Contemporary Thought on Nineteenth Century Socialism

Volume IV

Kevin Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429839351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

For historians of the international labour movement, the decades before 1914 were the golden age of Marxist thought. In this flowering of socialist thinking, Britain seemingly had no part, and the question has been asked instead: 'Why was there was no Marxism in Britain?' The selections in this volume confirm that Marxist ideas in Britain were not always pitched at the highest theoretical level. There are also examples of the reductionism to which leading exponents were sometimes prone. Nevertheless, there is also a richness and outspokenness across wide and varied themes that belies the caricature of arid economic determinism. Marxists believed they carried on the tradition of home-grown movements of struggle such as Chartism. They also identified with the new spirit of internationism whose ideas and personalities filled the pages of their periodicals. Behind such well-known names as William Morris, James Connolly and Tom Mann, a wider movement of contrarians remains to be discovered.

Part 1
THE IDEA OF SOCIALISM

1
SOCIALISM MADE PLAIN. BEING THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MANIFESTO OF THE DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION (DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION, 1883)

[By 1883 the Democratic Federation had become a focal point for all those drawn by the ideas of socialism that were once more in the air. These ideas were crystal-lised in the declaration of principles adopted at the Federation’s second annual conference in June 1883 and issued as the pamphlet Socialism Made Plain. Though it was not until the following year that the Federation was renamed the Social Democratic Federation, the views expressed in the pamphlet marked its formal adoption of a socialist objective and meant a political break with radicals who had come this far with Hyndman but felt unable to endorse such a position.

They would have noticed most its clear exposition of the economic case for socialism. It was certainly this aspect that the arch-individualist Herbert Spencer took issue with in his Man Versus the State (1884). Hyndman has much to say about the pernicious role played historically by the landed classes. Nevertheless, he leaves no doubt that the rule of the “active capitalist class” was now a still more serious source of oppression.

Even so, the text shows very clearly how Hyndman sought to marry the economic ideas he had found in Marx with traditions of political radicalism that went back to the Chartists and beyond (Pierson 1973, ch. 4). The manifesto thus takes its stance against all established political groupings, and against the alliance of capitalists and landlords that had been cemented by the first Reform Act of 1832 and left largely unchallenged since the decline of Chartism after 1848. In the language of paid delegates and annual conventions one may certainly see the echo of the old Chartist demands for annual parliaments and payment of members. There is also a commitment to adult suffrage, explicitly including both men and women, which would remain a fixture of the SDF’s programme and a source of considerable controversy in the period of the suffragettes. In the form of the “direct reference” of grave matters to the country at large, the pamphlet also envisages recourse to the instrument of the referendum. This continued to enjoy much support among some socialists, but at the same time was emphatically opposed by the Fabians with their strong commitment to ideas of professionalised representation (Barrow and Bullock 1996).

Essentially drafted by Hyndman, the text that follows was arguably the first of the decade’s summary expositions of socialist argument. As such, it not only predated but helped to inspire those like the Fabians whose socialism would take them in rather different directions. Later in 1883, Hyndman would also publish a fuller exposition, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England, in which his debt to Marx’s thought was openly acknowledged. The robustly national framework he adopted was one principal cause of the misgivings Hyndman aroused among some socialists, who included Marx and Engels. Another bone of contention was the specification of so-called palliatives, here referred to as “stepping-stones to a happier period”. Hyndman’s commitment to more immediate objectives would over time give rise to numerous defections from the SDF. The first of them, barely a year or so later, was that of the Socialist League (Chapter 2, this volume).]

