Party News from the October 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard
Thursday, October 8, 2026
News in Review: Berlin again (1962)
Berlin again
Berlin seems to be developing into one of capitalism’s nastier perennials.
With each year’s squabbles over the divided city — some of the more minor ones being prime examples of the ridiculous lengths to which capitalist powers go in the risky game of international tit-for-tat–the Russians advance their cause in Germany a little further.
Last year’s wall, a temporary-seeming structure then, is now solider and more permanent. The East German police range their guns along it. This year the Russians have withdrawn their commandant in East Berlin, leaving the Western powers to negotiate with the civilian administration there, or else with nobody.
In retaliation the Western powers have forced the Russians to use a more direct route when taking the guard to their war memorial which stands in West Berlin.
This petty and undignified bickering is only the detail of a more serious situation.
The Soviet object, it seems, is to force the Western powers to acknowledge that Berlin — and indeed Germany — is permanently divided. (Permanently, that is, until another European war draws out the frontiers again, creating new zones of dispute and tension.) If they can do this, the Russians will have won a new foothold in Europe and another buffer state will be between her and any threat of a re-emergent German capitalism.
There was a lot of indignant sob-stuff in the press about Peter Fechter, the 18 year old who was shot down by the East Berlin police and left by them to bleed to death beneath the Wall.
None of the papers recalled that when Fechter was born they were all busily telling us that it was heroic and laudable to kill Germans. At that time the Allied air offensive against Germany was at its height; the persistent bombers killed thousands of Germans quite indiscriminately. It was not their fault that the infant Fechter survived, to die so horribly later.
Berlin is typical of capitalism’s international rivalries. It is fought out over apparently minor details. But its potential is frighteningly dangerous.
And it is all sustained by cynical lies.
Chinese Bomb
Although they were quick to retract it, the statement from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington that China would be able to set off a nuclear explosion in a few months was enough to send a shiver down our spines.
More bombs. More tests. More fallout. More suffering. More death.
That is the immediate prospect. For the longer run, China’s bomb will mean a fiercer arms race and an increase in the tension in any dispute between her and the other great powers. And perhaps in the end a bigger and more destructive war.
China, like any aspirant capitalist power, has long been determined to make nuclear weapons. And, just like the others, she will excuse them with any sort of lying propaganda.
Last year, the general manager of Reuters persuaded the Chinese Foreign Secretary to talk on this subject. Marshall Chen Yi said that China’s having the bomb would actually decrease the chance of a war, because when only a few powers had it they were more tempted to throw their weight about.
We may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, for it is the very reverse of the deterrent theory which the nuclear powers now use to justify their having the bomb. These countries have always claimed that what stops a war is the fact that they have an almost exclusive possession of the biggest of all sticks.
Who should we believe in this? London, Washington and Moscow? Or Peking? In fact, nobody need worry about the answer to that question.
For what will China do when she has got the bomb? Will she follow the logic of Chen Yi’s argument and give the secret to the world? To India, for example? To Japan? If all the other nuclear powers are anything to go by China will forget her big-talk and keep her secrets to herself.
And perhaps we may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, too.
Capitalism will always have its ghastly weapons and it will always have its paid liars to excuse them. While they are spinning their lies the weapons get bigger and more horrifying and the conflicts grow more agonising.
Still feel like smiling?
Farnborough
Apart from the little-boy excitements of the machines themselves, what was the interesting and significant thing about this year’s Air Show at Farnborough?
Not so long ago it was a popular working-class idea that the aircraft industry was bound to expand into the future and that nobody who made his career in it could fail. This was the reason for many workers—among them graduates from universities—taking jobs with the aeroplane manufacturers.
But like many working-class assumptions, this one took no account of the nature of the beast called capitalism.
There were no turbo-prop aircraft on show this year. Yet the British aircraft industry once calculated that these would be more economical to run than the big jets and would therefore sell better to the airlines which, for all their superficial glamour, must have a sordid capitalist interest in cheap operating costs. Boeing, Douglas and Sud-Aviation in France proved this calculation wrong. So the turbo-prop is a dead-end and all the money tied up in it has gone down the drain. BOAC has its last Britannias up for sale for next to nothing.
Now the British industry is gambling on the future success of the VC10 and the de Havilland Trident. For neither of these are the prospects golden. If the fears which are expressed for them come to reality there will probably be another big cut-back in the aircraft industry and a lot more of its workers unemployed.
The airlines, too, are facing their problems. To stay in the race, each of them is forced to buy the latest, biggest, fastest (which usually also means the noisiest) machines on offer. The result up to now is that the number of seats available far exceeds the passengers who want them. So there is fierce competition, especially on the Trans-Atlantic runs.
This has caused most airlines in the world to fail to make a profit. Last month BEA one of the few profitable lines up to the present—announced that interest payments had turned a working profit of £550,000 into a loss of a million and a half pounds.
We all know what capitalism says must happen to an industry which does not make a profit. Aircraft are something of a special case; there are elements of national prestige and strategy to take into account. But in the end, in one way or another, the rule will apply.
For a lot of aircraft workers it looks like being a very bumpy ride.
Fasten your safety belts, please.
Nkrumah strikes
Doctor Nkrumah has succeeded in battling many people with his latest round of deportations and imprisonments.
It is simple enough to discern the reason for his expelling the Bishops Roseveare and Patterson. Both of them were involved in criticising the Young Pioneers, a nationalistic youth organisation whose members are required to chant, among other nonsense, that “Nkrumah never dies.”
Nobody who knows anything about Ghana under Nkrumah expected the Bishops to get away with suggesting that in the country’s youngsters should spend less time in worshipping the god in Accra and more in the (equally futile) worship of the god who they say is in a place called heaven.
But it is harder to explain the detention of Mr. Adamafio, Mr. Cofie Crabbe and Mr. Ako Adjei. The first two of these men were up to the hilt in Nkrumah’s campaign against the churches. We might have thought them safe in their jobs.
Perhaps they were involved in the bomb-throwing which has been going on in Ghana of late. Or perhaps they were just becoming too great rivals to Nkrumah’s supremacy.
Now they have gone and Krobo Edusei, famous for his wife’s £3,000 bed, is back in the government after his dismissal six months ago. Nkrumah, already overloaded with jobs (among others, he controls the Convention People’s Party, the Ghana Civil Service and the Volta Dam project) has taken on the Foreign Secretaryship.
These moves may be difficult to explain to our entire satisfaction, but one or two things can be said for sure.
Nkrumah is a dictator. His Young Pioneers are a copy, albeit a weak one, of the Hitler Youth movement. In taking on totalitarian powers, Nkrumah has betrayed the promises he made when he was fighting the British for Ghana’s independence.
There is nothing new in this. Postwar history is full of examples of nationalist dictators who ousted their country’s occupiers and came to power themselves with slogans of eternal liberty.
Many people outside Ghana were taken in by Nkrumah’s propaganda in the old days. Shocked though they may now be, they still lend their ears to the nationalists who are currently banging the independence drum.
Let Nkrumah’s Ghana stand as a warning that national independence has nothing to offer the ordinary people who are misled into supporting it and who end up by being oppressed and exploited by it.
Dr. Soblen
The death of Doctor Soblen brought to a close another of capitalism’s nasty little episodes.
Soblen killed himelf because, above everything else, he did not want to go back to the United States to serve his sentence for spying for Russia. The British government, perhaps at the insistence of Washington, were determined that he should be sent back. To get their way, they were prepared to break some of the legalities which at other times they hypocritically defend.
