Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1868
Marx To Johann Baptist von Schweitzer
In Berlin
Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 132;
First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1896.
[Draft]
To von Schweitzer
London, 13 October 1868
Dear Sir,
A misunderstanding on my part accounts for your having received no reply to your letter of 15 September. I interpreted the letter as meaning that you would submit your ‘proposals’ to me for examination. So I waited for them. Then came your congress, and (being much overworked) I regarded a reply as no longer urgent. Before the arrival of your letter dated 8 October, I had already repeatedly appealed for peace, in my capacity as secretary of the International for Germany. I received the answer (and with it relevant quotations from the Social-Demokrat) that you yourself were provoking war. I declared that my role must necessarily be confined to that of ‘impartial referee’ at a duel.
In your letters you express great trust in me, and I believe I cannot respond better than to give you my opinion of the present state of affairs quite openly, without any diplomatic circumlocution. In doing so, I assume that, for you, as for myself, the cause is all that matters.
I recognise, without reserve, the intelligence and energy with which you are active in the workers’ movement. I have concealed this view from none of my friends. Wherever I have to express my views in public — in the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association and in the German Communist Association here — I have always treated you as a man of our party, and never let drop a word about points of difference.
However, such points of difference do exist.
D'abord, as regards the Lassallean Association, it was formed in a period of reaction. After fifteen years of slumber, Lassalle — and this remains his immortal service — re-awakened the workers’ movement in Germany. But he made great mistakes. He allowed himself to be influenced too much by the immediate circumstances of the time. He made the minor starting point, his opposition to the dwarf-like Schulze-Delitzsch, the central point of his agitation — state aid versus self-help. In this, he merely re-adopted the slogan circulated in 1843 sqq. by Buchez, the leader of Catholic socialism, against the genuine workers’ movement in France. Being far too intelligent to regard this slogan as anything but a transitory pis-aller, Lassalle was only able to justify its use on the grounds of its immediate (alleged!) practicability. To this end, he had to claim that it was feasible in the immediate future. The ‘state’ was, therefore, transformed into the Prussian state. He was thus forced to make concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clericals. He linked Buchez’s state aid for associations with the Chartist call for universal suffrage. He overlooked the difference between conditions in Germany and England. He overlooked the lessons of the bas-empire, with regard to universal suffrage in France. In addition, like everyone who claims to have in his pocket a panacea for the sufferings of the masses, he gave his agitation, from the very start, a religious, sectarian character. In fact, every sect is religious. And just because he was the founder of a sect, he denied all natural connection with the earlier movement, both in Germany and abroad. He fell into Proudhon’s mistake of not seeking the real basis of his agitation in the actual elements of the class movement, but of wishing, instead, to prescribe for that movement a course determined by a certain doctrinaire recipe.
Most of what I am stating here post factum I predicted to Lassalle when he came to London in 1862 and called upon me to place myself, with him, at the head of the new movement.
You yourself know the difference between a sect movement and a class movement from personal experience. The sect seeks its raison d'être and its point d'honneur not in what it has in common with the class movement, but in the particular shibboleth distinguishing it from that movement. Thus when, in Hamburg, you proposed convening a congress to found trades unions, you could only suppress the opposition of the sectarians by threatening to resign as president. You were also forced to assume a dual personality, to state that, in one case, you were acting as the leader of the sect and, in the other, as the representative of the class movement.
The dissolution of the General Association of German Workers provided you with an opportunity to take a big step forward and to declare, to prove s'il le fallait [if necessary], that a new stage of development had been reached and the sect movement was now ripe to merge into the class movement and end all ‘eanisms’. With regard to the true content of the sect, it would, like all former workers’ sects, carry this as an enriching element into the general movement. Yet instead you, in fact, demanded that the class movement subordinate itself to a particular sect movement. Your non-friends concluded from this that you wished to conserve your ‘own workers’ movement’ under all circumstances.
Regarding the Berlin Congress, the time was d'abord not pressing, since the Combination Law has not yet been voted. You ought, therefore, to have reached an agreement with the leaders outside the Lassallean circle, worked out the plan together with them, and convoked the congress. Instead of this, you left them only the alternative of either publicly joining you, or lining up against you. The congress itself appeared to be only an extended edition of the Hamburg Congress.
As for the draft statutes, I regard them as unsuitable in principle, and I believe I have as much experience as any of my contemporaries in the field of trades unions. Without going further into detail here, I shall merely remark that a centralist organisation, suitable as it is for secret societies and sect movements, contradicts the nature of the trades unions. Were it possible — I declare it tout bonnement to be impossible — it would not be desirable, least of all in Germany. Here, where the worker is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards, where he believes in authority, in those set over him, the main thing is to teach him to walk by himself.
Your plan is also impracticable in other ways. In the ‘Union’ there are to be three independent authorities of differing origin: 1. The Committee, elected by the trades; 2. the President (here a completely superfluous personage) [In the Rules of the International Working Men’s Association there also figures a President of the Association. In reality his only function was to preside at the sessions of the General Council. On my proposal, this office — which I had refused in 1866 — was completely abolished in 1867, and was replaced by that of a Chairman, who is elected at each weekly session of the General Council. The London Trades’ Council also has simply a Chairman. Its sole permanent official is the Secretary, as he has a continuous business function to exercise.] [NB. This passage follows in the copy of the letter to Schweitzer after the end of this sentence], elected by a general vote; 3. the Congress, elected by the local branches. Thus — collisions everywhere, and this is supposed to promote ‘rapid action’! (At this point the inserted sentence.) Lassalle committed a bad mistake in borrowing the ‘président élu du suffrage universel’ ['president elected by universal suffrage'] from the French Constitution of 1852. And now this in a trades unions movement! The latter is mostly concerned with financial issues, and you will soon discover that all dictatorialism finds its end here.
Yet whatever the shortcomings of the organisation, they can perhaps be cancelled out, to a greater or lesser degree, by rational application. As secretary of the International I am ready to act — naturally on a rational basis — as mediator between you and the Nuremberg majority, which has adhered to the International directly. I have written in the same vein to Leipzig. I understand the difficulties of your position, and never forget that each of us depends more upon circumstances than upon his own will.
I promise you, under all circumstances, the impartiality that is my duty. On the other hand, I cannot promise that I shall not, some day, acting as a private author, — as soon as I feel it to be absolutely dictated by the interests of the labour movement — publicly criticise the Lassallean superstition, in the same way as I dealt, in its time, with the Proudhonist superstition.
With the assurance of my best wishes to you personally,
I remain
K. M.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop Be-Bop 1960s Night- The Rock ‘n’ Rock Era: 1961-When Gary Ladd Danced The North Adamsville High School Dance Night Away- Not-With Chubby Checker In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Shirelles performing their 1960s teen angst classicMama Said
CD Review
The Rock ‘n’ Rock Era: 1961, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the pieces of teen life-driven artwork that graces each CD in this series.
Saturday night, any third Saturday of the month from September to May, when every red-blooded teen boy and girl in the 1961 North Adamsville High School be-bop,be-bop night could only be in one locale, or want to be. That was the night of the monthly seasonally-themed high school hop where anyone, even freshmen and sophomores, could ante up the dollar admission and dance the night away. Well, almost dance the night away. And that is the dilemma confronting one freshman, Gary Ladd (he is the “wallflower” way off to the side of the gym almost into the wall if you didn’t think you saw him on one of the nights in question).
Gary, well, we might as well have our moment of truth right up front, can’t dance. Can’t dance a damn, to hell, heaven or any place in between. Two- leftfeet. Two left-feet despite the best efforts of one Agnes Ladd, North Adamsville Class of 1961 Vice President, whose own feet have taken a terrible beating trying to teach little brother Gary the elements of the waltz, the fox trot, and hell, even the twist to no avail. But Gary, no twerp under his two left-footed exterior, has always, as he put it, exercised his democratic right to be at these universal dances, come hell or high water.
But this night, this warm April Springfest Dance night, things might just be a little different as Gary takes his place against the far wall (the wall farthest away from the girl “wallflowers” just in case you wanted an exact location. Mostly wallflowers, boy or girl, are keeping their respective distances on the odd chance that someone may actually come up and ask them to dance). First off this month the local craze rock band sensations, The Rockin’ Ramrods, are here live on the makeshift bandstand. And just this minute they are tuning up with the appropriately named Please Stay by the Drifters. Secondly, a new girl in town, Elsie Mae Horton, is here. Naturally the mere fact that she is here is added reason why Gary is here (and why he tortured his sister Agnes to try, try in vain, to teach him some dance steps). See Gary has the “bug” for Elsie Mae, ya, he is smitten.
Now this Elsie Mae is maybe, on a scale of one to ten, about a six so it is not looks that have Gary (and about six other guys), well, smitten. But what Elsie Mae has is nothing but smarts, book smarts, idea smarts, talk smarts you name it smarts and one of the sweetest smiles this side of heaven. And, as Gary found out early on in one of their shared classes, very easy to talk to about anything. Yes, he is smitten; the only unknown is whether she can dance good enough to stay out of his way. That is if he gets up the nerve to ask her. And as the Ramrods start their first set with Gary Bonds’ School Is Out (praise be) he notices her coming in the door. Heart pounding he starts sinking into the wall again. As they finish with Brother Bonds the Ramrods start in on The Impressions’ Gypsy Woman before Gary realizes that Elsie Mae has drawn a bee-line straight for him and is standing right in front of him, turning a little red. “Oh, my god,” Gary whispers under his breathe, “she is going to ask me to dance. No way.” The usually easy to talk to Elsie Mae though says nothing, nothing but turns a little redder as the Ramrods cover the Pips Every Beat Of My Heart (nicely done too). She is waiting for Gary to ask her, if you can believe that. Well, two-left feet or not, he does ask her. And she smiles a little smile as she “accepts.” Relief.
Needless to say when they did their dance, The Edsels’ Rama Lama Ding Dong, it was nothing but a disaster. A Gary disaster? Yes. But here is the funny part. Elsie Mae Horton, formerly of Gloversville and new to North Adamsville so of unknown dance quality, had two-left feet too. Get this though. When the dance was mercifully finished, and the two had actually survived, Elsie Mae thanked Gary and told him that he was a wonderful dancer and she wished that she could dance like him. Whee! Here is the real kicker though. Elsie Mae had also been taking dancing lessons, unsuccessfully. Dancing lessons so that two-left feet Elsie Mae Horton could dance with Gary Ladd. See, she was “smitten” too. And so if you did not see Gary or Elsie Mae at the Mayfair Dance you have now solved that mystery. They were sitting, sitting very close to each other, on the seawall down at Adamsville Beach laughing about starting a “Two-Left Feet” Club. With just two members.
CD Review
The Rock ‘n’ Rock Era: 1961, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the pieces of teen life-driven artwork that graces each CD in this series.
Saturday night, any third Saturday of the month from September to May, when every red-blooded teen boy and girl in the 1961 North Adamsville High School be-bop,be-bop night could only be in one locale, or want to be. That was the night of the monthly seasonally-themed high school hop where anyone, even freshmen and sophomores, could ante up the dollar admission and dance the night away. Well, almost dance the night away. And that is the dilemma confronting one freshman, Gary Ladd (he is the “wallflower” way off to the side of the gym almost into the wall if you didn’t think you saw him on one of the nights in question).
Gary, well, we might as well have our moment of truth right up front, can’t dance. Can’t dance a damn, to hell, heaven or any place in between. Two- leftfeet. Two left-feet despite the best efforts of one Agnes Ladd, North Adamsville Class of 1961 Vice President, whose own feet have taken a terrible beating trying to teach little brother Gary the elements of the waltz, the fox trot, and hell, even the twist to no avail. But Gary, no twerp under his two left-footed exterior, has always, as he put it, exercised his democratic right to be at these universal dances, come hell or high water.
But this night, this warm April Springfest Dance night, things might just be a little different as Gary takes his place against the far wall (the wall farthest away from the girl “wallflowers” just in case you wanted an exact location. Mostly wallflowers, boy or girl, are keeping their respective distances on the odd chance that someone may actually come up and ask them to dance). First off this month the local craze rock band sensations, The Rockin’ Ramrods, are here live on the makeshift bandstand. And just this minute they are tuning up with the appropriately named Please Stay by the Drifters. Secondly, a new girl in town, Elsie Mae Horton, is here. Naturally the mere fact that she is here is added reason why Gary is here (and why he tortured his sister Agnes to try, try in vain, to teach him some dance steps). See Gary has the “bug” for Elsie Mae, ya, he is smitten.
Now this Elsie Mae is maybe, on a scale of one to ten, about a six so it is not looks that have Gary (and about six other guys), well, smitten. But what Elsie Mae has is nothing but smarts, book smarts, idea smarts, talk smarts you name it smarts and one of the sweetest smiles this side of heaven. And, as Gary found out early on in one of their shared classes, very easy to talk to about anything. Yes, he is smitten; the only unknown is whether she can dance good enough to stay out of his way. That is if he gets up the nerve to ask her. And as the Ramrods start their first set with Gary Bonds’ School Is Out (praise be) he notices her coming in the door. Heart pounding he starts sinking into the wall again. As they finish with Brother Bonds the Ramrods start in on The Impressions’ Gypsy Woman before Gary realizes that Elsie Mae has drawn a bee-line straight for him and is standing right in front of him, turning a little red. “Oh, my god,” Gary whispers under his breathe, “she is going to ask me to dance. No way.” The usually easy to talk to Elsie Mae though says nothing, nothing but turns a little redder as the Ramrods cover the Pips Every Beat Of My Heart (nicely done too). She is waiting for Gary to ask her, if you can believe that. Well, two-left feet or not, he does ask her. And she smiles a little smile as she “accepts.” Relief.
