Work: Paid and unpaid (part 2) (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1 of this article last month considered how people react to work according to whether it is paid or unpaid and how hierarchised and authoritarian work structures are increasingly affecting their lives. This second part looks at the feasibility of attempts to ‘humanise’ work under the current system of production for profit and points to how such humanisation is only truly feasible in the context of a different social system.

Together with the intensification of the employment process previously discussed, in recent years there has also been considerable discussion about whether there might be more effective and efficient, and at the same time more humane, ways of organising work – even within the existing system of production for profit.

Hierarchy challenged

There are examples of companies instituting freer, less rigid work structures and even more ‘equal’ pay. One of the most striking instances has been the American ‘Valve’ video game company where the owner decided to establish a ‘flat’ non-directive structure based on the conviction that people work better and more efficiently when they’re relaxed and don’t feel they’re being surveilled and constantly judged. Another example is the financial services company Gravity Payments. Here the CEO decided to pay all his staff a minimum wage of $70,000, that being the amount he decided was necessary to live what he called ‘a normal life’. This compared with the previous average salary of $48,000. At the same time, he slashed his own salary of $1.1m to the same $70,000. Then a recent programme in the ‘Analysis’ series on BBC Radio 4 asking the question ‘Does Work Have To Be Miserable?’, included the boss of the Howorth Air Tech company in Salford explaining how he had moved strongly in the direction of putting resources into helping to bring out his employees’ latent talents and not simply regarding them as ‘factors of production’.

Other reactions to hierarchy and authoritarian work practices in capitalism have included a beneath-the-radar move among some workers away from the conventional jobs market – a rejection, partial at least, of the normally life-sapping existence of wage and salary work to lead what has been called ‘a low-desire life without gruelling competition’. Those who choose this path still do of course need to carry out some paid work and to participate in the buying and selling system, but what they are seeking is an existence that offers them more freedom and less stress. This kind of choice was recently highlighted in the BBC radio series ‘The Digital Human’ where the presenter, Aleks Krotosky, talked about how, unexpectedly, in China, a country she referred to as ‘the most competitive society on earth’, a good number of young people were managing to ‘opt out’ from full-time paid work and attempt to lead that ‘low-desire life’.

Reorganising capitalism?

The more radical view, such as espoused by the Socialist Party, that the nature of work can only be fundamentally altered by a new social system, also has advocates in a significant number of quarters. In a ‘Ted Talk’ from the University of Edinburgh given by Jade Saab in 2018 and called ‘A World Without Money’, the speaker includes a section entitled ‘Why and how we work will be different’. On social media too there are groups hosting similar discussions with names that speak for themselves, for example ‘Moneyless Society’, ‘World of Free Access’, and ‘A group around the world where we are all anti-capitalist’. This is matched in book publication by more than just a few writers proposing various different kinds of non-hierarchical work organisation.

Some of these proposals, when closely scrutinised, amount to suggestions for reorganising capitalism, which we would regard as utopian, since it would be impossible in reality for the capitalist system, given its profit-seeking basis, to implement them. We would agree with Anitra Nelson, in her book Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy, that ‘modified forms of money and markets … are bound to fail’ with the vast majority being ‘unable to enjoy the full benefits of their everyday work and have little say in how they live or work’. Her conclusion is that we cannot ‘tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses’.

Such flaws as pointed to by that writer are also to be found in otherwise perceptive books about work such as Daniel Susskind’s A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond (2020) and Michael D. Yates’s Work, Work, Work. Labour, Alienation and Class Struggle (2022). But even if the conclusions of those writers fall short of advocating a completely different social order or of being convinced that this may be possible in the foreseeable future, they can still have a lot of powerfully relevant things to say about work and its meaning in human society. Susskind, for example, while in the end not venturing beyond the idea of buying and selling, describes work as ‘a source of meaning, purpose and direction in life with community recognition of that work rather than wages fulfilling the human longing for personal fulfilment and social interaction’. Yates, for his part, states: ‘Regarding work (…) we should strive for a society in which this word is no longer used except to describe the past. What we are, as human beings, is a species that can thoughtfully produce what is needed for survival and enjoyment (…) only cooperative and beneficial production, with substantive equality in all aspects of life’.

Work in a non-market society

But others go further in seeing as a practical possibility a society where work in exchange for payment would not need to take place at all – and this within the framework of a completely different social system than the one that dominates the world at present. Recent examples of this outlook are to be found in Matthew Holten’s book, Moneyless Society. The Next Economic Evolution, in Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work, and in Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. These writers stress the downsides of employment for money with its imposition of a daily stretch of work, lack of variety, hierarchical organisation, and the potential precariousness of keeping your job. And they are generally keen to point to the fact that, in a future post-capitalist, non-market society, non-socially productive activity (e.g armaments, insurance, banking, sales promotion, taxation, legal contracts, etc) will disappear and all the work that takes place will have a useful and necessary function with no stigma attached to any of it.

As to specific details of how work could be organised in a non-monetary society and the nature it would take, it is probably Benanav who puts his finger on it most tellingly. In his final chapter, entitled ‘Necessity and Freedom’, he argues for ‘the abolition of private property and monetary exchange in favor of planned cooperation’, and ‘a world of fully capacitated individuals … in which every single person could look forward to developing their interests and abilities with full social support’ and which will be ‘the first time in their lives that they could enter truly voluntary agreements – without the gun to their heads of a pervasive material insecurity’. He goes on to say that ‘we would divide up responsibilities while taking into account individual aptitudes and proclivities’ with some tasks needing to be performed locally, but many capable of being ‘planned on a regional or global scale, using advanced computer technologies’. And finally: ‘The realm of freedom would be the one giving rise to all manner of dynamism: that is where human beings would invent new tools, instruments, and methods of accounting, as well as new games and gadgets, rapidly reallocating resources over time and space to suit changing human tastes (…). The world would then be composed of overlapping partial plans, with interrelated necessary and free activities, rather than a single central plan’.

Commentators such as these are clearly not talking here about strategies within capitalism for dealing with problems thrown up by that system, for example climate change or environmental degradation. They are not looking for more ‘sustainable’ ways for production, consumption and work to continue much as before, for ‘green deals’ or for ways of finding replacement work for those who lose their jobs through automation. They are talking rather about a society in which people will no longer have to do jobs they do not necessarily like (or may even hate) just for the money but will be able to do work they want to do and ideally enjoy doing. And for any ‘less popular’ jobs, there would be a focus on automation and the use of robotics to give assistance.

Above all one of the first things that will end in the kind of society being envisaged, which we would call socialism, is the link between work and consumption: what people will consume will not depend on the amount of work they do. Above all people will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in workplaces, in their local communities, in their regions and, in some overarching cases, no doubt even globally. Above all there will no longer be top-down control by leaders, governments and bosses and no more money controlling people’s lives, wasting so much of our time and energy. There will be no useless toil, only useful work.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The following books that were mentioned in the article have been previously reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard:

• Mar 2020: A World Without Work. Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind
• Feb 2021: Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav
• Oct 2022: Beyond Money. A Post-Capitalist Strategy by Anitra Nelson
• Jan 2023: Moneyless Society: the Next Economic Evolution by Matthew Holten
• Mar 2023: Half-Earth Socialism: a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass
• Oct 2023: Work Work Work. Labor, Alienation and Class Struggle. By Michael D. Yates

Work: paid and unpaid – Part 1 (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most of my working life was spent teaching in a university. I consider myself to have been reasonably well paid for the work I did. And the superannuation scheme I paid into has yielded a reasonable pension. The same applied to my workplace contemporaries, fellow wage-slaves who started and finished their careers at more or less the same time as me. But, if I look at them, they’ve not all had identical reactions to ending their paid employment.