Great Britain has signed a treaty of extradition with, among others, the United States. This treaty means that if, say, a murderer escapes to America the government there will catch him and end him to this country for trial.
This treaty expressly excludes spies. The reasons are obvious, all countries have their network of espionage and it would be embarrassing for all of them if, should one of their agents flee, he could be extradited by the country he had been spying on.
Soblen should have been covered by this provision; in a sense, he was. The government never fought his case on the grounds that he was to be extradited. They only insisted that he should be deported.
But deportation only means that a person is sent out of a country—it does not mean that he must be sent to any particular other country. He can choose, in fact, the frontier by which he leaves, if Soblen had been deported he might have chosen to go to one of the Iron Curtain countries where, no doubt, he would have been welcomed as a hero.
The government were, of course, aware of this. In the name of the Anglo-American alliance they ignored the laws which they themselves have made to make their system run more smoothly.
Soblen was a tragic dupe to the illusion that Russian capitalism is worth working and dying for. This does not obscure the fact that he was a victim of the callous cynicism which all capitalist powers—including Russia fall back on when it suits them.
South Africa
At the time of the Sharpeville shootings and the “Boycott South African” campaign many anti-apartheid spokesmen went to great lengths to show how South Africa’s economy would suffer as a result of world opinion and moral indignation.
Up to the present the owners of the means of life in South Africa are no more or less affected by trials and tribulations than their brothers in less race-prejudiced countries. In fact, some foreign industrialists think the place has some attraction?.
Textile chief Mr. Cyril Lord intends to move the contents of two cotton mills from Lancashire to the Bantu areas of the Union. He says the British Government has failed to protect textile interests against cheap Asian competition. Some 100 key men are offered jobs abroad; the rest face the sack.
A South African official in London said: “Mr. Lord will have the advantages of cheap labour among others.” (Daily Herald, September 12th, 1962.)
Will Mr. Lord continue to demand that the British Government protect their textile interests by keeping out his cheap South African cotton goods? Boycotters and “Ban this and that” mongers may note that, while workers may be threatened with ills such as unemployment, propertied groups do not suffer economically, even though they sanction or commit acts which are quite anti-social.
Made in Britain (1962)
Exports and Imports
Before the war “Made in Britain” was a selling point. At any rate, enough manufacturers thought so to make something of a splash about it in their advertisements. We don’t hear so much of this now. Down at any youth club, we know, it is Italian clothes which are all the rage. Swedish tableware has won a name for itself as an elegant, durable wedding present. The black leather jackets knock up their tons on motor cycles from Japan, which also supplied a lot of the cameras that clicked away on our damp beaches this summer.
To the casual observer—and this is how we can describe most of the workers whose fortunes under capitalism depend upon their observations being anything but casual—this gives the impression that British industry is being engulfed by a wave of foreign imports. This impression is often coloured by heart-racking stories of the cheap labour which foreign industries are supposed to use. Stories of pregnant Japanese women sweating out long hours in textile mills for next to no pay. Of slum dwellers in Milan being squeezed in the factory until their pips squeak. English employers, of course, are supposed to play fair. No cheap labour is used here. All of this country’s exports are fairly priced and compete honestly on the world’s markets. So runs the popular story. You can hear it in any City restaurant any day of the week.
From there, the argument progresses simply. Because they use cheap labour, the foreign industries can knock out dirt cheap goods. But the British manufacturer, selling his products as if he were playing cricket, sticks to the rules and poor, simple, honest fool that he is, is undercut and outsold all over the world. So British industry packs up and we are left unemployed, staring at shop windows full of cheap cameras from Tokyo and cheap shirts from Hong Kong. This should be enough to teach us all to buy British, even if it does cost us twice as much from our wages.
This argument is so popular, so convenient to British capitalism—and so wrong—that it is worth dealing with.
First of all, nobody should run away with the idea that imports are a one-way traffic. This country, although it imports an enormous amount of wealth, is also one of the world’s great exporters. Last June, for example, Britain exported £327.8 million worth of goods. This holds good also for the specific case of Japan, which is the villain of so many of the dark import/export sales. According to the Director of the Anglo-Japanese Economic Institute, who wrote to The Guardian on 15th August last, Japan is importing British goods at the rate of one million pounds worth each week. Japanese business men do not like the prospect of being outsold any more than their English counterparts do. The letter went on:
” . . many Japanese industries have been protesting to their own Government about possible flooding of the Japanese market by foreign goods once Japan’s 90 per cent import liberalisation plan is in full operation this October. It seems there are two ways of looking at everything.”
British business men should appreciate the force of this as much as anyone. For they, like the Japanese, complain about foreign imports at the same time as they are exporting for all they are worth. Some of them shelter behind protected markets in this country, but demand that the industries which supply them with their raw materials should be subjected to the rigours of freely competing imports. The agricultural interests in this country are notorious for adopting this attitude. Although they prosper on padded home market, British farmers do not care about undermining the interests of other industries in this country, if this means that they might be able to buy cheaper food for their animals or cheaper fertilisers. They object to the chemical industry having its own protected market, making them pay more than they would for foreign chemicals. Last March, for example, the chairman of the Farmers’ and Smallholders’ Association was advising all farmers to buy Italian fertilisers because this was cheaper than the same stuff turned out by British chemical firms. This may be good business for the farmer, but not so for ICI, who were at the time agitating for an anti-dumping duty on imports of the fertiliser.
Another example of this is the attitude of British European Airways, who can always be relied upon to put up a bitter opposition to any private airlines application for a licence to ply along one of their routes. BEA’s objections have nothing new about them. They plead that they have spent time and money on building up the routes and that they will only be able to afford the expensive equipment which a big airline needs if they are allowed a monopoly of British operators on their routes. In their last annual report, they said that they would not make up their mind about how many of the new Trident jets they would order until they knew what competition the government is prepared to allow over these airlines.
Nobody who knows anything about capitalism would expect BEA to surrender their established fields of exploitation without a fight. Neither would they expect any capitalist concern to protect some other industry’s interests. In the same report, BEA announced their new, cut-rate “walk-on” fares to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast. These low fares are especially designed to attract passengers away from the railways. It is obvious that BEA, like any capitalist business, favours competition when they are making the running. In fact, the railways could reasonably object to the new fares by using the airline’s own arguments against them. They could plead that they have built up the passenger traffic over the routes which BEA is now trying to dominate. They could argue that they have a lot of expensive equipment to buy and do not know whether this will be worthwhile if they are to be so easily undercut.
Undercutting
This sort of tangle is not confined to domestic industries. Early last year, an application from the Steel Company of Wales to be allowed to import cheap American coking coal was fought, and defeated by the National Coal Board. The fact that the coal industry had succeeded in preventing the Americans from undercutting them did not stop them trying to do the same thing to coal industries abroad. Lord Robens, chairman of the NCB, is itching for this country to join the European Common Market and on August 29th last he gave his reasons for this. British coal, he said, could undersell coal from the Ruhr into Hamburg; the only thing that slops it doing so is the import quota which the German government, doubtless under pressure from Lord Robens’ counterparts in their country, uses to restrict British coal imports to 400,000 tons a year. Lord Robens frets under this restriction. Without it. he thinks, the coal mines could double or treble their sales in Germany. He likes competition provided it is the “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose” variety.