Needless to say when they did their dance, The Edsels’ Rama Lama Ding Dong, it was nothing but a disaster. A Gary disaster? Yes. But here is the funny part. Elsie Mae Horton, formerly of Gloversville and new to North Adamsville so of unknown dance quality, had two-left feet too. Get this though. When the dance was mercifully finished, and the two had actually survived, Elsie Mae thanked Gary and told him that he was a wonderful dancer and she wished that she could dance like him. Whee! Here is the real kicker though. Elsie Mae had also been taking dancing lessons, unsuccessfully. Dancing lessons so that two-left feet Elsie Mae Horton could dance with Gary Ladd. See, she was “smitten” too. And so if you did not see Gary or Elsie Mae at the Mayfair Dance you have now solved that mystery. They were sitting, sitting very close to each other, on the seawall down at Adamsville Beach laughing about starting a “Two-Left Feet” Club. With just two members.
The Latest From The "Partisan Defense Committee" Website- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
From The Partisan Defense Committee-Execution Set For September 21-Stop The Legal Lynching Of Troy Davis-Stop The Execution!- Free Troy Davis!- Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
From The Partisan Defense Committee-Execution Set For September 21-Stop The Legal Lynching Of Troy Davis-Stop The Execution!- Free Troy Davis!- Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
Time is running out for Troy Davis, a 41-year-old black man facing execution despite substantial evidence of his innocence. On September 6, a Georgia Superior Court judge signed an execution warrant, and a date has been set for September 21. Davis, who faced three prior death warrants, has now exhausted all his appeals. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to even consider the evi¬dence exonerating Davis of the 1989 killing of a white off-duty police officer. Davis has a hearing before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole two days before the scheduled execution. Davis's supporters have called for a global day of solidarity on September 16, including a march in Atlanta. What's needed is a mass outpouring of protest. Opponents of the racist death penalty, defenders of civil liberties, trade-union militants and fighters for black rights must demand: Stop the execution! Free Troy Davis!
The impending execution is nothing short of a racist legal lynching. In 1991, Davis was sentenced to death after a frame-up conviction based on questionable "eyewitness" identifications, dubious accounts that he confessed and testimony coerced by the cops, without a shred of physical evidence linking him to the killing. Seven of the prosecution's nine witnesses have since recanted. The only holdouts are one man who may be the actual killer and another who initially denied being able to identify the shooter, only to pin the killing on Davis at trial two years later.
At a federal court hearing last year, some of the witnesses were finally able to tell how they were forced by the cops to falsely implicate Davis. But in upholding the conviction and death sentence, the judge sneered that this testimony was "smoke and mirrors" and declared the accounts of police/prosecution coercion —a regular feature of the capitalist justice system—were not credible.. .because the cops said it didn't happen that way! (See "Troy Davis Appeal Turned Down," WV No. 965, 24 September 2010.)
The impending legal lynching of Troy Davis exemplifies that for America's capitalist rulers the life of a black man on the bottom is worth nothing. In this decaying profit system, which was founded on black chattel slavery, the bourgeois rulers' impulse to genocide is seen in the death penalty, mass black incarceration, the elimination of welfare and rampant cop terror in the ghettos. Troy Davis is a victim of a bourgeois "justice" system premised on protecting capitalist rule and profits through organized terror against the working class, the black masses and other minorities.
We oppose the death penalty on princple—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to decide who shall live and who shall die. Capital punishment is a barbaric legacy of medieval torture, a system of legal murder that reinforces the brutalization of society in all respects. And in racist America, black people are overwhelmingly the victims of state terror, whether this system is administered by the Republican or Democratic parties of capital. Davis was tried in a courtroom flying the Georgia state flag, which at the time included the battle flag of the slaveholding Confederacy. The lynching of black men—by racist mobs and by the august courts—is deeply embedded in this country's history, particularly but by no means exclusively in Southern states like Troy Davis's Georgia. Over 40 percent of those on death row in this country are black. Abolish the racist death penalty!
Through petitions and public statements, hundreds of thousands have opposed Davis's execution, including former president Jimmy Carter, former FBI director William Sessions, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Pope. While this may have given Georgia's rulers some pause, it was only so they could gather additional judicial sanction to kill Davis. To put a final halt to the grisly workings of the U.S. rulers' machinery of death requires sweeping away the racist capitalist system through proletarian revolution.
Time is running out for Troy Davis, a 41-year-old black man facing execution despite substantial evidence of his innocence. On September 6, a Georgia Superior Court judge signed an execution warrant, and a date has been set for September 21. Davis, who faced three prior death warrants, has now exhausted all his appeals. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to even consider the evi¬dence exonerating Davis of the 1989 killing of a white off-duty police officer. Davis has a hearing before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole two days before the scheduled execution. Davis's supporters have called for a global day of solidarity on September 16, including a march in Atlanta. What's needed is a mass outpouring of protest. Opponents of the racist death penalty, defenders of civil liberties, trade-union militants and fighters for black rights must demand: Stop the execution! Free Troy Davis!
The impending execution is nothing short of a racist legal lynching. In 1991, Davis was sentenced to death after a frame-up conviction based on questionable "eyewitness" identifications, dubious accounts that he confessed and testimony coerced by the cops, without a shred of physical evidence linking him to the killing. Seven of the prosecution's nine witnesses have since recanted. The only holdouts are one man who may be the actual killer and another who initially denied being able to identify the shooter, only to pin the killing on Davis at trial two years later.
At a federal court hearing last year, some of the witnesses were finally able to tell how they were forced by the cops to falsely implicate Davis. But in upholding the conviction and death sentence, the judge sneered that this testimony was "smoke and mirrors" and declared the accounts of police/prosecution coercion —a regular feature of the capitalist justice system—were not credible.. .because the cops said it didn't happen that way! (See "Troy Davis Appeal Turned Down," WV No. 965, 24 September 2010.)
The impending legal lynching of Troy Davis exemplifies that for America's capitalist rulers the life of a black man on the bottom is worth nothing. In this decaying profit system, which was founded on black chattel slavery, the bourgeois rulers' impulse to genocide is seen in the death penalty, mass black incarceration, the elimination of welfare and rampant cop terror in the ghettos. Troy Davis is a victim of a bourgeois "justice" system premised on protecting capitalist rule and profits through organized terror against the working class, the black masses and other minorities.
We oppose the death penalty on princple—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to decide who shall live and who shall die. Capital punishment is a barbaric legacy of medieval torture, a system of legal murder that reinforces the brutalization of society in all respects. And in racist America, black people are overwhelmingly the victims of state terror, whether this system is administered by the Republican or Democratic parties of capital. Davis was tried in a courtroom flying the Georgia state flag, which at the time included the battle flag of the slaveholding Confederacy. The lynching of black men—by racist mobs and by the august courts—is deeply embedded in this country's history, particularly but by no means exclusively in Southern states like Troy Davis's Georgia. Over 40 percent of those on death row in this country are black. Abolish the racist death penalty!
Through petitions and public statements, hundreds of thousands have opposed Davis's execution, including former president Jimmy Carter, former FBI director William Sessions, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Pope. While this may have given Georgia's rulers some pause, it was only so they could gather additional judicial sanction to kill Davis. To put a final halt to the grisly workings of the U.S. rulers' machinery of death requires sweeping away the racist capitalist system through proletarian revolution.
Georgia Pardons Board Rejects Clemency For Troy Davis- Stop The Execution-Free Troy Davis!-Down With The Death Penalty!
Click on the headline to link to a AP news report, dated September 20, 2011 detailing the decision of the Georgia State Pardons Board to grant clemency in the case of Troy Davis.
Markin comment:
My headline today says all that needs to be said at this last minute in the Troy Davis case. Call, write, petition, vigil, read about- anything that you can do to publicize this case of severe injustice. Stop The Execution!-Free Troy Davis!-Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
Markin comment:
My headline today says all that needs to be said at this last minute in the Troy Davis case. Call, write, petition, vigil, read about- anything that you can do to publicize this case of severe injustice. Stop The Execution!-Free Troy Davis!-Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
Free Troy Davis! There’s No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! -From The "Liberation News Service" Via "Boston IndyMedia"- Stop The Execution! Free Troy Davis!-Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
Free Troy Davis! There’s No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
by Steven Argue
(No verified email address) 19 Sep 2011
Troy Davis was sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing of an off-duty Savannah policeman. Davis was found “guilty” based on dubious accounts that he confessed to the killing and questionable “eyewitness” identifications that included false eyewitness testimony coerced by the cops. Seven of the prosecution’s nine “eyewitnesses” have since recanted. The only holdouts are one man who may be the actual killer and another who initially denied being able to identify the shooter only to pin it on Davis two years later. Three of the eyewitnesses say their testimony was coerced by the police. New eyewitnesses have come forth identifying another suspect.
Parole Board Delays Decision on Legal Lynching Set for Weds Sept. 21st
Free Troy Davis! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
There’s No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
By Steven Argue
During slavery a slave named Dred Scott was taken by his master to what is now Minnesota and Illinois. Slavery was illegal in those territories so Dred Scott took his master to court to sue for his freedom. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott saying that a Black man “has no legal rights that any white man was bound to respect”.
Since that time the Civil War has abolished chattel slavery and the heroic struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements have abolished the most blatant forms of Jim Crow segregation. Yet, the death penalty, a hold-over of the class terror of slavery, continues. Likewise, racist injustice is alive and well in the American judicial system.
“Innocence is no Bar to Upholding a Jury Conviction”
In the tradition of Dred Scott, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1993 case of Herrara v Collins that the execution of an innocent man did not violate the Constitution. Judge Scalia stated of the case that "Innocence is no bar to upholding a jury conviction". As a result, strong new evidence that Leonel Herara was innocent was never allowed to be heard in a court of law. Instead, Leonel Herara was executed in 1993 in the state of Texas with his last words being, "I am innocent, innocent, innocent. I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight."
So a standard has been set where those who have been appointed to the highest court in the land don’t think that the execution of an innocent person is a violation of their constitutional rights. It is on this standard that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Troy Davis on March 28, 2011, denying his appeal without comment.
Troy Davis was sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing of an off-duty Savannah policeman. Davis was found “guilty” based on dubious accounts that he confessed to the killing and questionable “eyewitness” identifications that included false eyewitness testimony coerced by the cops. Seven of the prosecution’s nine “eyewitnesses” have since recanted. The only holdouts are one man who may be the actual killer and another who initially denied being able to identify the shooter only to pin it on Davis two years later. Three of the eyewitnesses say their testimony was coerced by the police. New eyewitnesses have come forth identifying another suspect.
Amnesty International said of his case, "Troy Davis was convicted of murder in 1991. Nearly two decades later, Davis remains on death row — even though the case against him has fallen apart."
Now Troy Davis may be executed on Wednesday, September 21st of this week. On September 6th a Chatham County, Georgia Judge issued a death warrant for Troy Davis. The so-called “Department of Corrections” then set the date for the execution. This Monday, September 19th the Georgia parole board heard arguments for and against execution. That five person panel is given the power to issue a ruling on whether Troy Davis lives or is legally lynched. They pronounced no decision Monday and gave no indication on when they will.
How Bill Clinton Prevented the Evidence from Being Heard
For over a decade, state and federal courts refused to hear evidence that Troy Davis is innocent. This included a federal court ruling against Troy Davis on April 16, 2009. A dissenting federal judge said the execution of Davis “in the face of a significant amount of the proffered evidence that may establish his actual innocence” was “unconscionable.” Yet the majority decision cited Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, an act which virtually eliminates the right of federal habeas corpus (i.e. federal review of state legal cases).
The right to federal habeas corpus was a gain of the Civil War passed in the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The act gave the federal government authority to intervene in cases of racial injustice. This included federal habeas corpus giving the federal courts authority to review state legal decisions. Federal habeas corpus was further expanded during the Civil Rights and Black Liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.
Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, on the other hand, virtually eliminated the right to federal habeas corpus. The act bars federal reconsideration of most factual and legal findings of the state courts. It also puts a six month statute of limitations on new evidence in death penalty cases (one year for other cases).
The same 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that has been used against Troy Davis was also cited as cause against federal review of evidence of the innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is political activist, award winning journalist, and political prisoner on death row in the United States. Mumia was framed by the Philadelphia police and DA's Office. To convict Mumia they produced a crudely falsified “confession” which didn’t surface until two months after the killing; tampered with ballistics “evidence”; and produced “eyewitness” accounts that were secured through police manipulation, coercion, and blatant terror. During the trial the Philadelphia DA’s Office knowingly used perjured testimony and hid essential evidence to procure a conviction. That frame-up case was then presented in a court presided over by Judge Sabo who was heard by a court stenographer during the time of the trial saying, "Ill help you fry the nigger".
After investigation, Amnesty International stated of the trial, “Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer in 1982 after a trial that failed to meet international standards." Yet, like in the racist frame-up case of Troy Davis, the federal courts have cited the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act as pretext not to hear evidence of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s innocence.
As the historian Howard Zinn stated of Mumia Abu-Jamal in April 2009:
“To me, the Mumia Abu-Jamal case is another instance in the history of American injustice. Our judicial system is stacked against people of color, radicals, and people who are not wealthy, and Mumia fits all three categories.
“It is shameful that he has been in prison, and on death row, for such a large part of his life. He has shown immense courage in refusing to be beaten down by this cruel system.
“I hope that justice will be done in his case, but that will only happen if large numbers of Americans speak out loudly on his behalf, and on behalf of the principle — so much ignored — of equal justice before the law.”
A Continuing Pattern of Racist Injustice
Blacks have long faced political repression in the United States. For many decades the KKK, Democratic Party, and local police ruled over half of the country as a semi-fascist state where Blacks were denied the right to vote and murdered for speaking their minds. With victories won against that system the FBI orchestrated a reign of terror against the most radical Blacks who stood up against racism, class inequalities, and imperialism.