FELLOW CITIZENS,

THE time has come when it is absolutely necessary that the mass of the people should seriously take in hand their own business unless they are content to find themselves in the near future worse off than they have ever yet been. At present, social and political power is monopolised by those who live upon the labour of their fellows; and Tories or Conservatives, Whigs, Liberals or Radicals strive only to keep the workers ignorant of the truths which most nearly concern them. After the Reform Bill of 1832 the capitalists entered into alliance with the landlords except on one question, and from the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 to this day the lords of the money-bag and the lords of the soil have together been absolute masters of the millions who labour throughout the United Kingdom. So complete has been their control that since the year 1848 no vigorous attempt has even been made to overthrow it. But what has been the result to the workers of this supremacy of the luxurious classes? During fifty years our labourers have competed against one another for wages which barely suffice to keep them alive. Whilst the realised wealth and the annual income of the country have more than trebled, those who create these riches remain a wage-slave class, overworked and underfed, at the mercy of every crisis and the victims of each succeeding depression. The improved machinery, the extension of railways, the great steam and electric communications—that vast increase of the power of man over nature which has been the main feature of our epoch, has brought luxury for the few, misery and degradation for the many. Even in the past ten years what have we seen? The interests of Great Britain utterly neglected, Ireland shamefully misgoverned, India ruined and South Africa estranged. In 1874 the Liberals were dismissed for incapacity and Conservatives ruled in their stead for six years. Not a single measure did they introduce during that long tenure of office which could in any way lighten the lot of the millions who toil. The Conservatives having been turned out in disgust the Liberals again try their hand, and once more not a single measure is before Parliament, not a single measure is proposed for future legislation, which can benefit the working men and women who are really the source of all our wealth.

Fellow-Citizens the further success of this pitiful trickery depends upon your ignorance and will last as long as your apathy. Landlords and capitalists, who own the House of Lords and fill the House of Commons, wish nothing better than to protect their interests under the pretence of looking after yours. Take up then your

Total Production of the United Kingdom…………	£1,300,000,000
Taken by Landlords, Capitalists and Profitmongers…..	1,000,000,000
Left for the Producers……………………….	300,000,000

Study these figures all who toil and suffer that others may be lazy and rich; look upon the poverty, the starvation, the prostitution around you ye who labour and return the value of your entire day’s wages to your employers in the first two or three hours of your day’s work. Ponder on these facts, reflect upon these figures, men and women of England, and then ask yourselves, whether it is worth while for such a result as this to bow down in slavish subjection before your “governing classes,” whether you will not rather demand and obtain the full fruits of your labour and become your own governing class yourselves. Submit then no longer to a system of Parliamentary Government which is maintained in the interests of those who rob and oppress you—which has proved itself for generations to be alike a failure and a fraud.

EDUCATE! AGITATE! ORGANISE!

Fellow Citizens, we of the DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION demand complete adult suffrage for every man and woman in these islands, because in this way alone can the whole people give free expression to their will; we are in favor of paid delegates and annual Conventions because by this means alone can the people control their representatives; we stand up for the direct reference of all grave issues to the country at large, and for the punishment as felony of every species of corruption, because thus only can tyranny be checked and bribery uprooted; we call for the abolition of all hereditary authority, because such authority is necessarily independent of the mass of the people. But all these reforms when secured mean only that the men and women of these islands will at length be masters in their own house. Mere political machinery is worthless unless used to produce good social conditions.

All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourers all wealth is due.

But we are strangers in our own country. Thirty thousand persons own the land of Great Britain against the 30,000,000 who are suffered to exist therein. A long series of robberies and confiscations has deprived us of the soil which should be ours. The organised brute force of the few has for generations robbed and tyrannised over the unorganised brute force of the many. We now call for Nationalisation of the Land. We claim that land in country and land in towns, mines, parks, mountains, moors should be owned by the people for the people, to be held, used, built over and cultivated upon such terms as the people themselves see fit to ordain. The handful of marauders who now hold possession have and can have no right save brute force against the tens of millions whom they wrong.