It is obvious, then, that this business of imports and exports is very much two-sided. A broad view sees that the exports of British coal mines are the imports of German power stations and that the exports of the Honda motor cycle firm are the imports of the British dealers in those machines. But capitalists are seldom interested in broad views or any ether such concept. Any industry in capitalism must sell to survive and none of them can afford to be particular about how they make their sales. Sometimes they have to put in some backstairs pressure work upon a government department to protect their market. Sometimes they have to indulge in some double-talk and black-is-white argument. Sometimes they must be inconsistent. And sometimes they must tell lies. For none of them can ever cry enough. While they protect their own markets they must always be seeking new ones, always trying to move into some other industry’s established field of selling. This is typical of the muddle and wasteful anomalies which capitalism produces in such abundance.
Unhappily—and in some ways almost unbelievably—many workers take their masters’ part in this struggle. The miners were behind the NCB’s fight against the American coal. Presumably Japanese workers will back their employers in their protests to the government in Tokyo over the freeing of imports into Japan. Textile workers over here complain about the cheap goods coming in from Japan and other Far Eastern countries, without realising that these goods may have been made in such abundance and so cheaply on machines which were exported from this country. It is too obvious that international trade in an established part of capitalism which no amount of prejudiced and one-sided objection can break down.
This reasoning may not appeal to the redundant motor cycle worker as he watches the Hondas roaring along the bypass. But he would do better to consider the root cause of his unemployment. He was laid off because it was not profitable to employ him any longer. Because everything it makes is meant to be sold, capitalism fits everything into the strait jacket of profitability. If profitability says that foreign goods must be imported, in they come. If it says that an industry must close down, if does so.
Profitability, for example, says that shipworkers must be laid off. In the boom of the early fifties many ships, especially tankers, were produced on speculative orders which hoped that when they were built there would be a market for them. But by the time the ships were ready a new trading pattern had developed and with it a demand for the enormous “super tankers.” This forced a lot of the smaller tankers into the grain market, flooding the market for bulk carriers, bringing freight rates down and driving the shipping industry into a slump. This is typical of the anarchic problems which capitalism’s profitability mania creates in abundance, but can never solve. It was not caused by foreign competition; only aggravated by the fact that all the world’s shipyards were going flat out in boom time to cash in on the market. That is something which every industry tries to do, and will always try, so long as capitalism is with us.
That is where our unemployed worker, and the clerk in the City restaurant, should look for the key to unravel their problems. There has never been any lack of medicine men to peddle their remedies for capitalism’s ailments. But the ailments keep on showing themselves with ever greater complications. Nothing can be too drastic to cure them. Even a bit of straight thinking about capitalism.
Ivan
This year’s T.U.C. (1962)
It is normal at trade union conferences for numbers of resolutions to be carried that have no practical outcome and serve no purpose except to indicate the feelings of delegates on all sorts of issues about which they protest loudly because they cannot think of anything else to do. Delegates have only to look back at the resolutions they carried last year and the years before to realise that nobody takes any notice of most of them, least of all the Government to whom many are conveyed.
This year, however, there were one or two decisions of the T.U.C. that may, for better or for worse, have some consequences that may be worth considering.
The Delegates at the Blackpool Conference were almost unanimous in supporting a resolution calling on the General Council to examine the possibility of reorganising the structure of both the T.U.C. and the trade union movement “with a view to making it better fitted to meet modern industrial conditions.” Nothing will happen immediately as a result of this resolution. The intention is that the General Council should complete its examination in time for next year’s conference, but Mr. Woodcock warned that it would take at least two years. The movers took care not to indicate the kind of alterations of structure that may be found desirable, this reticence being the only way to get the delegates to agree wholeheartedly to the resolution. As Mr. Woodcock remarked, each union is inclined to regard its own way of doing things the right one and the other fellow’s wrong. Though no particular changes were foreshadowed, one union, the Locomotive drivers, voted against the enquiry; they think it will probably recommend a merger with the National Union of Railwayman and they have no intention of merging.
Many times in its history the T.U.C. has seen delegates at its conferences pass resolutions calling for re-organisation of the unions. Not much has come of such resolutions because most trade unionists nowadays have the feeling that none of the changes likely to occur will make much difference. There was a time when trade unionists could get into excited argument about the respective merits of craft unions and industrial unions, about the benefits of amalgamation, and about giving the General Council of the T.U.C. authority to control the wage claims and strikes of affiliated unions. These causes still have their advocates, but it is all in a less heated atmosphere than once it was. Experience and disappointment have had a sobering effect. The collapse of the Triple Alliance of Miners, Railwaymen and Transport workers and the “General Strike” of 1926 have left their mark.
One of the periods of lively discussion about the trade unions was just after the first World War. In that atmosphere a resolution was carried at the 1919 T.U.C. instructing the General Council to examine the constitution of every affiliated union and on the information so obtained “to report upon what, in its opinion, is the most desirable and up-to-date method of organisation that will enable the workers by hand and brain to reap the full results of their toil.”
It was moved, seconded and carried without more than a hundred words of supporting speech by the mover, and no opposition. This could have been due to the unanimity on the part of the delegates, or to a general feeling that it was a pious resolution and nothing would come of it.
Whatever the explanation, nothing much did come of it.
The idea of giving the General Council power to control the unions has often been put forward, but has had little support in this country, most trade unionists obviously preferring to keep the power to decide on wage claims and any supporting action within their own organisation. A characteristic attitude was that of a Miners Federation delegate at the 1915 T.U.C. when opposing a resolution which had called on the T.U.C. to try to obtain an all-round 5s.. increase of wages:
“This is work for the Trade Unions themselves to tackle. So far as the Miners Federation is concerned, we should object to the Parliamentary Committee coming to us and trying to get us 5s. a week extra.”
After that speech the delegates would not even discuss the resolution any more and went on to next business.
And in 1919, when it was moved that the T.U.C. should undertake the amalgamation of all unions into one body, under control of the T.U.C., only one short opposition speech was made, but it was sufficient to kill the resolution: only seven delegates voted for it out of 851.
The opposer said: “I want to say that there is not a single Trade Union in the country that would submit to the control of the Parliamentary Committee. It is ridiculous to suppose that this Congress would ever submit to anything of the kind.”
This persistent opposition to formal proposals of a changed structure does not mean that the unions in Britain have not changed. By process of amalgamation of local unions into National bodies and of more or less associated unions into larger ones the number of unions has been nearly halved since 1913 (from 1,269 to 690), while membership has more than doubled, from 4.135,000 to 9,803,000. In 1913 about two-thirds of all trade unionists were in the small number of unions with over 50,000 members. Now membership is largely concentrated in seventeen unions above the 100,000 level. But 1913 has nothing like those mammoth unions, the Transport & General Workers with over 1,300,000 members and the A.E.U. with 982,000. Apart from the Miners who had 600,000 members in 1913 (and that was a more or less loose federation, not a concentrated body) the largest union in 1913 appears to have been the N.U.R. with 273,000 members.
While these trade union developments of half a century have been going on, and indeed inducing them, British capitalism has been organising into larger units, with employers federations acquiring more experience of handling “labour problems” and productivity techniques, and making more use of arbitration and conciliation machinery.
It is arguable whether the unions are a little more effective or a little less effective in dealing with the changed conditions. Certainly their members are dissatisfied with the results, but so they always were. Basically it is because the trade unions have never dealt with anything except the effects of capitalism, and capitalism has not changed in essentials.