In the 1960’s and 70’s the U.S. government liquidated the Black Panther Party through the murders of 39 members, including the FBI organized police shooting of Fred Hampton in his sleep, and through political frame-ups such as that of Geronimo (Ji. Jaga) Pratt who was finally exonerated (i.e. found innocent) after 30 years in prison. Other framed Black Panthers still sit in prison and Black Panther Assata Shakur lives in exile, granted political asylum by Cuba, but with a one million dollar bounty put on her head by the New Jersey government. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a target of FBI surveillance from the time of his youth in the Black Panther Party, survived the FBI’s physical liquidation of his party, only to be framed-up in the 1980’s after exposing violent police repression against Black radicals in an organization called Move.
Similarly, the Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota who supported the culturally and politically nationalist American Indian Movement faced brutal counter-insurgency tactics complete with FBI-armed and -trained death squads that murdered 61 political activists and their children on the reservation between 1973 and 1976. As part of that terror war against America’s first nations, American Indian Movement member Leonard Peltier was framed by the FBI and remains in prison to this day. Many of Leonard Peltier’s supporters had hoped that Bill Clinton would pardon Leonard Peltier as he left office, but Clinton refused to do so.
Today, a world movement hopes that Troy Davis is not executed. In the last few days over 300 protests have been held for Troy Davis in cities around the world. Nearly a million petitions have been signed demanding Troy Davis not be executed. He is supported by many important organizations including the NAACP, Amnesty International, and the International Longshore Workers Union
Troy Davis has sat in prison for 20 years in a case that not only shows cause for reasonable doubt, the legal definition of innocence, but also shows the classic symptoms of a racist police frame-up including police coercion of witnesses. Whatever happens in the next couple days, justice in this case will not mean just stopping his execution, it will also mean freeing Troy Davis. Yet, we should be clear, the U.S. government is capable of the worst, it is capable of the murder of innocents, and it is even capable of producing legal arguments like "Innocence is no bar to upholding a jury conviction” to justify state sanctioned murder.
From Dred Scott to Troy Davis
In his May 1857 “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” Frederick Douglass, a former slave and activist for the abolition of slavery, denounced the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that a Black man “has no legal rights that any white man was bound to respect” by saying,
“If it were at all likely that the people of these free States would tamely submit to this demoniacal judgment, I might feel gloomy and sad over it, and possibly it might be necessary for my people to look for a home in some other country. But as the case stands, we have nothing to fear.
“In one point of view, we, the abolitionists and colored people, should meet this decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the downfall and complete overthrow of the whole slave system.”
The unpopular Dred Scott decision is widely seen as playing a role in bringing on the Civil War. It was the Civil War that completed the abolition of slavery, a task that had begun in the north with the American Revolution. With U.S. courts now openly ruling that it’s OK to murder innocent people, it is now time to prepare for a second American Revolution. It is with such radical conclusions we should confront government atrocities like what is being done to Troy Davis. In doing so, we make the government pay for its crimes.
By revolution I don’t mean blow things up or any other form of individual terrorism. A revolution is a change in who rules society. Presently the wealthy capitalists rule America through their ownership of the economy; through their political parties, the Democrats and Republicans; and through the repressive actions of their cops, courts, prisons, and military. That entire system must be swept away in a mass proletarian revolution.
Liberation News is dedicated to building a socialist party that has goals like eliminating the dictatorial control of our society by the wealthy, bringing about true workers democracy, ending imperialist wars, and bringing Black liberation through socialist revolution. While capitalism is leading us into an oblivion of economic decay, austerity, unemployment, ever more wars, and environmental catastrophe, a socialist economy can be geared for full employment, free health care, free education, housing for all, and better environmental protection because it will not be run for capitalist profit. A party that fights for such a socialist future also exposes and fights for immediate demands like freeing Troy Davis and abolishing the racist death penalty. In building such a movement that helps people draw the deeper radical conclusions of the injustices perpetrated by this system and the fight that is needed for liberation, we make the capitalist system pay for its crimes.
Subscribe Free to Liberation News
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
This work licensed under a
Creative Commons license
by Steven Argue
(No verified email address) 19 Sep 2011
Troy Davis was sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing of an off-duty Savannah policeman. Davis was found “guilty” based on dubious accounts that he confessed to the killing and questionable “eyewitness” identifications that included false eyewitness testimony coerced by the cops. Seven of the prosecution’s nine “eyewitnesses” have since recanted. The only holdouts are one man who may be the actual killer and another who initially denied being able to identify the shooter only to pin it on Davis two years later. Three of the eyewitnesses say their testimony was coerced by the police. New eyewitnesses have come forth identifying another suspect.
Parole Board Delays Decision on Legal Lynching Set for Weds Sept. 21st
Free Troy Davis! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
There’s No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!
By Steven Argue
During slavery a slave named Dred Scott was taken by his master to what is now Minnesota and Illinois. Slavery was illegal in those territories so Dred Scott took his master to court to sue for his freedom. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott saying that a Black man “has no legal rights that any white man was bound to respect”.
Since that time the Civil War has abolished chattel slavery and the heroic struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements have abolished the most blatant forms of Jim Crow segregation. Yet, the death penalty, a hold-over of the class terror of slavery, continues. Likewise, racist injustice is alive and well in the American judicial system.
“Innocence is no Bar to Upholding a Jury Conviction”
In the tradition of Dred Scott, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1993 case of Herrara v Collins that the execution of an innocent man did not violate the Constitution. Judge Scalia stated of the case that "Innocence is no bar to upholding a jury conviction". As a result, strong new evidence that Leonel Herara was innocent was never allowed to be heard in a court of law. Instead, Leonel Herara was executed in 1993 in the state of Texas with his last words being, "I am innocent, innocent, innocent. I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight."
So a standard has been set where those who have been appointed to the highest court in the land don’t think that the execution of an innocent person is a violation of their constitutional rights. It is on this standard that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Troy Davis on March 28, 2011, denying his appeal without comment.
Troy Davis was sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing of an off-duty Savannah policeman. Davis was found “guilty” based on dubious accounts that he confessed to the killing and questionable “eyewitness” identifications that included false eyewitness testimony coerced by the cops. Seven of the prosecution’s nine “eyewitnesses” have since recanted. The only holdouts are one man who may be the actual killer and another who initially denied being able to identify the shooter only to pin it on Davis two years later. Three of the eyewitnesses say their testimony was coerced by the police. New eyewitnesses have come forth identifying another suspect.
Amnesty International said of his case, "Troy Davis was convicted of murder in 1991. Nearly two decades later, Davis remains on death row — even though the case against him has fallen apart."
Now Troy Davis may be executed on Wednesday, September 21st of this week. On September 6th a Chatham County, Georgia Judge issued a death warrant for Troy Davis. The so-called “Department of Corrections” then set the date for the execution. This Monday, September 19th the Georgia parole board heard arguments for and against execution. That five person panel is given the power to issue a ruling on whether Troy Davis lives or is legally lynched. They pronounced no decision Monday and gave no indication on when they will.
How Bill Clinton Prevented the Evidence from Being Heard
For over a decade, state and federal courts refused to hear evidence that Troy Davis is innocent. This included a federal court ruling against Troy Davis on April 16, 2009. A dissenting federal judge said the execution of Davis “in the face of a significant amount of the proffered evidence that may establish his actual innocence” was “unconscionable.” Yet the majority decision cited Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, an act which virtually eliminates the right of federal habeas corpus (i.e. federal review of state legal cases).
The right to federal habeas corpus was a gain of the Civil War passed in the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The act gave the federal government authority to intervene in cases of racial injustice. This included federal habeas corpus giving the federal courts authority to review state legal decisions. Federal habeas corpus was further expanded during the Civil Rights and Black Liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.
Bill Clinton’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, on the other hand, virtually eliminated the right to federal habeas corpus. The act bars federal reconsideration of most factual and legal findings of the state courts. It also puts a six month statute of limitations on new evidence in death penalty cases (one year for other cases).
The same 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that has been used against Troy Davis was also cited as cause against federal review of evidence of the innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is political activist, award winning journalist, and political prisoner on death row in the United States. Mumia was framed by the Philadelphia police and DA's Office. To convict Mumia they produced a crudely falsified “confession” which didn’t surface until two months after the killing; tampered with ballistics “evidence”; and produced “eyewitness” accounts that were secured through police manipulation, coercion, and blatant terror. During the trial the Philadelphia DA’s Office knowingly used perjured testimony and hid essential evidence to procure a conviction. That frame-up case was then presented in a court presided over by Judge Sabo who was heard by a court stenographer during the time of the trial saying, "Ill help you fry the nigger".
After investigation, Amnesty International stated of the trial, “Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer in 1982 after a trial that failed to meet international standards." Yet, like in the racist frame-up case of Troy Davis, the federal courts have cited the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act as pretext not to hear evidence of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s innocence.
As the historian Howard Zinn stated of Mumia Abu-Jamal in April 2009:
“To me, the Mumia Abu-Jamal case is another instance in the history of American injustice. Our judicial system is stacked against people of color, radicals, and people who are not wealthy, and Mumia fits all three categories.
“It is shameful that he has been in prison, and on death row, for such a large part of his life. He has shown immense courage in refusing to be beaten down by this cruel system.
“I hope that justice will be done in his case, but that will only happen if large numbers of Americans speak out loudly on his behalf, and on behalf of the principle — so much ignored — of equal justice before the law.”
A Continuing Pattern of Racist Injustice
Blacks have long faced political repression in the United States. For many decades the KKK, Democratic Party, and local police ruled over half of the country as a semi-fascist state where Blacks were denied the right to vote and murdered for speaking their minds. With victories won against that system the FBI orchestrated a reign of terror against the most radical Blacks who stood up against racism, class inequalities, and imperialism.
In the 1960’s and 70’s the U.S. government liquidated the Black Panther Party through the murders of 39 members, including the FBI organized police shooting of Fred Hampton in his sleep, and through political frame-ups such as that of Geronimo (Ji. Jaga) Pratt who was finally exonerated (i.e. found innocent) after 30 years in prison. Other framed Black Panthers still sit in prison and Black Panther Assata Shakur lives in exile, granted political asylum by Cuba, but with a one million dollar bounty put on her head by the New Jersey government. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a target of FBI surveillance from the time of his youth in the Black Panther Party, survived the FBI’s physical liquidation of his party, only to be framed-up in the 1980’s after exposing violent police repression against Black radicals in an organization called Move.
Similarly, the Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota who supported the culturally and politically nationalist American Indian Movement faced brutal counter-insurgency tactics complete with FBI-armed and -trained death squads that murdered 61 political activists and their children on the reservation between 1973 and 1976. As part of that terror war against America’s first nations, American Indian Movement member Leonard Peltier was framed by the FBI and remains in prison to this day. Many of Leonard Peltier’s supporters had hoped that Bill Clinton would pardon Leonard Peltier as he left office, but Clinton refused to do so.
Today, a world movement hopes that Troy Davis is not executed. In the last few days over 300 protests have been held for Troy Davis in cities around the world. Nearly a million petitions have been signed demanding Troy Davis not be executed. He is supported by many important organizations including the NAACP, Amnesty International, and the International Longshore Workers Union
Troy Davis has sat in prison for 20 years in a case that not only shows cause for reasonable doubt, the legal definition of innocence, but also shows the classic symptoms of a racist police frame-up including police coercion of witnesses. Whatever happens in the next couple days, justice in this case will not mean just stopping his execution, it will also mean freeing Troy Davis. Yet, we should be clear, the U.S. government is capable of the worst, it is capable of the murder of innocents, and it is even capable of producing legal arguments like "Innocence is no bar to upholding a jury conviction” to justify state sanctioned murder.
From Dred Scott to Troy Davis
In his May 1857 “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” Frederick Douglass, a former slave and activist for the abolition of slavery, denounced the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that a Black man “has no legal rights that any white man was bound to respect” by saying,
“If it were at all likely that the people of these free States would tamely submit to this demoniacal judgment, I might feel gloomy and sad over it, and possibly it might be necessary for my people to look for a home in some other country. But as the case stands, we have nothing to fear.
“In one point of view, we, the abolitionists and colored people, should meet this decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the downfall and complete overthrow of the whole slave system.”
The unpopular Dred Scott decision is widely seen as playing a role in bringing on the Civil War. It was the Civil War that completed the abolition of slavery, a task that had begun in the north with the American Revolution. With U.S. courts now openly ruling that it’s OK to murder innocent people, it is now time to prepare for a second American Revolution. It is with such radical conclusions we should confront government atrocities like what is being done to Troy Davis. In doing so, we make the government pay for its crimes.
By revolution I don’t mean blow things up or any other form of individual terrorism. A revolution is a change in who rules society. Presently the wealthy capitalists rule America through their ownership of the economy; through their political parties, the Democrats and Republicans; and through the repressive actions of their cops, courts, prisons, and military. That entire system must be swept away in a mass proletarian revolution.
Liberation News is dedicated to building a socialist party that has goals like eliminating the dictatorial control of our society by the wealthy, bringing about true workers democracy, ending imperialist wars, and bringing Black liberation through socialist revolution. While capitalism is leading us into an oblivion of economic decay, austerity, unemployment, ever more wars, and environmental catastrophe, a socialist economy can be geared for full employment, free health care, free education, housing for all, and better environmental protection because it will not be run for capitalist profit. A party that fights for such a socialist future also exposes and fights for immediate demands like freeing Troy Davis and abolishing the racist death penalty. In building such a movement that helps people draw the deeper radical conclusions of the injustices perpetrated by this system and the fight that is needed for liberation, we make the capitalist system pay for its crimes.
Subscribe Free to Liberation News
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
This work licensed under a
Creative Commons license
Photos From The Boston Rally To Stop The Execution Of Troy Davis In Georgia On September 21, 2011- Stop The Execution! Free Troy Davis!- Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indymedia entry on the September 16, 2011 Boston rally to stop the Georgia execution of Troy Davis on September 21, 2011.
