free will. His equal society was to be a “spontaneous equality of conditions” not an enforced one. Although he did not use the term “communism” (which was not then in use) or even that of” community of goods”—in fact, to tell the truth, he was too much in the individualist tradition to have used such terminology—his system was equivalent to what might be called a “voluntary” communism (as opposed to one “maintained by the vigilance of the state”). For, if we assume that the producers deposit the surplus over their needs of their particular product in some general storehouse from which they can take the products of other producers that they need, then we have the classic distribution system proposed by previous pre-industrial communists such as Thomas More and Gerrard Winstanley.

Although the social change Godwin advocated—the euthanasia of government and the abolition of “the monopoly of property”—was a radical one, the method by which he saw this coming about—the slow and gradual “progress of the human mind”—was in stark contrast and led him to oppose any kind of organised political action to further the cause of an equal society. In fact the only kind of organised activity he would accept were philosophical debating societies. In this sense, Godwin was a classical armchair philosopher. However, as often happens in such cases, his radical social criticism was taken up by others who did not share his qualms about political action.

One of those to be influenced by Godwin’s ideas was the poet Shelley, who the previous year had been expelled from Oxford University for producing an atheist pamphlet. Shelley came across Godwin’s works at the age of 18 and was very impressed. He was eventually to marry Godwin’s daughter who, among things, wrote the original Frankenstein story.

So impressed was Shelley by Godwin’s proposals for a new society in which people would be motivated by “disinterestedness” rather than selfishness that he set out to express them in verse, in a long poem called Queen Mab which he published privately in 1813. This is a vision of the past, present and future of mankind. In it Shelley attacks kings, war, commerce and, in particular, priests and religion. In fact the criticism of christianity, in the poem as well as in prose notes attached to it was so hard-hitting that when it was republished in the 1820s the publisher was sent to prison for blasphemy. Queen Mab became the work that publishers used in defiance of the restrictive press laws of the time. Each time they were convicted of blasphemy. But as a result Queen Mab, and thus Godwin’s social ideas, came to be widely read in Chartist and radical circles.

In part V of Queen Mab Shelley attacks commerce which he sees as a product of selfishness in the sense of people wanting to sell their surplus for money rather than give it to others to satisfy their needs:

Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange

Of all that human art or nature yield;

Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,

And natural kindness hasten to supply

From the full fountain of its boundless love,

For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.

Commerce! Beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But Poverty and Wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death,

To pining famine and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life,

Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce drags the chain,

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind,

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,

The signet of its all-enslaving power

Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:

Before whose image bow the vulgar great,

The vainly rich, the miserable proud,

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,

And with blind feelings reverence the power

That grinds them to the dust of misery.

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn

All earthly things but virtue.

Later Shelley continues his criticism:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven

Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,

The smallest and most despicable of things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep,

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the laws allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man,

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively,

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising selfishness, that sets

On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign,

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age

Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare

A life of horror from the blighting bane

Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs

From unenjoying sensualism, has filled

All human life with hydra-headed woes.

It is quite clear that Shelley was expressing Godwin’s idea that, in a just society, producers would give away their surplus produce free rather than sell it for money, Hence his opening description of commerce as “the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yield; which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, and natural kindness hasten to supply”. When he later describes what will happen when people are motivated by the “consciousness of good” he naturally states that they will have no need of “mediative signs of selfishness”—of money—and that “every transfer of the earth’s natural gifts shall be a commerce of good words and works”.

This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No mediative signs of selfishness,

No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,

No balancings of prudence, cold and long;

In just and equal measure all is weighed,

One scale contains the sum of human weal,

And one, the good man’s heart.

Part V of Queen Mab ends as follows:

But hoary-headed Selfishness has felt

Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:

A brighter morn awaits the human day,

When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts

Shall be a commerce of good words and works;

When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,

The fear of infamy, disease and woe,

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell

Shall live but in the memory of Time,

Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,

Look back, and shudder at his younger years.

It is only by completely ignoring these passages that Paul Foot is able to claim in Red Shelley (1980) that “Shelley was not a socialist. Shelley was a leveller”. Shelley, at least at this time, was just as much an advocate of a “spontaneous equality of conditions” that amounted to a voluntary moneyless communism as was Godwin.

In one sense this argument as to whether or not Godwin and Shelley were socialists is anachronistic since the modern idea of socialism, as the solution to the problems of a majority wage-working class within a capitalist industrial society, had not yet come into being. This is partly why in this article we have used the word “communist” rather than “socialist” to describe the moneyless equal society advocated by critics of the essentially agrarian class society that existed before industrial capitalism developed. It was of course the low level of development of the means of production that accounts for the frugal, even Spartan, character which the pre-industrial communists were obliged to give to the egalitarian society they advocated, but it still remains true that people like (in England) More, Winstanley and Godwin and Shelley and (in France) Morelly, Babeuf and Buonarotti were forerunners of the socialist industrial society of abundance that we modern socialists now advocate.

Adam Buick

Socialism in Debate. Part 1. (1914)

From the May 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard 

As mentioned in our April issue, it was brought to our notice that Mr. G. W. Daw, Conservative agent for Wandsworth, had stated publicly that Socialists are reluctant to open the columns of their journals to pronounced opponents. We therefore offered Mr. Daw space in this journal for three months to set out his case. The following is the outcome.

The Case Against Socialism.

Thousands of pamphlets, lectures, and articles lave been published in order to present the case for Socialism, therefore in responding to the invitation of the Editor of the “Socialist Standard” to state a case against Socialism within a limited space in these columns, I must ask critics to hear in mind that I am only submitting a few of the arguments which can be advanced.

In all debates on Socialism I have heard and taken part in, the champion of Socialism has devoted a very large portion of his speech to a denunciation of the evils which arise under the existing conditions. Obviously, this gives Socialist debaters an advantage on the platform, for they at once enlist the sympathy of their audience, and place their opponents at a great disadvantage. Nevertheless, the successful condemnation of existing evils is no proof that Socialism would be a remedy, nor are Socialists justified in assuming, as they do, that defenders of the present organisation of society are indifferent to suffering and poverty because they oppose Socialism. The constant effort made by legislation and various charities is evidence of the sympathy which exists amongst all classes to assist the unfortunate.