The workers, including the “white collar” workers who are now increasingly entering the fold of trade union organisation, are still a class that lives by selling its labour power, its mental and physical energies, to the employers. Nothing has changed about that.
Contrasted with this country with its 650 unions, of which 183 are affiliated to the T.U.C., there are other countries in which the trade union movement has been reconstructed and streamlined or where the central trade union body has powers unknown and hitherto unacceptable here. But has it made any material difference? Are the workers of Austria, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, in any better situation?
The answer is, of course, that against the universal background of the capitalist wages system structural alterations can have only relatively small affect.
What is needed, as the Socialist has to go on repeating, is that the outlook and purpose of the working class have to be changed: not the grouping of non-Socialist trade unions into organisations of different size and shape, but the adoption of a different outlook and purpose. This aim is not the one for which trade unions exist or that they can achieve. It calls for Socialist understanding and political organisation and action, not on a craft or industrial or National basis but internationally, on the basis of the common interest of all workers in abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism.
Edgar Hardcastle
Branch News (1962)
Party News from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard
Dates to Remember. Saturday and Sunday, October 6th and 7th, venue Head Office, 52 Clapham High Street, SW4—occasion—the 1962 Autumn Delegate Meeting. Fuller details on meetings page. The Propaganda Committee are arranging an evening indoor meeting after the Sunday’s proceedings. Thursday, October 18th at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, W.C.1 at 7,30. Public meeting—support of Comrades and sympathisers will ensure that this meeting will he a successful one. Subject — “Labour Government or Socialism”. Speakers— Comrades E. Grant and E. Hardy. This is the first date that a meeting could be arranged after the Labour Party Conference and the speakers will be referring to this. As with all Party activity, the support of members is essential and is also most encouraging to those organising and speaking at the meetings—So Comrades, if you are not speaking or organising on this evening, please bring along as many friends and be available to help with literature sales, etc.
There will be a contingent of Socialist Party members in Brighton during the Labour Party Conference week which commences on October 1st. Our comrades will be around throughout the week to sell literature. Any Comrade living, or holidaying in the vicinity would be a welcome assistant. The Propaganda Committee are hoping to arrange some outdoor meetings at the week-end. The Comrades at Brighton will know about the meetings and will be able to give details to other Comrades who wish to support such meetings.
It is encouraging to see the list of lectures and meetings being held to start off the Autumn/Winter Propaganda session. Glasgow and Paddington Branches have arranged lectures right through to next Spring. Islington, Hackney and Lewisham, Ealing and Wembley Branches are also very energetic and have several meetings arranged. Hackney Branch for instance will hold regular meetings every second Wednesday in each month from October to March. All readers are cordially invited fas they are to all and every meeting of the Socialist Party of Great Britain—Executive Committee meetings included.
Lewisham Branch activity is increasing with the lectures arranged, correspondence with the Press, canvassing locally and work for the Bromley Group. The Branch members would be pleased if Comrades in near by branches could assist in billposting, printing and canvassing. A number of Branch members attended a public meeting of the local Committee of 100 and extended a challenge to debate. They hope the challenge will be accepted in the near future.
Ealing Branch commences its most ambitious programme of lectures, discussions and films. All members are asked to give the venture their fullest support and sympathisers are cordially invited. Two film shows are in the programme for October.
Wembley Branch Comrades were very gratified when comrade Michael’s recent talk on “The Socialist Revolution” attracted about twenty members of the local Labour Party Youth section (“Young Socialists”) There was good and lively discussion. September 10th was the date of the first indoor public meeting this Autumn, Comrade Hardy spoke on the “Common Market”. Among the other events planned the Branch hope to show a film on Cuba.
Two successful meetings have been held at Southsea this season. It is a pity that this station cannot be given greater attention. It was noted that audiences seemed more attentive than previously and literature sales were greater. Other outdoor meetings at Earls Court, in conjunction with Ealing Branch have been most encouraging, with large audiences and good literature sales.
Canvassing efforts continue month-by-month, and August 26th saw a small team visiting Stevenage in support of the new Mid-Herts Group. The Comrades hope that on the next more people will be at home to greet the canvassers. The result of the first canvass was rather disappointing but there will be another time!
The “New Zealand Building Worker” is reprinting the whole of our January Common Market articles in serial form. The first section appeared in their July issue and we have received their July and August numbers. Each section has a heading. The July issue contained the following:— “For the benefit of our members we intend to reprint from the Socialist Standard (England) a survey and analysis of the Common Market (E.E.C.). The complicated situation the United Kingdom finds herself in today is revealed in these articles which will be reprinted in succeeding issues of our journal”,
Phyllis Howard
What is a commodity? (1962)
A commodity can be defined as any useful article produced for sale in order to obtain profit. A product of labour can also be described as a useful article which satisfies some human need or want. To point out the distinction between products of labour and commodities is the chief object of this article, Therefore, to begin with, it should be emphasised that while all commodities are products of labour, it does not follow that all products of labour are commodities. A person may, with his own materials and labour, make a chair for his own use. Such an article, although useful, is not a commodity. The sole distinction between what is merely a useful article and something which is produced for sale is a social one.
We see practically everywhere a wide range of merchandise displayed, with tickets to indicate the price for which the owners will sell. It all seems to be so natural and simple and self explanatory. But the origin, growth and development of a commodity make it something more than a chair, etc. If we examine the definition given above we shall find that it implies private ownership and also the desire of the owner to sell and his prospects of obtaining profit. This in turn means people willing to buy. The circumstances are social and many complications arise therefrom.
The commodity character of wealth is of comparatively recent origin. For countless generations men produced wealth without creating a single commodity. In the times preceding private property, the social relations between early men were simple, direct and useful. Their labour was expended in obtaining and transforming nature-given materials into useful articles for their own consumption. They made their own tools and weapons, hunted, fished and cultivated. No useful article, whether produced by men or nature, could be bought or sold. Private ownership of the land and other instruments of production did not exist. The only obstacles which early men encountered were the natural elements. If this is kept in the forefront the nature of commodity wealth should be cleat.
Irrespective of how it is produced all wealth is made to be used. Use value is a material property of any article. It is physically consumed in the satisfying of some, human want and its production, whether by man or nature, is a physical process. This applies to commodities although they are, primarily, produced for sale and profit as distinct from use. In the sphere of utility we are dealing with natural and material properties at all times. For example, shirts, shoes and coals are all physical objects and, are the products of weaving and shirt-making, tanning and shoemaking. and weaving and tailoring. The quality of the labour is also natural and physical, it is in all cases concrete labour, or the labour of the individual producers. The utility of such articles is determined by the physical quality of the labour and natural materials.
Value as a social phenomenon, although a reality, is non material in character. A commodity does not acquire value merely because human labour is embodied in it. As previously stated products were in the past, and shall again in the future, be created without acquiring value. It is solely due to definite historical conditions that articles for sale are born. Private ownership of the land and other means of production was the means by which a minority of society obtained control of all natural wealth and of the useful labour of the majority of people. It is only within such social conditions that embodied labour acquires value and the product of labour become commodities. Value is a social reality, therefore, but not a material or indispensable part of the article.
An article for sale is solely a value to its owner. To its potential buyer it must be a useful thing, i.e., a social utility. This is the essential basis of value. However, its owner who has produced it for sale is not primarily concerned with its utility. So far as he is concerned use value is secondary and is only of interest to him in so far as it enables a sale to take place. The realising of its value is his chief if not sole concern.