Markin comment:
My headline today says all that needs to be said at this last minute in the Troy Davis case. Call, write, petition, vigil, read about- anything that you can do to publicize this case of severe injustice. Stop The Execution!-Free Troy Davis!-Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
Markin comment:
My headline today says all that needs to be said at this last minute in the Troy Davis case. Call, write, petition, vigil, read about- anything that you can do to publicize this case of severe injustice. Stop The Execution!-Free Troy Davis!-Down With The Barbaric Death Penalty!
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
From The "Free Jaan Laaman" Blog- "Jaan's Running Down the Walls 2011 Shoutout" - Free Jaan Laaman And Tom Manning The Last Of The Imprisoned Ohio 7
Click on the headline to link to the Ohio 7's Free Jaan Laaman blog for the latest.
Markin comment:
Generation of '68ers we have some unfinished business around taking care of our own. Agree with their politics or not, the fought the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist fight. Not that far removed from the stuff we believed in then, and some of us now. Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning the last of the imprisoned Ohio 7. They must not die in jail.
Markin comment:
Generation of '68ers we have some unfinished business around taking care of our own. Agree with their politics or not, the fought the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist fight. Not that far removed from the stuff we believed in then, and some of us now. Free Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning the last of the imprisoned Ohio 7. They must not die in jail.
Out In The Be-Bop Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Rock: 1958- Betsy And Earl ’s Senior Prom Moment- With Vaughn Monroe In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tommy Edwards his 1950s teen angst classic It’s All In The Game
CD Review
The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Roll: 1958, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1995
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the snapshot photos that grace each CD in this series.
The “Big” night, the night that every school boy and girl has been waiting for, well, maybe not waiting for, but hoping for, the night of their senior prom signifying the end of their days at old North Adamsville High School. Of course being a Podunk town away from the big city lights of Boston said senior prom, as has been a tradition since who knows when is held in the school gymnasium. A school gymnasium that, from long experience, has been turned into a faux-elegant hotel-style ballroom for the occasion. No cheap jack bunting and streamers, a few garlands, and maybe a couple of pieces of subdued lightning like at the ho-hum weekly school dances this night. Today the place is filled with well-appointed tables set with the best china and silverware, the bandstand is ablaze with decorations, and the dance floor specially lit to create, well, to create that mood like you were downtown at some swanky hotel. Even Podunk knows how to raise the bar for those now leaving the North Adamsville High family nest and who will soon be facing that hard 1958 Cold War world that keeps menacing everybody’s happiness.
In the middle of the festivities standing, check to check, as they have since sophomore year, eighth grade if you count the hemming and hawing that went on before the two became one, are Betsy Binstock, resplendent in her chiffony, open shoulder mother-made gown, complete with blue dahlia corsage (just what she wanted) and looking very handsome in his rented tuxedo (from Mr. Tuxedos right up in Adamsville Square as always since time immortal), Earl Avery. Children born and bred to rock ‘n’ roll they have just finished dancing up a storm to Robin Luke’s Susie Darlin’, the latest “have to have” record in the 1958 teen be-bop night. Of course this song, as all the music tonight, will be covered by the local rock band sensations The Rockin’ Ramrods hired for the occasion by the Senior Prom committee to keep their fellow seniors happy. As they release cheeks and head for their table Betsy is beaming because Earl has just made his first, tentative, maybe, kind of, move in the direction of asking her to marry him in the not to distant future. And as if on cue Jack Scott’s My True Love come forth from the bandstand and they shuffle back to the floor as if mesmerized by the power of the song.
Of course, after coming off the floor again to the sound of Tommy Edwards It’s All In The Game Betsy cannot wait to get to the Ladies’ (yes, this night Ladies) Powder Room to tell one and all of her conquest. (Really the “powder room” is the legendary Junior and Senior Girls’ Lounge, looking very much the elegant hotel lounge, including real hand towels, that has been the scene of more gossip about who did or did not do what with whom, the what being, naturally “going all the way” than Hollywood could ever conger up in its wildest dreams.) So Betsy excuses herself from the table and starts picking up girlfriends to head to the lounge. Spunky Betsy knows that in this wicked old world only the strong survive, even in the question of marriage. Therefore her strategy is to spread Earl’s kind of, sort of proposal into something like the granite from the quarry that the town was known to produce in the old, old days. Maybe it has something to do with the evening, maybe it was the Ramrods covering Ed Townsend’s For Your Love, maybe it was just something in the early June air but Betsy went all out that night in the lounge, even speculating that she and Earl would be marriage within the year.
Meanwhile poor Earl, still shaky for even going as timidly far as he did on the marriage question had to laugh as the Ramrods played the Chantels Maybe. Earl nevertheless had a sense that the die was cast as a glowing Betsy and her entourage came back into view. As we leave this scene to the strands of Jimmy Clanton and His Rockets’ Just A Dream Earl has shrugged off all evil thoughts for the night, for his senior prom night and has decided to just go with the flow.
P.S. For those who can hardly wait to know how Betsy and Earl made out here is the scoop. Well, yes they were married in the summer of 1959 although not under the circumstances one would have expected. Whether by design or just happenstance Betsy got pregnant and honest and true Earl did the right thing. In the fall of 1959 Earl Avery, Junior came. Betsy a little worn from her pregnancy seems a bewildered just now. Earl on the other hand, with a raise and new job title to go with his junior boy, couldn’t be happier. Go figure, right.
CD Review
The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Roll: 1958, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1995
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the snapshot photos that grace each CD in this series.
The “Big” night, the night that every school boy and girl has been waiting for, well, maybe not waiting for, but hoping for, the night of their senior prom signifying the end of their days at old North Adamsville High School. Of course being a Podunk town away from the big city lights of Boston said senior prom, as has been a tradition since who knows when is held in the school gymnasium. A school gymnasium that, from long experience, has been turned into a faux-elegant hotel-style ballroom for the occasion. No cheap jack bunting and streamers, a few garlands, and maybe a couple of pieces of subdued lightning like at the ho-hum weekly school dances this night. Today the place is filled with well-appointed tables set with the best china and silverware, the bandstand is ablaze with decorations, and the dance floor specially lit to create, well, to create that mood like you were downtown at some swanky hotel. Even Podunk knows how to raise the bar for those now leaving the North Adamsville High family nest and who will soon be facing that hard 1958 Cold War world that keeps menacing everybody’s happiness.
In the middle of the festivities standing, check to check, as they have since sophomore year, eighth grade if you count the hemming and hawing that went on before the two became one, are Betsy Binstock, resplendent in her chiffony, open shoulder mother-made gown, complete with blue dahlia corsage (just what she wanted) and looking very handsome in his rented tuxedo (from Mr. Tuxedos right up in Adamsville Square as always since time immortal), Earl Avery. Children born and bred to rock ‘n’ roll they have just finished dancing up a storm to Robin Luke’s Susie Darlin’, the latest “have to have” record in the 1958 teen be-bop night. Of course this song, as all the music tonight, will be covered by the local rock band sensations The Rockin’ Ramrods hired for the occasion by the Senior Prom committee to keep their fellow seniors happy. As they release cheeks and head for their table Betsy is beaming because Earl has just made his first, tentative, maybe, kind of, move in the direction of asking her to marry him in the not to distant future. And as if on cue Jack Scott’s My True Love come forth from the bandstand and they shuffle back to the floor as if mesmerized by the power of the song.
Of course, after coming off the floor again to the sound of Tommy Edwards It’s All In The Game Betsy cannot wait to get to the Ladies’ (yes, this night Ladies) Powder Room to tell one and all of her conquest. (Really the “powder room” is the legendary Junior and Senior Girls’ Lounge, looking very much the elegant hotel lounge, including real hand towels, that has been the scene of more gossip about who did or did not do what with whom, the what being, naturally “going all the way” than Hollywood could ever conger up in its wildest dreams.) So Betsy excuses herself from the table and starts picking up girlfriends to head to the lounge. Spunky Betsy knows that in this wicked old world only the strong survive, even in the question of marriage. Therefore her strategy is to spread Earl’s kind of, sort of proposal into something like the granite from the quarry that the town was known to produce in the old, old days. Maybe it has something to do with the evening, maybe it was the Ramrods covering Ed Townsend’s For Your Love, maybe it was just something in the early June air but Betsy went all out that night in the lounge, even speculating that she and Earl would be marriage within the year.
Meanwhile poor Earl, still shaky for even going as timidly far as he did on the marriage question had to laugh as the Ramrods played the Chantels Maybe. Earl nevertheless had a sense that the die was cast as a glowing Betsy and her entourage came back into view. As we leave this scene to the strands of Jimmy Clanton and His Rockets’ Just A Dream Earl has shrugged off all evil thoughts for the night, for his senior prom night and has decided to just go with the flow.
P.S. For those who can hardly wait to know how Betsy and Earl made out here is the scoop. Well, yes they were married in the summer of 1959 although not under the circumstances one would have expected. Whether by design or just happenstance Betsy got pregnant and honest and true Earl did the right thing. In the fall of 1959 Earl Avery, Junior came. Betsy a little worn from her pregnancy seems a bewildered just now. Earl on the other hand, with a raise and new job title to go with his junior boy, couldn’t be happier. Go figure, right.
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Article by Engels in the Labour Standard 1881-Trades Unions
Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Article by Engels in the Labour Standard 1881-Trades Unions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Reproduced from the newspaper;
Written: May 20, 1881;
Published: No. 4, May 28, 1881, as a leading article;
Transcribed: director@marx.org, Labor Day 1996.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part I
In our last issue we considered the action of Trades Unions as far as they enforce the economical law of wages against employers. We return to this subject, as it is of the highest importance that the working classes generally should thoroughly understand it.
We suppose no English working man of the present day needs to be taught that it is the interest of the individual capitalist, as well as of the capitalist class generally, to reduce wages as much as possible. The produce of labour, after deducting all expenses, is divided, as David Ricardo has irrefutably proved, into two shares: the one forms the labourer's wages, the other the capitalist's profits. Now, this net produce of labour being, in every individual case, a given quantity, it is clear that the share called profits cannot increase without the share called wages decreasing. To deny that it is the interest of the capitalist to reduce wages, would be tantamount to say that it is not his interest to increase his profits.
We know very well that there are other means of temporarily increasing profits, but they do not alter the general law, and therefore need not trouble us here.
Now, how can the capitalists reduce wages when the rate of wages is governed by a distinct and well-defined law of social economy? The economical law of wages is there, and is irrefutable. But, as we have seen, it is elastic, and it is so in two ways. The rate of wages can be lowered, in a particular trade, either directly, by gradually accustoming the workpeople of that trade to a lower standard of life, or, indirectly, by increasing the number of working hours per day (or the intensity of work during the same working hours) without increasing the pay.
And the interest of every individual capitalist to increase his profits by reducing the wages of his workpeople receives a fresh stimulus from the competition of capitalists of the same trade amongst each other. Each one of them tries to undersell his competitors, and unless he is to sacrifice his profits he must try and reduce wages. Thus, the pressure upon the rate of wages brought about by the interest of every individual capitalist is increased tenfold by the competition amongst them. What was before a matter of more or less profit, now becomes a matter of necessity.
Against this constant, unceasing pressure unorganised labour has no effective means of resistance. Therefore, in trades without organisation of the workpeople, wages tend constantly to fall and the working hours tend constantly to increase. Slowly, but surely, this process goes on. Times of prosperity may now and then interrupt it, but times of bad trade hasten it on all the more afterwards. The workpeople gradually get accustomed to a lower and lower standard of life. While the length of working day more and more approaches the possible maximum, the wages come nearer and nearer to their absolute minimum -- the sum below which it becomes absolutely impossible for the workman to live and to reproduce his race.
There was a temporary exception to this about the beginning of this century. The rapid extension of steam and machinery was not sufficient for the still faster increasing demand for their produce. Wages in these trades, except those of children sold from the workhouse [1] to the manufacturer, were as a rule high; those of such skilled manual labour as could not be done without were very high; what a dyer, a mechanic, a velvet-cutter, a hand-mule spinner, used to receive now sounds fabulous. At the same time the trades superseded by machinery were slowly starved to death. But newly-invented machinery by-and-by superseded these well-paid workmen; machinery was invented which made machinery, and that at such a rate that the supply of machine-made goods not only equalled, but exceeded, the demand. When the general peace, in 1815, [2] re-established regularity of trade, the decennial fluctuations between prosperity, over-production, and commercial panic began. Whatever advantages the workpeople had preserved from old prosperous times, and perhaps even increased during the period of frantic over-production, were now taken from them during the period of bad trade and panic; and soon the manufacturing population of England submitted to the general law that the wages of unorganised labour constantly tend towards the absolute minimum.
But in the meantime the Trades Unions, legalised in 1824 had also stepped in, and high time it was. Capitalists are always organised. They need in most cases no formal union, no rules, officers, etc. Their small number, as compared with that of the workmen, the fact of their forming a separate class, their constant social and commercial intercourse stand them in lieu of that; it is only later on, when a branch of manufactures has taken possession of a district, such as the cotton trade has of Lancashire, that a formal capitalists' Trades Union becomes necessary. On the other hand, the workpeople from the very beginning cannot do without a strong organisation, well-defined by rules and delegating its authority to officers and committees. The Act of 1824 rendered these organisations legal. From that day Labour became a power in England. The formerly helpless mass, divided against itself, was no longer so. To the strength given by union and common action soon was added the force of a well-filled exchequer -- "resistance money", as our French brethren expressively call it. The entire position of things now changed. For the capitalist it became a risky thing to indulge in a reduction of wages or an increase of working hours.