The Socialist, having effectually criticised the evils of “the capitalist system,” which are visible, proceeds to enunciate a remedy, viz., “the establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.” This formula involves the organisation of a new system of society. The Socialist assumes that the main source of the evil is the “system,” and that by reconstructing it on a communal basis the evil will disappear. But if we examine the actual source of the major portion of poverty and suffering, we shall find that the innate selfishness of man, sin, disease, age, and improvident marriages, are all contributory causes. What justification is there for assuming that the so­cialisation of wealth—admitting for the sake of argument that it is practicable—would overcome these ? No new system devised by man could eradicate human failings and selfishness. As the S.P.G.B. Manifesto admits, “in all human actions, material interests rule,” and above all, that interest which affects his own individual welfare.

Socialism is simply a theoretical system which has never been successfully applied. It is not supported by facts—-it is not scientific. Socialists are very pleased when they get an opponent on a platform. They postulate theories as arguments and challenge all comers to refute them. I might as well assert that the planet Mars is inhabited by human beings and invite any astronomer to disprove it. You cannot disprove the claims made on behalf of Socialism because, like the dwellers in Mars, they exist only in imagination.

Socialism, it is admitted by the S.P.G.B., can only bring about a transfer of the ownership and control of wealth by revolutionary methods. That is the one trait I admire in the S.P.G.B. They give a plain, straightforward interpreta­tion of Socialism, and in this they differ from the I.L.P.ers, who exploit Socialism like some hypocrites exploit religion, using it as a cloak to achieve personal ends. This, by the way, is further evidence of the theoretical character of Socialism, for if it were scientific it would be impossible for a party of opportunists to use it as an instrument for exploiting the masses. Any man can proclaim himself an adherent to the cause, and the rank and file have no means of testing his sincerity. The reason is that all Socialists are Socialists in theory but not in practice, and, therefore, are as logical as a man who declares himself a teetotaler in theory but a consumer of alcohol in practice.

Robert Owen, the father of English Socialism, realised the absurdity of preaching a new system and practising another. He set out to show us how to carry the theory into practice, and spent the whole of his fortune in the attempt. Ever since then Socialists have wisely refrained from making similar ventures.

The greater part of the coveted wealth which is set forth by the Fabian, Mr. Chiozza Money, depends upon security and credit, and would disappear at the first sign of a revolution and upheaval of civilised society, which is the goal of all true Marxists. The billions which exist on paper would drop to insignificant millions in actual gold and materials. Kautsky, dealing with this question, admits :

“The capitalists do not consume all their income ; a portion of it they put away for the extension of production. A proletarian regime would also have to do the same in order to extend production. It would not, therefore, be able to transfer, even in the event of a radical confiscation of capital, the whole of the former income to the working classes.”

Adding:

“Thus we see that not much will remain for the raising of the wages of the working classes, even if capital were confiscated at a stroke—still less if we were to compensate the capitalists.”

This, it may be observed in passing, refutes the oft-repeated statement that the capitalists exploit the workers; and certainly dispels the notion that poverty would vanish.

A strong point in Socialist propaganda is the “anomaly of starvation in the midst of plenty.” No scheme devised by Socialists could abolish poverty any more than disease, for both originate from physical causes which no “system” can control. The history of every race in every country shows that the population always increases up to the limits of the means of bare subsistence. Every wave of prosperity is accompanied by such an increase, and if, as Socialists profess, they could so adjust wealth production as to relieve the pressure of existence created by existing poverty, the same natural law would prevail. I know some Socialists contend that wealth is as plentiful as water, but there is not an unlimited supply of necessities, and there is no evidence which warrants us assuming that it is possible to keep pace with the increasing demands of a growing population. State aid in the shape of poor relief and voluntary charity are ever engaged in a race against poverty, which they can never overtake and never will. A Socialist State would be more heavily handicapped in such a contest because it would relieve the individual of parental responsibilities, and thus remove what now operates as the strongest restraint on parentage.

Socialists as a rule evade this, as they do other fatal objections. Others, including an American Socialist, suggest that a parent of unwanted children should be compelled to work longer hours. This, to say the least, would be hard on the prolific parent. No one can evolve a practical organisation—political or industrial—dominated by Collectivist conditions, which does not of necessity impose restrictions to which no community would submit. What Socialists fail to realise is that just an you can obtain no monetary aid from a State Exchequer beyond what is taken by the State from the people in the form of taxes, so you cannot obtain from the State services or privileges more than are rendered to the State by individual members to an equivalent degree.

Whilst under Socialism they would eliminate one of the strongest motives tending to pro­gress—the incentive of personal gain—they offer no substitute. Socialism suggests that people would work from altruistic motives, which is quite contrary to human experience. The alter­native would be State compulsion. As Emile Vandervelde admits :

“Absolute freedom of labour is only possible in individual enterprises, that is, of course, if we call submission to natural laws alone ‘freedom of labour,’ a submission which is all the more complete as labour is more isolated. From the moment, on the contrary, when labour, whatever be its nature, demands the incorporation of the individual in a whole, his liberty, necessarily, undergoes restrictions.”

In plain language the worker under Socialist conditions would be a slave, as we now use the term.

G. W. Daw.

————————————

The Socialist Reply.

Beyond stating our Object in a sentence, Mr. Daw has failed to put forward the Socialist case which he tries to attack. It will be an advantage for the sake of clearness to state briefly that case.

Socialists state, and the facts and figures are given in many of the pamphlets Mr. Daw refers to in his first paragraph, that all the wealth that exists, whatever the precise quantity may be, is produced by the application of human labour-power to the nature-given materials; that this labour-power is applied by only one class in society—the working class ; therefore the wealth the capitalist class own, enjoy, waste and use, is obtained by robbing the working class. No defender of Capitalism has ever been able to show a flaw in the above statement. The Socialists then proceed to make a simple but strictly scientific deduction from these facts. That deduction is : The working class should endeavour to gain control of power for the purpose of owning and controlling the means of life, and to manipulate them for their own benefit and well-being, instead of for the benefit, profit and luxury of an idle profligate class in society.