‘Bored out of my skull’

Some of them have carried on with a particular aspect of the work they did before – their academic research – but independently. And even though they’re no longer paid for it, they seem reasonably content. Others have been less happy. They’ve found themselves at a loose end with no teaching or associated work, and see no point in carrying on with any research given that it’s no longer connected to a day job. They see working in isolated fashion as no longer affording them the recognition and approbation of their colleagues and of their wider academic community. I found an example of this when I ran into a former colleague some time ago, several months after he’d retired in his early 60s. I asked him how things were going. He seemed pretty miserable and replied: ‘I’m bored out of my skull’. He sounded and looked angry and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do other than wish him well.

Volunteering

So these are a couple of the kind of reactions that workers in what was my own line of work may have in response to no longer doing paid work. But there’s also a third category – those who, having finished their paid employment, feel they’ve been set free, and this has made them decide to involve themselves in activities which are usually unpaid and often quite different from the paid work they did. Sometimes it’s a continuation of things they devoted a certain amount of time and energy to in their spare time before, such as looking after family members, for example grandchildren, or involvement in political or social activity such as campaigning or charity work, or participation in a voluntary group of some kind. In my own case, for instance, I agreed to be recruited to a committee of volunteers who run my local Community Centre. Once there, I found that two of my former work colleagues, now retired like me, were also active there and in the community more widely. One of them was heavily involved in helping to organise a local food bank of the kind that has sprung up in increasing numbers in recent times. A common factor in this kind of activity is the obvious personal satisfaction people who engage in it derive from their new unpaid, ‘non-professional’ work. And it is of course a form of work, in that it involves expending mental or physical energy, even if many people wouldn’t necessarily think of it as such, since there’s no suggestion of any financial recompense from it. But, however they regard it, the motivation, rather, is the perception that they’re doing something useful, experiencing a sense of community, and also enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.

As well as this, two other activities have absorbed my own time and energies in a practical and satisfying way since retirement. The first has been increased activity in the trade union that, though retired from work, I’m still a member of. With the forbearance of my former employer, I’m still able to handle personal cases or pension matters for members, as I did when I was employed. And I have more time to do this than those colleagues who also volunteer for union work but still have paid jobs. The second has been playing an increased part in Socialist Party activity – helping to organise my local branch, giving talks, going to events to try and spread the socialist message, writing columns, articles and book reviews for this journal.

Hierarchical work

Some of the reviews have actually been of books on the subject of work in its various different aspects. This seems, in fact, to be an area in which there’s a good deal of interest at present – interest stimulated by the fact that, in recent times, say over the last 30-40 years, the face of employment has changed in a number of noteworthy ways. In particular, it has become increasingly what may be called ‘hierarchised’. The ‘flat structures’ in the workplace that were being talked about and to a certain extent practised in the 1960s and 70s and seen as the way of the future began to fall out of favour and to give way to more rigid, authoritarian line management systems, so that most workers effectively had someone ‘higher up’ breathing down their necks, assessing them, judging their work or productivity – and sometimes intimidating them.

I saw that in my own field of employment, where it was accompanied by the invention of various terms, such as ‘lean production’ or ‘agile working’, to try and give a benign, softening impression to a more rigid form of workplace organisation. Critics of this new form of work discipline gave it other names such as management by stress or managerial feudalism (or even managerial fascism). The way American mathematician and political activist Eric Schechter characterises it in his video ‘Only Revolution Can Save Life on Earth’ is brutally simple: ‘workplaces are dictatorships’. Certainly, in many cases, the process consists of workers’ performance being subjected to close surveillance, with their efficiency or productivity judged on a regular basis via performance targets, sometimes referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). And this with the shadow of a possible ‘capability process’ hanging over them, which can potentially lead to dismissal.

An irony here of course is that the manager conducting the KPI operation is usually her or himself subject to the same process at the hands of the person who is their manager. It’s hard not to be reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he writes: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, authors of the book Wageless Life, are just as uncompromisingly critical. They describe work of whatever kind under capitalism as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’, describing it as ‘a war of profit against life on earth’, in which workers are denied the ability to control how they work and so suffer a disconnection that ‘separates them from the material conditions that allow humans to flourish’. Capitalism, they go on to say, fosters ‘the utter worship of paid work’ and in so doing ‘thrives on producing docile subjects who are alienated from their surroundings’. One of their conclusions is: ‘We live in a world sculpted by money but populated by the moneyless.’ Very much akin to this, if expressed in milder language, is Martin Luther King’s well-known maxim: ‘profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ A similar more recent characterisation says: ‘the greatest prison has no bars, just a paycheck, a routine and weekends off’.

Not all ‘bullshit jobs’

While we would broadly endorse such an analysis, it is also necessary to point to the fact that not all paid work is equally dispiriting, unsatisfying and alienating. So while it’s surely true, for example, that, if they didn’t need a wage to survive, no man or woman would willingly choose to sit at the entrance to a supermarket all day looking at a screen to check if anyone is stealing or looks as though they might steal, at the same time there’s no doubt that some paid work, even if accompanied by conditions of insecurity or duress, can give significant pleasure or satisfaction to those who carry it out. And while that supermarket guard job is one of the many millions that exist across the planet in the system we live under (so-called ‘bullshit jobs’), constituting a colossal waste of talents, energies and resources, in some cases even the rigid and unforgiving employment practices already mentioned can be offset to an extent by an individual’s passionate interest in the work they are engaged in – maybe for example as a naturalist, a scientist, a computer programmer, or as a gardener or a builder.

It’s only fair to point out too that some challenges have arisen to the hierarchy and intensification of employment practice in recent years, and from some quarters there have also emerged striking (sometimes revolutionary) ideas and recommendations concerning work organisation. These are the areas that Part 2 of this article next month will discuss before going on to look at ways in which work might be organised in the different, non-coercive, moneyless production for need society that socialists campaign to see established.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone's 'Wageless Life. A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism' was reviewed in the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The binman (2002)

From the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

What would you do if you grew tired of a successful career as a salesman, earning lots of dosh as you persuade people to part with their readies for things they probably didn’t want? Would you fake a smile and carry on, hating every minute of it but realising your suffering puts bread on your kids’ table? Probably. One man in my home town did something else. He quit that job and became a dustbin man.

He is quite an energetic guy. He doesn’t walk at all, he runs with the bins. Danish labour legislation has thankfully forbidden the old-style bins, without wheels, and law requires easy access to them for the binmen. No more busted backs or falling over gnomes. His fellow refuse workers tuns too. They get their job done in next to no time, which means our hero gets lots of hours for canoeing, his favourite hobby. He likes the outdoor life, the pace of the job, feels much happier, and is not concerned that his wage packet is smaller. Whilst it is a physically demanding job, he claimed the sales job was pretty demanding due to the mental tedium of waiting about for the next hard sell.

This little news story was one of those light relief space fillers we have grown accustomed to. However, it was by far the most interesting thing on the news that evening. It raises some intriguing points.

The reporter couldn’t understand why someone would turn their back on a big wage placket and become, “of all things” a binman. Why should refuse work be deemed less worthy than salesmanship? Why should anyone have to be asked, and justify, why they want to be a binman? A bin in summer can have a nasty, ripe smell, and it is obvious that public health requires, amongst other things, a clean environment – nothing could be worse than your Nan being plagued by rats, after all. What useful social function does a salesman have? None really, if you think about it. Salesmen are out to sell a product. Once the product is sold, the outlays are paid for and a tidy, little sum is netted in profit for the product’s pre-sale owner, who is probably wise enough to use another brand and who isn’t the salesman. Salesmen are only necessary in capitalism.