Wherever we find capitalist society there we shall find commodity wealth and the profit motive. This wealth, socially produced by workers, is privately owned by non producers, capitalists. The absurdity of poverty-stricken producers side by side with wealthy non-producers is to be found everywhere. The physical and mechanical side of wealth production is efficient enough to accommodate the needs of the people. It is solely the ownership side, sale and purchase as means of consumption, which causes the trouble The establishment of Socialism will end this state of affairs. The units of wealth created in a socialist society will not be combinations of use value and value. The loss of the commodity status would not in any way diminish the usefulness of the wealth produced. The essentials of life, socially produced and owned, would be available for all according to their needs. Buying and selling and profit would have no place.
John Higgins
The Passing Show: The Wall (1962)
If we do not realise that the third world war—with its probable loss of many millions of human lives may break out at any minute, it is not the fault of our rulers. They never weary of warning us. If the third world war does come, we cannot say we have not been told of its likelihood many, many times in advance. Whether the recurrent crises are over China, or Cuba, or the U2 planes, or Berlin—to name only a few current head-liners—the leaders of the Western and Eastern blocs never miss a chance to tell us that this is exactly the kind of behaviour—by the other side— that could well lead to the ultimate explosion. And these speeches and warnings are not simply fortuitous. They are part of the necessary conditioning of the workers in all parts of the world to the idea that war may come at any moment, so that if it does come they will once again be prepared to go out and sacrifice their lives in defence of their masters’ profits.
The wall
The Berlin wall is high up on the list of the pretexts which the great powers are keeping warm as excuses for a third world war when they decide it will be in their interests to have one. For a pretext is all the wall could be.
Let us see what both sides say about it. The Western bloc say it has been wantonly built by the East Germans right across the middle of Berlin, dividing German from German, in order to prevent East Germans fleeing to the west. The Eastern bloc says that the wall is a deplorable necessity, which had to be built to fence off West Berlin, since it had been turned into a nest of spies and agents-provocateurs. Both sides agree that the wall is regrettable and unnatural, but each blames the other for its erection.
Frontiers
In fact, there is nothing unnatural about the wall. Frontiers, which divide the world up into segments, are a natural concomitant of capitalism. All capitalist states, whether their frontiers are old-established or newly-drawn, erect fences to keep their own people in and “foreigners” out. Where frontiers are changed, through wars or treaties, defences are soon put up along the new lines. And anyone trying to cross the frontier without the necessary papers and permissions will find himself treated as roughly as anyone caught on the Berlin wall, especially if the two powers on either side of the frontier happen to be hostile to each other. The only thing that is “unnatural” about the Berlin wall is that such a long time elapsed before it was built to mark the new frontier. There are reasons for that, of course; the East German rulers hoped for a long time that they could extend their sway over West Germany as well, while the West German leaders hoped to bring East Germany under their control. The building of the Berlin wall marks the abandonment, or the postponement, of these hopes by the East German regime.
The same language
The Western bloc makes great play with the fact that the wall divides German-speaking people from other German-speaking people. This, of course, is nothing unusual. The Franco-Belgian frontier divides French-speaking people from each other; the Belgian-Dutch frontier divides Dutch-speaking people from each other; the Swiss frontier cuts across areas of German-speaking people, of Italian-speaking people, of French-speaking people. The majority of frontiers in South America divide Spanish-speaking people from each other.
In Africa, the great powers in the last century cut up the continent among themselves without the slightest reference to the wishes or language of the inhabitants, so that there are now very few frontiers in Africa which do not cut across the old tribal or speech-group lines. For the capitalist power-groups of the world —East and West—to make public professions of regret at the carving of Germany and Berlin into two pieces is sheer hypocrisy.
Divided world
Socialists oppose the Berlin wall for the same reasons that they oppose every other capitalist-made frontier—that it divides the people of the world from each other. So much emphasis is placed on whether a man is a Frenchman or a German or an African that it is often forgotten that he is primarily a human being. Socialists oppose state frontiers because they keep human beings apart; frontiers will cease to exist under Socialism. It is just as iniquitous to build barbed-wire fortifications manned with troops and police to keep Frenchmen and Germans apart as it is to keep Germans from each other. As so often happens when the issues of the day are probed more deeply, it becomes clear that it is useless to oppose the manifestations of capitalism while supporting capitalism itself. For the wall is merely a symptom of the class-divided, and therefore frontier-divided, world which produced it.
Alwyn Edgar
Do it yourself ! (1962)
The working class are enthusiastic when they do things for fun. Pottering about in the garden, tinkering with a car, decorating or repairing the home, or knocking up something from the do-it-yourself kit, these jobs they do with much care and joy.
But spare time occupations, although they provide fun, are more usually sternly necessary because they save the worker from having to pay to have the job done elsewhere. As anyone knows with bills to pay, it is a strain on the household purse otherwise.
In fun or in earnest, the desire when hungry is to eat, when tired to sleep, when cold to seek warmth. These satisfactions are brought about by men producing the things which satisfy these wants.
Under Capitalism, needs and wages are for the working class economic twins. The food, clothing and shelter they buy are dependent upon the price they can get for their labour power. Their lives are fashioned by wages. Wage-labour, prices, and profits, are the economic features of private property ownership. The The bread we eat is produced in order that a profit can be got out of the baking, and this like everything else that, is bought and sold has a direct bearing on the question of unemployment. No profit, no jobs.
The means of production throughout the entire world are today owned by the Capitalist class who employ the working class in order to exploit them. So that the working class may be maintained and reproduced they receive back from the wealth they have produced enough roughly to keep them fit for further work. All the surplus the working class have produced then goes to the Capitalist class.
This surplus value is the source of the disparity between rich and poor, reflected throughout the world in the fact that a relative few languish in luxury whilst millions struggle in misery and poverty.
To those not conscious of the whys and wherefores, this is a problem which may appear insoluble or which will at least take years to solve. To be sure, men will not allow a problem to prevail once they realise the solution. We could have a world where all would contribute what they could to society and take what they needed out of all that was available. This would be a much more simple and sane way of producing and distributing. In order to do this, society must own in common all the means of wealth production and distribution.
This is Socialism. Instead of leaving it to others to bring about, do it yourself!
Joe McGuinness
Betting Becomes Respectable (1962)
Now that the new legalised betting shops are off to a good start and working class punters adorned with the dubious honour of a mantle of bourgeois respectability wherever they can lose their fair days pay in a more dignified way; it may be timely to compare the old back street hole-in-the-corner betting dens of Manchester with some of the present chromium plated outfits blossoming forth under the new regulations.
No longer is there any need to slip surreptitiously down a back alley or dodge P.C. 49 and the Black Maria in a frantic effort to play up one’s pension or the rent on the elusive 2.30 winner; one awaits the result, jammed tight in a sweating mass of the unfortunate class of society, who never seem to tire of trying to gamble their way out of poverty, merely because they do not yet realise the cause of it.
Those repulsive conditions of working class punters, in grim contrast to the environment and atmosphere of Ascot lawns, etc., have given way, despite the hypocritical opposition of the men of God, to armchair betting in the main street betting shops, with loudspeaker commentaries, official receipts for all commissions, and rapid payment after results and the weigh in.
Of course, the usual anarchic laws of competition may eventually force the small fry betting shops to the wall or into take-overs by the tycoons in the business.
