The Lady with the Lamp (1944)

From the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nursing as it is To-day

That nursing is a vocation in the religious sense is an assertion surprisingly still made to-day, as witness the film “The Lamp Still Burns,” about which something will be said later. Nurses, like Nuns, are supposed to take up their work in response to a mysterious call, but many relinquish its mixed joys on closer acquaintance.

In early times, before the dissolution of the monasteries, the care of the sick was in the hands of the religious houses, remnants of which became the first voluntary hospitals. The Elizabethan Poor Law was the basis of what is now the municipal hospital, first under the Parish overseer, then the Board of Guardians, and lastly the Ministry of Health.

Of nurses and nursing in this country we know little before the nineteenth century, and training was unknown. In military hospitals there were no female nurses, and mortality was high. The lack of organisation went unnoticed until a major war occurred nearer the scale of modern war. War to the general public seemed far away when only a standing army was affected.

In the early nineteenth century there were voluntary hospitals and workhouse infirmaries for the sick poor, looked after by nurses who, if for nothing else, were known for their drunkenness. This was excused on the ground that hospital conditions were so terrible that some stimulant was necessary to enable nurses to carry on. Beds were packed close together, fresh air was practically nil, and surgical cases often died of the dreaded hospital gangrene. The rich were cared for in their own homes, by women of whom Dickens’ Sarah Gamp seems to have been a fair prototype; but at least they were not exposed to the infection of a hospital ward. Any poor ignorant woman who was fitted for nothing else could be a nurse. They worked long hours, did all the domestic work, and usually lived in the hospital, often in the wards themselves.

In the mid and late nineteenth century great reforms came about, mainly through the establishment of training centres, notably Florence Nightingale’s school of nursing and St.Thomas’s Hospital in 1860. Florence Nightingale may be called the founder of modern nursing. Though known sentimentally as the “Lady with the Lamp,” she instituted modern hospital planning and hygiene, and spread much knowledge of sanitation. It is interesting to notice a little of her career. Being of the propertied class, her wish to be a nurse was resisted by her parents on the ground that a gentlewoman could not associate on equal terms with working women, often drunken and immoral, and, even if chaste, still working women. After much resistance she obtained what training she could at Kaiserworth in Germany in 1851 and with the Sisters of Charity in Paris in 1853.

In 1853 the Crimean War commenced, and in this major campaign great perturbation was caused by the deaths of the wounded British from negligence. Nearly 50 per cent. died. People became incensed as they learned that preparations and precautions were practically nil. The French ally, by contrast, had reasonably well organised medical services, and had taken 50 Sisters of Charity to act as nurses.

Florence Nightingale was asked by the Government to take a party of nurses to remedy matters. We have seen that the British Army had no female nurses, and this intrusion was energetically resisted by many of the medical officers, who saw in it criticism of themselves. The medical profession to-day likewise resists any apparent encroachment on their privileges. We know by Florence Nightingale’s reorganisation of the hospitals at Scutari and in the Crimea that she did not lack energy and initiative.

Following the Crimean War, strenuous efforts were made to reorganise hospitals in this country, and trainees of Florence Nightingale started nursing schools at many hospitals, and the status of nursing became raised.

Just before the turn of the century, great improvement were made in this and other Western countries. Efforts were made to check infectious diseases by isolating and notifying. Great strides in medicine, such as the technique of antiseptic surgery, introduction of anaesthetics, discoveries of the causes of hitherto baffling diseases were made. County councils with medical officers of health were set up, and sanitation at last received some attention.

Florence Nightingale’s reforms in nursing had their way because all this was in the air. The discoveries in medicine made the more intelligent nursing of the sick essential. It was not something which just happened out of the blue by the goodness of one woman, but because at this time it became necessary to transform the Sarah Gamp into a trained knowledgeable worker in the art of nursing, into a woman who could carry out important observations, and many special treatments—in a word, to change the unskilled into the skilled worker.

In 1902 the Midwives Act was passed—”an Act secure the better training of midwives.” Efforts were made to secure as nurses girls of better education, at least secondary school standard. But the shortage of suitable recruits has usually been acute except at the best teaching hospitals —e.g., the London voluntary Hospitals. Girls of better education have wanted better rewards than nursing can give. The lure of the vocation, the life of satisfying work for suffering humanity, etc., ad nauseum, have all been tried. The bait has never been good conditions, reasonable hours and adequate pay for an efficient worker. But the dope has never been completely successful. The municipal hospitals and smaller voluntary hospitals have had to recruit from the elementary schools. This makes it difficult for the recruit, who has probably left school at 14 years and worked in a shop, office or factory, to go back to school again at 18 years. Particularly is this the case now that many high schools run pre-nursing courses, thus relieving the student nurse of much study in her first difficult year of hospital life.

A student has much to learn of a scientific character, and a knowledge of chemistry and mathematics is a great help to the prospective nurse. As always, the good background of education makes all the difference between taking a job in one’s stride or making it a very hard grind. Many fall by the wayside and never become State registered. They then become the assistant nurses, or, shall we say, the labourers of the present nursing world.

What has been the reward for the hard grind ? Until the Rushcliffe scale of salaries was introduced recently, the best salary paid to a student nurse was £20 in the first year, £30 in the second, and £40 in the third, together with board and lodging. The answer to complaints on this score has always been that training was being given free during this period, whilst other trainees—e.g. doctors, teachers, architects, etc.—have to pay for theirs. Such students, however, do not have to work 10-12 hours day or night, often at an exhausting pace, and then attend lectures afterwards. In the writer's experience of commencing training only 11 years ago night duty commenced at 7.30 p.m. and finished at 8 a.m. Often the entire night was worked without a break even for a meal, and then lectures had to be attended at either 9 a.m. or 6 p.m. At 9 a.m. the lecturer received scant attention. A hard school, indeed, and the one night off per week was often spent in sleeping the clock round. The Horder Committee report on nursing reconstruction, recently published, recommends that the nurse should be a student paying for her training, and not an hospital employee responsible for the work of the hospital. They suggest she should be helped by Government grants.

Conditions, however, are improving, in order to attract recruits of what are termed the better kind. Parents are not willing to allow their daughters to undergo an interesting but vigorous training at the cost of their health. “Hard work never killed anyone,” still say some members of the old school. Perhaps not, but health may be impaired, and vitality and energy for outside interests may be completely sapped. We do not, generally speaking, find nurses interested in political questions and world affairs. Why? Because the hospital is its own little world in which one may work and take no notice of the greater world. This may be thought a good thing. Florence Nightingale would have considered that completely absorbing work in the service of others was so. Facts belie it. A nurse so living becomes narrow and harsh, and finally is quite unable to understand the youngest recruits. Certain hospitals in this country now allow their trained staff to live out. This has, on the whole, been extremely successful, and these hospitals have had less difficulty in obtaining staff.

What are the nurse’s expectations when finally she is trained, passes her exams, and can put those long-coveted letters S.R.N. behind her name? She may remain in a general hospital as a staff nurse to do surgical or medical nursing, and after a few years of experience become a Sister and direct the ward. She may take further training in some other branch of. nursing—e.g., midwifery, fevers, children, district, public health or industrial nursing. Many fields of interest are now open to the trained nurse. The latest of these is that of industrial nursing.

The Government has recommended that factories employ a trained nurse and establish a first-aid and welfare department. This department was not established out of the kindness of the employer’s heart. Absenteeism through sickness is considerably reduced: prompt treatment of accidents saves weeks of disability, and reduces compensation;—the worker with a wound has his dressing done by the factory nurse, thus preventing him taking a day off to visit his local hospital or his panel doctor.

Public health and district work is popular, as here the nurse works with greater freedom than her hospital colleague, and she lives out. These nurses regard their work as important and socially useful; their hours are reasonable, and their scale of salary has just been raised through the recommendations of the Rushcliffe Committee. It is not, however, princely, as the maximum salary for a superintendent of health visitors, a post only reached after years of experience, is £55O per year.

The Rushcliffe yearly salaries for the trained nurse are £90, for the ward sister £130, and for a sister tutor £200 rising to £350. These are exclusive of emoluments. The student nurse is to be paid at the rate of £10 first year. £45 second year, £50 third year, and £60 fourth year. These are mentioned in detail as they were supposed to constitute a wonderful improvement.

Previous to the war nurses who married were expected to leave. Since the war they have been permitted—nay, implored—to remain. Florence Nightingale was harsh with nurses who married; she considered that they should devote their whole lives to their work.