A salesman is, or so it goes, more educated than a binman. There is a social stigma attached. Only Dumbo empties bins. (Our hero is not a Dumbo of course.) It is a rotten snobbishness that overlooks a variety of things. The unemployed watching the news that night would jump at the chance to get a job. Perhaps some of them might be inspired to try a refuse job, even though the thought of rotting chicken and cat crap turns their stomachs. But then they could always change their job to salesmanship if they grow tired of bins, right? You see, what we want to do is pretty much irrelevant. You are employed only if you are exploitable. Jobs are plentiful in booms but come a slump you are put on the dole. You might get tons of papers from school, but does that mean you will get the job you want (and if you do, will the work conditions rapidly change your expectations); get a job; or even get educated? In any case schooling does not equate with education.

Hopefully our hero will continue to enjoy his job. Of course the Aarhus refuse workers’ strike some five years ago reveals the true nature of work in capitalism. There is a ceaseless struggle between capitalists seeking to up the tempo of work and reduce wages (in these days of permanent inflation, all they need do is freeze wages and workers will feel the pinch) and workers seeking to get their own back (by smoking on the WC and stealing the bog roll) or organising to implore conditions and pay.

Work should not really be equated with employment. Work will be an essential part of life in socialism; it will be a part of the individual’s development and a necessary, healthy expenditure of energy. Employment is wage labour (the ability to work is a commodity the workers are forced to sell – we are all “salesmen” in reality), commodity production instead of production solely for use. As such it has alienating factors associated with it; e.g. Monday to Friday is “their” time, whilst the weekend is your time, where you can enjoy working in the garden or painting. Employment is based on the division of labour. The upshot being workers are tied to one job for years on end, instead of being people able to do all kinds of things, which socialist society – run by conscious decisions instead of blind forces – will allow. (Of course it is a moot point as to how far the division of labour can be removed from socialism; not every one can have the steady hand and requisite knowledge of a surgeon.)

One of the strangest objections to socialism is “who will do the dirty work?” The man of this piece was not entirely motivated by cash. His sales job made him miserable; he loves his new job. We can speculate that there will be people willing to do dirty work in socialism. The hours required will be considerably reduced as the waste of unemployment and salesmanship, amongst many other occupations, will not exist in the moneyless, free access society of socialism; there will simply be more hands to do the unpleasant but necessary stuff. The objector is always a bit strange: “I don’t want to live in a world without wear and starvation, and where my needs are satisfied, if it means I have to do dirty work once a week.” Socialism can do lots of things, but not make crap smell of roses; that is one little fact of life we’ll have to put up with.

'Engelbassen'

Letter: A View from the Hospital Basement (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A View from the Hospital Basement

To the Editors,

I write to you as a 53 year old working class logistics porter for NHS Scotland, and someone who has recently come to terms with a lifelong reality: I am autistic. Having spent my younger years in the frantic ‘activism’ of the far left, I find myself now, in the quiet of my fifties, looking at the world through a lens sharpened by both my diagnosis and the consistent logic of socialism.

For the autistic worker, capitalism is not merely an exploitative system; it is a sensory and social assault. The ‘wages system’ demands a specific type of human raw material, one that is flexible, socially performative, and capable of enduring the chaotic, profit driven environments of modern industry. If you cannot ‘mask’ your traits, if you cannot navigate the arbitrary social hierarchies of management, or if your nervous system recoils at the bright, loud, and disorganised nature of the capitalist workplace, you are branded ‘inefficient’.

In my eighteen years within the NHS, I have seen the machinery of the state attempt to patch up a broken population. We are a class of ‘repair men’ trying to fix the damage caused by a system that prioritizes the accumulation of capital over human well being. My job as a porter relies on lists, logic, and routine, elements that suit my autistic mind. Yet, the overarching system is one of irrationality. We see the ‘crisis’ in our hospitals not as a failure of funding, but as a failure of a system that treats health as a commodity and workers as mere expenses on a balance sheet.

The Socialist Party’s ‘Impossibilist’ stance, the refusal to advocate for the mere ‘crumbs’ of reform resonates deeply with the autistic need for systemic consistency. In my youth, I chased the ‘immediate demands’ of reformism, only to find that every hard won ‘right’ can be stripped away by the next budget or the next shift in the market. For my daughters, one who shares my neurodivergent wiring, I have no interest in fighting for a ‘better’ version of their exploitation.

A socialist society, one based on the common ownership of the means of life and production for use, is the only environment in which the neurodivergent person can truly thrive. Consider the logic:

First, the abolition of the ‘interview’ and the ‘personality test’. In a world of voluntary labour, the social ritual of ‘selling oneself’ to a master disappears. An autistic person’s focus and ‘special interests’ cease to be a commodity and become a direct contribution to the community.

Second, the end of sensory exploitation. Capitalism builds cheap, high stress environments because they are profitable. A society producing for human need would, for the first time, design spaces for human comfort, accounting for the diverse sensory needs of all its members.

Third, the removal of social hierarchy. My alexithymia and my struggle with social cues are only ‘disabilities’ because capitalism demands a specific type of social compliance to maintain the master servant relationship. In a society of equals, where no one has the power to command another’s labour, the ‘unwritten rules’ of the workplace vanish.

I have stopped apologising for the way I am wired. I have realised that my autistic brain, with its preference for facts over rhetoric and systems over leaders. We do not need charismatic leaders to tell us we are exploited; we need only to look at the ledgers of our lives.

Socialism offers a ‘case’ that does not shift with the political winds. It is a list of principles that holds up to the most rigorous logical scrutiny. For the worker in Scotland, for the porter in the basement, and for the autistic child yet to enter the fray, the message must remain clear: the system cannot be mended. It must be ended.

Yours for the Revolution,

Pablo Wilcox

Scotland

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A youth panel at the conference examined how Germany’s political establishment is pressuring young people into the armed forces not only through direct reforms, but also through policies that attack livelihoods. The situation imposed onto young workers and students today amounts to ‘economic blackmail’ for those without wealthy families to support them, argued Max Radtke of the trade union ver.di…The reintroduction of conscription should be understood as a question of class interests, added David Christner of Junge Linke (Young Left). He emphasized the need for a sharper analysis of ‘who is being sent to kill and die, and for whose interests’, saying that the political imperative at this point is to develop a ‘practical alternative to repression and militarization’. 

[peoples dispatch]

How Does Yoga Alleviate Child Poverty in India? Yoga classes can offer several benefits, particularly for children living in poverty. They: 1. Provide mindfulness and resilience. These sessions provide a break from daily life, where minds are taken off of hardship outside. Students gradually develop inner strength and willpower that they can take home with them. 2. Build a community. Children feel safe making friends and coming out of their shells. They will feel less alone and it makes the day-to-day that little bit easier. 3. Improve physical health. By building physical strength, students are less likely to contract illnesses and injuries, thereby increasing attendance at school and reducing stress on health care systems. 

[The Borgen Project]

Wide-scale desertions and 2 million draft-dodgers are among a raft of challenges facing Ukraine’s military. 

[AP]

People are now openly confronting the authorities, with a few lucky ones escaping conscription. Sadly, other videos show men being forced into vehicles by recruiters or beaten to death. This past summer, József Sebestyén, a Hungarian from Transcarpathia, died during his forced conscription. The Ukrainian authorities tried by all means to cover up his case. In the video, recorded in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, a crowd of civilians surrounds a police car in which a man has been placed. In the recording, people can be heard protesting, standing in front of the car, and preventing the vehicle from leaving the scene. Ukrainians are fed up with war and even more fed up with having to see their loved ones die for it. They are now openly speaking out against family members, friends, and neighbors being dragged away.