Details will be dealt with in the course of the discussion.

It is not long ago that the defenders of the present system denied the existence of the “evils of Capitalism” stated by the Socialist. Mr. Daw not only admits their existence but claims that even the “sympathy” of all classes will be unable to remove it. This is a nasty knock for “sympathy” and the Charity Orga­nisation Society.

He says “the successful condemnation of existing evils is no proof that Socialism would be a remedy.” No Socialist ever claimed it was. The condemnation is contained in the facts of Capitalism and the remedy in the abolition of that system.

We are then told that “if we examine the actual source of the major portion of poverty and suffering, we shall find the innate selfishness of man, sin, disease, age and improvident marriages are all contributory causes.” The meaning of this beautiful sentence is hardly startling in its lucidity. Do sin, disease, age— is the latter young or old—form the “actual source” ? or are they merely additions to it ? If the latter, what is the actual source ? And in either case how comes it that the capitalist class never suffer from “the innate selfishness of man, etc.” seeing that they never suffer from poverty ? Was the American millionaire Harry Thaw’s marriage a “provident” one? Was the Duke of Norfolk’s son free from disease? If so what did he suffer from? It certainly was not poverty.

The “actual source” of poverty is wage slavery. Whether a man is selfish or altruistic; sinful or good; diseased or in good health; old or young; married or single; when he receives his wages on pay-day and before he spends a single penny, with the wages in his pocket he is poor—he is in poverty. Wages are never sufficient to keep a man above poverty.

The remark that Socialism is not supported by facts—is not scientific—is met by our opening statement of our case. Mr. Daw is welcome to try and disprove the facts therein or show how the deduction is not scientifically drawn.

The statement that if Socialism “were scientific it would be impossible to use it as an instrument for exploiting the masses,” touches the depths of absurdity. Any schoolboy could repeat to Mr. Daw from his little primers the vast uses made of Science to “exploit the masses.” The harnessing of the electric current to produce light so that the capitalists may carry on their robbery of the workers during night as well as day, does not detract in the slightest from the strictly scientific discovery and its application.

Robert Owen, as a matter of fact, continued preaching until he died. Quite hopelessly, it is true, because he was preaching to the capitalists to come and save the workers.

A brilliant flash of economics is attempted when we are told “the greater part of the coveted wealth which is set forth by Mr. Chiozza Money depends upon security and credit.” It is just the reverse that is true. Credit is never given where no wealth exists. All that credit does is to arrange for existing wealth to be moved from point to point. And Kautsky was not dealing with this point at all—in fact, never mentioned it—when he wrote chapter IV. of one of the worst works he ever penned: “The Morrow of the Social Revolution,” from which Mr. Daw is quoting. How this quotation “refutes” the fact of capitalists exploiting the workers Mr. Daw does not attempt to show.

Let us say at once, however, that we repudi­ate Kautsky on this as we have done on several other points. In the first place a very large portion of the wealth “put away for the exten­sion of production” never figures in the Income Returns at all, but appears on Balance Sheets as Reserve Funds, etc. On other occasions it is used up during the year in these extensions and counted merely as an item of expense and never reaches the Income sphere. Of the wealth that comes under Income Returns huge sums are spent in barbaric orgies that would make the heroes of the Arabian Nights turn green with envy. £20,000 on a single dinner; silken coats and diamond studded collars for four-legged puppies; elaborately furnished suites of apartments for pet monkeys, with attendants to look after them ; more spent by an individual in a single endeavour to look “smart” by some bizarre insanity than a hundred workers receive in a year. Where does it all come from and how much of it is used for “extension of production” ? Even then there remains the fact that “every extension of production” under Capitalism means a corresponding extension of exploitation, so that far from “refuting,” it strengthens our case.

In the next paragraph he says that poverty, like disease, “originates from physical causes,” in lofty indifference to the fact that he had previously said it was due to the “innate selfishness of man, etc.” Now it is because “population always increases up to the limits of the means of a bare subsistence.” Later we are told “Socialists as a rule evade this, as they do other fatal objections.” Firstly, it not only is not a “fatal” objection, it is not an objection at all. Secondly, no Socialist ever evades the point because he has not the slightest reason to do so.

The statement about increases of population is taken from the parson Malthus’ dirty, lying apology for Capitalism called “On Population.” What Mr. Daw is apparently ignorant of is the fact that Godwin—the Utopian Socialist—whom the book was written against, wrote a reply directly after the first edition appeared that tore up every shred of so-called argument Malthus had put forward. Though Malthus lived to edit four or five more editions and in doing so seriously altered his whole position, not once did he attempt to answer Godwin. Later on, Henry George in “Progress and Poverty,” taking Godwin’s work without acknowledgment as a basis, built up a case with the fuller information the intervening years supplied that crushed Malthus’ book to powder.

We need only emphasize one point. Neither Malthus, nor anyone else, has ever produced a single tittle of evidence historical or otherwise, that “population always increases up to the limits of bare subsistence.”

In every age since the break-up of the tribal communes mankind has carried an idle luxuri­ous class upon its back. That this could be possible proves there must have been a surplus above subsistence all the time. We may hope that Mr. Daw in his next instalment will give our readers his first point against Socialism.

Ed. Com.

Link to Part 2.

50 Years Ago: Socialists and Malthus (1964)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

From a reply to a Conservative. Mr. G. W. Daw in the Socialist Standard, May 1914

Mr. Daw says that poverty, like disease, “originates from physical causes,” in lofty indifference to the fact that he had previously said it was due to the “innate selfishness of man, etc.” Now it is because “population always increases up to the limits of the means of a bare subsistence.” Later we are told “Socialists as a rule evade this, as they do other fatal objections.”