Hence the violent outbursts of the capitalist class of those times against Trades Unions. That class had always considered its long-established practice of grinding down the working class as a vested right and lawful privilege. That was now to be put a stop to. No wonder they cried out lustily and held themselves at least as much injured in their rights and property as Irish landlords do nowadays. [3]
Sixty years' experience of struggle have brought them round to some extent. Trades Unions have now become acknowledged institutions, and their action as one of the regulators of wages is recognised quite as much as the action of the Factories and Workshops Acts as regulators of the hours of work. Nay, the cotton masters in Lancashire have lately even taken a leaf out of the workpeople's book, and now know how to organise a strike, when it suits them, as well or better than any Trades Union.
Thus it is through the action of Trades Unions that the law of wages is enforced as against the employers, and that the workpeople of any well-organised trade are enabled to obtain, at least approximately, the full value of the working power which they hire to their employer; and that, with the help of State laws, the hours of labour are made at least not to exceed too much that maximum length beyond which the working power is prematurely exhausted. This, however, is the utmost Trades Unions, as at present organised, can hope to obtain, and that by constant struggle only, by an immense waste of strength and money; and then the fluctuations of trade, once every ten years at least, break down for the moment what has been conquered, and the fight has to be fought over again. It is a vicious circle from which there is no issue. The working class remains what it was, and what our Chartist forefathers were not afraid to call it, a class of wages slaves. Is this to be the final result of all this labour, self-sacrifice, and suffering? Is this to remain for ever the highest aim of British workmen? Or is the working class of this country at last to attempt breaking through this vicious circle, and to find an issue out of it in a movement for the ABOLITION OF THE WAGES SYSTEM ALTOGETHER?
Next week we shall examine the part played by Trades Unions as organisers of the working class.
Part II
No. 5, June 4, 1881
So far we have considered the functions of Trades Unions as far only as they contribute to the regulation of the rate of wages and ensure to the labourer, in his struggle against capital, at least some means of resistance. But that aspect does not exhaust our subject.
The struggle of the labourer against capital, we said. That struggle does exist, whatever the apologists of capital may say to the contrary. It will exist so long as a reduction of wages remains the safest and readiest means of raising profits; nay, so long as the wages system itself shall exist. The very existence of Trades Unions is proof sufficient of the fact; if they are not made to fight against the encroachments of capital what are they made for? There is no use in mincing matters. No milksop words can hide the ugly fact that present society is mainly divided into two great antagonistic classes -- into capitalists, the owners of all the means for the employment of labour, on one side; and working men, the owners of nothing but their own working power, on the other. The produce of the labour of the latter class has to be divided between both classes, and it is this division about which the struggle is constantly going on. Each class tries to get as large a share as possible; and it is the most curious aspect of this struggle that the working class, while fighting to obtain a share only of its own produce, is often enough accused of actually robbing the capitalist!
But a struggle between two great classes of society necessarily becomes a political struggle. So did the long battle between the middle or capitalist class and the landed aristocracy; so also does the fight between the working class and these same capitalists. In every struggle of class against class, the next end fought for is political power; the ruling class defends its political supremacy, that is to say its safe majority in the Legislature; the inferior class fights for, first a share, then the whole of that power, in order to become enabled to change existing laws in conformity with their own interests and requirements. Thus the working class of Great Britain for years fought ardently and even violently for the People's Charter, [4] which was to give it that political power; it was defeated, but the struggle had made such an impression upon the victorious middle class that this class, since then, was only too glad to buy a prolonged armistice at the price of ever-repeated concessions to the working people.
Now, in a political struggle of class against class, organisation is the most important weapon. And in the same measure as the merely political or Chartist Organisation fell to pieces, in the same measure the Trades Unions Organisation grew stronger and stronger, until at present it has reached a degree of strength unequalled by any working-class organisation abroad. A few large Trades Unions, comprising between one and two millions o£ working men, and backed by the smaller or local Unions, represent a power which has to be taken into account by any Government of the ruling class, be it Whig or Tory.
According to the traditions of their origin and development in this country, these powerful organisations have hitherto limited themselves almost strictly to their function of sharing in the regulation of wages and working hours, and of enforcing the repeal of laws openly hostile to the workmen. As stated before. they have done so with quite as much effect as they had a right to expect. But they have attained more than that -- the ruling class, which knows their strength better than they themselves do, has volunteered to them concessions beyond that. Disraeli's Household Suffrage [5] gave the vote to at least the greater portion of the organised working class. Would he have proposed it unless he supposed that these new voters would show a will of their own -- would cease to be led by middle-class Liberal politicians? Would he have been able to carry it if the working people, in the management of their colossal Trade Societies, had not proved themselves fit for administrative and political work?
That very measure opened out a new prospect to the working class. It gave them the majority in London and in all manufacturing towns, and thus enabled them to enter into the struggle against capital with new weapons, by sending men of their own class to Parliament. And here, we are sorry to say, the Trades Unions forgot their duty as the advanced guard of the working class. The new weapon has been in their hands for more than ten years, but they scarcely ever unsheathed it. They ought not to forget that they cannot continue to hold the position they now occupy unless they really march in the van of the working class. It is not in the nature of things that the working class of England should possess the power of sending forty or fifty working men to Parliament and yet be satisfied for ever to be represented by capitalists or their clerks, such as lawyers, editors, etc.
More than this, there are plenty of symptoms that the working class of this country is awakening to the consciousness that it has for some time been moving in the wrong groove [6]; that the present movements for higher wages and shorter hours exclusively, keep it in a vicious circle out of which there is no issue; that it is not the lowness of wages which forms the fundamental evil, but the wages system itself. This knowledge once generally spread amongst the working class, the position of Trades Unions must change considerably. They will no longer enjoy the privilege of being the only organisations of the working class. At the side of, or above, the Unions of special trades there must spring up a general Union, a political organisation of the working class as a whole.
Thus there are two points which the organised Trades would do well to consider, firstly, that the time is rapidly approaching when the working class of this country will claim, with a voice not to be mistaken, its full share of representation in Parliament. Secondly, that the time also is rapidly approaching when the working class will have understood that the struggle for high wages and short hours, and the whole action of Trades Unions as now carried on, is not an end in itself, but a means, a very necessary and effective means' but only one of several means towards a higher end: the abolition of the wages system altogether.
For the full representation of labour in Parliament, as well as for the preparation of the abolition of the wages system organisations will become necessary, not of separate Trades, but of the working class as a body. And the sooner this is done the better. There is no power in the world which could for a day resist the British working class organised as a body.
Notes
From the MECW
1 The Poor Law adopted in England in 1834 provided for only one form of relief for the able-bodied poor workhouses with a prison-like regime in which the workers were engaged in unproductive, monotonous and exhausting labour. The people called the workhouses "Bastilles for the poor".
2 The reference is to the Vienna Congress of European monarchs and their ministers (September 1814 to June 9, 1815), which set up a system of all-European treaties after the wars of the European powers against Napoleonic France.
3 Engels is referring to the landlords' discontent with the Land Bill passed by the Gladstone government on August 22, 1881 for the purpose of distracting the Irish peasants from the revolutionary struggle. The Bill restricted the landlords' right to evict tenants from their plots if they paid the rent in time; the rent was fixed for 15 years in advance. Despite the fact that the 1881 Law gave the landlords a chance to sell their lands to the state at a profit, and that the fixed rent remained very high indeed, the English landowners still opposed the Law trying to preserve their unlimited rule in Ireland. Despite the Law, illegal evictions from the land continued, which provoked the resistance of the Irish tenants.
4 The People's Charter, which contained the demands of the Chartists, was published in the form of a Parliamentary Bill on May 8, 1838. It contained six points: universal suffrage (for men of 21 and over), annual Parliaments, vote by ballot, equal electoral districts, abolition of the property qualification for MPs and payment of MPs. Petitions urging the adoption of the People's Charter were turned down by Parliament in 1839, 1842 and 1848.
5 The reference is to the second Reform Bill approved by Parliament on August 15, 1867 under pressure from the mass working-class movement and direct participation in it of the General Council of the First International. Under the new law, the property qualification for the voters was lowered, and their number doubled, suffrage was granted also to part of skilled workers. The bulk of the working population, however, was still deprived of the right to vote.
6 Starting from the late 1870s, the British working-class movement gradually freed itself from the influence of the Liberal Party.
The more advanced section of the workers took part in the activities of radical organisations and clubs, and campaigned for Irish self-determination. In 1879 the Midland Social-Democratic Association was set up in Birmingham, and in 1881 the Labour Emancipation League in London. Of great importance was the Democratic Federation founded in London in June 1881 and in 1884 transformed into the Social-Democratic Federation, which openly recognised Marxist principles.
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
*****
Article by Engels in the Labour Standard 1881-Trades Unions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Reproduced from the newspaper;
Written: May 20, 1881;
Published: No. 4, May 28, 1881, as a leading article;
Transcribed: director@marx.org, Labor Day 1996.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part I
In our last issue we considered the action of Trades Unions as far as they enforce the economical law of wages against employers. We return to this subject, as it is of the highest importance that the working classes generally should thoroughly understand it.
We suppose no English working man of the present day needs to be taught that it is the interest of the individual capitalist, as well as of the capitalist class generally, to reduce wages as much as possible. The produce of labour, after deducting all expenses, is divided, as David Ricardo has irrefutably proved, into two shares: the one forms the labourer's wages, the other the capitalist's profits. Now, this net produce of labour being, in every individual case, a given quantity, it is clear that the share called profits cannot increase without the share called wages decreasing. To deny that it is the interest of the capitalist to reduce wages, would be tantamount to say that it is not his interest to increase his profits.
We know very well that there are other means of temporarily increasing profits, but they do not alter the general law, and therefore need not trouble us here.
Now, how can the capitalists reduce wages when the rate of wages is governed by a distinct and well-defined law of social economy? The economical law of wages is there, and is irrefutable. But, as we have seen, it is elastic, and it is so in two ways. The rate of wages can be lowered, in a particular trade, either directly, by gradually accustoming the workpeople of that trade to a lower standard of life, or, indirectly, by increasing the number of working hours per day (or the intensity of work during the same working hours) without increasing the pay.
And the interest of every individual capitalist to increase his profits by reducing the wages of his workpeople receives a fresh stimulus from the competition of capitalists of the same trade amongst each other. Each one of them tries to undersell his competitors, and unless he is to sacrifice his profits he must try and reduce wages. Thus, the pressure upon the rate of wages brought about by the interest of every individual capitalist is increased tenfold by the competition amongst them. What was before a matter of more or less profit, now becomes a matter of necessity.
Against this constant, unceasing pressure unorganised labour has no effective means of resistance. Therefore, in trades without organisation of the workpeople, wages tend constantly to fall and the working hours tend constantly to increase. Slowly, but surely, this process goes on. Times of prosperity may now and then interrupt it, but times of bad trade hasten it on all the more afterwards. The workpeople gradually get accustomed to a lower and lower standard of life. While the length of working day more and more approaches the possible maximum, the wages come nearer and nearer to their absolute minimum -- the sum below which it becomes absolutely impossible for the workman to live and to reproduce his race.
There was a temporary exception to this about the beginning of this century. The rapid extension of steam and machinery was not sufficient for the still faster increasing demand for their produce. Wages in these trades, except those of children sold from the workhouse [1] to the manufacturer, were as a rule high; those of such skilled manual labour as could not be done without were very high; what a dyer, a mechanic, a velvet-cutter, a hand-mule spinner, used to receive now sounds fabulous. At the same time the trades superseded by machinery were slowly starved to death. But newly-invented machinery by-and-by superseded these well-paid workmen; machinery was invented which made machinery, and that at such a rate that the supply of machine-made goods not only equalled, but exceeded, the demand. When the general peace, in 1815, [2] re-established regularity of trade, the decennial fluctuations between prosperity, over-production, and commercial panic began. Whatever advantages the workpeople had preserved from old prosperous times, and perhaps even increased during the period of frantic over-production, were now taken from them during the period of bad trade and panic; and soon the manufacturing population of England submitted to the general law that the wages of unorganised labour constantly tend towards the absolute minimum.
But in the meantime the Trades Unions, legalised in 1824 had also stepped in, and high time it was. Capitalists are always organised. They need in most cases no formal union, no rules, officers, etc. Their small number, as compared with that of the workmen, the fact of their forming a separate class, their constant social and commercial intercourse stand them in lieu of that; it is only later on, when a branch of manufactures has taken possession of a district, such as the cotton trade has of Lancashire, that a formal capitalists' Trades Union becomes necessary. On the other hand, the workpeople from the very beginning cannot do without a strong organisation, well-defined by rules and delegating its authority to officers and committees. The Act of 1824 rendered these organisations legal. From that day Labour became a power in England. The formerly helpless mass, divided against itself, was no longer so. To the strength given by union and common action soon was added the force of a well-filled exchequer -- "resistance money", as our French brethren expressively call it. The entire position of things now changed. For the capitalist it became a risky thing to indulge in a reduction of wages or an increase of working hours.
Hence the violent outbursts of the capitalist class of those times against Trades Unions. That class had always considered its long-established practice of grinding down the working class as a vested right and lawful privilege. That was now to be put a stop to. No wonder they cried out lustily and held themselves at least as much injured in their rights and property as Irish landlords do nowadays. [3]
Sixty years' experience of struggle have brought them round to some extent. Trades Unions have now become acknowledged institutions, and their action as one of the regulators of wages is recognised quite as much as the action of the Factories and Workshops Acts as regulators of the hours of work. Nay, the cotton masters in Lancashire have lately even taken a leaf out of the workpeople's book, and now know how to organise a strike, when it suits them, as well or better than any Trades Union.