[ZeroHedge]

. . . one of Beckert’s more arresting contentions is that for most human beings, through most of history, the idea of working full-time, not for their own provisions but for cash, was utterly alien: the proletariat almost always had to be forced into being. Sometimes this involved slavery or indentured labour, but just as often it was accomplished by undermining the traditional basis for subsistence production. By enclosing, for example, common lands in Georgian England, or indeed through more recent restrictions on access to the plains of Ethiopia or the forests of Indonesia. 

[Prospect]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Finance and Industry: Who goes bust? (1966)

The Finance and Industry Column from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who goes bust?

Many workers refuse to accept the hard fact that they have been condemned for life to work for a wage or salary for those who own the means of wealth production. Spurred on by stories of how ordinary workers have risen to be wealthy capitalists, they imagine that they, too, can do this. Such people long for their own shop or snack-bar or garage to escape from wage-slavery, Unfortunately for them they often find they have to work harder for themselves (or their creditors) than they had to when working for wages. For some it’s even worse—they go under and are cast back into the working class, less their savings.

The latest annual report of the Board of Trade on bankruptcy gives as the top lines among the 3,404 who went bust in 1965:

The list continues with hardware and electrical goods retailers, confectioners, tobacconists and newsagents, meat retailers, plumbers, fruit and vegetable retailers, general stores, electrical contractors, commercial travellers and so on. In other words the small shopkeepers and businessmen that workers often wish to be.

Next time you hear the story about how good capitalism must be because so-and-so rose to be a capitalist, remember the other side of the story: for every one who succeeds hundreds fail completely and thousands more are condemned to a life of drudgery and worry not unlike the rest of us. Besides capitalism can’t work without a working class, which means that most of us don't even get a chance of becoming a petty capitalist.

World Capitalism

Socialism can only be world-wide because capitalism, the system it will replace, is already so. Modern industry has a world-wide character which ignores frontiers. But although millions co-operate to produce wealth this wealth does not belong to society as a whole; it belongs to just a part of society. Today wealth is produced socially but owned privately. This is the basic contradiction of capitalism. Private ownership of the means of wealth production in fact conflicts with modern technology. One aspect of this is the division of the world into competing, and often warring, states.

Many people don’t realise that the typical firm today is not the small builder or motor repair man mentioned in the previous section. Production, in many lines, is dominated by a few giant, international firms such as Shell, ICI, Unilever and Philips. Sir Paul Chambers, head of ICI, made an interesting speech at the International Management Congress in Rotterdam on September 20. He doubted whether the creation of a Western European economic bloc could be more than a short-term solution to the problems created by the vast size and international character of some modern industries. Modern technology, he said, could be a source of “strife" if its international character were not taken into account. Chambers went on:

I have pointed to the aircraft industry and the inevitability of the growing integration of aircraft firms on an international basis. Almost every emergent country wants its own airline, but it has to rely upon the major makers—mainly British and American—for its needs. A similar trend can be seen in computers and in photographic materials and equipment. In car manufacture the integration of firms is beginning to take on a similar international character. The complete sovereign independence of small states is becoming inconsistent with the growing economic dependence upon large international industrial groups domiciled elsewhere. (Financial Times Sept. 21, 1966).

Men like Sir Paul Chambers do not think in national terms. They know that capitalism is international and act on it. The workers, those who run these industries from top to bottom , in all countries, might well learn from this.

The right to be lazy

Are you tired even before you start work? Do you dislike having to work hard for eight or more hours a day?

Peter Lennon, in the Guardian of September 22, wrote up some of the views put forward on these and other questions at a recent international conference on psychosomatic medicine in Paris:

Many citizens manage to reach a condition of distressed exhaustion before doing anything at all. They wake up tired, grouse through the day, and at night mourn departed sleep. A scrabble and tangle of humanity, they stew in bad air and petty psychological turmoil, buffeted by noise and needled by a multiplicity of unrewarding duties. In eternal competition with shadowy colleagues and goaded by social obligations beyond their capabilities they experience a feeling of impotence and inadaptability. Neurotic fatigue is the result.

Professor Chombart de Lauwe claims that fatigue, other than muscular fatigue, has its origins in the discrepancy between our means and our needs: between aspirations and social pressures—the eternal discrepancy between a possible life and the life we are forced to live.

At least one concrete conclusion to rejoice the civilised emerged from the conference: laziness, far from being the shameful attribute of the social renegade is the man of sensibility’s criticism of an unnatural activity: hard work. It is also his defence against a barbaric way of life.

A hard look at the conclusions of these eminent specialists leaves us with these convictions: the prestige attached to daily strenuous toil is a myth and a shabby modern one, and it is seriously probable that, in spite of generations of domesticity, intense, sustained daily work is incompatible with the realities of human physiology.

Lennon writes in an amusing way. But, when you come to think of it, it is a serious matter that most of us should be condemned to a lifetime of boring, toil. The least we should do is ask: Does this have to be?

Work, of course, is necessary in any human society. But it does not have to take the form of “intensive, sustained daily work”. If such boring, unsatisfying toil is “incompatible with the realities of human physiology” (as most of us must suspect anyway) then socialist society can abolish it. Indeed it should abolish it. Work itself cannot be abolished. However it is up to the defenders of capitalism to show that wealth can only be produced by people, working under unhealthy conditions, doing jobs they find dull and uninteresting.

Adam Buick

Revolution. The Problem of the Out of Work. (1908)

From the November 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Strange Inversion.

The free born wage-worker of to-day has a heaven that is peculiar to himself and his age and which speaks volumes for the wretchedness of his position. It is his paradise to be exploited, regularly—to have plenty of work—while his hell is to have none. And, truly, the hell is genuine enough ! Use, however, becomes second nature, and many a worker is so inured to his position that he accepts his lot uncomplainingly, or even with a certain smug satisfaction, so long as he is in work, his “manly” breast swells with pride when he hears the politicians talk of “honest toil,” and he grasps with humble gratitude the few mouldy crumbs that are flung to him out of the heap of good things he has created. So might the chattel slave have been proud of his chains, grateful for the offal thrown to him, and jealously appreciative of the dignity of his toil and his right to do it.

Modern times, however, differ somewhat in that the society of to-day cannot feed its slaves. Its slaves go begging for a master and yet are turned empty away. Thus in a period that is heir to the discoveries of the ages, and that possesses means multiplied a thousand-fold for producing all the good things of life, and wherein labour-saving devices have reached a perfection hitherto undreamed of, there exists, nevertheless, among the very class whose labour made this abundance possible, a mass of poverty and suffering that makes the famines of olden time trivial by comparison.

And this is caused, not by scarcity, as of old, but by sheer plenty ! The producers are but the hirelings of those who own field, factory, and workshop, and these leave no stone unturned in their feverish anxiety to find means, by improved combination and machinery, of reducing the number of wage-slaves they need hire. Hence the unemployed—a permanent and growing feature of capitalist society.

No Hope in the Master Class.

During the coming winter, indeed, the question of unemployment may be expected to reach an acuteness never before equalled. And what will the master class do ? Will they solve the unemployed problem ? Only fools think so, for the master class themselves confess that it is, to them, insoluble. They neither can nor will solve this riddle of the Sphinx. A capitalist system without unemployed would be impossible, and our masters know it.