The statement about increases of population is taken from the parson Malthus' dirty, lying apology for Capitalism called “On Population.” What Mr. Daw is apparently ignorant of is the fact that Godwin—the Utopian Socialist—whom the book was written against, wrote a reply directly after the first edition appeared that tore up every shred of so-called argument Malthus had put forward. Though Malthus lived to edit four or five more editions and in doing so seriously altered his whole position, not once did he attempt to answer Godwin. Later on, Henry George in ”Progress and Poverty,” taking Godwin’s work without acknowledgment as a basis, built up a case with the fuller information the intervening years supplied that crushed Malthus’ book to powder.

We need only emphasize one point. Neither Malthus, nor anyone else, has ever produced a single tittle of evidence, historical or otherwise, that “population always increases up to the limits of bare subsistence.”

In every age since the break-up of the tribal communes mankind has carried an idle luxurious class upon its back. That this could be possible proves there must have been a surplus above subsistence all the time.

A correction (1970)

From the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Malthus and overpopulation

There has always been some confusion about what Malthus thought about the possibility of over-population, even in his lifetime. It arose partly because he used ambiguous phrases and partly because after the first edition of his book on population, he shifted his ground. By the time he reached the third edition his considered view was that overpopulation could never happen because it is always prevented. He wrote:

  For undoubtedly, as long as this continues to be the law of his (man’s) nature, what arc here called the natural checks cannot possibly fail of being effectual. (Appendix to Third Edition and page 488 in Eighth Edition).

In his view there was in an average year never any appreciable surplus of food and as population, if unchecked, always increases faster than food supply the checks on population operate immediately. So there never could be “too many people on the earth” as we misleadingly suggested he held in the August Socialist Standard.

When he wrote his first Essay on the Principle of Population his aim was to show that the ideas of Condorcet, Godwin and others about the perfectibility of society were unsound because population is and must always be held in check by means which produce vice and misery (war, poverty, pestilence, etc.) Faced with the argument that population could also be held in check by abstention from marriage or postponement of marriage he had to contend that this too leads to vice and constitutes misery.

In his second edition he abandoned the latter argument and admitted that “moral restraint” does not lead to vice and misery. Having to find another case against Condorcet and Godwin he now maintained that such “moral restraint" is possible only in a society based on private property and the incentive of “individual interest”. Therefore it could not operate in an anarchist or communist society.

By this time he had largely lost his interest in Godwin and was more interested in population laws themselves. He was forced to admit that food supply could never increase as fast as unchecked population but in face of all the evidence he continued to maintain his general proposition that population is held in check.

Editorial Committee.

A Trio of “Intellectuals.” (1920)

Book Review from the July 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the many developments that capitalism has brought to a high degree is the group of employees of the capitalists who carry out the various non-manual functions in modern society. This group comprises the managers, supervisors, lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, journalists, politicians, in fact all those who love to describe themselves as “intellectuals.”

Being, as a rule, better paid than the rest of the wage slaves, there is considerable competition for these jobs, with the result of an over­-crowding of this particular market. For the moment we are only concerned with the position of two sections of this group.

One endeavours to obtain pay and position from the masters by pointing out the “dangers” of Socialism and so hoping to, more or less, scare the masters into engaging them for the purpose of exposing the “fallacies of Marx,” etc. This section is found, largely, among the jour­nalists and university professors.

The other section, failing in this pursuit, try to obtain a footing in the camp of the “common workers” and offer themselves as “guides,” “leaders,” “experts,” etc. to the “lower orders.”

A good example of a combination among individuals from both these sections has lately come our way.

In March 1883 Marx died. The next month an article was published in Italy purporting to be a biography of Marx Apparently about 1916 this article was reprinted with some alterations and additions, as a pamphlet. This pamphlet was translated into English in 1918 as a great work from a wonderful professor who has made marvellous discoveries in economic and social science, some of whose works have been translated into English. Who is this giant and what are his works? Let the following quotation tell us.

  Marx had hardly died, when Mr. Achille Loria hastily published an article about him in the Nuova Antologia (April, 1883). He starts out with a biography of Marx full of misinformation, and follows it up with a critique of Marx’s public, political and literary activity. He misrepresents the materialist conception of history of Marx and twists it with an assurance which indicates a great purpose. And this purpose was later accomplished. In 1886, the same Mr. Loria published a book entitled La teoria economica delta costituzione politica (The Economic Foundations of Society), in which he announced to his admiring contemporaries that the materialist conception of history, so completely and purposely misrepresented by him in 1883, was his own discovery. True, the Marxian theory is reduced to a rather Philistine level in this book. And the historical illustrations and proofs abound in mistakes which would not be pardoned in a high school boy. But what does that matter? He thinks he has established his claim that the discovery that always and everywhere the political conditions and events are explained by corresponding economic conditions was not made by Marx in 1845, but by Mr. Loria in 1886. At least this is what he has tried to make his countrymen believe, and also some Frenchmen, for his book has been translated into French. And now he can pose in Italy as the author of a new and epoch-making theory of history, until the Italian socialists will find time to strip the illustre Loria of his stolen peacock feathers. 

But this is only an insignificant sample of Mr. Loria’s style of doing things. He assures us that all of Marx’s theories rest on conscious sophistry; that Marx was not above using false logic, even though he knew it to be so, etc. And after thus biasing his readers by a whole series of such contemptible insinuations, in order that they may regard Marx as just such an unprincipled upstart as Loria, accomplishing his effects by the same shameless and foul means as this professor from Padua, he has a very important secret for the readers, and incidentally he touches upon the rate of profit.” (Engels’ Preface to 3rd Volume of “Capital,” pp. 25-26.)

We need not now discuss the highly technical point of the rate of profit. When Marx referred in Volume I. of “Capital” to the detailed working out of this problem in a future volume Mr. Loria stated that the problem was insoluble and that the promised volume would never appear. Yet when the second Volume of “Capital” was published, with Engels’ challenge to the Robertians, Mr. Loria attempted to solve the insoluble by taking up the challenge. Even in this position he is a mere copyist. Another “great professor”—Bohm-Bawerk—had said that Marx had no solution, and that he would never publish the promised volume. Some years after saying so he was constrained to write a book entitled “Karl Marx and the Close of his System” against the volume he had said would never appear.