The clock cannot be put back despite frantic efforts to do so. The production at this time of the film “The Lamp Still Burns” shows a desire to do so. The heroine, Hilary, foregoes her private life to serve her calling. Few would be willing to make such an unnatural sacrifice Why should such an anachronism be expected? Under modern conditions the nurse may work, for example, for eight hours efficiently and then leave hospital, district or clinic for her home or her own interests and relaxation. The nurse in training may live in for convenience, but should have her lectures in her “on duty” time.

Reorganisation is required and had to some small extent been carried out in England before the war, but more widely in America. Under better conditions nursing could be a most satisfying kind of work. Indeed, it provides an answer to those who state that workers must have bosses. Many nurses, working without supervision, voluntarily exceed their hours of duty for their patients’ welfare.

Efforts are required by nurses themselves to improve their conditions. Hitherto they have been too exhausted to do much in that direction, plus, of course, the play on the vocational side.

The nurse has now become a skilled worker, but do not whisper this to her, as she is taught to regard herself as belonging to the professional class, whom it would appear are a race apart. This snobbery has been a bar to trade-union activity, which has, generally speaking, been resisted by hospital matrons.

Apart from the apathetic state of nurses, three main obstructions to progress exist : The attitude of the working class, who ignorantly look on her as an angel of mercy or despise her as part of what they regard as the racket of medicine; the medical profession, who wish the nurse to be the Cinderella to their own great glory; lastly, from those who as nurses wish the vocational idea to continue.

Many of the diseases and accidents which can be directly traced to the needless hazards of industry or to the poverty of the workers, as well as the more dramatic casualties of war, will die with the death of capitalism. Only under a form of society in which the health and happiness of people, rather than the production of commodities, is the aim can nursing come into its own, with its infinite possibilities of satisfying work.

W. P.

Editorial: Fabian Fallacies, or the Sorrows of Bernard Shaw (1944)

Editorial from the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fresh from a vain attempt to show that our Transatlantic comrades of the “Western Socialist” do not understand Socialism, Mr. G. B. Shaw has enlivened the columns of the Times (February 1, 1944) with a letter teaching the Chancellor of the Exchequer how not to suck the financial eggs of capitalism, and the Foreign Secretary the A.B.C. of using Quislings to run the new European governments to be set up at the heels of the departing Germans. Though the connection may not be obvious, the two pieces of advice are based on the same old Fabian principle that you cannot destroy an existing system unless you already have experts and machinery to operate a new one.

Mr. Shaw has raised the flag of revolt on behalf of the downtrodden dukes of England, the impoverished millionaires, and the payers of Excess Profit Tax. He and other rich men are being ruined by excessive taxation. So he implores the Chancellor to exempt from surtax “all legitimately earned incomes exceeding £20,000,” re-introduce the income tax three-years average system to meet the hard case of “the wretch who makes £21,000 in one year, and a bare subsistence in the years preceding and following,” and “abolish the Excess Profits Tax root and branch.” So long as we have pampered rich, he says, “we must pamper them for all they are worth, and far from crying that nobody must profit commercially by war, make war the most profitable of all businesses until it ends in victory.”

A paragraph from Mr. Shaw’s letter will make his argument clear, especially if read in conjunction with a statement made by him in a further letter to the Evening Standard : —

“It may be finally desirable to get, rid of landlordism; but while we have landlords let us have rich ones, and encourage them to be richer, rather than poor and persecuted ones. And what applies to private farming enterprise applies to all enterprises.” (Times, February 1).

“The question at issue is whether private factories are to be closed and private farmers evicted before the Government is ready to carry on the work they are doing without a day’s intermission. I say no.” (Evening Standard, February 10).

His advice to the Foreign Secretary is based on the same principle, that when governments are overthrown on the Continent new ones will not be able to function unless they retain the services of the trained functionaries who have served the previous German-controlled governments. Shaw has in mind men like the late Admiral Darlan, “the citizen who will obey and faithfully serve the established government of his country, no matter how often it changes.”

It is not our concern to enter into discussion about Shaw’s advice to the Cabinet—probably they appreciate the force of his arguments as well as he does. What we are concerned with is a deeper issue, one that Shaw ignores.

On the surface, the Fabian Society has been a superb success. Its ideas moulded the Labour Party and I.L.P., and some of its leading men reached high office and wielded great influence in the Labour Party and in Liberal and Labour Governments. It has claimed that those who rejected Fabian theories have never made any headway. What, then, were the theories .of the Fabian Society? They are well stated in “The History of the Fabian Society,” by Mr. E. R. Pease, its secretary for 25 years (published in 1916 by A. C. Fifield). Professing Socialism as its aim, the Fabians rejected the view “Make Socialists and you will make Socialism” (the view held by the S.P.G.B.), and declared instead that Socialism was a principle already in part embodied in the constitution of capitalist society. As Fabians and Fabian ideas permeated other parties, this Socialist principle would, they said, gradually be extended. Mr. H. G. Wells, who quarrelled with them over this, defined their attitude fairly enough when he said that they believed “the world may be manoeuvred into Socialism without knowing it” and that “society is to keep like it is … and yet Socialism will be soaking through it all, changing without a sign.”

Mr. Pease says in his “History,” “The work of the Fabian Society has been not to make Socialists, but to make Socialism” (p. 255).

Then the Fabians believed in government by the expert —”what it demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central government . . . but primarily an expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of a really democratic municipal government” (p. 248). Critics of the Society used to charge their largely civil service membership with being concerned with creating careers for themselves. As one leading member once said, “The government of the future will be by experts, and we, naturally, want to be the experts” (Mr. H. Snell, quoted in the Socialist Standard, February, 1907).

It will be noticed that Mr. Shaw is still worried about having somebody, the experts, to carry on in place of factory owners, landlords, farmers and government officials, and this brings us to the utter failure of 60 years of Fabianism. They were going to smooth the road to complete Socialism. Writing in 1889, Mr. Shaw declared that the transfer of private property to the nation had already been in progress for 15 years (“Fabian Essays,” p. 180), yet now, after a further 55 years, making a round century in all, we are told in effect that we are helpless to do anything because the propertied men in control are still indispensable. Shaw’s slogan now is “Dukes are better landlords than needy freeholders” (Times, February 1, 1944).

The Fabian experts half a century ago, like their Labour Party imitators afterwards, had a vision of municipal and state enterprises extending everywhere under their guiding hand and driving private concerns out of business. Wages of workers in the nationalised undertakings would rise, and landlords and capitalists would disappear. Mr. Shaw airily rounded it off thus in his “Transition” (Fabian Essays, 1889, p. 199) : —

“It is not necessary to go further into the economic detail of the process of the extinction of private property. Much of that process as sketched here may he anticipated by sections of the proprietary class successively capitulating, as the net closes about their special interests, on such terms as they may be able to stand out for before their power is entirely broken.”

We shall not be accused of exaggeration if we say that something seems to have gone wrong with the time-table. This has not escaped the notice of the Fabians, and Mr. Pease and Mr. Shaw have both had their say about the actual results of Fabianism. Mr. Pease wrote, in 1916 : “It must be confessed that we have made but little progress along the main road of Socialism. Private ownership of capital and land flourishes almost as vigorously as it did 30 years ago. Its grosser cruelties have been checked, but the thing itself has barely been touched” (p. 241).

That is as true now as it was in 1916, and note, too, that whereas in 1889 it was the Fabians who were very cleverly—as they thought—permeating the Liberal and Radical parties with their reform programmes, now the boot is on the other foot, and it is the Liberal Sir William Beveridge who is permeating the Labour Party with his scheme for removing a new batch of grosser cruelties in the campaign to make the world safe for capitalism.

Mr. Shaw lias been just as frank as Mr. Pease. In reply to the question whether Socialism had made progress during his lifetime, he replied to the News-Chronicle (January 6, 1936) : —

“Yes; but it is the capitalists who exploit it for their own profit everywhere except in Russia . . . The Socialists here broke down the old capitalist policy of laissez-faire, and showed that State help was indispensable in modern industry. Accordingly, the capitalists now will not build a Queen Mary unless the State helps them out; and mines are registered as Public Utility Societies instead of private ventures. Excellent Socialism for capitalists; but the sailors and miners get nothing out of it.”

