A Letter to a Worker
Fellow Worker,
If you are interested in politics, economics or trade unionism, you no doubt feel at times the need for accurate knowledge on these subjects. Political discussions are always carried on with more or less heat, and quite frequently there is bad feeling, together with wild charges of dishonesty and misrepresentation. At election times the atmosphere is charged with hostility, and each party is more concerned with damaging the chances of its opponents than with enlightening you.
Nevertheless there is a source of information open to you that is sound and reliable. The works of Socialist thinkers like Marx and Engels may be at first difficult for you to follow ; those, works, in parts, being of a highly technical character. If you desire to understand your position in modern society it is, perhaps, better to commence with something more elementary : something that is intimately connected with your everyday life. The literature of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is entirely based on the scientific case of Marx, but is simply written and easily understood.
The Party exists for Socialism and makes Socialist knowledge available, for the workers. All the publications of the Party are, therefore, issued with this end in view; and you can be sure of accurate information and sound reasoning in all our pamphlets and in each issue of THE SOCIALIST STANDARD.
You are probably aware in a vague way that the only remedy for the evils of capitalism is a new order of society, sneeringly referred to by capitalist journalists as the millennium. Now sneers are not argument, and those who sneer are quite unable to inform you how to clear up the mess in any other way but by the establishment of Socialism. In the same breath as their sneers they offer very little hope for any improvement in working-class conditions. Most politicians agree that, in spite of everything that can be done, conditions, instead of improving, tend in fact to grow worse. This is in line with Socialist truth ; all the industrial forces that we see operating to-day are tending in that direction, and there is no apparent limit to the depths of poverty and degeneracy to which the workers may not be forced.
In your everyday life you come up against these forces and are compelled to realise your utter insignificance. You are dependent on fluctuations in trade that are entirely beyond your control. Some new invention that should ease human toil throws you out of a job. With every worker so displaced markets shrink and the stagnation spreads. Your impotence before all this is a tragedy for you, though your masters may be smilingly optimistic about the future. They can afford to wait for the turn of trade. They are sorry, but their sympathy does not feed and clothe you. Nevertheless, we do not blame them. You could do no different if you changed places with them. Just consider for a moment. The bulk of industry is carried on by huge companies, trusts and combines. Those who hold shares in these concerns seldom know anything about the actual business; their knowledge is limited to the amount of dividend payable at the end of each half-year or year.
These conditions are general in every industrial or financial concern. Each concern has a management or directing board that is more or less intimate with technical processes; their chief business being to force the highest possible rate of dividends out of the concern. When you read about companies being formed to exploit oil, rubber, wheat and other things, it is taken for granted by you that these companies make their dividends out of those products. Now, while it is impossible for anyone to produce wealth of any kind without some material substance as a basis, such substances are not dividends and cannot be allocated as dividends. Coal, for instance, in the bowels of the earth cannot be placed to a banking account as dividends. It does not become wealth in any sense until it is brought to the surface : an operation that involves a large expenditure of energy on the part of a number of workers. In short, dividends are produced by the workers, they form a large part of the total wealth produced by them. A knowledge of Socialism enables you to understand why it is that some people in society are shareholders and need not work for a living, while millions cannot find a job and are not permitted to satisfy their needs by producing for themselves. To be a shareholder means to hold certificates of ownership over a definite portion of the means of wealth production. Because shareholders own they are entitled to dividends.
The land and the whole machinery of production and distribution are owned by shareholders in this way. It is the scheme, or basis of the capitalist system. Given that basis, we cannot avoid certain results, and the connection between the two is easily traceable by you. For example, you can easily trace the connection between the private ownership of the means of life and your unemployment.
As your only means of living is to sell your energy for wages, you naturally want wages to be high, but as wages and dividends are part of the same whole, any increase of the one is a decrease of the other, unless the total product is increased. The conflicting interests of workers and shareholders expresses itself in endless strikes and lock-outs all over the field of industry. Society is split definitely along lines of material interests : owners on one side and workers on the other. These opposing interests can never be reconciled while the conditions that have caused them remain.