Thus it is through the action of Trades Unions that the law of wages is enforced as against the employers, and that the workpeople of any well-organised trade are enabled to obtain, at least approximately, the full value of the working power which they hire to their employer; and that, with the help of State laws, the hours of labour are made at least not to exceed too much that maximum length beyond which the working power is prematurely exhausted. This, however, is the utmost Trades Unions, as at present organised, can hope to obtain, and that by constant struggle only, by an immense waste of strength and money; and then the fluctuations of trade, once every ten years at least, break down for the moment what has been conquered, and the fight has to be fought over again. It is a vicious circle from which there is no issue. The working class remains what it was, and what our Chartist forefathers were not afraid to call it, a class of wages slaves. Is this to be the final result of all this labour, self-sacrifice, and suffering? Is this to remain for ever the highest aim of British workmen? Or is the working class of this country at last to attempt breaking through this vicious circle, and to find an issue out of it in a movement for the ABOLITION OF THE WAGES SYSTEM ALTOGETHER?
Next week we shall examine the part played by Trades Unions as organisers of the working class.
Part II
No. 5, June 4, 1881
So far we have considered the functions of Trades Unions as far only as they contribute to the regulation of the rate of wages and ensure to the labourer, in his struggle against capital, at least some means of resistance. But that aspect does not exhaust our subject.
The struggle of the labourer against capital, we said. That struggle does exist, whatever the apologists of capital may say to the contrary. It will exist so long as a reduction of wages remains the safest and readiest means of raising profits; nay, so long as the wages system itself shall exist. The very existence of Trades Unions is proof sufficient of the fact; if they are not made to fight against the encroachments of capital what are they made for? There is no use in mincing matters. No milksop words can hide the ugly fact that present society is mainly divided into two great antagonistic classes -- into capitalists, the owners of all the means for the employment of labour, on one side; and working men, the owners of nothing but their own working power, on the other. The produce of the labour of the latter class has to be divided between both classes, and it is this division about which the struggle is constantly going on. Each class tries to get as large a share as possible; and it is the most curious aspect of this struggle that the working class, while fighting to obtain a share only of its own produce, is often enough accused of actually robbing the capitalist!
But a struggle between two great classes of society necessarily becomes a political struggle. So did the long battle between the middle or capitalist class and the landed aristocracy; so also does the fight between the working class and these same capitalists. In every struggle of class against class, the next end fought for is political power; the ruling class defends its political supremacy, that is to say its safe majority in the Legislature; the inferior class fights for, first a share, then the whole of that power, in order to become enabled to change existing laws in conformity with their own interests and requirements. Thus the working class of Great Britain for years fought ardently and even violently for the People's Charter, [4] which was to give it that political power; it was defeated, but the struggle had made such an impression upon the victorious middle class that this class, since then, was only too glad to buy a prolonged armistice at the price of ever-repeated concessions to the working people.
Now, in a political struggle of class against class, organisation is the most important weapon. And in the same measure as the merely political or Chartist Organisation fell to pieces, in the same measure the Trades Unions Organisation grew stronger and stronger, until at present it has reached a degree of strength unequalled by any working-class organisation abroad. A few large Trades Unions, comprising between one and two millions o£ working men, and backed by the smaller or local Unions, represent a power which has to be taken into account by any Government of the ruling class, be it Whig or Tory.
According to the traditions of their origin and development in this country, these powerful organisations have hitherto limited themselves almost strictly to their function of sharing in the regulation of wages and working hours, and of enforcing the repeal of laws openly hostile to the workmen. As stated before. they have done so with quite as much effect as they had a right to expect. But they have attained more than that -- the ruling class, which knows their strength better than they themselves do, has volunteered to them concessions beyond that. Disraeli's Household Suffrage [5] gave the vote to at least the greater portion of the organised working class. Would he have proposed it unless he supposed that these new voters would show a will of their own -- would cease to be led by middle-class Liberal politicians? Would he have been able to carry it if the working people, in the management of their colossal Trade Societies, had not proved themselves fit for administrative and political work?
That very measure opened out a new prospect to the working class. It gave them the majority in London and in all manufacturing towns, and thus enabled them to enter into the struggle against capital with new weapons, by sending men of their own class to Parliament. And here, we are sorry to say, the Trades Unions forgot their duty as the advanced guard of the working class. The new weapon has been in their hands for more than ten years, but they scarcely ever unsheathed it. They ought not to forget that they cannot continue to hold the position they now occupy unless they really march in the van of the working class. It is not in the nature of things that the working class of England should possess the power of sending forty or fifty working men to Parliament and yet be satisfied for ever to be represented by capitalists or their clerks, such as lawyers, editors, etc.
More than this, there are plenty of symptoms that the working class of this country is awakening to the consciousness that it has for some time been moving in the wrong groove [6]; that the present movements for higher wages and shorter hours exclusively, keep it in a vicious circle out of which there is no issue; that it is not the lowness of wages which forms the fundamental evil, but the wages system itself. This knowledge once generally spread amongst the working class, the position of Trades Unions must change considerably. They will no longer enjoy the privilege of being the only organisations of the working class. At the side of, or above, the Unions of special trades there must spring up a general Union, a political organisation of the working class as a whole.
Thus there are two points which the organised Trades would do well to consider, firstly, that the time is rapidly approaching when the working class of this country will claim, with a voice not to be mistaken, its full share of representation in Parliament. Secondly, that the time also is rapidly approaching when the working class will have understood that the struggle for high wages and short hours, and the whole action of Trades Unions as now carried on, is not an end in itself, but a means, a very necessary and effective means' but only one of several means towards a higher end: the abolition of the wages system altogether.
For the full representation of labour in Parliament, as well as for the preparation of the abolition of the wages system organisations will become necessary, not of separate Trades, but of the working class as a body. And the sooner this is done the better. There is no power in the world which could for a day resist the British working class organised as a body.
Notes
From the MECW
1 The Poor Law adopted in England in 1834 provided for only one form of relief for the able-bodied poor workhouses with a prison-like regime in which the workers were engaged in unproductive, monotonous and exhausting labour. The people called the workhouses "Bastilles for the poor".
2 The reference is to the Vienna Congress of European monarchs and their ministers (September 1814 to June 9, 1815), which set up a system of all-European treaties after the wars of the European powers against Napoleonic France.
3 Engels is referring to the landlords' discontent with the Land Bill passed by the Gladstone government on August 22, 1881 for the purpose of distracting the Irish peasants from the revolutionary struggle. The Bill restricted the landlords' right to evict tenants from their plots if they paid the rent in time; the rent was fixed for 15 years in advance. Despite the fact that the 1881 Law gave the landlords a chance to sell their lands to the state at a profit, and that the fixed rent remained very high indeed, the English landowners still opposed the Law trying to preserve their unlimited rule in Ireland. Despite the Law, illegal evictions from the land continued, which provoked the resistance of the Irish tenants.
4 The People's Charter, which contained the demands of the Chartists, was published in the form of a Parliamentary Bill on May 8, 1838. It contained six points: universal suffrage (for men of 21 and over), annual Parliaments, vote by ballot, equal electoral districts, abolition of the property qualification for MPs and payment of MPs. Petitions urging the adoption of the People's Charter were turned down by Parliament in 1839, 1842 and 1848.
5 The reference is to the second Reform Bill approved by Parliament on August 15, 1867 under pressure from the mass working-class movement and direct participation in it of the General Council of the First International. Under the new law, the property qualification for the voters was lowered, and their number doubled, suffrage was granted also to part of skilled workers. The bulk of the working population, however, was still deprived of the right to vote.
6 Starting from the late 1870s, the British working-class movement gradually freed itself from the influence of the Liberal Party.
The more advanced section of the workers took part in the activities of radical organisations and clubs, and campaigned for Irish self-determination. In 1879 the Midland Social-Democratic Association was set up in Birmingham, and in 1881 the Labour Emancipation League in London. Of great importance was the Democratic Federation founded in London in June 1881 and in 1884 transformed into the Social-Democratic Federation, which openly recognised Marxist principles.
“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-"Resolution On The Work Of The Canadian Section"
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering
and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering
and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts.
Monday, September 19, 2011
The Latest (And Hopefully The End) From "The San Francisco Eight" Blog- Torres Case Dismissed
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the San Francisco Eight blog.
Markin comment:
In the bitter class struggle (class-war to use the current favored expression in bourgeois politics-at least they know it is a war even if some of our own don't) we get precious few "victories" but here is one to savor. Good luck, Brother Torres. Free all the class-war prisoners!
Markin comment:
In the bitter class struggle (class-war to use the current favored expression in bourgeois politics-at least they know it is a war even if some of our own don't) we get precious few "victories" but here is one to savor. Good luck, Brother Torres. Free all the class-war prisoners!
Labor's Untold Story-From The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Archives-The Struggle For Working Class Organization-Value, Price and Profit- a Polemic-1865
Markin comment:
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
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Value, Price and Profit
XII. General Relation of Profits, Wages, and Prices
Deduct from the value of a commodity the value replacing the value of the raw materials and other means of production used upon it, that is to say, deduct the value representing the past labour contained in it, and the remainder of its value will resolve into the quantity of labour added by the working man last employed. If that working man works twelve hours daily, if twelve hours of average labour crystallize themselves in an amount of gold equal to six shillings, this additional value of six shillings is the only value his labour will have created. This given value, determined by the time of his labour, is the only fund from which both he and the capitalist have to draw their respective shares or dividends, the only value to be divided into wages and profits. It is evident that this value itself will not be altered by the variable proportions in which it may be divided amongst the two parties. There will also be nothing changed if in the place of one working man you put the whole working population, twelve million working days, for example, instead of one.
Since the capitalist and workman have only to divide this limited value, that is, the value measured by the total labour of the working man, the more the one gets the less will the other get, and vice versa. Whenever a quantity is given, one part of it will increase inversely as the other decreases. If the wages change, profits will change in an opposite direction. If wages fall, profits will rise; and if wages rise, profits will fall. If the working man, on our former supposition, gets three shillings, equal to one half of the value he has created, or if his whole working day consists half of paid, half of unpaid labour, the rate of profit will be 100 percent, because the capitalist would also get three shillings. If the working man receives only two shillings, or works only one third of the whole day for himself, the capitalist will get four shillings, and the rate of profit will be 200 per cent. If the working man receives four shillings, the capitalist will only receive two, and the rate of profit would sink to 50 percent, but all these variations will not affect the value of the commodity. A general rise of wages would, therefore, result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but not affect values.
But although the values of commodities, which must ultimately regulate their market prices, are exclusively determined by the total quantities of labour fixed in them, and not by the division of that quantity into paid and unpaid labour, it by no means follows that the values of the single commodities, or lots of commodities, produced during twelve hours, for example, will remain constant. The number or mass of commodities produced in a given time of labour, or by a given quantity of labour, depends upon the productive power of the labour employed, and not upon its extent or length. With one degree of the productive power of spinning labour, for example, a working day of twelve hours may produce twelve pounds of yarn, with a lesser degree of productive power only two pounds. If then twelve hours' average labour were realized in the value of six shillings in the one case, the twelve pounds of yarn would cost six shillings, in the other case the two pounds of yarn would also cost six shillings. One pound of yarn would, therefore, cost sixpence in the one case, and three shillings in the other. The difference of price would result from the difference in the productive powers of labour employed. One hour of labour would be realized in one pound of yarn with the greater productive power, while with the smaller productive power, six hours of labour would be realized in one pound of yarn. The price of a pound of yarn would, in the one instance, be only sixpence, although wages were relatively high and the rate of profit low; it would be three shillings in the other instance, although wages were low and the rate of profit high. This would be so because the price of the pound of yarn is regulated by the total amount of labour worked up in it, and not by the proportional division of that total amount into paid and unpaid labour. The fact I have mentioned before that high-price labour may produce cheap, and low-priced labour may produce dear commodities, loses, therefore, its paradoxical appearance. It is only the expression of the general law that the value of a commodity is regulated by the quantity of labour worked up in it, and the the quantity of labour worked up in it depends altogether upon the productive powers of labour employed, and will therefore, vary with every variation in the productivity of labour.
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XIII. Main Cases of Attempts at Raising Wages or Resisting their Fall
Let us now seriously consider the main cases in which a rise of wages is attempted or a reduction of wages resisted.
1. We have seen that the value of the labouring power, or in more popular parlance, the value of labour, is determined by the value of necessaries, or the quantity of labour required to produce them.
If, then, in a given country the value of the daily average necessaries of the labourer represented six hours of labour expressed in three shillings, the labourer would have to work six hours daily to produce an equivalent for this daily maintenance. If the whole working day was twelve hours, the capitalist would pay him the value of his labour by paying him three shillings. Half the working day would be unpaid labour, and the rate of profit would amount to 100 percent. But now suppose that, consequent upon a decrease of productivity, more labour should be wanted to produce, say, the same amount of agricultural produce, so that the price of the average daily necessaries should rise from three to four shillings. In that case the value of labour would rise by one third, or 33 1/3 percent. Eight hours of the working day would be required to produce an equivalent for the daily maintenance of the labourer, according to his old standard of living. The surplus labour would therefore sink from six hours to four, and the rate of profit from 100 to 50 percent. But in insisting upon a rise of wages, the labourer would only insist upon getting the increased value of his labour, like every other seller of a commodity, who, the costs of his commodities having increased, tries to get its increased value paid. If wages did not rise, or not sufficiently rise, to compensate for the increased values of necessaries, the price of labour would sink below the value of labour, and the labourer's standard of life would deteriorate.
But a change might also take place in an opposite direction. By virtue of the increased productivity of labour, the same amount of the average daily necessaries might sink from three to two shillings, or only four hours out of the working day, instead of six, be wanted to reproduce an equivalent for the value of the daily necessaries. The working man would now be able to buy with two shillings as many necessaries as he did before with three shillings. Indeed, the value of labour would have sunk, but diminished value would command the same amount of commodities as before. Then profits would rise from three to four shillings, and the rate of profit from 100 to 200 percent. Although the labourer's absolute standard of life would have remained the same, his relative wages, and therewith his relative social position, as compared with that of the capitalist, would have been lowered. If the working man should resist that reduction of relative wages, he would only try to get some share in the increased productive powers of his own labour, and to maintain his former relative position in the social scale. Thus, after the abolition of the Corn Laws, and in flagrant violation of the most solemn pledges given during the anti-corn law agitation, the English factory lords generally reduced wages ten per cent. The resistance of the workmen was at first baffled, but, consequent upon circumstances I cannot now enter upon, the ten per cent lost were afterwards regained.