Economic development under capitalism, however, makes the out-of-work army grow rapidly to huge dimensions and become in fact a serious menace to the security of the class that rules. Indeed, the indifference of the ruling class and the needs of the unemployed make disturbance the only resource of the latter in their endeavour to get an immediate plate of soup or crust of bread to prolong their pitiable existence. Yet, by appealing to the class in power to do something what will they get ? What but promises and then more promises ? What but paltry relief works that do not relieve and votes of sums of money that may not be spent ? Works that can wait no longer for execution will be said to be put in hand to “help the unemployed.” If a City alderman, having worn out seat of his trousers with constant dining, buys a new pair, it will also, presumably, be for the sake of the unemployed, just as tramway works that have been delayed until they can be delayed no longer are started ostensibly “to relieve the unemployed.” And so the fraud goes on.

The Treachery of the ‘Labour’ Members.

Meanwhile the unemployed, as though their misfortunes were not great enough, continue to have their misery exploited by reform organisations and fresh editions and emulators of John Burns. For whatever else the recent Grayson episode may have emphasised, it made once more abundantly clear that the “Labour”, members are prepared—even anxious—to range themselves on the side of Labour’s enemies when it suits their book to do so—although whether this will be apparent to those who pay the piper is, unfortunately, still very dubious. But so many things have happened that it would seem must come to those who have pinned their faith to these Labour misleaders as direct blows, full between the eyes, and yet have been practically unnoticed, that there is little immediate hope that this last instance will have much greater effect. The Parliamentary group rely for their present maintenance upon working-class ignorance, and knowing how abysmal that ignorance is, feel safe in taking action the results of which must overwhelm them and render further misleading impossible directly the working class have anything like an adequate appreciation of their class interests. Just as recent bye-elections have been significant of nothing so much as of the desperate concern of the “Labour” members to hang on to the coat-tails of Liberalism outside the House, lest the security of their seats and their £200 a year be imperilled, so the Grayson incident made it clear that the methods to be pursued inside are those that will not embarrass the Government, and may result in recognition and advancement, if not to the elevation of a seat in the Cabinet, at any rate to the comfort and security of some minor official job that will remove them from the risk of the loss of their £200 a year consequent upon working-class enlightenment.

We Warned the Working Class.

Of course, to us this was apparent from the very inception of the Labour Representation Committee and we said so. The “half-baked” and the semi-enlightened then preferred to call us very much the sort of name some of them are now applying to the opponents of Grayson. If, however, incidents similar to those referred to have the effect of opening a few eyes to the actual and potential power for working-class evil resident in this precious “Labour” Group, it will be some sort of satisfaction. They have now reached a stage where, as we have said, it seems almost incredible that any man could be left who failed to see just what the Parliamentary “Labour” leaders are after and where they are leading. The attitude of the S.P.G.B. is more than vindicated.

Let there be no misunderstanding as to our view of Grayson’s action. Grayson is a man who has no very clear idea of where he stands upon questions of economics, who certainly does not understand the Socialist position, and who cannot, therefore, be accepted as in any adequate sense a representative of Socialism. He is, we should say, a product of Clarionism, Clarionism being compact of sentiment and snobbery, with a strong infusion of capitalist “progressive” ideas and a mild dash of Socialist thought —a queer compound that a staff consisting of little girls and old women serve up for the gratification of the elect weekly.

From a product of this sort of food nothing great can be expected, but Grayson took up a position on the unemployed question in the House that, at any rate, compelled attention and translated into action a protest against the callous indifference of capitalism to the growing volume of misery that capitalism had created, and the flacid, supine, “respectability” and “statesmanship” of the pseudo-Labour Group. With one accord these “Labour” gentlemen ranged themselves on the side of capitalism. Let that be included as a count in the indictment that in the name of the working class we bring against them.

What’s Bred In the Bone.

And now, lest their treachery be too palpable, they hasten to explain that the Government were on the point of saying something, and they wanted to hear what it was before taking action. If the something had been unsatisfactory they proposed etc., etc. The same old story. The same contemptible lie, or the same hopeless, helpless stupidity—whichever they like. First they do not know the forms of the House. We were to wait until they had time to familiarise themselves, and then we should see something. Then—give the Government a chance. Let us wait to see what it would do. If it did not do anything . . . ! Then again, let us see what Burns would make of his opportunity. If nothing came of it we . . . ! And so on.

Not even sufficient originality to invent a new lie or a decent excuse. They either knew that the Liberal Party, and the Liberal Party’s jackal, Burns, would not do anything if they waited till the last trump, or the whole record of the Liberal Party was a closed book to them, or they had not even a glimmer of that essential antagonism of interest of which the Liberal Party is a political expression on the side of capitalism. In short, and not to put too fine a point on it, they were either damned fools or doubly damned knaves.

Now we have our Pete Currans who were cursing the forms of the House and praying for something to break them up, our Will Thornes who are forever mouthing “revolution” and the absurdity of awaiting the Government’s convenience, our Jowetts who are always ready to make scenes if necessary, our Phillip Snowdens—the Daily Mail’s fierce and bitter iconoclasts, and the rest of them turning to sneer at the theatricality (it may have been that, of course) of Grayson, and protesting that they could not be led by boys who indulge in expensive suppers and so on—banal puerilities given off in the hope that that which cannot be justified may be obscured.

Well, since the Grayson outbreak the Government has spoken, and the unemployed know that, except for an additional £100,000, they are where they were last year. Burns is to administer the fund as before—a wholly grotesque sum in the hands of a wholly fraudulent (from a working-class point of view) administrator. In addition, the necessity of the unemployed is to be used as a means, if possible, of making up Haldane’s special army reserve that would otherwise, in all probability, have failed to materialise. Indeed, the Liberal Party are full of sympathy for “the honest workman starving through no fault of his own.” We don’t think.

Keir Hardie, on behalf of the “Labour” Group, made certain dark references to what they would do if the Government’s proposal was unsatisfactory. The “Labour” Group’s action (at the time of writing) takes the form of an amendment expressing dissatisfaction !

One other notable thing the present agitation has emphasised that can only be very briefly referred to, viz., the impotence of the “one step at a time” or “something now” “Socialist,” directly his “evolutionary not revolutionary” theory is put to the test. The people, the women and children, are starving. They want something now. What is the use of preaching Socialism to them ?—before they get that they must die of want. And so they proceed to get the “something now” by asking Governments who, by their very nature, cannot prevent starvation and do not even pretend to try, to take action. And the Governments take “action,” and have been taking “action,” and the starving people continue to starve, and the children continue to cry, and the unemployed army grows and grows, until—until we have reached the stage of crisis where the honest adherents to the “something now” policy, in desperation of ever getting their “something now,” throw in their lot with those who advocate riot and pillage as the only means by which food may be obtained immediately ; the only means by which fear may be stricken into the hearts of the capitalist class. Overboard goes “evolution” (their brand), and in its place they preach—anarchy. They break up their stepping-stones to use them as missiles.

Well, to the extent to which this change of attitude represents the demolition of the quasi-intellectual posture, it is good. But we have to point out that to preach pillage is to bring trained, armed, and well fed men against untrained, unarmed, and starving men. The.result harmful to the latter, although not necessarily more disastrous than the process of starvation they are at present undergoing, while the menace of a desperate crowd threatening to, or actually, running amok, invariably has quite a notable effect in stimulating the flow of doles.

While we cannot speak for God, as Cardinal Manning claimed to do, we agree that Manning was quite right in affirming that a starving man was entitled to take food—notwithstanding that, as Curtis Bennet, the magistrate, pointed out to the ferocious Will Thorne, M.P. (who mildly allowed himself to be bound over not to be naughty again), it was bad “law.” If anyone knows of any alternative for a hungry man, woman, or child other than that of getting food by some means or other (any means being justified) or starving, we have still to hear of it.