So after half a century of building “Socialism for capitalists” but without making Socialists, we find that things are very much as they were. Vital change is still impossible because there is something lacking. We must, says Mr. Shaw, bolster up our dukes and landlords, pamper the rich, and depend on Continental Quislings to keep capitalism going. There is something lacking; Socialists are lacking. The Fabians never held with making Socialists, yet it is surely obvious that if the enormous effort devoted to advising the capitalists how to adapt their system to the changing circumstances of the past half-century had been devoted to making Socialists here and abroad, Mr. Shaw’s twin problem would be non-existent and his advice superfluous.

The early Fabians, the I.L.P. and the Labour Party were wrong, and the S.P.G.B. was right. The problem was not, and is not, one of extending state and municipal capitalism—(incidentally the present drift is towards monopolistic public utility corporations under some sort of state supervision, not towards state operated enterprises)—-nor is it one of finding experts and superior brains. There is no lack of able and experienced workers in industry, farming and the civil service to carry on, nor was there 60 years ago. All that is lacking is a Socialist working class to give orders to its delegates in Parliament and on the local councils for the ending of the private property basis of society. Socialism is still not here, but that is only because the workers are still not Socialists. What society needs now, as when the Fabians began their slow march to nowhere, is not Fabian experts to show the capitalists what changes are necessary to keep capitalism going, but a majority who understand Socialism and are determined to achieve it, through gaining control of the machinery of government.

Letter: Marx’s Economic Theories (1944)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow

Editorial Committee, the Socialist Standard.

Dear Sirs,

In thanking you for your courtesy in publishing my letter on Marx, I would ask your permission to make the following answer to “H.’s” reply.

My critic states : (1) that the authorities I quoted are, with one exception, not economists, and (2) that they do not always agree with one another.

In reply to this I would say that they are all men who have devoted a lifetime to the study of political and economic questions, and that no one can expect them to agree with one another on every point.

In what branch of science are all the authorities agreed on everything?

As for the statement that they are not “political economists,” if by this term is meant those who are professors of the subject in our universities, I would ask what professor of political economy in any university in the world to-day, outside Russia, does endorse Marx’s theory of value? I have never been able to find the name of anyone who does, though I have questioned many of my Marxian friends on the subject. And it will not do to say that they refrain from doing so from fear of victimisation by the university authorities. In this revolutionary age anyone who came forward as an open champion of Marx would probably make a fortune from the sale of his books. The Dean of Canterbury was not put out of the Church for championing Russia, and his uncritical works (so thoroughly exposed in the Socialist Standard) are circulated by the million.

Moreover, the fact that one authority builds upon the theory of another (another point made by your contributor) does not invalidate his testimony. Sir Arthur Keith stood upon the shoulders of Darwin, but his testimony to the truth of evolution is no less valuable for that. Even Marx was indebted to his predecessors.

I scarcely think it necessary to dwell on Shaw’s remarks on Mallock. As a humorist, Shaw is at times superb, at others just a little tiresome. But surely no one takes him seriously on economic science. His criticism of Mallock is typical-—a man whose shoes, intellectually speaking, he was, in my opinion, never fit to clean.

The authorities I quoted gave reasons for their belief that Marx was wrong, but “H.” has not refuted them. In my opinion, their arguments cannot be disproved.

In his second article your contributor says, “Our critic obviously misunderstands the Marxian theory of value.” If this is so, I err in good company. After a careful, analysis of Marx’s teaching, Prof. Hearnshaw says : “The absurdity of the labour theory of value, stated thus succinctly, is so patent and so appalling that Marx himself was compelled to conceal its naked monstrosity by clouds of Hegelian vapour. He plays upon the word ‘commodity’ until it loses all recognisable features. He juggles with the word ‘labour’—abstract labour, concrete labour, skilled labour, unskilled labour, manual labour, mental labour, human labour, homogeneous labour, socially necessary labour, average labour, general labour, and so on indefinitely—-until the most devoted and most diligent Marxians (e.g,, Kautsky and Trotsky) tear one another to pieces in contradictory assertions as to what Marx means. ‘It is possible,’ said one despairing Socialist—and probably many more than one—’to prove anything from Marx.’ ”

I think my illustration of the fishing boat was quite appropriate, for if the Marxian teaching that rent, interest, and profit are three forms of robbery is true, it should apply not in certain cases but in all cases. The fact that modern industry is run on the joint stock principle does not alter the fact that capital so contributed is as necessary as labour in the production of wealth, and is entitled to an adequate (though not an excessive) return.

The way in which I see the matter is this : A ship requires £10,000 to build. I, as a worker, earn £200 per year—that is to say, I produce £200 worth of consumable goods and receive tickets in the form of money entitling me to draw upon the common store to that extent. I choose to spend only £100, however (that is to say, I draw upon the common store to the extent of only half of my contribution to it). The other half I hand to the directors or promoters of a joint stock company. This they pay, at least to the greater extent, in wages, which entitle the workers who receive them to draw upon, or consume, that half of the consumable goods I have produced but have refrained from claiming. The energy in these goods is converted into the energy of human labour, and the energy of human labour is converted eventually into a ship, since I am but one of 300 investors who act in a similar manner. My investment and the investment of my fellow-shareholders was as necessary as any other factor to the result. If we claim a share of the ship’s earnings (it may, to simplify the illustration, be regarded as a trawler), in what respect are we “robbing the workers?” It will not do to say that all transactions are not on such a clear cut basis. If the Marxian view is sound—if, as your contributor implied in his original article, labour is the only factor in production entitled to reward, it must be shown why this is so. And, as I have already said, this argument, should apply, not in one case, but in every ease.

My illustration of one book selling five times better than another—(I accept the amended version of your contributor, which puts the matter in an even clearer light)—I still consider valid, but considerations of space prevent my entering into a lengthy discussion of this. The example, however, serves to illustrate a further point brought out by almost every critic of Marx—namely, his disregard of demand as a determinant of value.

In conclusion; may I say just this : Quite by chance I came across a modern book by a political economist. “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,” by J. A. Schumpeter, Professor of Economics in Harvard University (published by Allen & Unwin). Mindful of your contributor’s reproach that my authorities were not political economists (though some have spent as long as Marx in study of the subject), I looked up Professor Schumpeter’s view of the matter under discussion, and here it is : “Everybody knows that this theory of value is unsatisfactory” (page 23); “In any case it is dead and buried” (page 25).

But the theory forms the very cornerstone of the Marxian attack on capitalism. Without it, Marxism itself is dead !

Yours faithfully,

H. W. Henderson.

Reply.

(Our critic’s first letter and our reply appeared in the November and December issues.)

The point has already been made that a dispute about economic theory cannot be settled by an appeal to authorities: if it could, Marx’s own statements are more weighty than those of his critics. The real test is that of experience. Our critic asks what professor of political economy in any university outside Russia endorses Marx’s theory of value. The arbitrary exclusion of Russian economists gives away our critic’s whole case. If economic authorities as such can decide the issue, then the Russian have as much authority as any others. It is a tacit admission by our critic that professors are liable to be influenced by those who control the universities and by the environment in which they make their living. Abundant evidence of this is given in Upton Sinclair’s ‘Goose-step,’ a study of the suppression of opinion in American universities. A typical incident among many is that of the professor who declined an invitation to address a student’s club on Marxian theories—he wanted to keep his job (p. 211). Incidentally, Sinclair quotes Laski on the way pressure makes university professors adopt reactionary ideas in order to get promotion, or makes them keep silent (p. 391). Quite recently (Daily Express, November 28, 1942) it was related how the late Sir Arnold Wilson found himself up against a conspiracy of silence at the universities about the ramifications of the insurance companies. Beveridge explained to him why the London School of Economics, “on grounds of expediency,” ignored the subject.

In addition to pressure, there are other reasons why economists reject Marx. One is that they pick up biased and incorrect views of what Marx’s theories actually are during their own training at universities. Another is that the atmosphere of social snobbery makes them reluctant to accept a theory which identifies their own “intellectual” labour with that of the working class.

Our critic, earlier quoted Laski against Marx. Since 1927, when Laski made that criticism, he has been moving more and more towards accepting Marx’s views, and in Reynolds News (March 7, 1943) he wrote:

“It is important to add that Marxism has never been more living than to-day; as the eminent American economist, Thorstein Veblen, said, his is the only socialism that really matters.”

Our critic says there is no branch of science in which all the authorities are agreed about everything. This may be true, but it follows that where they are disagreed the dispute cannot be settled by an appeal to authorities.