While the workers fail to understand, they struggle blindly over wages. When they do understand they will carry on a political struggle for possession of the means of life. Thus the class struggle has its origin in conflicting interests that for a long time are capable of more or less satisfactory adjustment. But development of the means of wealth-production makes this adjustment increasingly unsatisfactory, and the workers are forced to see the only solution.
Thus all the problems that puzzle and confuse you in the complicated life of to-day can be easily straightened out, providing you understand the basic principles governing the system of society under which you live. You must not think that because capitalist society appears complicated that it really is so in its fundamental characteristics. It is the conflicting interests between different sections of the capitalist class that make the social machinery appear complex. The interests of financiers, land owners, manufacturers, transport companies and insurance corporations, etc., are so interwoven or conflicting that it would take long to understand and describe them. If you tried to reason which is best for the workers, Free Trade or Protection, you would involve yourself in a vicious circle of argument leading nowhere, and would never understand the capitalist system in itself, which operates under Free Trade or Protection according to circumstances.
To understand the capitalist system you must study it in the same way that you would study the physical organs of your own body, learning the functions and inter-relations of each. You must take note of the broad facts and the essential things that characterise society. There must be a well-defined meaning in your mind for every word you use. When you speak of the working class you should mean all those who live by the sale of their mental and physical energy, i.e., those who work for wages or salaries. When you speak of the capitalist class you should mean all those who live on surplus value, i.e., the value produced by the workers over and above what they are paid in wages for the production of the whole wealth of society. Understanding these two statements, you will see that all the people in any capitalist country come under one of these two heads : that there are, in the only sense that matters, but two classes in society, the working class, who produce all wealth, and the capitalist, or master class, for whom it is produced, and who pay wages out of that wealth.
Now the existence of a master class presupposes a class in subjection : a slave class. There is no escape from this logic. You may protest that you are. free to leave your present master ; true, but in most cases you dare not, and even if you do, necessity compels you to find another. Chattel slaves were bought like cattle and driven in the same way; but the driving force behind you is the fact that you can only live by selling your labour-power to someone who owns the means of life.
Lacking the knowledge of greater possibilities of life you tell yourself you are contented with your job, and work with a will, but only by virtue of necessity. Refusal means conditions infinitely worse. From “in work” to “out of work” is a case of “out of the frying-pan into the fire.” There is no greater driving force than want. Unemployment and the fear of unemployment goads men till they become machine-like in their efficiency.
These facts are the essential things of your life as a worker. The first and most elementary thing of life is to have access to the means of maintaining that life. Everything else is as dust in the balance. All the paraphernalia of empire and state are nothing to you if you cannot satisfy your hunger. Trade prosperity means nothing to you if you cannot find a place in the working machinery of production, though the job, when found, is more or less hell. It matters nothing to you whether Germany, France or Great Britain is dominant in the industrial scramble for markets if anxiety continually dogs your steps, and you know that sooner or later you will not be wanted by any employer.
In the factory or the office you do nothing without reason. You understand, wherever you have to use your brain, the meaning of cause and effect. If something goes wrong with the company’s machinery, you first look for the cause as a matter of course. Having found the cause, your experience and judgment tells you whether it is a case for adjustment, repairs or replacement. We suggest that the same process should be applied by you in politics and social questions. Capitalism does not deliver the goods. It produces them in abundance, but you do not get them because your wages or unemployment pay will not buy them. First, what is the cause? Second, what is the remedy? Is it adjustment, or reform, or replacement of the system by one more in accordance with Working-class needs?
These questions can be reasoned out on sound lines. They are reasoned out in THE SOCIALIST STANDARD every month. If you read it regularly your thinking will become clear. You will no longer be at the mercy of job-hunting politicians. You will be able to analyse every political proposition for yourself with sound judgment. Think it over !
F. F.