The point is, then, that only out of fear for their own position and possessions can the “something now” be obtained from the capitalist class. And that fear is struck more surely and far deeper by the fact of a working class, understanding their class interests, consciously organising for the overthrow of the capitalist system in its entirety, than by any conglomeration of unorganised human atoms blindly struggling for food with no idea beyond their immediate requirements. These last can be dealt with and their agitation “scotched” by judicious sops, or, in the last resort, by the use of the police and soldiery. The former cannot be so easily put off the scent. It will have to rain sops like manna before any hope of check can be entertained.

Now, is it not high time that the working class—in work or out of work, realised the futility of expecting those who live by working-class exploitation to seriously grapple with a problem the solution of which would spell their extinction as a class ? Instead of useless parading and futile tinkering with effects, is it not clear that the problem must be attacked at its root ? Its root is in the system of capitalism, and as an evil to the workers it can end only when capitalism ends—when the means of living are owned and used by the democratic community of those who labour.

That, however, will not be accomplished by those whose source of life is profits, but will and can only be brought about by the conquest of the powers of government by the working class for that object. This is the only way to deal with the unemployed problem, for what avails it to waste time on effects if the source of the misery pours unchecked an increasing flood upon us ? The task before us is not to appeal to the capitalist class to do something, but to organise the workers for the overthrow of that class so they (the workers) may do something for themselves. The battle-cry of the workers’ party is not “The Right to Work,” but “The Right to the Product of Our Labour,” and that right waits only upon their might. That is the really revolutionary way.

And you, reader, have a duty as a worker to yourself and to your fellows—it is to join the political party of your class. If unemployment is to cease to be your scourge, if you in common with your fellows are to have your lot made brighter, if you and those dear to you are to have the means of health and happiness secured, you must take your place in the ranks, for the deliverance of the workers from wage-slavery can come from none others than the workers themselves.

The party of the working class is the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which works democratically and consistently for the end of unemployed misery, and declines to exploit the wretchedness of the unemployed by parading them in futile appeal to the robber class. Your duty is to join it, for your only hope lies in the democratic organisation of your class for Socialism, since through working-class victory only can class oppression cease and the toiler come at last by his own.

Blogger's Note:

". . . the recent Grayson episode . . ." is a reference to an incident in the House of Commons, which took place on the 31st October 1908. According to the Victor Grayson page over at Spartacus Educational:

On Tuesday, 31st October, 1908, Grayson stood up in the House of Commons and shouted out: "I wish to move the adjournment of the House so that it can deal with the unemployment question... people are starving in the streets." When he refused to sit down he was escorted from the Commons. As he left he turned to Labour members and shouted: "You are traitors! Traitors to your class."

By the Way. (1916)

The By The Way Column from the October 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the past month several conferences have been held in various parts of the country, and the reports appearing in the Press of their deliberations, though brief, are somewhat interesting reading. For instance, I gather that at the closing meeting of the British Association at Newcastle the subject for consideration was that of industrial fatigue. On this occasion one, Dr. Hunter, declared that the question of fatigue had been very much exaggerated, and he went on to say that :

“In yards where they worked four and a half days a week of 37 hours there could not be any over-fatigue in the ordinary sense, but it was found that if men combined hard work with drinking whisky then over-fatigue might and did come in.

Men who did not take drink worked longer hours in his works and did not suffer in health or complain of over-fatigue.”

Presumably Dr. Hunter would have us believe that the men engaged in the shipbuilding yards only work 37 hours per week, and that the main cause of the trouble in whisky drinking. How many more times is the drink gag to be trotted out as the first and last reason of the failure of capitalist production? One has only to recall the shortage of munitions in the early days of the war to recollect that then there was the same outcry of drinking and shirking. The concluding remarks of the speaker are exceedingly interesting. He continues:

“If men took a more intelligent interest in their work and worked harder they would feel very much less fatigue. The effort to work slowly was really very fatiguing.”—”Daily Chronicle,” Sept. 11, 1916.

Of course, all those wage slaves who have had the good fortune to write daily time sheets and the privilege of punching the clock when they start and finish a job will be able to appreciate to the fullest extent the reference to “a more intelligent interest in their work.” Delightfully funny, isn’t it ?

* * *

A reference to the foregoing conference in another paper states that “Dr. Oliver said that industrial fatigue did exist and played a very important part in the number of accidents that took place.” There you are, you pay your money and take your choice. This quotation is from the “Daily Mail,” same date.

* * *

The Chief Officer of the Board of Education has recently issued his annual report and has emphasised the value of open-air training for children. This is not in the least surprising when one takes into consideration the hovels that vast numbers of the working class have to inhabit from sheer compulsion. What with the dark and gloomy basements to the barrack-like “model dwellings” where the sun’s rays hardly ever penetrate, is it to be wondered at that our children require open-air treatment and social welfare centres !

That the subject is a serious one, and particularly so in view of the wastage of war, may be gathered from the fact the Chief Officer states:

“Not less than a million children of school age are so physically or mentally defective or diseased as to be unable to derive reasonable benefit from the education which the State provides.”

This in itself is a sufficient condemnation of capitalist society. Miss Margaret McMillan, commenting on the above, says: “That is a very low estimate. I should have said that the number of such children was two millions—rather more than less.” Think of it you who toil and slave and who consciously or unconsciously support modern capitalism, what your apathy means to your children and your class. You labour that others may have ease, you build houses but live in dens where your masters would not put their dogs. Such are the legacies resulting from the private ownership in the means of life.

The lady above referred to cites a fact from her own experience in Deptford as to the condition prevailing therein the following words :

“We once examined 147 children who were sent to our clinic to see if they were suffering from something other than the complaints for which they had come to be treated. And we found that 71 of them had weak backs and that 42 of these cases were so serious as to place the future lives of the children in jeopardy. Yet not one of these children had been sent to us as suffering from this complaint at all.”

We ask you to study these things for yourselves, to get at the why and the wherefore of them, to recognise the continual slaughter of the innocents, and when you understand the cause of these abominations to join with us that an end may be put to a system of society which means poverty, misery and want for the vast majority, and assist in ushering in a new society wherein these horrors may be eliminated. Isn’t this worth fighting for? (Quotations from “Daily News,” Sept. 16th, 1916.)

* * *

Reference to the above is also made in “Reynolds’s” (17.9.16) and may perhaps add further to the point. The writer asks: What are we going to do about it ? The importance of the question to our masters is not overlooked as may be judged by this reference.

“Time after time “Reynolds’s” has pointed out the menace to the future of the nation which the neglect of children and child-bearing mothers means. Perhaps now, when the flower of our young men is dying on the battlefield, we may find widespread recognition of the importance of making the best of our children. . . . But the greatest blame most be borne by the democracy, which has not insisted long ago on the sweeping away of many causes which make such a report as Sir George Newman’s possible. Some of the evils are not preventible, but many of them are, and it is only ignorance and apathy which have allowed us to remain quiet while so little has been done.”

Many of the “evils” are “preventible,” then, if so, why not prevent them ? Only the Socialist holds the remedy. Capitalist politicians and reformers have tinkered about with them, long enough, and in the words of Lloyd George stand condemned, for has he not stated that as soon as they heal one social sore another one breaks out. Thirty-bob at birth, sickness and unemployment benefit, and old age pensions at 70 fail to touch the spot. Arise, then, ye workers !