He quotes Sir Arthur Keith as one authority who builds upon the theory of another (Darwin). This has no bearing on our point about various anti-Marxian historians and others who simply passed on, parrot fashion, each other’s opinions about Marxian economics. Keith is himself an independent authority who claims that his anatomical experience and his original studies confirm Darwin’s main conclusions.

Our critic quotes Hearnshaw to show that if he errs he does so in good company. This may bring comfort to our critic, but if he persists in thinking that Marx claimed all labour as value-creating, despite Marx’s repeated statement that he was only referring to “socially necessary labour.” then fifty Hearnshaws won’t make it any different.

On the question of the operation of capitalist undertakings, our critic gives another example of what he thinks happens. We are asked to consider a worker who earns £200 a year (in return for his work which produces £200 worth of consumable goods), and who could draw the whole £200 from the common store, but actually saves £100 and invests it. In support of Ins claim that “capital … is as necessary as labour in the production of wealth,” our critic says, “If we claim a share of the ship’s earnings … in what respect are we robbing the workers?”

Here in a nutshell is the fallacy of the whole argument. Labour and capital are claimed to be equally necessary, yet on the basis of this principle of equal treatment our critic claims that the worker who puts in £200 (through his work) is entitled to draw out £200 and no more; while the investor who puts in £100 is entitled, not only to continue owning his £100 investment, but in addition is to receive “an adequate return.”

It may be asked, too, whence comes the “adequate return,” since, according to our critic, the workers get back as wages all that they producer As the investor, as such, produces nothing but merely allows the workers to use the means of production, and as inanimate capital itself obviously cannot add more than its own value to the product, our critic is asking us to accept the theory that there is no surplus value, yet out of this non-existent surplus the investor receives his profit. Actually it can only come from the unpaid labour of the workers. The workers are working, say, half their time to produce their own cost of subsistence (the value of their labour power, their wages), and the rest of the time to produce the surplus value the capitalist takes.

It should be added that under capitalism as it really is the great bulk of existing capital is not the result of current savings, most of it being inherited; still less is it the result of savings by workers. All their savings together do not and could not amount to more than a trifling part of the whole capital.

The capitalists as such are not producers, nor are they “savers” except in the technical sense that their income is greatly in excess of what they need to spend, and can spend, on their own consumption. They are monopolists who, through their control of the machinery of government, are able to exact toll in the form of surplus value on the wealth produced by the workers who operate the capitalist-owned means of production.

As a late after-thought, our critic charges Marx with disregarding demand as a determinant of value. It is quite unnecessary to go into that charge here, for it will be noticed that our critic likewise disregarded demand. When he explained that a worker produces value by his labour (“£200 worth of consumable goods”), he did so without mentioning this after-thought that not the worker but the demand produced the value.

Last of all, our critic asks us to consider Schumpeter’s opinion that “everybody knows that this theory of value is unsatisfactory,” and that “in any case, it is dead and buried.” They both protest too much. If it is dead and buried, and everybody knows it is unsatisfactory, why are Schumpeter and our critic so anxious to kill it again?

Edgar Hardcastle

Why Bother About the Burma Road ? (1944)

From the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

There has been quite a bit in the papers, one way and another, about getting supplies through to the Chinese. At one time it was simply a question of whether the British Government should open or close the Burma Road, but when the Japanese solved this problem by taking over the route themselves, plans were laid for the rapid building of a great new road from North India to “Free” China. We heard a great deal about the urgency and importance of the task of sending China the materials needed for the fight of the sorely beleagured Chinese troops in their effort to restore their country to freedom from the oppressing occupation of the War Lords of the Rising Sun. The Japanese had raped and pillaged, looted and burnt in the Chinese territory they occupied. The cruellest of soldiers, the most sadistic of foes, they had swept right into the very heart of China over a period of twelve years. Never had a people suffered so long and so much in modern times under the iron heel of the conqueror.

In view of what we have been told, therefore, it is surprising to read the following report in the Manchester Guardian Weekly (December 17th, 1943): —

“Trade between Japanese occupied and Free China has recently taken on larger proportions on account of the Chinese Government’s endeavour to attract useful goods from enemy territory and the accelerated fall or the Japanese puppet currencies in terms of Chinese national dollars.

“Value of the known imports from occupied areas to Free China during the last six months, according to a Government spokesman, was £1,250,000 sterling on Government account, and £25,000,000 through commercial channels.”

So why bother about building new roads or reopening old ones? It seems that British supplies might be shipped to Chunking via Tokio so long as the label was correctly addressed. Nobody would be a bit less happy surely—unless it were the Chinese soldiers if it turned out that British raw materials did not furnish such good weapons to kill the Japs with as Japanese produced supplies.

N. S.

Provincial Organisers’ Fund (1944)

Party News from the March 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the September issue of the Socialist Standard we outlined our plans for the future development of propaganda and organisation in the Provinces. In asking our readers to contribute to a special fund for this important work, we said : —

“It remains for those who wish to see our movement progress to help us with contributions towards this end. If you want a life different from the slavery of the factory, the office and the farm, here is the opportunity to help forward the change. It is a change that will bring into existence a social system in which all men and women, on a footing of social equality, will be able to control their own destinies and make their existence on earth something worth living for.”

In many parts of the country there are small groups of workers who desire this change and are prepared to work for it. but they lack experienced speakers and organisers, without which their task is made much more difficult. At the present time we lack the funds to help them over this difficulty, and that is where we look to you to play your part. The urgency of the task before us will not be questioned by those who wish to see our movement progress, and we make no apology for asking you to make even greater efforts to give us the financial support we need.

Up to mid-December the amount received for the fund was £173. This is quite a good start, but before we can go ahead with our, plans we shall need several times that amount. It’s up to you to see that our work is not handicapped by lack of funds. Send along that donation NOW. Don’t put it off until to-morrow, don’t leave it to the other sympathisers, and remember, no amount is too big ! !

Donations should be sent to J. Butler, 298, Halley Road, Manor Park, London, E.12, and it must be stated clearly that they are intended for the Provincial Organiser’s Fund. P.O.s, cheques, etc., must be crossed and made payable to the S.P.G.B.

Sensitive Content Warning . . .

Help me out here. 

Just stumbled across the following 'warning' that concerns the April 2015 Voice From The Back column, which appeared on the blog in March 2019:

The warning from blogger did not pop up at the time. It's obviously something that been flagged in recent months. Is it the passing reference to Russia's predatory 'interest' in Eastern Ukraine? Is it about gender inequality in Saudi Arabia or is it about the lack of basic sanitation for tens of millions of people in Pakistan? Blogger doesn't tell me. It's a real head scratcher.

Looking forward to future 'Sensitive Content Warnings'.

Fatalism and Historic Necessity. A Vindication of the Socialist Position. (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Perverted Vision.

The opponents of our method and theory – bourgeois scientists, and Syndicalist or Anarchist doctrinaires – are in accord in urging against Marxism the accusation which men like Guyot, of vulgar political economy, levelled of old against Socialism in general: they say we are guilty of an attack upon the individual, of an attempt upon liberty.

It is not the capitalist system which sacrifices the liberty of the many to the greater liberty of the privileged few; it is we who do so. It is not the regime of capitalist property which makes the “free” will of the immense majority of the population obey the hard law of labour for another; it is Socialism!

From the Frenchman De Molinari to the Prussian Eugene Richter, from the Englishman Herbert Spencer to the Italian Syndicalist Arturo Labriola, from the extreme right of the political horizon to the extreme left of “Socialist” opportunism, we hear vituperation against “the Socialist tyranny”, against “the future slavery”, and, above all, against the “suppression of individual liberty” – of capitalists!

But among our opponent there are, it seems, men of good faith who sincerely imagine that Marxism replaces "liberty" with the "fatalism" of immutable economic laws.

Note, in the first place, that the same accusation of fatalism has been made against all modern philosophers who proclaim the subordination of so-called moral phenomena to natural law. When Hippolyte Taine, the author of L’Intelligence, wrote that vice and virtue are as necessary products of certain conditions “as are vitriol and sugar”, he was stupidly accused of recommending the replacing of the consumption of sugar by that of vitriol. The minds of many moderns are so degraded by centuries of theological and metaphysical education that they take plain statements of fact for approvals or condemnations. They resemble the capricious woman who broke her mirror because it revealed the decline of her beauty.

This accusation of fatalism is somewhat comprehensible, and even excusable, when applied to those theories which subordinate human history to the influence of climate or the geographical environment. The climate, within certain limits, is practically invariable. The sky of Greece and of France has varied little from the most remote times; but how many revolutions have occurred under the same sun!