Many bookmakers who operated under cover from one address only before legal status was conferred on them, now have several new offices all doing brisk business. It certainly appears that betting on horses is on the increase, at any rate in Manchester. What with this and the Pools, Premium Bonds, Chemin-de-fer clubs, Bingo Parlours, etc., ordinary traders with stock on their hands lament the drain on the wage packets of otherwise potential customers.
However, there is no need for us to shed tears. Perhaps it may serve to teach them a thing or two about the competitive system they are so fond of ! Rather do we point to the cause of all this gambling activity—the crazy profit system of production which divorces the producers from their products, leads them up the garden to chase shadows in State-organised lotteries, Football Pools and Bingo rackets, and the rest. This is typical of capitalism in 1962: but in a cooperative world of production for use, a money-less, class-less, trade-less community, gambling will cease simply because profits and losses, poverty, privilege and luxury will give way to the social equilibrium of production for use.
This is something which the citizens of Manchester have yet to learn despite the fact that it is over a century ago since Engels sign-posted the way for them. Manchester may currently boast the tallest building in Europe, but it certainly does not stand very high in recording its vote for a saner social system.
G. R. Russell
50 Years Ago: Plimsoll Line (1962)
Samuel Plimsoll hated Toryism, but the depth of his hatred of Liberal government was shown when he said in the House of Commons on May 14, 1873:
“I am a Liberal of the Liberals. I have supported Liberal measures ever since I came into this House, but it has been borne into my mind that the interest of the working classes, when at issue between themselves and capitalists, are safer with the Conservatives than with the Liberals.”
Thirty-one years after the load line was lowered; thirty-one years after the Plimsoll Mark was established, David Lloyd George became President of the Board of Trade, and he wiped out the labours of Plimsoll by issuing new regulations raising the load line. The Plimsoll line—the charter of the seamen—was dead. In its place was substituted the Lloyd George load line.
*
On Saturday, September 21st, the Board of Trade enquiry into the loss of the North Briton was held at Cardiff. The magistrate who presided over it summed up thus:
“For some time before the vessel foundered, and when her condition was hopeless, the crew—those 20 brave men of that brave class, the British Mercantile Marine—stood together on the deck with their pipes in their mouths, silently, calmly, dauntlessly facing death. Without a murmur or a cry they perished in the sea. Their lives were sacrificed to the 130 tons of additional freight.”
He pointed out that:
“According to law she was not overladen, but the Court is satisfied that consistent with safety the loading was excessive,” and “the primary cause of her loss.”
The Court put the Board of Trade the following question for urgent consideration:
“Do the disasters to vessels that have occurred since March 1906, when the rules for assigning a ship’s freeboard were revised, and whereby numerous vessels had their freeboard reduced, call for further immediate revision of such rules?”
[From the editorial, 'Lloyd George's permit to murder', Socialist Standard, October 1912.]
SPGB Glasgow Branch (1962)
Party News from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard
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Blogger's Note:
The October 1962 issue also carried the following notice:
Election AppealGlasgow Branch intend to contest a bye-election in Woodside ward. They need financial support. Please send contributions to the Election Fund to SPGB, 52 Clapham High St., London SW4
I thought a separate post was necessary for Glasgow Branch's activities in October 1962 because it was self-evident that the branch was going through a period of growth and increased activity. In the early 1960s, the Party didn't have branches in either Edinburgh or Hamilton but they did have longstanding members in both locales. Glasgow Branch holding meetings in both areas was obviously their attempt to aid and assist local comrades. And, by the late 60s, there was a very active branch in Edinburgh.
For more background on some of Glasgow Branch members listed as speakers, click on the following links:
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SPGB Rally (1962)
Party News from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard
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Blogger's Note:
It is perhaps worthwhile to check out the editorial from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard for more background on the purpose of this rally.
Socialist Sonnet No. 249: Going through the Motions (2026)
From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog
Going through the Motions
Fine promises are all too glibly made
In a conference hall, filled with delegates
Gathered from the political estate,
Where future electoral plans are being laid.
All this nation’s ills are the fault, of course,
Of other parties, but power won’t be lost
With well thought through proposals, fingers crossed:
All delivered with rhetorical force.
The only real obstacle is the cost,
Because money’s always in short supply.
Profits remain sacrosanct, which is why
Though politicians try, markets won’t be bossed.
Conference approves what has been arranged
And then departs; yet nothing will have changed.
D. A.
Labour under Liberal Rule. (1911)
What the Workers owe the “Great Liberal Party”.
L. T. Hobhouse, M. A., Professor of Sociology at London University, is the author of a book on Liberalism (Home University Library). The book coming from a well-known supporter of the Liberal party, many may turn to it expecting to find a serious examination of the aims and methods of Liberalism. The capitalist Press has been profuse in its praise, but those who seek a knowledge of Liberalism will get little direct information therein.
Our Liberal apologist indulges in a long academic dissertation upon Manchesterism, Benthanism, abstract ideas, and absolute rights, and throughout the book there runs the hypocritical plea that Liberalism, from its inception to the present day, has carefully guarded
THE INTERESTS OF THE WORKER
and made his lot better and brighter.
The real position and interest of rising Liberalism is not dwelt upon, but an understanding of it is essential.
The Liberal Party represented the developing manufacturing class, the merchants, etc., who found the progress of their order hindered by the old forms that had survived from feudal days. The landowners, the nobility and the clergy had placed various restrictions upon the trading class—the bourgeoisie. It had imposed taxes and tariffs, and made the trader and the manufacturer bear the greatest part of the expenses of carrying on the various wars.
The Liberal Party arose an a protest against the prevailing semi-feudal institutions. Representing, as it did, the manufacturers and middlemen, it objected to any interference by the landowning legislature. In its battle against them it was aided by the workers, but when the Liberals had won their battle they spurned and betrayed those whom they had beguiled into helping them.
Laissez-faire, the gospel of the Liberals, was a policy conceived in the direct interest of the industrial capitalists.
It believed that no limits or restraints should be put by the State to the rate at which they could pile up wealth and
MURDER THE TOILERS
and their children in the process. Our author says:
“The condition produced by the new factory system shocked the public conscience and as early as 1802 we find the first of a long series of laws out of which has grown an industrial code that year by year follows the life of the operative in his relations with his employer into more minute detail. The first stages of this movement were contemplated with doubt and distrust by many men of Liberal sympathies.”
Thus cowardly and cunningly does the Professor of Liberalism hide the savage ferocity with which the members of the “Great Liberal Party” opposed all attempts to improve the conditions of the Capitalism’s insatiable greed.
The Legislature had enclosed the land, driven the labourer from the soil, and confiscated his cottage. The artizan found his simple tools and plant superseded by the giant machinery and factories that had arisen all around him. These propertyless workers were forced to seek work from the Liberal manufacturers, who took a fearful advantage of their outcast condition. These manufacturers piled up huge wealth by the unlimited toil of men, women, girls and tiny children. They used every subterfuge to prevent any legal limits being placed to the crushing slavery even of tender little ones. In the forefront of this great army of industrial murderers stood the champions of Liberalism, John Bright, Richard Cobden, C. P. Villiers, W. R. Greg, and W. J. Fox. Bright and Cobden are the revered pioneers of the present Liberal party, and the book under review is lavish in its praise of these
PIOUS PURITAN HUMBUGS.
Hobhouse says to the Liberals: “Rather we want to learn our supreme lesson from the school of Cobden.” The history of the attitude of the Liberal party toward the awful sufferings of the working class in those early days has more than a passing interest for workmen. Their record in opposing factory legislation, trade unionism, manhood suffrage, etc., is pregnant with significance. For insight into their actions then, helps to show the true nature of their motives and methods in the present.