* * *

Still they come ! Another object lesson in the way patriotism is rewarded is to be found in a newspaper report to hand of a man who was in the 13th Essex Regiment and has been discharged “as being no longer physically fit for war service.” The report states that the man threw up a good job early in 1915 to enlist. He was not a conscript, and he sacrificed between £2 and £3 a week. Passed as medically fit for active service he eventually began training and at last took up the work of a cook. He said:

“We used to get our clothes soaking wet through at the field ovens, but there we had to stick, no matter what sort of weather it was. I have been at it … many times in rain, snow, and blizzards. At Northampton in January it was awful.”

The result was that his health broke down and ultimately he was discharged. The allowance his wife had been receiving was also stopped and he himself on the 10th of August received the following intimation:

“I am directed to acquaint you that the Commissioners of this Hospital [Chelsea], having fully considered your case, have decided that you have no claim to a pension.”—”Star,” August 25th, 1916.)

As this decision stands it serves to show the cold and callous indifference of those who in times past have framed the necessary regulations governing the grant of pensions. May it prove to be a means of opening the eyes of those who are used as cannon fodder to realise their true position in society.

* * *

The Trades Union Congress recently met at Birmingham, and an idea of the revolutionary nature of this body may be gauged from the fact that they were received by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Mr. Neville Chamberlain. In his opening speech he “emphasised the need for effort all round, and made an eloquent plea for the preservation of that national unity which the war has brought us. He admitted the claim of working men to take a greater share in the organisation of industry than they have hitherto enjoyed, and did not attempt to gloss over the fact that the conditions in many trades in the past had been bad, and that every man who did his best deserved to obtain decent conditions of life and work and the opportunity of bringing up his children under cheerful and healthy conditions.” How nice and kind our masters are when it suits them for the purpose of swanking the workers. Tell them part of the truth, how in many trades in the past conditions had been bad (as if they were not now), but for heaven’s sake don’t let them realise how they are fleeced.

* * *

In the same article the writer tells us that “the secret of industrial peace lies not in attempts by labour to squeeze capital or by capital to squeeze labour, but in the working together of employer and employed against the competition of outside forces.” Here again we have the old bogey trotted out, the robbed and the robbers are to work amicably together in order to fight against “the competition of outside forces.” That there will be “competition” for jobs here is religiously omitted from the article in question, and the writer says that the fear of a flooded labour market with the disbanding of our great armies is very largely “illusory.” How simple all are !

The Scout

Our case in brief. (1915)

From the October 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

At such a time of appalling misery and waste of human life as the present, it may be useful to review again the claims of the Socialists, and to set out once more the means by which they propose to reach their goal. The writer has nothing new to tell—nothing at all that he has not said many times over in these columns. Nor can he hope to say it in a different way from which he has said it all before. But the message must be repeated again and yet again, though the messenger grows sick at heart. Conditions are always changing, if the message is not, and therein lies hope sufficient for the day.

Socialists claim that human happiness rests primarily upon the security and sufficiency of the necessaries of life—food, clothing, and shelter They do not say that there are no other sources of happiness, or that security and plenitude in these things must necessarily banish all unhappiness. What they contend is that these material things are the basis of human happiness viewed generally, just as they are the basis of human life itself.

Socialists maintain that the wealth produced at the present day is sufficient to afford ample of the necessaries of life to every man, woman, and child in the community, while the means at the command of society are sufficient to enable that wealth to be produced by the expenditure of a comparatively small amount of the time and effort by which the working class gain their meagre livelihood to-day.

The first of these contentious, namely, that human happiness depends primarily upon the means of living, hardly needs any enlarging upon at this time of day. Everybody understands, even if he had never thought seriously about it before, that before one can have any experience at all, happy or otherwise ; before one can think or act or desire, one must eat—for the simple reason that every organic activity results from the consumption of food, from this to the proposition, that lack of the means of subsistence is bound to cause physical distress and, in highly sentient beings such as man, mental distress also, is a logical step. This physical and mental distress, which, where it exists and in proportion as it exists inevitably undermine all happiness, can only be banished by giving sufficiency of and security in the means of subsistence.

Now as to the amount of wealth which is produced today, let us take the evidence of the opponents of Socialism. Mr. Chiozza Money, the Liberal M.P., an accredited capitalist statisti­cian, estimated the national income in the year 1904 at £1,710,000,000. and he says in his book “Riches and Poverty” (page 29), “if the income the nation were equally distributed amongst its inhabitants a family of five persons would enjoy an income of about £200 per annum.” It is seen, then, that sufficient wealth is produced to afford ample means of subsistence to all.

It must, of course, be granted that much of the wealth produced to-day takes a form which would be useless in a society where the products of labour were equally enjoyed by all, but as all this wealth is simply nature-given material to which human labour has been applied, either to change its from (as in the case of cannon) or to change its position (as in the case of coal), or to change both form and position, as in the case of most things, it would be the simplest of matters to direct all labour into channels, and turn all useful materials into forms, which would contribute to the end in view.

Is it true that the means which we possess for producing wealth to-day are sufficiently developed to enable us to maintain the present output of wealth with the expenditure of far less time and energy per head of the able-bodied population than the working-class bread-winner of to-day has to give, on the average, to the gaining of his livelihood ? To commence with, think what happens to every commodity which is produced before it becomes available to fulfil the function for which human toil has fitted it— that is, before it can be consumed. It has to be sold, and perhaps sold several times. It is, in fact, produced in order be sold, not in order to be used though unless it was capable of being used it could not (except under false pretences) find a purchaser. This means that, an enormous number of clerks, travellers, salesmen, shopkeepers, and others too numerous to mention must be maintained in labour which adds not one iota to the wealth which is produced. According to the Census returns of 1901 there were 504,294 commercial travellers and commercial and business clerks engaged in this useless labour in the United Kingdom—apart from thousands of other clerks and touts, such as those employed by lawyers, political and other organisations, for example. How many shop-assistants are wasting their time waiting for customers who do not come ? How many baker’s and butcher’s carts chase each other over the same ground ? How many canvassers, agents, and house-to-house distributors swarm the streets ? And all this because goods must be sold when they are completed, instead of then being immediately available for consumption.

And as goods are produced under the present system only to be sold, so they are only produced while they can be sold. Hence there is at all times an immense army of workers unable to find employment because there is not sufficient sale for the sort of goods they are producers and distributors of. In the year when the stupendous amount of wealth mentioned by Mr. Money was produced the “percentage of members of Trade Unions making returns who were out of employment was 6.8” (“Statistical Memoranda,” Cd 4671, Local Govt. Board). It is generally admitted that the unorganised trades would show an even larger unemployment percentage, but this figure applied over the whole field would give about a million workers in the country in enforced idleness.

Then even before the war there were in the Army, Navy, Police force and Prison staffs, the very pick and flower of the race another half-a-million men adding nothing to the wealth of community, while 50,000 parson “labour” but to keep us in the land of nod.

Everywhere around us we find energy wasted, from the railway ticket-collector and the ‘bus company’s spy to the jeweller setting diamonds in the collar of her ladyship’s Pekinese pup and the flunkey buttoning up his dilettante master’s breeches. And on top of all this there is that great group of the master class, to the number of about 5,000,000, who produce nothing, and who would, if they contributed workers in the same ratio as the working class, add another 2,000,000 to those available for production.

These figures, even if they may be disputed on the matter of strict accuracy, are sufficient to show that society has means to hand to produce vastly more wealth than is at present produced with the same average expenditure of time and toil which the members of the working class who are in employment render for their bare, miserable subsistence, or the same amount with far smaller average expenditure of time and effort. But we must find a method by which all these idlers, compulsory or voluntary, shall be brought into production, and all these workers whose efforts are directed into wrong channels shall become fruitful in their labours.