Man Makes History.

Thomas Buckle has been reproached for his climatic fatalism; but hardly with justice, because the celebration author of The History of Civilisation proved that as men developed they emancipated themselves from the influence of the geographical and climatic factors, and began to dominate nature.

But, I repeat, the geographical interpretation of history may well give rise to a fatalistic tendency. The semi-invariable nature of the geographical factor lends itself easily to this. One may say the same of all historic theories which subordinate history to external nature.

Such is not the case with the Marxian theory. Nothing is more human or more varied than the mode of production. To produce, said Marx in his Capital, man needs a plan, a consciousness of the work to be done. He know what he is doing. He thinks his work. After Vico,  Marx affirmed that history is made by man. Revolutions in the method of production which generate political and social revolutions are due to the great and small “inventions” – that is to say, to the products of human talents and genius.

Therefore Marx has not excluded man from history. He did not consider individuals as mannequins launching “new modes of production”, like modes of another kind are “launched” – that of the harem skirt, for example.

That is not all; it is the “dogmatic”, “sectarian”, and “orthodox” Marxians who have insisted, against Bernstein and his more or less idealistic school, on the necessity of affirming and propagating the “final aim” of Socialism.

Marxists alone are Constant.

It is they, and they alone, who have, in the great crisis of International Socialism (which is far from being terminated) remained unshakeably faithful to the Socialist ideal – without stupidly repeating the word – while opportunists of every order, or even of disorder, have allowed themselves to drift at the mercy of the political events of the day, along with the blind and fatal forces of the system which knows only the inexorable struggle of appetites and interests.

But the dialectical method is the enemy of all that is arbitrary. It does not place history in an aeroplane at the mercy of the winds of “His Majesty, Chance”. The movement of history is nothing like the zig-zag of a drunken man. It is governed by necessities. Humanity is not free to renounce its physical and intellectual needs. As it is not suicidally disposed, it submits, in order to live, to the necessities of production. Production gives rise to and determines the social system. To a given social system there correspond definite ideas and conceptions; religion, morality, philosophy, science.

It requires all the interested blindness, all the brutal selfishness, of the capitalist to say to the worker: You are free to cease to work. Absolute liberty is death.

A society is not transformed by the force of The Word, nor by strokes of will. It is necessary that all the forces of the past and present collaborate therein. Already Saint Simon, the true precursor of Marx, had clearly shown that the elements of the new system accumulate during centuries, and prepare themselves within the framework of ancient systems. according to him, the capitalist class has taken seven or eight centuries to become the dominant force in society.

Evolution Includes Revolution.

Isolated men, or small minorities, may, from time to time, indulge their gentle fantasies. They may dream of transformations in the twinkling of an eye. In the name of the “right of abortion” they may apply the forceps of “direct action” to the body social in order to bring the new society into the world before its time. But society as a whole – an entire class – only gives itself such aims as are in the domain of the realisable and possible. And when the time comes it shrinks from no necessary means. Evolution does not exclude revolution, any more than the gradual transformation of the earth excludes cataclysms. Births occur in blood, and are associated with cries and painful rendering. But only monsters come into the world before the normal hour.

A ship is launched. Does it deprive its captain of liberty to give him a nautical chart, prepared with scientific accuracy, and a compass? Would he be more free if he drifted at the will of the waves? The dialectic method, as used by Marx and Engels, provides us with chart and compass to determine the movement of history. It does not fetter us. It simply shows the way. In helping us toward the desired goal, it emancipates us from blind forces, from the fatality of chance. It is, therefore, an influence of freedom – not of slavery.

Primitive man is the slave of Nature. He is literally terrorised by natural phenomena. He seeks by cruel human sacrifices to obtain a mitigation of his lot. Natural science emancipates him. From being the slave of Nature he becomes master. Modern society is still at the mercy of blind, semi-natural forces. We are, in relation to society, what primitive man was in relation to nature. It is necessary to conquer our liberty. We must emancipate ourselves from the blind social forces which bind and oppress us. Society must become our thing, as the great forces of nature have become. We must become masters of society, just as we have become, more or less, the masters of our natural environment.

Science is Liberty.

But how have we conquered nature? By studying it; by learning its laws and making them serve our ends. It is the same with social laws. We shall only vanquish social oppression when we have discovered the laws of the working of society. Science is liberty. And the dialectical method, which powerfully aids toward that discovery, toward the edification of social science, is the tool of liberty, the instrument of precision of our emancipation.

The dialectical method is therefore quite the contrary of fatalism. In making us cognisant of historical necessities, it makes us able to effectively combat the fatalist decree of capitalist ignorance that there always have been poor, and always will be!

No, replies the dialectical method. Capitalist poverty is an “historical category”, which will disappear with the historical conditions which create and nourish it.

The dialectical method of Socialism is the method of science and of liberty.

[Ch. Rappoport in Le Socialisme. Translated by F. C. Watts.]

Capitalist “Humanity”. (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Socialist is almost always, yet, in most cases, without conscious hypocrisy, a non-Socialist in his own private life. On all sides of his character, indeed, the average Socialist shows the absence of that feeling for humanity which his creed inculcates.”—Witness (Ontario).

Ignoring the obvious contradiction that “the Socialist” is “nearly always a non-Socialist,” the truth of the above depends upon the writer’s interpretation of the words.

If the term Socialist is intended to mean one who endeavours to practice Socialism, then none can be other than non Socialist—unless our critic would expect the aspirant to the name to start a co-operative commonwealth, as a hobby, after knocking off work.

Let me elucidate. Socialism is a name given to a system of society wherein the present anachronism : social production—private ownership, shall find no place; a system wherein classes with opposing interests shall give place to a community with a common interest.

A Socialist is one who recognises that private ownership must give place to social control in order that society shall progress ; one who sees that the evils attendant upon mankind are due to the clashing interests of producer and owner, and who works for the society of harmonious material interests that must result from the abolition of class domination.

That is a Socialist, both public and private ; and the piebald individual with Socialistic principles in spots is ruled out.

The “feeling for humanity which his [Socialist] creed inculcates” is, evidently, conspicuously absent in the pro-capitalist, for, be it noted, our Socialist in parts “shows its absence” on his non-Socialist side. Certainly such feelings are not rapidly generated in the hothouse of capitalism. It does not pay ; but capitalism is never at a loss. If the real thing cannot be produced at a profit, nevertheless, quite an overdose of shoddy goods of this character has been dumped upon an unsuspecting proletariat in this enlightened country.

The humanity made so much of by the pro-capitalist does not appeal to the Socialist, who is more concerned with preventing the evils than sympathising with the unfortunate victims thereof.

What does capitalist humanity amount to ? Human beings are maimed and crippled in the scramble for dividends. Commerce demands such sacrifice. Production for profit ignores humanity, and after each day of modern industry hundreds are left by the wayside, maimed and bleeding.

The humanitarian here steps in and calls upon his brothers to assist in the holy work of rescue. How awful it is for the “image of the Creator” to expire in the gutter ! To tend the sick and to comfort the weary should be the work of the more fortunate ones.

To be sure. And, apart from the usefulness of such work, it may be very dangerous to allow the carcass to rot. Germs from the body may travel even into the homes of those more fortunate brethren. So, while supporting the system which maims and kills, they erect hospitals and poor-houses to receive the wreckage from the capitalist workshops.

Year by year the mass of that wreckage increases, and, of course, with the growth in the number of those who have fallen among thieves and got broken, the “good Samaritan” business expands also. To quote a writer in the Daily Chronicle, “they are awaiting the half starved children and consumptive sempstresses who will never get well until they have had enough to eat, and for the mothers who cannot feed their babes because they have no food for themselves.”

Describing a visit to the “House of Horror” (the London Hospital) the same writer says :

“Throughout the length and breadth of a building covering a space of eight acres, men and women were busy with the great and ceaseless fight with death. Always the great city casts up its human wreckage, its broken bodies, its scum of disease. The supply is inexhaustible from the torture chamber of life. . . I saw the vision of life’s cruelty in a great city. I saw sharp knives in whirling machines of great factories chopping off the fingers of working men and slicing off their limbs. I saw great ladders falling and smashing the bodies of men. I saw starvation weakening the fibre of the people of mean streets, and the microbes of disease grow fat in the filth. I saw vice eating up the bone and blood of men and breeding children of despair. For here around me in the London Hospital were the victims of all the seething cruelty of a great city in a civilised world.”