But private ownership of land in our present society is only one and not the worst form of monopoly which enables the wealthy classes to use the means of production against the labourers whom they enslave. Of the £1,000,000,000 taken by the classes who live without labour out of a total yearly production of £1,300,000,000, the landlords who have seized our soil, and shut us out from its enjoyment, absorb little more than £60,000,000 as their direct share. The few thousand persons who own the National Debt, saddled upon the community by a landlord Parliament, exact £28,000,000 yearly from the labour of their countrymen for nothing; the shareholders who have been allowed to lay hands upon our great railway communications take a still larger sum. Above all, the active capitalist class, the loan-mongers, the farmers, the mine-exploiters, the contractors, the middle-men, the factory-lords—these, the modern slave-drivers, these are they who, through their money, machinery, capital, and credit turn every advance in human knowledge, every further improvement in human dexterity, into an engine for accumulating wealth out of other men’s labour, and for exacting more and yet more surplus value out of the wage-slaves whom they employ. So long as the means of production, either of raw materials or of manufactured goods are the monopoly of a class, so long must the labourers on the farm, in the mine or in the factory sell themselves for a bare subsistence wage. As land must in future be a national possession, so must the other means of producing and distributing wealth. The creation of wealth is already a social business, where each is forced to co-operate with his neighbour; it is high time that exchange of the produce should be social too, and removed from the control of individual greed and individual profit.

As stepping-stones to a happier period, we urge for immediate adoption:—

The COMPULSORY CONSTRUCTION of healthy artisans’ and agricultural labourers’ dwellings in proportion to the population, such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone.

FREE COMPULSORY EDUCATION for all classes, together with the provision of at least one wholesome meal a day in each school.

EIGHT HOURS or less to be the normal WORKING DAY in all trades.

CUMULATIVE TAXATION upon all incomes above a fixed minimum not exceeding £300 a year.

STATE APPROPRIATION OF RAILWAYS, with or without compensation.

The establishment of NATIONAL BANKS, which shall absorb all private institutions that derive a profit from operations in money or credit.

RAPID EXTINCTION of the NATIONAL DEBT.

NATIONALISATION OF THE LAND, and organisation of agricultural and industrial armies under State control on co-operative principles.

By these measures a healthy, independent, and thoroughly educated people will steadily grow up around us, ready to abandon that baneful competition for starvation wages which ruins our present workers, ready to organise the labour of each for the benefit of all, determined, too, to take control finally of the entire social and political machinery of a State in which class distinctions and class privileges shall cease to be.

Do any say we attack private property? We deny it. We attack only that private property for a few thousand loiterers and slave-drivers, which renders all property in the fruits of their own labour impossible for millions. We challenge that private property which renders poverty at once a necessity and a crime.

Fellow-Citizens, we appeal to every man and woman among you who is weary of this miserable huckster’s society, where poverty and prostitution, fraud and adulteration, swindling and jobbery, luxury and debauchery reign supreme, we appeal to you to work with us in a never-ceasing effort to secure a happier lot for our people and their children, and to hold up a high ideal of national greatness for those who come after. Such an ideal of true greatness and glory, needs but intelligence, enthusiasm, and combination, to make it a reality even in our own day. We, at least, will never falter. We stretch out our hands for help, co-operation, and encouragement, to all creeds and all nationalities, ready ourselves to render assistance in every struggle against class injustice and individual greed. The land of England is no mean heritage; there is enough and to spare for all; with the powers mankind now possess wealth may easily be made as plentiful as water at the expense of trifling toil. But to-day the worn-out wage-slaves of our boasted civilisation look hopelessly at the wealth which they have created to be devoured only by the rich and their hangers-on. To the abject poor patriotism is but a mockery, all talk of happiness, of beauty, of morality, is a sneer. We call, then, upon every lover of freedom to support us in our endeavour to form a real party of the people, which shall secure a noble future for our own and other lands.

The aims and objects of the DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION are before you. Success can only be achieved by organised effort.

• EDUCATE! We shall need all our intelligence.
• AGITATE! We shall need all our enthusiasm.
• ORGANISE! We shall need all our force.

EDUCATE! AGITATE! ORGANISE!

2
“THE MANIFESTO OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE”, COMMONWEAL, FEBRUARY 1885, 1–2.

[A positive view of the SDF might stress how many socialists passed through its ranks and acquired a political training there. A negative view would see these same socialists as having been driven from the organisation by the autocratic leadership of Hyndman and those closest to him. Whichever view one takes, the SDF’s history was one of numerous defections both individual and collective.