And in another point is the same practice followed. Mr. Loria takes the Malthusian theory of population and modifying it by taking (without acknowledgement) a part of Herbert Spencer’s ”New Theory of Population,” presents the jumble as his own original discovery.

Of Loria’s criticisms of Marx we need only refer to two statements made on consecutive pages. On page 67 he says :

  It is undeniable that Marx’s thesis of the progressive concentration of wealth into the hands of an ever-diminishing number of owners, and of the correlatively progressive impoverishment of the common people, has not been confirmed. It has indeed been confuted by the most authoritative statistics collected since the publication of the book.

On page 68 he says:

  Again, no one can deny that the contrast between high grade and low grade incomes has of late exhibited an enormous increase ; that banking concentration, and the sway of the banks over industry (a source of increasing disparity in fortunes) has attained in recent years in intensity which even Marx could not foresee; and that subsequently to the publication of Capital and to the death of its author, the social fauna has been enriched by an economic animal of a species previously unknown, the multimillionaire, whose existence undeniably reveals an unprecedented advance in capitalist concentration. Agrarian and industrial concentration attained preposterous proportions such as he had never ventured to predict In the American Union a single landed estate will embrace territories equal to entire provinces, while industrial capital becomes amassed by milliards in the hands of a few despotic trusts so that two-thirds of the entire working population are employed by one-twentieth of all the separate enterprises in the country. 

We are told that this is a free country, so, having paid his half-crown for a ninety page pamphlet, one third of which consists of an introduction by the translators, the reader has full liberty to choose which of the above statements he will accept.

The introduction is worthy of the body of the pamphlet. The translators—Eden and Cedar Paul—are members of the second section of the “intellectuals” referred to above, who have condescended to come down among the common people and teach them how to achieve their emancipation. Possessing all the ignorance of the “educated,” they lack none of their conceit. As an example we find on page 16 that they agree with Karl Pearson when he says:

  “the acceptance of the law discovered by Malthus is an essential of any Socialistic theory which pretends to be scientific.”

What is this “law discovered by Malthus ? Neither law nor discovery of his. Malthus stole certain ideas from Price, Wallace, and others and put them forward as his own. Reduced to a few words the “law” is that population increases in a geometrical ratio (2-4-8-16-32, etc.) while the means of subsistence increase only in’ arithmetical ratio (1-2-3-4-5, etc.) Hence the poverty of the working class is due entirely to there being more at Nature’s table than Nature can feed. Our “intellectuals” say Lafargue, Henry George, and others who have endeavoured to meet the Malthusian difficulty “by a simple denial of the facts” have displayed more zeal than knowledge. The sentence quoted is a “simple” lie. Not simple denial, but complete exposure of the falsity of the so-called facts has been the work of these opponents. How ignorant “intellectuals” can be is shown by the following facts.

Malthus wrote his book partly as a general explanation of the misery prevalent in his day, and partly against Godwin’s book, “Political Justice,” that was an expression of revolt against that misery. Godwin wrote a crushing reply to Malthus entitled “On Population.” Malthus, although he lived to edit five more editions of his work, made no attempt to meet Godwin’s exposure of his fallacies. Henry George in “Progress and Poverty” has taken Godwin’s case and, adding further facts and evidence, discovered since Godwin wrote, has presented a reply that no Malthusian has been able to touch.

Not satisfied with Loria’s falsifications of Marx, the translators try one themselves, though only by suggestion. On page 15 they quote Marx’s criticism of Lassalle’s “Iron Law of Wages” from the Gotha Programme. Marx had pointed out that the “Iron Law of Wages” rested upon the Malthusian theory of population, and said if this “law” were correct then it would be a waste of time to try and overthrow the system of wage labour as the “law” could not be overthrown and would assert itself under any system. He then pointed out that this was exactly the argument used by the hired apologists of the master class, who claimed that Socialism would merely make poverty universal because of this “law.”

Now say our translators, “Does not it almost seem as if Marx by 1875, had, for a moment at least, glimpsed the real difficulty.”

To suggest that Marx “for a moment at least” accepted the truth of the Malthusian “law” whose falsities he had exposed shows not only the conceit of the people making the suggestion, but also their readiness to attempt to mislead those members of the working class who may read their introduction to Loria.

Further exposure of their ignorance is given in their reference to Loria’s remarks on the neglect by Marxists of the great question of technical development. Loria says: “This physiology of industry which is now the least studied and least appreciated of Marx’s labours nevertheless constitutes his most considerable and most enduring contribution to science.”

The answer of the translators to this charge is to refer to William Paul’s slovenly and inac­curate sketch of the State and to Newbold’s journalistic articles as forming a reply. The splendid work of Lafargue, Kautsky, Sanial, and others in this field is evidently unknown to these intellectuals.

The value of the judgement of the translators on current events is dearly shown when on page 30 they refer to Workers’ Committees—dead as a door nail to-day, except under the guise of the capitalist Whitley Councils—and Industrial Unionism, with its idiocy of proposing that unarmed men can beat the Army, as new forms of organisation for the working class.

Apart from the evidence it supplies of the ignorance and conceit of the “intellectuals” who contribute to its pages, the worth of the pam­phlet to students of sociology is measured by the price of waste paper.

Jack Fitzgerald

Shelley – Poet and Socialist (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

I became acquainted with Shelley in 1944. At the time I was eighteen years of age and a Republican remand prisoner in Belfast jail. I liked poetry and, searching for something readable in the prison library—a cupboard which they opened twice weekly to the accompaniment of bawling screws, who could see no justification for delay in lifting one of the books—I found a treasure: The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Eventually I got my own copy of Shelley and, over many, many years, I have prized it as the first real socialist literature I ever read. It is, I think, fitting that, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, an appreciation of his life’s work should appear in a socialist journal.

Poets, with their abstract notions of freedom and justice, can momentarily help a prisoner transcend the ignominy and degradation that the prison system imposes. But Shelley’s ideas of freedom and justice were no way abstract; his was no mere solace for the soul. Yes, there were the odes To The West Wind, To A Skylark, To A Cloud; beautiful word music in the classical tradition of English metrical composition.