The modern hospital resembles nothing so much as the repairing department of a large factory. The human machine is received broken and worn ; the broken parts are patched and the worn parts rebuilt, and then it is returned to be rebroken and again repaired, until at last it is thrown on the industrial scrap-heap as utterly useless.

At present parsons, labour leaders, and others engaged in the dissemination of the “feeling for humanity” are busy denouncing the horrors of war and calling for “international arbitrament of national quarrels,” heedless of the fact that wars are necessary factors in the expansion of markets, and that standing armies are required to subdue a subject class.

Great though the loss of life by warfare is, it pales into insignificance beside the myriads needlessly slaughtered in factory and mine.

“Where is the Socialist’s humanity ?” “Where is he who practices Socialism in ‘private life’?” “Where are your Socialist hospitals ?” “What has Socialism done for the workers?” Such are the questions of the unthinking. Ask rather “What does that ‘humanity’ amount to which waits until the damage is done and then applies the sticking plaster; which calmly stands by while the limb is broken, and then hastens to supply a splint ?”

Look for the humane instinct in a system which is based upon the robbery and murder of the useful in the interest of the useless. Enquire into and discover what capitalism has done for the toiler.

Dr. Newman, chief medical officer of the Board of Education, reports that of the 6 millions of children attending elementary schools, approximately 50 per cent. require medical treatment.

The chief registrar of births and deaths, in his report for 1909, states that 20 per cent. of the deaths in that year occurred in the workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and prisons.

In London 1 in 7 and in Glasgow 1 in 2 live in overcrowded conditions, while in both cities thousands of houses are unoccupied, and there are thousands upon thousands of acres of unused land in both England and Scotland.

We are told that in Great Britain “there are a million men unemployed ; that one third of the population are on the verge of hunger.”

The total wages paid are ever decreasing, it being estimated that the wages now paid to the workers of this country are less by 6 millions than they were 8 years ago, and further, that the number of paupers in the United Kingdom has increased by 118,000 since 1901.

T. S. Chouston, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E., in a recent work, says : “In the report of a Royal Commission it is estimated that there are at least 350,000 persons representing the mentally helpless, dependent, and diseased element in the body politic. I should add another 50,000 and be well within the mark. Those have as first cousins an army of defectives of another kind. . . . It comes to this, that a large part of our ‘submerged tenth’ lacks brain-grit to cope with the conditions of modern life, especially in large cities.”

These are a few of the good things capitalism has done for the workers. The mechanism to cope with this enormous poverty, disease, and crime, necessary for the maintenance and upkeep of present society, springs, we are told, from a “feeling for humanity.” The Socialist wants none of it.

Just as every vice alleged against Socialism is found to actually exist to-day, so every pretended virtue of capitalist society shows its inherent rottenness.

No greater condemnation of the existing order can be given than the fact that it creates the necessity for these vast “humane” institutions to deal with the worst of its flotsam and jetsam, to provide, for decency sake, a screen for awful spectacle of its wreckage.

T. W. Lobb

Capitalism and the Shopkeeper. (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist teaching of the truth that capital is becoming concentrated in the hands of a diminishing number of capitalists has been recently attacked, from two points of view, by the “illuminati” of the I.L.P. and by the Anarchists.

In both cases is the wish father to the thought. Both parties have a case to bolster up, and both have diligently sought for “facts” to support their tenets.

The Joint-Stock Company and the small shopkeeper are stock illustrations supposed to prove the theory of the division of capital among an increasing number of happy and deserving recipients. The “theory of increasing misery” has its converge in the theory of a slow but sure evolution into terrestrial paradise. No one will be able to say of any particular period: here ends capitalism and Socialism has its birth ; but the change will be gradual, peaceful, ethical—through the Joint Stock company and the small shopkeeper, and small reforms, vide Bernstein & Co. Let us look into the position of this small shopkeeper.

The English race have been reputed a nation of shopkeepers; the growth of multiple retail stores has suggested the remark that we are now a nation of managers. It is beyond dispute that the existence of thousands of company stores has limited the scope for individual success in the retail trade, and has driven the small retailer to accept the most casual and unremunerative portion of that trade. A huge business is carried on in multiple and chain shops, by mail-order businesses, departmental stores, and other massive concerns. They cause tradesmen great anxiety ; all along the line the small shopkeeper is exploited ; manufacturers are making attempts to deal direct with the consumer ; department stores are trying to filch suburban trade ; they are spoiling the retailer by well-organised mail-trading systems.

If the man with little capital can exist to day at all it is as a retailer; but even this small sphere of activity seems narrowing. Half a century ago little capital was required to become a retailer. In no branch of commerce is the personal factor, the knowledge of a customer’s wants and whims, of such value. The old tradesman was in personal contact with hundreds of his customers, and it was once thought that. here was a barrier to Joint Stock Company success in the retail trade. However, slower than in manufacture, but as surely, the big capitalist is gaining ground.

In the North of England the shopkeeper has two competitors—the multiple stores and the co-operative societies. These obtain the cream of the cash trade, and leave to the shopkeeper a hazardous credit trade, plus what he can catch when the stores are closed—for he works fifteen hours a day. Certainly, as one walks along and sees hundreds of small shops, it would seem as if the small trader throve in spite of powerful competitors. But even if we grant an increase in the number of small shops, it does not imply greater prosperity for their owners, nor that a certain number of proletarians have risen out of their class and become independent shopkeepers. In large towns hundreds of these “emporiums” are run by workingmen with the aim of adding a trifle to their petty wages, just as, as Kautsky has shown, in Belgium many of the belauded peasant proprietors work in contiguous mines and milk to help eke out a livelihood.

It is certainly the ideal of thousands of workingmen to “get out of the factory,” as the phrase goes, and live a life free from the factory buzzers, managers, and foremen ; alas, many are called but few chosen ! The majority of them have not even a sporting chance of obtaining a livelihood from their shop alone. Years ago such, small speculators had better opportunities of becoming successful retail merchants, but to-day they are snowed under by powerful enemies. The big fish, are swallowing the little fish even in a branch of commerce where so much is in favour of the small fry. The Marxian law surely stands unassailable everywhere if it is applicable to retail trading. The following figures relative to the number of shops in Prussia are taken from Bernstein’s “Evolutionary Socialism.”

Bernstein remarks : “It is not the large businesses that offer the most deadly opposition to the small ones; the latter provide it among themselves.” If he can obtain comfort from such statistics his position is surely in dire straits.

The better placed shopkeepers who manage to obtain a “living” are, too, getting more in the clutches of the big capitalists. Most retail tobacconists are merely agents for the Imperial Tobacco Company ; in the grocery line such firms as Lever Bros, are obtaining great power ; and in every department of retail trade we meet with combination and association. Competition is as dead as piety. Arrangements are made amongst manufacturers to keep up prices, and amongst retailers to do likewise. Small dealers attempt, through their associations, to buy collectively. A few weeks ago a Manchester ironmongers’ association actually discussed a proposal that they, as an association, commence a large store in the centre of the city, to enable them to fight the great firms with better prospect of success. These stores, it was stated, were stealing the most profitable portion of the trade ; and individually they could not compete with the splendid displays and powerful organisation of the stores.

The transition from a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of managers is the transition from “small to big industry,” analogous to the transition from handicraftsman to factory hand in the sphere of production. The journals which circulate amongst the various retailers are not blind to this change, however much the I.L.P. official gang may deny it. The “Boot and Shoe Trade Journal” is a better judge of the havoc wrought by company shops amongst small retailers than is Ramsay MacDonald or the editor of the “Labour Leader.” And when the present chairman of the I.L.P., Mr. W. C. Anderson, was peripatetic organiser for the Shop Assistants Union, his stock speech was a lament at the small opportunities possessed by modern shop assistants, of budding into independent shopkeepers.

The Socialist must wish for a quick awakening, both in the ranks of the shop assistants and those of the shopkeeper. The former in permanently proletarian, the latter liable to drop into the proletarian ranks at any moment. The assistant, working in a shop, amongst thirty more of his class, that shop being but one of six hundred owned by his employers, is better able to appreciate the vast changes in the retail trade than are I.L.P. critics and Anarchist theorisers with creeds to defend at any cost.

John A. Dawson

Jottings. (1911)

The Jottings Column from the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Will Thorne has introduced a Bill in the House for the Nationalisation of the Railways and Canals. What have the tripe shops done amiss ?