We have the following admission grudgingly made (p. 88):
“It is true that in the beginning factory legislation enjoyed a large measure of Conservative support. It was at that stage in accordance with the best traditions of paternal rule, and it commended itself to the religious convictions of men of whom Lord Shaftesbury was the typical example. It is true also that it was bitterly opposed by Cobden and Bright.”
But our Liberal apologist seeks to water down their opposition and lead the workers to believe that it was a very transient one.
No more damning indictment of Liberalism could be penned than a bare description of the awful condition of the workers in the days when the Liberal manufacturers were uncontrolled by factory laws. The toilers’ Inferno has been truly described in the pages of Engels’s “Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.”
Richard Cobden owned print and cotton works at Manchester (R. Cobden & Co.), and his life, written by that Czar of India, Morley, is replete with
DETAILS OF HIS VILLAINY.
Speaking of Cobden’s opposition to the legal shortening of the working day, Morley says, p. 68,
“What he maintained was that all restrictions, however desirable, ought to be secured by the resolute demands and independent, action of the workmen themselves, and not by the intervention of the law.”
But when the workmen did try to obtain shorter hours and better conditions, what did Cobden say ? Listen to Morley (p. 68) :
“Singularly enough, while he thus trusted to the independence of the workmen, he objected to workmen’s combinations. ‘Depend upon it,’ he wrote to his brother, F. W. Cobden (Aug. 16, 1842), ‘nothing can be got from fraternising with trade unions. They are founded upon principles of brutal tyranny and monopoly. 1 would rather live under a Dey of Algiers than a Trades Committee.’”
Cobdcn’s co-worker, John Bright, was a Rochdale cotton manufacturer (John Bright and Bros.) He was highly esteemed by the Liberal party, was a member of their Cabinet, and acted as their champion against the struggling wage-slaves. His biographer, C. A. Vince, the leader of the Birmingham Liberals, says of one occasion (“John Bright,” p. 19) :
“In August 1842, a general strike or, as it was then called, a turn out, was organised in Lancashire. Bright issued a long addressTO THE WORKINGMEN OF ROCHDALE,urging them to return to their employment. ‘Neither act of Parliament nor act of a multitude can keep up wages. You know that trade has long been bad, and with a bad trade wages cannot rise. If you are resolved to compel an advance of wages you cannot compel manufacturers to give you employment. Such attempts must always fail in the end and yours must fail.’ ”
This was always the cry : “Bad trade !” Yet they were running their mills day and night, and gaining huge profits. These were truly the days when “Capital celebrated its bacchanalia.”
Yet present-day Liberals delight to talk of the “Hungry Forties,” and identify the landlords alone with the horrible sufferings of the people. Vince, speaking of Fielden’s (M.P. for Oldham) Bill to limit the labour of women and young persons to 60 hours per week, says :
“This Bill was opposed by Peel, Cobden, Bright, and Mr. Villiers, and rejected by a small minority. . . . Bright had already successfully resisted a proposal made by Lord Ashley (afterwards Lord Shaftesbury) two years earlier. His speech on that occasion had of necessity been acrimonious.”
The method of the Liberals was to claim that the condition of their workpeople was better
THAN THAT OF THE TORY LANDOWNERS’ TENANTS.
But it wasn’t true, as was easily proved.
Bright urged against the Bill of 1844 for limiting the labour of children under 13, that it would mean shortening the hours of adults too. And Vince says (p. 33)
“That this was the intention, as well as the effect, of the Bill, was proved by the refusal to accept an amendment of Bright’s to allow the women to work in relays”
He declared that if the Bill passed they would have to close their factories ! This was the cunning way of these past masters in trickery. They opposed the reduction of children’s hours by talking of its effect upon men’s hours. ” ‘Most of our evils,’ says Bright” (quoted Vince, p. 34) “‘arise from legislative interference,’ and this maxim, eminently characteristic of the Manchester school, continued to approve itself to him to the remainder of his career. . . . The same principle led Bright a few years later to throw cold water over Sir G. Forster’s Bill to strengthen the Truck Act. ‘Under the present condition of labour in the country there can be no permanent, continuous and irritating tyranny such as has been described by the promoters of the Bill, which the working classes are not perfectly well able to correct without coming to the House of Commons for a new measure !’ Finally, in 1855 he successfully resisted an attempt of J. M. Cobbett to improve the Factory Act.”
Thus did the Free Trade leader look after his pocket interests. He was not above raising the good old cry: “I’ll take my capital out of the country !” On page 36 Vince quotes Bright as saying :
“If I thought the elements of discord were again to be stirred up, I should myself be glad to leave the country and toGO SOMEWHERE ELSEwhere Capital and Labour are allowed to fight out their battles on their own ground without legislative interference.”
Vince further tells us that Bright “was also an enemy of any possible scheme of national education.”
The history of the fight for the Factory Acts is a record of the war of Liberal manufacturers against the slightest reduction of their enormous profits. The children—boys and girls—were semi-starved, flogged and brutally ill-treated for the slightest slackening of their terrible toil. Lord Shaftesbury, the Dorsetshire landlord, after long and bitter straggles, succeeded in getting a Bill passed during the Liberal administration of 1833. Bat it was such a hollow fraud that the battle continued for over 20 years longer. The Act of 1833 and other Acts were passed as a result of protracted warfare, but it was many years before the Government would vote a halfpenny to provide inspectors to see them carried out. The Acts long remained a dead letter. Even afterwards Leonard Hornerer and Alexander Redgrave—the best factory inspectors the workers ever knew—bitterly complained that when they brought cases into court they found the magistrate was the
LOCAL MANUFACTURER HIMSELF
and, of course the workers lost.
The Act of 1834 permitted 8 hours to be worked by children under 13, and young persons between 13 and 18 were allowed 12 hours actual work per day, but these regulations were not to come fully into operation till 1836. The Liberal Government with a majority of 307 refused Shaftesbury’s amendment to improve the Bill.
Shaftesbury introduced his 10 hours Bill (for young persons) in 1838, and the Parliament with a Liberal majority of 51 threw out the measure. Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister, and “The Times” (June 25, 1838) said :
“The public attention cannot be too forcibly directed to the scandalous conduct of the Melbourne Ministry with regard to the factory question. It was not that Lord Shaftesbury had been mocked and deluded by the broken promises and callous feeling of a mercenary and jobbing clique, but that laws of our making have been left unenforced and the unfortunate children unprotected, and that all the representations and remonstrances made to the members upon the subject had been treated with total neglect and contempt.”
It shows the unspeakable hypocrisy of the Liberals when we recall that it was this same Parliament with the largest majority of any in the 19th. century, that allowed children under 13 for years after to be employed for
72 HOURS PER WEEK
while in the “Emancipation” Act it limited the hours which adult Negro slaves could be worked by the planters to 45 per week !
The 10 Hours Bill came into force (partly) on May 1st., 1848, but the manufacturers rose up in a body against it. Karl Marx well says (“Capital,” chap. 8):
“The working class was everywhere placed under a ban, under a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers had no need any longer to restrain themselves. They broke out in open revolt, not only against the 10 Hour Bill, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833 had aimed at restricting in some measure the “free” exploitation of labour-power.“It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature, carried on for over two years with a cynical recklessness and terrorist energy all the cheaper because the rebel capitalist risked nothing but the skin of his ‘hands.'”