But, more importantly, there was the wisdom that stripped to its essential ugliness a system of society that dissipates, wastes and destroys wealth in order to make its rich richer while mentally and physically impoverishing the producers of that wealth. There was the vision of a new world, a world of dignity and equality where cash would not be the measure of human need. And there was the indignation, the anguish, even the pain—sometimes written in a spontaneity of anger that defied the discipline of well-marshalled prosody. Here was a text-book of revolutionary thought that showed the futility of the cause for which I was imprisoned and extended my vision beyond the empty rhetoric of nationalism.

During his lifetime Shelley had come to Ireland to protest at the misery of the peasantry. Some Irish nationalists have equated this with sympathy for Irish nationalism but Shelley, whose constituency was the toiling masses everywhere, did not subscribe to the myth that the English working class were the beneficiaries of English imperialism. Thus, after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre at Manchester in 1819, Shelley wrote the Masque of Anarchy in which he describes the contemporary condition of the working class in England:

Asses, swine have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one—
Thou, Oh Englishman, hast none!

This is Slavery —savage men,
Or wild beasts within a den
Would endure not as ye do—
But such ills they never knew.

This poem, consisting of some ninety-one short stanzas of varying lengths was written at Leghorn in Italy. According to his wife, Mary, when Shelley heard how the military murderers had waded into a peaceful reform protest “it . . . aroused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion”. According to some purists, that anger adversely affected the quality of the poem.

Whatever its poetic qualities, Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy must rank, from a working-class standpoint, as the most didactic of English poetical works. His verse castigates every rotten facet of capitalism: its law, its judiciary, its priests, its parasite class and the foulness of its oppression. His words bear the reader along the path of anger and frustration seeking, it would seem, retribution, revenge.

But Shelley, in an age when violence was the tool of revolution, was too deeply perceptive of the need for democratic action if the revolution which he craved was to realise his vision. True, he makes us angry, makes us loathe this evil that murders people for profit but, on the crest of our anger, he stops us:

Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood—and wrong for wrong—
Do not thus when ye are strong.

What then? What should we do when “we are strong”? Shelley, the democratic socialist says we should use the unassailable power of our numbers. Poetically, he says we should think . . . decide:

Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest, close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
(…)
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

In 1888 Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, and her partner, Edward Aveling published an appreciation of Shelley under the title Shelley’s Socialism. The justification for their assumption is abundant throughout Shelley’s poems and prose writings.

In one of his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley quotes Godwin with approval: “there is no real wealth but the labour of man”. Prometheus Unbound, The Masque of Anarchy, Queen Mab, The Ode to Liberty, these, with his prose writings, his prologues, his sonnets and his songs chronicle the misery of the peasant and the wage slave but always, there is the optimism of the true revolutionary; the clarity of vision, as here in Prometheus Unbound, of a future where:

The Loathsome mask has fallen the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king,
Over himself, just, gentle, wise.

In this passage from Queen Mab he criticises the way money contaminates all human relationships:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven
Is venal; Earth’s unsparing gifts of love,
The smallest and most despicable things
That lurk in the abysses of the deep,
All objects of our life, even life itself,
And the poor pittance which the laws allow
Of liberty, the fellowship of man,
Those duties which his heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively,
Are bought and sold as in a public mart
Of undisguising selfishness, that sets
On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.

He saw money, “paper coin—that forgery of the title deeds”, as capitalism’s instrument of theft; he saw slavery as a natural result of property society; he saw the poverty and alienation of the masses and, especially, did he decry the intellectual poverty and deception which capitalism inflicted on its wage slaves.

Richard Montague

Malthus, Marx and Socialism (1975)

From the June 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Malthus could look in at present-day discussions about population and food supply he would no doubt be flattered that he and his ideas are still remembered and that the discussions have gone beyond this country, to occupy a prominent place on the world stage. He would be particularly interested to note that the question now takes in the allegations that world resources are approaching exhaustion and that continued growth of total production is becoming more and more difficult.

Malthus has a special interest for us, both because of Marx’s attack on his theories and because of the purpose for which he published his essay in 1798. Its full title was: Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. At that time the British ruling class were alarmed by the spread of revolutionary ideas following the French revolution in 1789. Among those who caused them alarm was the philosophical anarchist William Godwin who propagated the idea that people could live happily together, free from poverty and crime in a system of society based on voluntary co-operation, with no coercive state or other institutions of a class society.

Malthus wrote his Essay to show that Godwin and others who shared his views were wrong because they ignored what Malthus called the Natural Law of Population. This law, as stated by Malthus, was that population, if not checked, would always increase faster than food supplies, and that it always is held in check by the limited food supply operating through poverty, war and pestilence, which necessarily bring misery and vice; therefore the Godwin utopia of universal happiness was impossible.

Having to admit that population in theory might be restricted by what he called “moral restraint’’ he fell back on the argument that such restraint could not be exercised in a society that lacked private property to act as incentive. (Much like the argument now used by Sir Keith Joseph for his “Social Market Economy” capitalism.)

Malthus’s Essay was welcomed by some of the ruling class at the time because it could be used not only against revolutionary ideas but against almost any social change. Malthus made no serious attempt to prove the arithmetic of his law, and the nineteenth century in Britain showed the rate of increase of the population falling drastically while powers of production were increasing fast. Interest in Malthus continued though very erratically, declining when trade was good and unemployment low and reviving during every recession, particularly in the Great Depression of the last quarter of the century.

This was the key to Marx’s attack on Malthus. Marx pointed out that capitalism has its own population law, the symptoms of which are that in a boom the population appears to be too small and in a depression too large. Because capitalism does not produce to meet the needs of people but only to meet the effective demand in the market, capitalism never had produced enough to meet the needs of the whole population.