* * *

In a leading article describing the history of the Socialist Movement in France, which appeared in the “Labour Leader” (24.2.11), the writer, Mr. J. F. Mills, states:

“To Blanc must be accorded the credit for theoretically bringing Socialism down from the empyrean to the solid earth. The conquest of political power by the masses and the democratic State as the great instrument of social transformation, and the right to work, … all these principles reveal Blanc’s originality, and proclaim his right to be entitled ‘The Father of Modern Social-Democracy,’ or if Marxists dispute his right to the word ‘father,’ then let us say ‘grandfather.’ ”

* * *

As a Socialist, I am not in the least concerned about the principles of Louis Blanc, nor yet his right to the titles claimed for him by the writer quoted—except to suggest that “grandmother” would, perhaps, have been more appropriate. If by “originality” is meant Blanc’s experiment of the national workshops, then it is about on a par with the “originality” of the Labour Party in their schemes of social reform, and so on.

But to attribute to Blanc that which Marx really accomplished, is a piece of unblushing effrontery indeed. To Marx, and Marx alone, is to be attributed the placing of Socialism on a scientific basis. He it was who discovered and established the great law of economic determinism, which may be briefly stated thus : Morals, laws, and political conditions grow out of, and are determined by, economic conditions.

The application of this law spells revolution and the end of wage-slavery. But as the “Labour Leader’s” policy is anti-revolutionary, it must expect the opposition of Socialists.

* * *

The same writer in a further article (10.3.11), in the midst of a tirade against Marxists (whom he refers to as Ishmaelites, Irnpossibilists, etc.), says: “Revolutionary Socialism (Marxism) is becoming merely a catchword . . .” And he remarks further on upon the scanty following of Marx, which following, he alleges, is chiefly confined to the Continent. Yet on the front page of the same issue we find an advertisement of a biography of Marx (published by the people who issue the “Labour Leader”) eulogising him, and in which occurs this passage: “Karl Marx, founder of modern scientific Socialism, under whose banner ten million voters are enrolled.” No wonder the workers are misled !

It might interest our modern Rip Van Winkle to know that not only is Marxism not dead or dying, but that it is, on the contrary, very much alive indeed—though, perhaps, it is not apparent to those suffering from that aggravated form of mental myopia prevalent in the I.L.P.

* * *

Speaking of the forced labour in the Congo, and the necessity for its abolition, Sir Edward Grey said (27.7.07): “If it is to come to an end it is essential that without delay the natives should be put in possession of large tracts of territory, which will enable them to keep themselves. Otherwise they will have no means of livelihood.”

This must have preyed on the mind of Mr. W. H. Lever, for we learn from the Brussels correspondent of the “Standard” that “the Minister for the Colonies has just come to an agreement with Messrs. Lever Bros., Port Sunlight, for the formation of a limited company, with a capital of £1,000,000, for the planting of palm-oil trees, and the establishment of a factory for the manufacture of oil products in the Congo.”

Is Mr. Lever going to do for the poor natives what he has done for the Sunligliters—socialise and Christianise business relations ? Will he extend to them his noble scheme of co-partnership, with its five per cent. certificates and the “feeling of brotherhood and partnership” ? Or (as I strongly suspect) is he going out there in order to still further augment his already bloated income ? If the latter, then he will have an easy thing on, for the cruel treatment of the natives under the Belgian administration will have rendered them easy victims for the exploiting process upon which the success of the scheme will largely depend.

* * *

That Mr. Lever (like William the Little) fondly believes that he is endowed with a divine mission is evident from the following statement made by him in the first number of the “Anti-Socialist” (Feb., 1909) :

“We cannot wisely disregard the very basis on which human nature was founded by a Divine Creator, viz., self-interest. We can only direct self-interest, as its Creator in tended, into beneficent and utilitarian channels, and check and control it from becoming a curse and a clanger to society.”

No one, I am sure, will accuse Mr. Lever of disregarding the “Divine” authority. It has been left to Mr. Lever and his kind to “check and control” it from permeating the brains of the workers. When it does do so, and the workers begin to “check and control” for themselves, it will be a bad look out for the class to which Mr. Lever belongs.

* * *

Mr. J. C. Wedgwood, M.P., has resigned his membership of the Fabian Society because his opinions are no longer in accord with the aims of the society. He has not joined the S.P.G.B.

Tom Sala

Editorial: Why we oppose this “Peace Movement.” (1911)

Editorial from the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The hypocrisy of the English race is proverbial. At intervals they rise to such a height in this direction, as to draw upon themselves the ridicule of the whole world—as when, drooling a sickening stream of sanctimony, they circumscribed the exploitation of the West Indian slaves, forbidding their masters to employ them more than eight hours a day, while children of tender years, of our own race, in our own country, toiled for sixteen hours a day in the mill-hells of the Midlands.

The recurring frenzy of nauseating pretence again sweeps over the land, and this time its infection spreads beyond our shores. They have caught it America ; they suspire the bacilus in Germany ; in Australia the complaint becomes epidemic. “Peace, sitting under her olive” is the subject of this amorous outbreak, and you might shout “mad dog !” in the streets and nobody would take any notice, because every eye is fixed on the beautiful form “sitting under her olive,” and every lip is outraging her name.

Peace, forsooth ! What has peace to do with you, workingmen of the world ? What horror has war that “peace” has not accustomed you to? “The red rain of death !” Ah ! go into the mine and you will see it. “The awful rending of strong men’s bodies !” The shunter sees it every day. “The fearful cost of human life !” The “Thunderer” was built in “peace” at the cost of a thousand accidents, from keel-laying to launch. Every plate in her great hull would sweat blood of those who mined it and smelted it and forged it, were the day when “the sea shall give up its dead” to come upon us tomorrow. Every great girder that gives strength to her stupendous form, and every rivet that holds them together, have been drenched with the blood of workingmen, at every stage of their winning and fashioning, before ever they come to crush and mangle workers’ bodies in the shipbuilder’s yard. And every gun which is to be put aboard her, and the engines and fittings and coal—all these are to be paid for with workers’ life and limb ; so that when she leaves port a complete thing, she may do so as an emblem of capitalist peace : for it is very unlikely that she will ever receive such libations of blood in battle has she has had poured over her on the stocks.

Peace ! The snuffling humbug of the word on capitalist lips ! At the very moment they are mouthing it most unctuously they are drafting police and military against the miners in South Wales, massing troops on the borders of Mexico, and raising an immense fund to fight the implement workers in Australia. And while the British Liberal Government are making the remote corners of the earth echo and re-echo with the empty nothing, “Peace !” they are voting the enormous sum of £75,000,000 for war—on the principle that they’ll have peace if they have to fight for it.

Strange, is it not, that in all this cry of “peace” but one incentive shows itself ? The burden of armaments. It is the treasure, not the blood, that causes the capitalist head to ache. No wonder—for treasure is the master’s while the blood is the workers. £75,000,000 in a year is a mighty drain, and the Government that is forced to exact it is in a precarious position. So they scream “peace” by way of a soft answer to turn away wrath—and also in the certain knowledge that the result will demonstrate that peace, even as the capitalist understands it, is possible only at the cost of crushing armaments—or national extinction. It is significant that no hope is held out of a “peace treaty” except with America—a country with whom all serious differences have already been composed, against whom, in addition, Britain would hurl her might in vain, and who could inflict damage, where they can inflict it all, with impunity. They could starve us out by stopping their own and Canadian wheat at the granaries. It is admitted that on the day when the States and Canada want join hands the “mother country” has got to submit. On that day the treaty becomes in all eyes what from the first it must be in reality—waste paper. It is easy for two nations who cannot fight, to make a treaty that they won’t.

But the case is different with, say Germany. No responsible person suggests a treaty with that country—yet it is Germany that has made a British Liberal Government increase its annual Naval Estimates £14,000,000 in five years. No, derision waits the Minister who dares suggest such a treaty, for the farce would be too apparent. Just as a treaty with America brings peace no nearer because the two could not fight, treaty or no treaty, so a treaty with Germany would bring peace no nearer because, in the face of conflicting interests (without which they would not fight in any event), the treaty would not be worth the cost of its inscripton. The humbug, therefore, of the cry of “Peace” and “Disarmament,” is apparent.

There comes a time, of course, when it becomes cheaper to submit to a foreign rival than to arm against him. What course our ruling class will take when the cost of “keeping up the two-power standard” is dearer than exploiting native workers under foreign rule is foreshadowed by the course of the French master class at the time of the commune. Their patriotism will quickly enough then take the form of reduced annamants—the tacit confession that they would sooner “wear the yoke” in humilty than seriously suffer in pocket.