The methods they pursued are beyond description, but they can be read in the factory inspectors’ reports for the years that followed. Sufficient to say here that they practically nullified the Acts. How well they carried out the nefarious work may be gathered from the speech of Mr. Ferrand in the House of Commons (27th. April, 1863):
“The cotton trade has existed for 90 years. It has existed for three generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during that period it hasDESTROYED NINE GENERATIONSof English operatives.”
In urging the claim of the Liberal party to working class support, Mr. Hobhouse says (p. 84): “Trade Unions gained the first step in emancipation through the action of Place and the Radicals in 1824.”
The fact is that the workers found the chief opponents of trade union combination in the Liberal-Radical party. The ferocity with which the workers were treated by the Liberal Government reminds one of the worst incidents of Russian rule. In 1824 Francis Place, the tailor, and Joseph Hume “smuggled” a law through Parliament annulling the Anti-Combination laws. But directly the workers sought to actually combine for defensive purposes the law pounced upon them. The presence of more than two workmen together laid them open to the charge of conspiracy, and in the reign of the strongest Liberal Government (1834) six Dorchester labourers were sentenced to seven years transportation for the “crime of combination.”
And again, under Liberal rule in 1838, five Glasgow spinners were condemned for the same term under the charge of illegal combination and conspiracy. Lord Melbourne and “the historian,” Lord Macaulay, were members of the Cabinet, and they did all they could to support those who were coining millions out of the blood and tears of women and children. They acted as in a panic and appointed numerous commissions to enquire into methods to
COMBAT AND SMASH WORKMEN’S UNIONS.
Bright, Cobden and Gladstone in their day were prominent enemies of working-class combination.
After long years of strife and suffering the workers got the Liberals to pass the Trade Union Act of 1871. This was proclaimed the “charter of the trade unions.” But it was so futile that the masters and the Courts still carried on a bitter war against the workmen. The following year (1872) some London firemen engaged at gasworks were charged with striking and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment.
Of Gladstone Mr. Hobhouse says (p. 103):
“He was not sympathetically disposed towards the ‘New Unionism’ and semi-Socialistic ideas that came at the end of the ’80’s, which, in fact, constituted a powerful cross-current to the work he had in hand.”
Right up to the present day the same class legislation in trade union matters continues. The Liberals claim to have legalised peaceful picketing by their Act of 1906, but it lies with the carefully selected judge to interpret this clause.
Hundreds of convictions have occurred since the Act was passed. The London polishers, the Newport dockers, the Hull seamen, the Belfast dockers and the agricultural labourers of Norwich—all have been fined or imprisoned for picketing amongst possible strike-breakers.
The Liberals, despite our author’s claim, in fact acted just as fraudulently
OVER THE SUFFRAGE
as on other issues. No mention is made of the long, terrible struggle on the part of the workers for a share in the franchise under Liberal Governments. Nothing is said about the ferocious fight the Liberals waged against the Chartist pioneers for simply advocating Manhood Suffrage. The trickery and treachery of the Liberals over “Household Franchise” in 1867 is completely passed over.
“The most striking victory of Liberal ideas,” Mr. Hobhouse tells us, “is the establishment of Free Trade,” and he points out that “the battle is one Liberalism is prepared to fight over again.” This shows the essentially capitalist character of Liberalism, for Free Trade is the manufacturer’s panacea, though it was obtained by deluding the working class and winning them away from Chartism by telling them, in the words of Cobden (Morley) : “Is it not clear that if capitalists were free to exchange their productions for the corn of other countries, the workmen would have abundant employment at enhanced wages ?”
Listen to Cobden’s appeal to his capitalist brethren (Morley’s “Cobden,” p. 74) : “Let us,” he said, “invest part of our property to save the rest from confiscation.” And he further says:
“At one meeting in Manchester one man after another called out’in quick succession, ‘A thousand pounds for me,’ ‘A thousand pounds for me,’ until 60 thousand pounds had been subscribed on the spot. They were spending £10,000 per week. . . . ‘ I am afraid,’ said Cobden, ‘that most of us entered upon the struggle with the belief that we had someDISTINCT CLASS INTEREST IN THE QUESTION.’ ”
Vince, in his life of Bright, says (p. 28): “The battle of the corn laws was a contention between the middle class and the aristocracy.” How hypocritical the agitation for repealing the Corn Laws was we may gather from the report of the Inspector of factories for 1849, where we learn that wherever the circumstances permitted the manufacturers reduced wages 25 per cent. upon the introduction of Free Trade.
Nearly 65 years have passed since Free Trade was introduced. Mr. Hobhouse tells us that “the 19th. century might be called the Age of Liberalism” (p. 214); and the National Liberal Federation, speaking of the period since 1832, says (“The Work of Liberalism since the Great Reform Act”): “It has been in the main an era of Liberal administration. The Liberal Party has had practically unfettered control of the interests of the country in foreign, colonial, and financial policy.” Yet after all this what is the position of the worker ?
After detailing the high claims made by the pioneers of Free Trade our author says :
“The actual course of events has in large measure disappointed these hopes….. the prospect of a complete and life-long independence for the average workman upon the lines of individual competition, even when supplemented and guarded by the collective bargaining of the Trade Union, appears exceedingly remote. The increase in wages does not appear by any means proportionate to the general growth of wealth.“There appears no likelihood that the average manual worker will attain to the goal of that full independence covering all the risks of life for self and family, which can alone render the competitive system really adequate to the demands of a civilised conscience. The careful researches of Mr. Booth in London and Mr. Rowntree in York, and of others in country districts, have revealed that a considerable percentage are actually unable to earn a sum of money representing the full cost of the barest physical necessities for an average family.”
Of industrial competition he says :
“That system holds out no hope of an improvement which shall bring the means of such a healthy and independent existence as should be the birthright of every citizen of a free State, within the grasp of the mass of the people of the United Kingdom.”
But what is the remedy ? Surely not more Liberalism and Free Trade ! Despite the above admissions of the
FAILURE OF CAPITALISM,
Mr. Hobhouse devotes many pages to attacking what he calls “Mechanical Socialism” and defending the present system of society. He defends it, though his leader, Mr. Lloyd George, told us (Swansea, Oct. 1, 1908): “No one can really honestly defend the present system.” Mr. Hobhouse ignores the great combinations and trusts the workers have to fight by making this statement (p. 99):
“It is possible under a competitive system for rivals to come to an agreement. The more powerful may coerce the weaker, or a number of equals may agree to work together. Thus competition may defeat itself and industry may be marshalled into trusts and other combinations for the private advantage against the public interest. Such combinations, predicted by Karl Marx as the appointed means of dissolving the competitive system,HAVE BEEN KEPT AT BAYin this country by Free Trade.”
This is a fitting statement for a capitalist Professor of Sociology to make. Anyone, without propertied interests to defend at all hazards, can see all around him the existence of great combinations and trusts. From the Imperial Tobacco Company to the gigantic Coats Cotton Trust; from the Salt Union Ltd. to the United Alkali Manufacturers, Ltd., they thrive and flourish even under your Free Trade.
One of the leading members of the Free Trade Union (Mr. J. A. Hobson) points out in his work “The Evolution of Modern Capitalism,” that Great Britain is honeycombed with trusts and combines ; and recently the great Birmingham Free Trader, Mr. Arthur Chamberlain, told us that rings and combines were necessary to the capitalist and inevitable even under beloved Free Trade !
A. Cleveland
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