Capitalism has not changed in that respect, and UN officials now estimate that about a third of the world’s population are poverty-stricken as measured by accepted standards of nutrition. This figure is quoted in a recent article by a regular columnist of the Financial Times, C. Gordon Tether (1 May 1975). He used it to show the uselessness of leaving the problem to the interplay of supply and demand and defines it as a double one, that of raising the standards of the “poor” and of providing for the expected big increase of world population.

Mr. Tether has at least come some way from Malthus, for whom there was a second “natural law”, that the poor should go on being poor. Mr. Tether is so fearful of “ultimate global disasters” that he demands “a far-reaching re-structuring of the planet’s economic system during the next few years”. He does not spell out what he has in mind, and it would be most improbable that he envisages the social revolution at which Socialists aim. Yet it is the only one that, by eliminating the waste, the limitations on production and the sheer destruction of capitalism would give the big increase of useful production that he knows is necessary.

One last word about Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels. They were fully aware of the arguments of the Malthusians and Engels wrote in 1844:

Even if Malthus were altogether right, it would still be necessary to carry out this [Socialist] reorganization immediately, since only this reorganization, only the enlightenment of the masses which it can bring with it, can make possible that moral restraint which Malthus himself puts forward as the easiest and most effective counter measure against overpopulation.

(See Marx and Engels on Malthus by Ronald L. Meek, p.109.)

Engels recalled this in a letter dated 1 February 1881 sent by him to Kautsky, in which he wrote:

There is of course the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty.

Edgar Hardcastle

Notes on Economic History (12) (1961)

From the October 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Malthus on Poverty

From his law of population, Malthus infers that Governments should, on the one hand, remove all obstacles to the cultivation of the soil and, on the other, favour preventative checks, especially the postponement of marriage. The following passage from the 1803 edition is interesting: "A man born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact has no right to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast, there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to begone and will quickly execute her own orders if he does not work upon the compassion of her guests."

Malthus therefore recommends the reduction of paupers' relief to a minimum. Money used to support the poor or destitute, he argues, us taken from the other classes in society, and especially from that section of the working class that is only just outside of destitution. For this poor relief, says Malthus, increases demand, and thus raises the price of food, clothing and shelter.

Malthus' main demand is for "moral restraint." He writes: "It is clearly the duty of each individual not to marry till he has the prospect of supporting his children: but it is at the same time to be wished that he should retain undiminished his desire of marriage, in order that he may exert himself to realise this prospect, and be stimulated to make provision for the support of greater numbers."

Arising from this, it was proposed to put legal difficulties in the way of marriage. The poor who had no prospects of being able to support a family were to be forbidden to marry.

The Malthusian doctrine attracted widespread attention, and was accepted almost without qualification by many scientists. It also made a strong impression on governments, and its effects were seen in the increased stringency of the marriage laws. Down to 1918 vestiges of this persisted in Bavaria and the Austrian Tyrol, where marriage could not be entered into without the permission of the commune.

The astonishing fact about the Malthusian theory is its persistence in face of evidence that confutes it. To go to the core of the question, we can say there is no evidence to warrant the assumption that there is any tendency in population to increase faster than subsistence. The facts stated by Malthus to show this tendency, simply show that where, owing to a small population in a new country. or where, owing to the unequal distribution of wealth, as among the working class in the old country, human life is occupied with physical necessity of existence, the tendency to reproduce is at a rate which, if unchecked, would at some time exceed subsistence. But it is not correct to infer from this that the tendency to reproduce would show itself to the same extent where population was sufficiently dense, and where wealth was distributed in such a way as to lift the whole community above the necessity of devoting their energies to a struggle for mere existence. Nor can it be assumed that the tendency to reproduce, by causing poverty, must prevent the existence of such a community: for this obviously would be assuming the very point at issue and be reasoning in a circle. And even if it be admitted that the tendency to multiply must ultimately cause poverty, it cannot be stated of existing that it is due to this cause until it is shown that there are no other causes which can account for it.

The Malthus theory has persisted, and will persist, because it does not in any way oppose or antagonise any powerful interest. It is soothing and reassuring to the class who, wielding the power of wealth, largely dominate thought. Indeed, at a time when men were beginning to question an examine society, it came to the aid of the ruling class. The Essay on Population was written as an answer to William Godwin's Inquiry concerning Political Justice, a book which dealt with the principle of human equality, and the effect of Malthus' book was to justify the existing inequality by shifting responsibility for it from the laws of society to some kind of God-given laws.

The Socialist of today still has to contend with Malthusian ideas, in a modern form. They become more prevalent in times of large-scale unemployment, and are also use as an excuse to justify poverty in such places as India, Africa, the Latin countries of America. The answer to Malthus, and the modern exponents of his teachings, is to be found in the method of ownership of the means of producing wealth.

Poverty, as dealt with by Malthus, is not in fact the result  of excessive breeding. It is the chaotic nature of the capitalist system which must be blamed. Its solution is obvious—remove the cause which the Socialist claims is the private property relation in the means of production. Make this property common property, and the common access to wealth which follows such a change will provide the answer to poverty, present or future.

Bob Ambridge

Shelley: a socialist poet

From the World Socialist Movement website

I became acquainted with Shelley in 1944. At the time I was eighteen years of age and a Republican remand prisoner in Belfast jail. I liked poetry and, searching for something readable in the prison library - a cupboard which they opened twice weekly to the accompaniment of bawling screws, who could see no justification for delay in lifting one of the books - I found a treasure: The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Eventually I got my own copy of Shelley and, over many, many years, I have prized it as the first real socialist literature I ever read. It is, I think, fitting that, on the bi-centenary of his birth, an appreciation of his life's work should appear in a socialist journal.

Poets, with their abstract notions of freedom and justice, can momentarily help a prisoner transcend the ignominy and degradation that the prison system imposes. But Shelley's ideas of freedom and justice were no way abstract; his was no mere solace for the soul. Yes, there were the odes To The West Wind, To A Skylark, To A Cloud; beautiful word music in the classical tradition of English metrical composition.