* * *

Before we go any further let us make up our minds for the wholesale destruction of preconceived notions, it is quite apparent that, the enormous waste of human labour entailed, in the selling of all the products of man’s industry cannot be eliminated by anything short of the abolition of sale and therefor of production for sale. Nor can unemployment be abolished, it is equally evident, until men’s employment ceases to be dependent upon the sale of the goods they produce—which again means that production for sale must go. And again, it is quite certain that we shall have to have a very different set of social conditions and a very different distribution of social power before those idlers, the master class, can be brought into production and distribution, and compelled to contribute their share to the common labour fund, in return for the food they eat, the clothes they wear, and the houses they live in. So it is plain that the method we are looking for must involve very great changes in our social structure, and that before we can accept, such changes many of the ideas current among us to-day, and many of our common ways of looking at things, must go into the melting-pot together.

* * *

Why do working-class men and women have to sell their strength and skill (commonly but wrongly called their “labour”) to the masters for wages or salary ?

Because the masters own and control all the means by which people to-day can produce the things by which they live…..that is, all the land, mines, factories, machinery, raw material, railways, ships, and so on.

Why do the masters not have to sell their strength and skill, or, indeed, why do they not have to work at all, in order to live ?

Because they own the means and instruments by which all wealth is produced and distributed, and owning these things, own also the wealth which is produced with their aid.

Why are there at all times many workers who are unable to get employment ?

Because the goods in the production of which they seek employment are only produced for sale and when such goods cannot be sold the owners of the means of production will not employ workers to produce them,

Why will not the owner of these means of production employ workers to produce goods which cannot be sold ?

Because, firstly, in order to maintain himself in the position of property-owner (that is, to keep solvent) he must pay his way, which he can only do by turning the wealth his employees produce into money, or in other words, by selling it ; secondly, in order to live without himself producing wealth the employer must secure that produced by others (his employees). But as he cannot satisfy his needs with the actual goods his employees produce, any more than he can pay his debts with them, again he must sell them. And if he cannot sell them he could [not] continue to stand the expense of their production.

It is seen how all these things have their root in the basic condition—the private ownership by a class of the means and instruments of production and distribution. Clearly, then, private ownership in these things—in all things which are necessary for the sustenance and well-being of mankind, in fact—must go.

That, in brief, is the Socialist remedy. Private ownership in the instruments of labour and the raw material, in the land, mines, factories, machinery, railways, canals, ships, and the like of all these things, must cease. They must become the property of the whole community, and be controlled and operated by the whole community. Can anything be simpler than that?

Socialism, after all, is very simple. There is never any need to wrap it up in hard terms. It is just a social system based upon the common ownership of the means of living, as the present social system—capitalism-is based upon the private ownership of these things.

In a future issue it will be shown what will follow from the changed property condition.

A. E. Jacomb

Shall We Work Harder? (1909)

From the August 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. W. H. Lever, M.P., writing in the Anti-Socialist says,

“The more consideration I give to the aims and objects of the Socialists the more I am confirmed in my opinion that Socialism cannot possibly achieve social betterment and increased social happiness.

“Whatever poverty we have to-day is entirely due to the fact that the world is not producing sufficient commodities to satisfy the world’s requirements. Not until we have a greater production of all that goes to make for social well-being shall we have a more even distribution of social well-being and comforts and less poverty.”

Now to see if poverty is due to an insufficiency of wealth to meet the world’s requirements.

Mr. Chiozza Money informs us in his “Riches and Poverty” that the annual aggregate income of the United Kingdom amounts to, roughly, £1,700,000,000 or £40 per head of the population, or, assuming that each family on the average consists of five persons, £200 per family.

But is the annual income so distributed that each family receives £200 per annum, or a proportionate sum according to its number ? The answer is obvious to any member of the working class. About half the wealth produced (and corresponding income), or £830,000,000, is taken by about 1 million persons, each with an income of over £160 or, again assuming that each of these persons is the head of a family of live we get 5 million people, while the other half, or £880,000,000, is taken by 38 million persons, all of whom are in receipt of less than £160 per family yearly. But if we extend our investigation a little further we shall find that 1,250,000 persons enjoy an aggregate annual income of £585,000,000. At one end of the social ladder we have ”one third of our population living on the verge of hunger,” while at the other end we have 250,000 persons, or with their dependents, 1,250,000 persons, enjoying an aggregate income of about £450 per head or £2,250 per family.

Yet Mr. “Millionaire” Lever informs us that he is of the opinion that we must first increase the amount of material wealth before we can “achieve increased social betterment.” 

Increase the means of wealth production to any extent you like and it can be shown that the workers would be where they are to-day—in poverty. (An instance is recorded in our issue of March last under the heading “A Cutting Cutting” where a surplus of textile products provided a splendid opportunity for a lock-out of the operatives and a little more starvation.) The introduction of new and cheaper methods of production, and therefore, means of producing wealth in greater abundance, to-day only results in the throwing out of employment many of the workers engaged in the particular industry in which the new methods are introduced, an increase in the army of the unemployed, greater poverty and misery for the workers. True, a reduction in the time necessary for the production of the necessaries of life means the cheapening of the cost of living ; but a fall in the cost of living results in the cheapening of the production and maintenance of the worker. The continued and enhanced competition of the workers for jobs soon reduces wages to the new cost of subsistence, while a decrease in wages results in the increased exploitation of the worker, a greater amount of surplus-value or profit for the employers, and an even greater disparity between the two classes. So then, while the means of production and distribution remain in the hands of a small section of the community, any new inventions that may arise to lessen the time necessary for the production of wealth only results in increased affluence and luxury for the few while the great bulk of the people remain in a perpetual state of poverty.

Not until the whole of the means and implements of production and distribution are owned and controlled by, and in the interest of, the entire community, will the great mass of the people enjoy the advantages that accrue from an improvement in the means of wealth production. Then, and not until then, will every new invention be hailed as an advantage to all, either to reduce the collective labour of the community or to increase the comforts and opportunities of its members.

If then, it is possible to produce sufficient wealth to satisfy the requirements of the whole community under the present wasteful competitive system, how much more within the bounds of possibility will it be under a system where competition for existence will be entirely eliminated and where industry will be so organised that only that labour which is absolutely necessary for the production of wealth will be expended, where the large army of people now engaged in the advertising trade, as travellers, policemen, soldiers, man-‘o-warsmen, workhouse officials, flunkeys, judges, lawyers, clerks, priests, and a host of others would be employed in useful, productive labour. These trades and professions arise out of and are necessary under a system based upon the private monopoly of the means of life, and will disappear with their transformation from private to social property.

Mr. Lever continues “The natural order of social progress must inevitably be first to produce material comfort, followed by intellectual, moral and social advancement.” It is something for a member of the capitalist class to recognise the necessity for satisfying the material wants and requirements of the community before any improvement in the intellectual and moral status of the people can be effected. When the means of decent living are assured to all, then and only then will the great mass of the people be elevated from the physical, intellectual and moral enslavement in which they are enveloped to-day. The means of life can only be assured to the whole of society by the demolition of Capitalism and the establishment of Socialism. This can be achieved when the workers get to understand their true class position, see the necessity for the change and determine to emancipate themselves from the slavery in which they exist to-day, brush aside the idea that “Socialism will not come in our time,” and realise the fact that as soon as the workers, who outnumber the other class by about eight to one, understand and determine to have Socialism, they will get it. As the late Lord Salisbury once said, “Nothing can go against the voice of the people.”

So then, join the S.P.G.B. immediately you understand and agree with its principles, and make one more pillar in the foundation of the Socialist Republic.

H. A. Young