The Socialist League breakaway was both the earliest and the most important of these. In part this was clearly an issue of personalities, and a first pronouncement issued by the defectors made a good deal of arbitrary rule and shifty leadership on the one hand and fairness and fraternal openness on the other. Nevertheless, when in February 1885 the League set out its objects in its new monthly paper the Commonweal, there were clearly also important issues of principle at stake. The manifesto’s rejection of modern bourgeois property-marriage and the cultural blight of commercialism suggests a more expansive view of human well-being and oppression, and the contempt for “mere politics” a more vigorous anti-parliamentarism than Hyndman was ever likely to countenance. There is also a clear opposition between the claims of co-operation and state socialism, and the partial measures and palliatives which they represented, and the uncompromising revolutionary socialism which the Socialist League itself proclaimed. The manifesto also includes a vigorous profession of socialist internationalism, and it was over this issue that some thirty years later Hyndman would end up leading his own breakaway.

The authors of the manifesto were William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax. For the rest of their lives they published prolifically on socialist themes, including further collaborations, and were certainly among the most gifted of Britain’s fin-de-siècle cohort of socialist intellectuals. The Socialist League they had founded, on the other hand, failed to flourish. By the end of the decade it was drifting in an anarchist direction. Even Morris found this uncongenial, and as he sundered the connection in 1890, Bax meanwhile was driven back into the SDF fold. He resumed where he left off, as one of its most active publicists, and his writings are among those represented in the present collection. Bax’s subsequent verdict was that personal differences had played a malign role in the rupture with the SDF, and that there had been no such issues of political or theoretical principle as could have justified such a split. Possibly even Hyndman learnt the lesson. He did not underestimate the scale of the setback, and the SDF henceforth was no more centralised, autocratic or beholden to its inner leadership than many other socialist organisations – least of all excluding the ILP.]

Fellow Citizens,

We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society – a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.

As the civilised world is at present constituted, there are two classes of Society – the one possessing wealth and the instruments of its production, the other producing wealth by means of those instruments but only by the leave and for the use of the possessing classes.

These two classes are necessarily in antagonism to one another. The possessing class, or non-producers, can only live as a class on the unpaid labour of the producers – the more unpaid labour they can wring out of them, the richer they will be; therefore the producing class – the workers – are driven to strive to better themselves at the expense of the possessing class, and the conflict between the two is ceaseless. Sometimes it takes the form of open rebellion, sometimes of strikes, sometimes of mere widespread mendicancy and crime; but it is always going on in one form or other, though it may not always be obvious to the thoughtless looker-on.

We have spoken of unpaid labour: it is necessary to explain what that means. The sole possession of the producing class is the power of labour inherent in their bodies; but since, as we have already said, the richer classes possess all the instruments of labour, that is, the land, capital, and machinery, the producers or workers are forced to sell their sole possession, the power of labour, on such terms as the possessing class will grant them.

These terms are, that after they have produced enough to keep them in working order, and enable them to beget children to take their places when they are worn out, the surplus of their products shall belong to the possessors of property, which bargain is based on the fact that every man working in a civilised community can produce more than he needs for his own sustenance.

This relation of the possessing class to the working class is the essential basis of the system of producing for a profit, on which our modern Society is founded. The way in which it works is as follows. The manufacturer produces to sell at a profit to the broker or factor, who in his turn makes a profit out of his dealings with the merchant, who again sells for a profit to the retailer, who must make his profit out of the general public, aided by various degrees of fraud and adulteration and the ignorance of the value and quality of goods to which this system has reduced the consumer.

The profit-grinding system is maintained by competition, or veiled war, not only between the conflicting classes, but also within the classes themselves: there...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: the Anglo-Marxists
• Part 1 The idea of socialism
• Part 2 Concepts of political change
• Part 3 Political economy
• Part 4 Work and social conditions
• Part 5 Ways of organising
• Part 6 Democracy and the state
• Part 7 The new religion and the old
• Part 8 Gender, sexuality, family and personal relations
• Part 9 War, peace and internationalism
• Part 10 The sense of the past
• Bibliography