But, more importantly, there was the wisdom that stripped to its essential ugliness a system of society that dissipates, wastes and destroys wealth in order to make its rich richer while mentally and physically impoverishing the producers of that wealth. There was the vision of a new world, a world of dignity and equality where cash would not be the measure of human need. And there was the indignation, the anguish, even the pain - sometimes written in a spontaneity of anger that defied the discipline of well-marshalled prosody. Here was a text book of revolutionary thought that showed the futility of the cause for which I was imprisoned and extended my vision beyond the empty rhetoric of nationalism.

During his lifetime Shelley had come to Ireland to protest at the misery of the peasantry. Some Irish nationalists have equated this with sympathy for Irish nationalism but Shelley, whose constituency was the toiling masses everywhere, did not subscribe to the myth that the English working class were the beneficiaries of English imperialism. Thus, after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre at Manchester in 1819, Shelley wrote the Masque of Anarchy in which he describes the contemporary condition of the working class in England:

Asses, swine have litter spread

And with fitting food are fed;

All things have a home but one -
Thou, Oh Englishman, hast none!

This is Slavery—savage men, Or wild beasts within a den Would endure not as ye do—But such ills they never knew.

This poem, consisting of some ninety one short stanzas of varying lengths was written at Leghorn in Italy. According to his wife, Mary, when Shelley heard how the military murderers had waded into a peaceful reform protest "it… aroused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion". According to some purists, that anger adversely affected the quality of the poem.

Whatever its poetic qualities, Shelley's Masque of Anarchy must rank, from a working class standpoint, as the most chdactic of English poetical works. His verse castigates every rotten facet of capitalism: its law, its judiciary, its priests, its parasite class and the foulness of its oppression. His words bear the reader along the path of anger and frustration seeking, it would seem, retribution, revenge. But Shelley, in an age when violence was the tool of revolution, was too deeply perceptive of the need for democratic action if the revolution which he craved was to realise his vision. True, he makes us angry, makes us loathe this evil that murders people for profit but, on the crest of our anger, he stops us:

Then it is to feel revenge

Fiercely thirsting to exchange

Blood for blood -and wrong for wrong -

Do not thus when ye are strong.

What then? What should we do when "we are strong"? Shelley, the democratic socialist says we should use the unassailable power of our numbers. Poetically, he says we should think . . . decide:

Stand ye calm and resolute,

Like a forest, close and mute,

With folded arms and looks which are

Weapons of unvanquished war.

(… )

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you

Ye are many - they are few.

In 1888 Marx's daughter, Eleanor, and her partner, Edward Aveling published an appreciation of Shelley under the title Shelley's Socialism. The justification for their assumption is abundant throughout Shelley's poems and prose writings. In one of his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley quotes Godwin with approval: "there is no real wealth but the labour of man".

Prometheus Unbound, The Masque of Anarchy, Queen Mab, The Ode to Liberty, these, with his prose writings, his prologues, his sonnets and his songs chronicle the misery of the peasant and the wage slave but always, there is the optimism of the true revolutionary; the clarity of vision, as here in Prometheus Unbound, of a future where:

The Loathsome mask has fallen the man remains

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man

Equal, unclassed, tribless and nationless,

Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king,

Over himself, just, gentle, wise.

Queen Mab is a vision of the past, present and future of mankind. In it Shelley attacks kings, war, commerce and, in particular, priests and religion. In fact the criticism of christianity, in the poem as well as in prose notes attached to it was so hard-hitting that when it was republished in the 1820s the publisher was sent to prison for blasphemy. Queen Mab became the work that publishers used in defiance of the restrictive press laws of the time. Each time they were convicted of blasphemy. But as a result Queen Mab, and thus Godwin's social ideas, came to be widely read in Chartist and radical circless.

In this passage from Queen Mab he criticises the way money contaminates all human relationships:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven Is venal;

Earth's unsparing gifts of love,

The smallest and most despicable things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep,

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the laws allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man,

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively,

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising selfishness, that sets

On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.

He saw money, "paper coin - that forgery of the title deeds", as capitalism's instrument of theft; he saw slavery as a natural result of property society; he saw the poverty and alienation of the masses and, especially, did he decry the intellectual poverty and deception which capitalism inflicted on its wage slaves.

In part V of Queen Mab Shelley attacks commerce which he sees as a product of selfishness in the sense of people wanting to sell their surplus for money rather than give it to others to satisfy their needs:

Commerce! Beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But Poverty and Wealth with equal handScatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death,

To pining famine and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life,

Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce dragsthe chain,

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind.

It is quite clear that Shelley was expressing Godwin's idea that, in a just society, producers would give away their surplus produce free rather than sell it for money. Hence his opening description of commerce as "the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yield; which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, and natural kindness hasten to supply". When he later describes what will happen when people are motivated by the "consciousness of good" he naturally states that they will have no need of "mediative signs of selfishness" - of money - and that "every transfer of the earth's natural gifts shall be a commerce of good words and works".

This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No mediative signs of selfishness,

No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,

No balancings of prudence, cold and long;

In just and equal measure all is weighed, One scale contains the sum of human weal, And one, the good man's heart.

Part V of Queen Mab ends as follows:

But hoary-headed Selfishness has felt

Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:

A brighter morn awaits the human day, When every transfer of earth's natural gifts Shall be a commerce of good words and works;

When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,

The fear of infamy, disease and woe,

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell Shall live but in the memory of Time,

Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,

Look back, and shudder at his younger years.

In one sense this argument as to whether or not Godwin and Shelley were socialists is anachronistic since the modern idea of socialism, as the solution to the problems of a majority wage-working class within a capitalist industrial society, had not yet come into being. This is partly why in this article we have used the word "communist" rather than "socialist" to describe the moneyless equal society advocated by critics of the essentially agrarian class society that existed before industrial capitalism developed. It was of course the low level of development of the means of production that accounts for the frugal, even Spartan, character which the pre-industrial communists were obliged to give to the egalitarian society they advocated, but it still remains true that people like (in England) More, Winstanley and Godwin and Shelley and (in France) Morelly, Babeuf and Buonarotti were forerunners of the socialist industrial society of abundance that we modern socialists now advocate.

Richard Montague