Meanwhile the Liberals, in their desire to cover themselves, have been loyally supported by the Labour Party. These have shouted “peace” with the best of them, and they lose no opportunity of implying that it is only the “burden of armaments” which prevents the Liberals “sweeping poverty from every hearth.” They thus kill a number of birds with one stone. First the Liberals are absolved directly it is discovered that their efforts for general disarmament are without avail ; secondly the Labour Members put themselves right with all those of their constituents who are, or who think they are, groaning under the burden of armaments, and thirdly they throw dust in the eyes of the rank and file of the Labour Party and Trade Unionists on whose backs they have climbed to place—and pelf.

Of course, a show of consistency had to be made in the House. The I.L.P. had organised 250 meetings on the question of armaments, so something was expected. And something happened.

Exactly one half of the Labour Members in Parliament came up to scratch to save the face of their party by voting against the Liberals’ immense Naval Estimates. The other half (save two who voted FOR them !) stood out of it oblige the Liberals !

Keir Hardie says the party were bribed, the Osborne Bill being the price of their defection, and he should know. But we wonder how many would have opposed the Estimates had they been really in danger. How many would dare have gone back to their Liberal constituencies with the confession on their lips that they had helped to defeat a Liberal Government? Not many, we venture to guess.

Did Jesus ever live? (1911)

Book Review from the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Christ Myth, by Arthur Drews, Ph. D., Professor of Philosophy at Karlsruhe. Translated from the third revised German edition by C. Desmond Burns, M.A. 304 pp. 7s. 6d., net. T. Fisher Unwin, London and Leipzic.

To the Socialist the question whether there existed an historical Jesus of the Gospels is hardly a burning question. Whether the Christ legends had an historical nucleus or not does not affect the antagonism between religion, as such, and scientific knowledge. There is nothing inherently improbable in the collection of ancient myths round an historical personage and the attribution to him of the magic commonly believed in at the time. The Socialist, however, unlike the average professor, does not consider the work concluded when a belief has been traced to a myth! The myth clamours just as loudly for explanation.

Considerable work has been done, particularly on the Continent, in the direction of tracing ancient legends to their material basis, and showing their connection with definite phases of social life; but immensely more remains. The present book does not greatly increase our knowledge in this respect, and is to that extent unsatisfactory. A reference is, however, made to a rite which exists in the Vedic Agni cult, and which, according to the author, reaches back into the very origins of all human civilisation, and preserves the memory of the discovery of fire in the midst of the “horrors of the Stone Age”. And the author gets near to a recognition of the social basis of early Christianity in the following passage:

“Christianity is a syncretic religion. It belongs to those movements which at the commencement of our era were struggling with one another for the mastery. Setting out from the Apocalyptic idea and the expectation of the Messiah among the Jewish sects, it was borne on the tide of a mighty social agitation, which found its centre and its point of departure in the religious sects and Mystery communities. Its adherents conceived the Messiah not merely as the Saviour of souls, but as deliverer from slavery, from the lot of the poor and the oppressed, and as the bearer of a new justice.”

But it is, perhaps, hardly fair to condemn Professor Drews’ book on the score that it does not explain the beliefs and myths with which it deals, for, in view of the frantic attempts of professor of Protestant theology to base their religion on an “historic” Jesus, it is certainly useful to show how unsupported such a base is.

In spite of occasional emphasis, however, the negative, as might be expected, is far from being proved. The non-historicity of Christ remains in the realms of the “may have been”, the “probable” and the “perhaps”, the professor’s scholarship notwithstanding. The innumerable comparisons with pre-Christian religions of all sorts nevertheless demonstrate, at least, the great antiquity of practically the whole of the rites popularly connected with the name of Jesus.

In essence, the author’s work in comparative religion (or, rather, in comparative mythology) simply carries the so-called Higher Criticism to its full conclusion, without seeking any sounder basis. He will have nothing to say to materialistic monism, and therefore never reaches bed rock; but his investigations within their idealistic limits have their value, and it may be useful to give Professor Drews’ chief conclusions.

At the birth of Christianity men not only longed for a new structure of society, for peace, justice, and happiness on earth, but they trembled at the expectation of the early occurrence of world-wide catastrophe which would put a terrible end to all existence. And, says the professor:

“Seldom in the history of mankind has the need for religion been so strongly felt as in the last century before and the first century after Christ. But it was not from the old hereditary national religions that deliverance was expected. It was from the unrestrained commingling and unification of all existing religions, a religious syncretism, which was specially further by acquaintance with the strange, but on that account more attractive, religions of the East. Already Rome had become a Pantheon of almost all religions in which one could believe”.

Christ is derived from a cult god of the Jewish sects, and etymological variations of the name Jesus are shown to be but older words for the Messiah, the mediator, the god of healing, and the redeemer; each with distinct characteristics. The supposed place-name, Nazareth, is a geographical fiction: the word really meant a guardian or protector. Further, the infliction of death upon a gibbet or cross as a human sacrifice was, as is, indeed, generally known, an extremely ancient religion practice. The crucifixion story had a direct connection with weather gods and the Roman Saturnalia.

Professor Drews, in common with most modern critics, attributes systematic Christianity to Paul, who possibly existed. “It is evident”, he says, “that in reality it was merely a new setting to the old conception of the representative self-sacrifice of God”. Moreover: “No historical personality who should, so to say, have lived as an example of the God-man, was in any way necessary to produce that Pauline development of the religion of Jesus . . . Christ is, for Paul, only a comprehensive expression for the totality of men, which is therein represented as an individual personal being”. In other words, according to our author, Paul did not actually conceive of an historical Jesus. “The Pauline religion was only one form of the many syncretising efforts to satisfy humanity’s need of redemption by a fusion of religious conceptions derived from different sources”. But the connection with ancient religion is even closer.

“The place of the bloody expiatory sacrifices of the believers in Attis, wherein they underwent ‘baptism by blood’ in their yearly March festival, and wherein they obtained the forgiveness of their sins and were ‘born again’ to a new life, was in Rome the Hill of the Vatican. In fact the very spot on which in Christian times the Church of St. Peter grew above the so-called grave of the Apostle. It was at bottom merely an alteration of the name, not of the matter, when the High Priest of Attis blended his rôle with that of the High Priest of Christ, and the Christ-cult spread itself from this new point far over the other parts of the Roman Empire”.

Apart from Professor Drews’ statements, however, we know that the Christian search for an historical Jesus is quite a modern thing, and is really a sign of the dissolution of Christianity, of the weakening of faith, and of the growing scientific habit.

It is the accompaniment, also, of personal individualist religion rather than of the communal faith of the original Church. As a god, Christ appeared to his worshippers to no more need historic support than did the Godhead. But to-day faith has gone, and the attempt to find an historical nucleus for the Christ of the Gospels is the last despairing effort of what once was faith to justify itself by the light of reason.

Moreover, as Kalthoff says: “In default of any historical certainty the name of Jesus has become for Protestant theology an empty vessel into which that theology pours the contents of its own meditations."

It is truly all things to all men. But behind all its many forms it retains one constant care. It is true that Christians are being compelled to abandon the supernatural and to attempt to take refuge in an unfindable Christ-man, but they only throw overboard their grosser superstitions in order to save the essential superstition of Idealism as a bulwark against Materialism.

Professor Drews sees farther than the Protestants. He wishes to save religion by abandoning Christ altogether. “There must be”, he says, “an idealistic monism in opposition to the naturalistic monism of Haeckel, which is prevalent even to-day. This monism must not exclude but include God’s existence; and its present unfruitful negation of all religion must deepen into a positive and religiously valuable view of the world”.

In practice an “idealistic monism” is not monism, but dualism; but that need not concern us here. At bottom the professor’s attitude is typically bourgeois in its unctuous sophistry. Rather jettison all the gods there be than risk being overwhelmed by materialistic monism. At all costs keep the gaze of the masses fixed upon the sky, the ideal world where they cannot see how they are robbed and oppressed; do not let them investigate the material world, where they would soon find the way to material salvation! Such is the useful rôle of all religion to every ruling class. And Professor Drews would help it make its last desperate stand, sans Christ, sans Bible, but not sans its essential pernicious superstition. Truly, one must say of religion in all its multifarious forms, what our French friends say of government: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!”

F. C. Watts