2. The values of necessaries, and consequently the value of labour, might remain the same, but a change might occur in their money prices, consequent upon a previous change in the value of money. By the discovery of more fertile mines and so forth, two ounces of gold might, for example, cost no more labour to produce than one ounce did before. The value of gold would then be depreciated by one half, or fifty per cent. As the values of all other commodities would then be expressed in twice their former money prices, so also the same with the value of labour. Twelve hours of labour, formerly expressed in six shillings, would now be expressed in twelve shillings. If the working man's wages should remain three shillings, instead of rising to six shillings, the money price of his labour would only be equal to half the value of his labour, and his standard of life would fearfully deteriorate. This would also happen in a greater or lesser degree if his wages should rise, but not proportionately to the fall in the value of gold. In such a case nothing would have been changed, either in the productive powers of labour, or in supply and demand, or in values.
Nothing would have changed except the money names of those values. To say that in such a case the workman ought not to insist upon a proportionate rise of wages, is to say that he must be content to be paid with names, instead of with things. All past history proves that whenever such a depreciation of money occurs, the capitalists are on the alert to seize this opportunity for defrauding the workman. A very large school of political economists assert that, consequent upon the new discoveries of gold lands, the better working of silver mines, and the cheaper supply of quicksilver, the value of precious metals has again depreciated. This would explain the general and simultaneous attempts on the Continent at a rise of wages.
3. We have till now supposed that the working day has given limits. The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be increased. The more capital succeeds in prolonging the working day, the greater the amount of other peoples' labour it will appropriate.
During the seventeenth and even the first two thirds of the eighteenth century a ten hours' working day was the normal working day all over England. During the anti-Jacobin war, which was in fact a war waged by the British barons against the British working masses, capital celebrated its bacchanalia, and prolonged the working day from ten to twelve, fourteen, eighteen hours. Malthus, by no means a man whom you would suspect of a maudlin sentimentalism declared in a pamphlet, published about 1815, that if this sort of thing was to go on the life of the nation would be attacked at its very source. A few years before the general introduction of newly-invented machinery, about 1765, a pamphlet appeared in England under the title, An Essay On Trade. The anonymous author, an avowed enemy of the working classes, declaims on the necessity of expanding the limits of the working day. Amongst other means to this end, he proposes working houses, which, he says, ought to be “Houses of Terror.” And what is the length of the working he prescribes for these “Houses of Terror"? Twelve hours, the very same time which in 1832 was declared by capitalists, political economists, and ministers to be not only the existing but the necessary time of labour for a child under twelve years.
By selling his labouring power, and he must do so under the present system, the working man makes over to the capitalist the consumption of that power, but within certain rational limits. He sells his labouring power in order to maintain it, apart from its natural wear and tear, but not to destroy it. In selling his labouring power at its daily or weekly value, it is understood that in one day or one week that labouring power shall not be submitted to two days' or two weeks' waste or wear and tear. Take a machine worth 1000 Pounds. If it is used up in ten years it will add to the value of the commodities in whose production it assists 100 Pounds yearly. If it is used up in five years it will add 200 Pounds yearly, or the value of its annual wear and tear is in inverse ratio to the quickness with which it is consumed. But this distinguishes the working man from the machine. Machinery does not wear out exactly in the same ratio in which it is used. Man, on the contrary, decays in a greater ratio than would be visible from the mere numerical addition of work.
In their attempts at reducing the working day to its former rational dimensions, or, where they cannot enforce a legal fixation of a normal working day, at checking overwork by a rise of wages, a rise not only in proportion to the surplus time exacted, but in a greater proportion, working men fulfill only a duty to themselves and their race. They only set limits to the tyrannical usurpations of capital. Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation.
In prolonging the working day the capitalist may pay higher wages and still lower the value of labor, if the rise of wages does not correspond to the greater amount of labour extracted, and the quicker decay of the labouring power thus caused. This may be done in another way. Your middle-class statisticians will tell you, for instance, that the average wages of factory families in Lancashire has risen. They forget that instead of the labour of the man, the head of the family, his wife and perhaps three or four children are now thrown under the Juggernaut wheels of capital, and that the rise of the aggregate wages does not correspond to the aggregate surplus labour extracted from the family.
Even with given limits of the working day, such as they now exist in all branches of industry subjected to the factory laws, a rise of wages may become necessary, if only to keep up the old standard value of labour. By increasing the intensity of labour, a man may be made to expend as much vital force in one hour as he formerly did in two. This has, to a certain degree, been effected in the trades, placed under the Factory Acts, by the acceleration of machinery, and the greater number of working machines which a single individual has now to superintend. If the increase in the intensity of labour or the mass of labour spent in an hour keeps some fair proportion to the decrease in the extent of the working day, the working man will still be the winner. If this limit is overshot, he loses in one form what he has gained in another, and ten hours of labour may then become as ruinous as twelve hours were before. In checking this tendency of capital, by struggling for a rise of wages corresponding to the rising intensity of labour, the working man only resists the depreciation of his labour and the deterioration of his race.
4. All of you know that, from reasons I have not now to explain, capitalistic production moves through certain periodical cycles. It moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, prosperity, overtrade, crisis, and stagnation. The market prices of commodities, and the market rates of profit, follow these phases, now sinking below their averages, now rising above them.
Considering the whole cycle, you will find that one deviation of the market price is being compensated by the other, and that, taking the average of the cycle, the market prices of commodities are regulated by their values. Well! During the phases of sinking market prices and the phases of crisis and stagnation, the working man, if not thrown out of employment altogether, is sure to have his wages lowered. Not to be defrauded, he must, even with such a fall of market prices, debate with the capitalist in what proportional degree a fall of wages has become necessary. If, during the phases of prosperity, when extra profits are made, he did not battle for a rise of wages, he would, taking the average of one industrial cycle, not even receive his average wages, or the value of his labour. It is the utmost height of folly to demand, that while his wages are necessarily affected by the adverse phases of the cycle, he should exclude himself from compensation during the prosperous phases of the cycle. Generally, the values of all commodities are only realized by the compensation of the continuously changing market prices, springing from the continuous fluctuations of demand and supply. On the basis of the present system labour is only a commodity like others. It must, therefore, pass through the same fluctuations to fetch an average price corresponding to its value.
It would be absurd to treat it on the one hand as a commodity, and to want on the other hand to exempt it from the laws which regulate the prices of commodities. The slave receives a permanent and fixed amount of maintenance; the wage-labourer does not. He must try to get a rise of wages in the one instance, if only to compensate for a fall of wages in the other. If he resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave.
5. In all the cases I have considered, and they form ninety-nine out of a hundred, you have seen that a struggle for a rise of wages follows only in the track of previous changes, and is the necessary offspring of previous changes in the amount of production, the productive powers of labour, the value of labour, the value of money, the extent or the intensity of labour extracted, the fluctuations of market prices, dependent upon the fluctuations of demand and supply, and consistent with the different phases of the industrial cycle; in one word, as reactions of labour against the previous action of capital. By treating the struggle for a rise of wages independently of all these circumstances, by looking only upon the change of wages, and overlooking all other changes from which they emanate, you proceed from a false premise in order to arrive at false conclusions.
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XIV. The Struggle Between Capital and Labour and its Results
1. Having shown that the periodical resistance on the part of the working men against a reduction of wages, and their periodical attempts at getting a rise of wages, are inseparable from the wages system, and dictated by the very fact of labour being assimilated to commodities, and therefore subject to the laws, regulating the general movement of prices; having furthermore, shown that a general rise of wages would result in a fall in the general rate of profit, but not affect the average prices of commodities, or their values, the question now ultimately arises, how far, in this incessant struggle between capital and labour, the latter is likely to prove successful.
I might answer by a generalization, and say that, as with all other commodities, so with labour, its market price will, in the long run, adapt itself to its value; that, therefore, despite all the ups and downs, and do what he may, the working man will, on an average, only receive the value of his labour, which resolves into the value of his labouring power, which is determined by the value of the necessaries required for its maintenance and reproduction, which value of necessaries finally is regulated by the quantity of labour wanted to produce them.
But there are some peculiar features which distinguish the value of the labouring power, or the value of labour, from the values of all other commodities. The value of the labouring power is formed by two elements -- the one merely physical, the other historical or social. Its ultimate limit is determined by the physical element, that is to say, to maintain and reproduce itself, to perpetuate its physical existence, the working class must receive the necessaries absolutely indispensable for living and multiplying. The value of those indispensable necessaries forms, therefore, the ultimate limit of the value of labour. On the other hand, the length of the working day is also limited by ultimate, although very elastic boundaries. Its ultimate limit is given by the physical force of the labouring man. If the daily exhaustion of his vital forces exceeds a certain degree, it cannot be exerted anew, day by day.
However, as I said, this limit is very elastic. A quick succession of unhealthy and short-lived generations will keep the labour market as well supplied as a series of vigorous and long-lived generations. Besides this mere physical element, the value of labour is in every country determined by a traditional standard of life. It is not mere physical life, but it is the satisfaction of certain wants springing from the social conditions in which people are placed and reared up. The English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard; the standard of life of a German peasant to that of a Livonian peasant. The important part which historical tradition and social habitude play in this respect, you may learn from Mr. Thornton's work on over-population, where he shows that the average wages in different agricultural districts of England still nowadays differ more or less according to the more or less favourable circumstances under which the districts have emerged from the state of serfdom.
This historical or social element, entering into the value of labour, may be expanded, or contracted, or altogether extinguished, so that nothing remains but the physical limit. During the time of the anti-Jacobin war, undertaken, as the incorrigible tax-eater and sinecurist, old George Rose, used to say, to save the comforts of our holy religion from the inroads of the French infidels, the honest English farmers, so tenderly handled in a former chapter of ours, depressed the wages of the agricultural labourers even beneath that mere physical minimum, but made up by Poor Laws the remainder necessary for the physical perpetuation of the race. This was a glorious way to convert the wages labourer into a slave, and Shakespeare's proud yeoman into a pauper.
By comparing the standard wages or values of labour in different countries, and by comparing them in different historical epochs of the same country, you will find that the value of labour itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the values of all other commodities to remain constant.
A similar comparison would prove that not only the market rates of profit change, but its average rates.
But as to profits, there exists no law which determines their minimum. We cannot say what is the ultimate limit of their decrease. And why cannot we fix that limit? Because, although we can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum.
We can only say that, the limits of the working day being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to such a prolongation of the working day as is compatible with the physical forces of the labourer. The maximum of profit is therefore limited by the physical minimum of wages and the physical maximum of the working day. It is evident that between the two limits of the maximum rate of profit and immense scale of variations is possible. The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.
The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.
2. As to the limitation of the working day in England, as in all other countries, it has never been settled except by legislative interference. Without the working men's continuous pressure from without that interference would never have taken place. But at all events, the result was not to be attained by private settlement between the working men and the capitalists. This very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economical action capital is the stronger side.
As to the limits of the value of labour, its actual settlement always depends upon supply and demand, I mean the demand for labour on the part of capital, and the supply of labour by the working men. In colonial countries the law of supply and demand favours the working man. Hence the relatively high standard of wages in the United States. Capital may there try its utmost. It cannot prevent the labour market from being continuously emptied by the continuous conversion of wages labourers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The position of a wages labourer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term. To mend this colonial state of things the paternal British Government accepted for some time what is called the modern colonization theory, which consists in putting an artificial high price upon colonial land, in order to prevent the too quick conversion of the wages labourer into the independent peasant.
But let us now come to old civilized countries, in which capital domineers over the whole process of production. Take, for example, the rise in England of agricultural wages from 1849 to 1859. What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries. Ricardo has justly remarked that machinery is in constant competition with labour, and can often be only introduced when the price of labour has reached a certain height, but the appliance of machinery is but one of the many methods for increasing the productive powers of labour. The very same development which makes common labour relatively redundant simplifies, on the other hand, skilled labour, and thus depreciates it.
The same law obtains in another form. With the development of the productive powers of labour the accumulation of capital will be accelerated, even despite a relatively high rate of wages. Hence, one might infer, as Adam Smith, in whose days modern industry was still in its infancy, did infer, that the accelerated accumulation of capital must turn the balance in favour of the working man, by securing a growing demand for his labour. From this same standpoint many contemporary writers have wondered that English capital having grown in that last twenty years so much quicker than English population, wages should not have been more enhanced. But simultaneously with the progress of accumulation there takes place a progressive change in the composition of capital. That part of the aggregate capital which consists of fixed capital, machinery, raw materials, means of production in all possible forms, progressively increases as compared with the other part of capital, which is laid out in wages or in the purchase of labour. This law has been stated in a more or less accurate manner by Mr. Barton, Ricardo, Sismondi, Professor Richard Jones, Professor Ramsey, Cherbuilliez, and others.
If the proportion of these two elements of capital was originally one to one, it will, in the progress of industry, become five to one, and so forth. If of a total capital of 600, 300 is laid out in instruments, raw materials, and so forth, and 300 in wages, the total capital wants only to be doubled to create a demand for 600 working men instead of for 300. But if of a capital of 600, 500 is laid out in machinery, materials, and so forth and 100 only in wages, the same capital must increase from 600 to 3,600 in order to create a demand for 600 workmen instead of 300. In the progress of industry the demand for labour keeps, therefore, no pace with the accumulation of capital. It will still increase, but increase in a constantly diminishing ratio as compared with the increase of capital.
These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.
At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"
After this very long and, I fear, tedious exposition, which I was obliged to enter into to do some justice to the subject matter, I shall conclude by proposing the following resolutions:
Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities.
Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages.
Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.
Every Month Is Labor History MonthThis post is part of an on-going series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
Other Septembers in this series I have concentrated on various sometimes now obscure leaders and rank and file militants in the international working class movement, especially those who made contributions here in America like "Big Bill" Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. This year, given the pressing need for clarity around the labor party question in America(algebraically expressed in our movement as the struggle for a workers party that fights for a workers government) I have gone back to the sources-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their correspondence on working class organization with various associates and opponents. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely given the state of working class organization here these days, many of their comments, taken in due regard for changed times and circumstances, are germane today. This correspondence is only a start and should just whet the reader's appetite to research further.
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Value, Price and Profit
XII. General Relation of Profits, Wages, and Prices
Deduct from the value of a commodity the value replacing the value of the raw materials and other means of production used upon it, that is to say, deduct the value representing the past labour contained in it, and the remainder of its value will resolve into the quantity of labour added by the working man last employed. If that working man works twelve hours daily, if twelve hours of average labour crystallize themselves in an amount of gold equal to six shillings, this additional value of six shillings is the only value his labour will have created. This given value, determined by the time of his labour, is the only fund from which both he and the capitalist have to draw their respective shares or dividends, the only value to be divided into wages and profits. It is evident that this value itself will not be altered by the variable proportions in which it may be divided amongst the two parties. There will also be nothing changed if in the place of one working man you put the whole working population, twelve million working days, for example, instead of one.
Since the capitalist and workman have only to divide this limited value, that is, the value measured by the total labour of the working man, the more the one gets the less will the other get, and vice versa. Whenever a quantity is given, one part of it will increase inversely as the other decreases. If the wages change, profits will change in an opposite direction. If wages fall, profits will rise; and if wages rise, profits will fall. If the working man, on our former supposition, gets three shillings, equal to one half of the value he has created, or if his whole working day consists half of paid, half of unpaid labour, the rate of profit will be 100 percent, because the capitalist would also get three shillings. If the working man receives only two shillings, or works only one third of the whole day for himself, the capitalist will get four shillings, and the rate of profit will be 200 per cent. If the working man receives four shillings, the capitalist will only receive two, and the rate of profit would sink to 50 percent, but all these variations will not affect the value of the commodity. A general rise of wages would, therefore, result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but not affect values.
But although the values of commodities, which must ultimately regulate their market prices, are exclusively determined by the total quantities of labour fixed in them, and not by the division of that quantity into paid and unpaid labour, it by no means follows that the values of the single commodities, or lots of commodities, produced during twelve hours, for example, will remain constant. The number or mass of commodities produced in a given time of labour, or by a given quantity of labour, depends upon the productive power of the labour employed, and not upon its extent or length. With one degree of the productive power of spinning labour, for example, a working day of twelve hours may produce twelve pounds of yarn, with a lesser degree of productive power only two pounds. If then twelve hours' average labour were realized in the value of six shillings in the one case, the twelve pounds of yarn would cost six shillings, in the other case the two pounds of yarn would also cost six shillings. One pound of yarn would, therefore, cost sixpence in the one case, and three shillings in the other. The difference of price would result from the difference in the productive powers of labour employed. One hour of labour would be realized in one pound of yarn with the greater productive power, while with the smaller productive power, six hours of labour would be realized in one pound of yarn. The price of a pound of yarn would, in the one instance, be only sixpence, although wages were relatively high and the rate of profit low; it would be three shillings in the other instance, although wages were low and the rate of profit high. This would be so because the price of the pound of yarn is regulated by the total amount of labour worked up in it, and not by the proportional division of that total amount into paid and unpaid labour. The fact I have mentioned before that high-price labour may produce cheap, and low-priced labour may produce dear commodities, loses, therefore, its paradoxical appearance. It is only the expression of the general law that the value of a commodity is regulated by the quantity of labour worked up in it, and the the quantity of labour worked up in it depends altogether upon the productive powers of labour employed, and will therefore, vary with every variation in the productivity of labour.
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XIII. Main Cases of Attempts at Raising Wages or Resisting their Fall
Let us now seriously consider the main cases in which a rise of wages is attempted or a reduction of wages resisted.
1. We have seen that the value of the labouring power, or in more popular parlance, the value of labour, is determined by the value of necessaries, or the quantity of labour required to produce them.
If, then, in a given country the value of the daily average necessaries of the labourer represented six hours of labour expressed in three shillings, the labourer would have to work six hours daily to produce an equivalent for this daily maintenance. If the whole working day was twelve hours, the capitalist would pay him the value of his labour by paying him three shillings. Half the working day would be unpaid labour, and the rate of profit would amount to 100 percent. But now suppose that, consequent upon a decrease of productivity, more labour should be wanted to produce, say, the same amount of agricultural produce, so that the price of the average daily necessaries should rise from three to four shillings. In that case the value of labour would rise by one third, or 33 1/3 percent. Eight hours of the working day would be required to produce an equivalent for the daily maintenance of the labourer, according to his old standard of living. The surplus labour would therefore sink from six hours to four, and the rate of profit from 100 to 50 percent. But in insisting upon a rise of wages, the labourer would only insist upon getting the increased value of his labour, like every other seller of a commodity, who, the costs of his commodities having increased, tries to get its increased value paid. If wages did not rise, or not sufficiently rise, to compensate for the increased values of necessaries, the price of labour would sink below the value of labour, and the labourer's standard of life would deteriorate.
But a change might also take place in an opposite direction. By virtue of the increased productivity of labour, the same amount of the average daily necessaries might sink from three to two shillings, or only four hours out of the working day, instead of six, be wanted to reproduce an equivalent for the value of the daily necessaries. The working man would now be able to buy with two shillings as many necessaries as he did before with three shillings. Indeed, the value of labour would have sunk, but diminished value would command the same amount of commodities as before. Then profits would rise from three to four shillings, and the rate of profit from 100 to 200 percent. Although the labourer's absolute standard of life would have remained the same, his relative wages, and therewith his relative social position, as compared with that of the capitalist, would have been lowered. If the working man should resist that reduction of relative wages, he would only try to get some share in the increased productive powers of his own labour, and to maintain his former relative position in the social scale. Thus, after the abolition of the Corn Laws, and in flagrant violation of the most solemn pledges given during the anti-corn law agitation, the English factory lords generally reduced wages ten per cent. The resistance of the workmen was at first baffled, but, consequent upon circumstances I cannot now enter upon, the ten per cent lost were afterwards regained.
2. The values of necessaries, and consequently the value of labour, might remain the same, but a change might occur in their money prices, consequent upon a previous change in the value of money. By the discovery of more fertile mines and so forth, two ounces of gold might, for example, cost no more labour to produce than one ounce did before. The value of gold would then be depreciated by one half, or fifty per cent. As the values of all other commodities would then be expressed in twice their former money prices, so also the same with the value of labour. Twelve hours of labour, formerly expressed in six shillings, would now be expressed in twelve shillings. If the working man's wages should remain three shillings, instead of rising to six shillings, the money price of his labour would only be equal to half the value of his labour, and his standard of life would fearfully deteriorate. This would also happen in a greater or lesser degree if his wages should rise, but not proportionately to the fall in the value of gold. In such a case nothing would have been changed, either in the productive powers of labour, or in supply and demand, or in values.
Nothing would have changed except the money names of those values. To say that in such a case the workman ought not to insist upon a proportionate rise of wages, is to say that he must be content to be paid with names, instead of with things. All past history proves that whenever such a depreciation of money occurs, the capitalists are on the alert to seize this opportunity for defrauding the workman. A very large school of political economists assert that, consequent upon the new discoveries of gold lands, the better working of silver mines, and the cheaper supply of quicksilver, the value of precious metals has again depreciated. This would explain the general and simultaneous attempts on the Continent at a rise of wages.
3. We have till now supposed that the working day has given limits. The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be increased. The more capital succeeds in prolonging the working day, the greater the amount of other peoples' labour it will appropriate.
During the seventeenth and even the first two thirds of the eighteenth century a ten hours' working day was the normal working day all over England. During the anti-Jacobin war, which was in fact a war waged by the British barons against the British working masses, capital celebrated its bacchanalia, and prolonged the working day from ten to twelve, fourteen, eighteen hours. Malthus, by no means a man whom you would suspect of a maudlin sentimentalism declared in a pamphlet, published about 1815, that if this sort of thing was to go on the life of the nation would be attacked at its very source. A few years before the general introduction of newly-invented machinery, about 1765, a pamphlet appeared in England under the title, An Essay On Trade. The anonymous author, an avowed enemy of the working classes, declaims on the necessity of expanding the limits of the working day. Amongst other means to this end, he proposes working houses, which, he says, ought to be “Houses of Terror.” And what is the length of the working he prescribes for these “Houses of Terror"? Twelve hours, the very same time which in 1832 was declared by capitalists, political economists, and ministers to be not only the existing but the necessary time of labour for a child under twelve years.
By selling his labouring power, and he must do so under the present system, the working man makes over to the capitalist the consumption of that power, but within certain rational limits. He sells his labouring power in order to maintain it, apart from its natural wear and tear, but not to destroy it. In selling his labouring power at its daily or weekly value, it is understood that in one day or one week that labouring power shall not be submitted to two days' or two weeks' waste or wear and tear. Take a machine worth 1000 Pounds. If it is used up in ten years it will add to the value of the commodities in whose production it assists 100 Pounds yearly. If it is used up in five years it will add 200 Pounds yearly, or the value of its annual wear and tear is in inverse ratio to the quickness with which it is consumed. But this distinguishes the working man from the machine. Machinery does not wear out exactly in the same ratio in which it is used. Man, on the contrary, decays in a greater ratio than would be visible from the mere numerical addition of work.
In their attempts at reducing the working day to its former rational dimensions, or, where they cannot enforce a legal fixation of a normal working day, at checking overwork by a rise of wages, a rise not only in proportion to the surplus time exacted, but in a greater proportion, working men fulfill only a duty to themselves and their race. They only set limits to the tyrannical usurpations of capital. Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation.
In prolonging the working day the capitalist may pay higher wages and still lower the value of labor, if the rise of wages does not correspond to the greater amount of labour extracted, and the quicker decay of the labouring power thus caused. This may be done in another way. Your middle-class statisticians will tell you, for instance, that the average wages of factory families in Lancashire has risen. They forget that instead of the labour of the man, the head of the family, his wife and perhaps three or four children are now thrown under the Juggernaut wheels of capital, and that the rise of the aggregate wages does not correspond to the aggregate surplus labour extracted from the family.
Even with given limits of the working day, such as they now exist in all branches of industry subjected to the factory laws, a rise of wages may become necessary, if only to keep up the old standard value of labour. By increasing the intensity of labour, a man may be made to expend as much vital force in one hour as he formerly did in two. This has, to a certain degree, been effected in the trades, placed under the Factory Acts, by the acceleration of machinery, and the greater number of working machines which a single individual has now to superintend. If the increase in the intensity of labour or the mass of labour spent in an hour keeps some fair proportion to the decrease in the extent of the working day, the working man will still be the winner. If this limit is overshot, he loses in one form what he has gained in another, and ten hours of labour may then become as ruinous as twelve hours were before. In checking this tendency of capital, by struggling for a rise of wages corresponding to the rising intensity of labour, the working man only resists the depreciation of his labour and the deterioration of his race.
4. All of you know that, from reasons I have not now to explain, capitalistic production moves through certain periodical cycles. It moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, prosperity, overtrade, crisis, and stagnation. The market prices of commodities, and the market rates of profit, follow these phases, now sinking below their averages, now rising above them.
Considering the whole cycle, you will find that one deviation of the market price is being compensated by the other, and that, taking the average of the cycle, the market prices of commodities are regulated by their values. Well! During the phases of sinking market prices and the phases of crisis and stagnation, the working man, if not thrown out of employment altogether, is sure to have his wages lowered. Not to be defrauded, he must, even with such a fall of market prices, debate with the capitalist in what proportional degree a fall of wages has become necessary. If, during the phases of prosperity, when extra profits are made, he did not battle for a rise of wages, he would, taking the average of one industrial cycle, not even receive his average wages, or the value of his labour. It is the utmost height of folly to demand, that while his wages are necessarily affected by the adverse phases of the cycle, he should exclude himself from compensation during the prosperous phases of the cycle. Generally, the values of all commodities are only realized by the compensation of the continuously changing market prices, springing from the continuous fluctuations of demand and supply. On the basis of the present system labour is only a commodity like others. It must, therefore, pass through the same fluctuations to fetch an average price corresponding to its value.
It would be absurd to treat it on the one hand as a commodity, and to want on the other hand to exempt it from the laws which regulate the prices of commodities. The slave receives a permanent and fixed amount of maintenance; the wage-labourer does not. He must try to get a rise of wages in the one instance, if only to compensate for a fall of wages in the other. If he resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave.
5. In all the cases I have considered, and they form ninety-nine out of a hundred, you have seen that a struggle for a rise of wages follows only in the track of previous changes, and is the necessary offspring of previous changes in the amount of production, the productive powers of labour, the value of labour, the value of money, the extent or the intensity of labour extracted, the fluctuations of market prices, dependent upon the fluctuations of demand and supply, and consistent with the different phases of the industrial cycle; in one word, as reactions of labour against the previous action of capital. By treating the struggle for a rise of wages independently of all these circumstances, by looking only upon the change of wages, and overlooking all other changes from which they emanate, you proceed from a false premise in order to arrive at false conclusions.
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XIV. The Struggle Between Capital and Labour and its Results
1. Having shown that the periodical resistance on the part of the working men against a reduction of wages, and their periodical attempts at getting a rise of wages, are inseparable from the wages system, and dictated by the very fact of labour being assimilated to commodities, and therefore subject to the laws, regulating the general movement of prices; having furthermore, shown that a general rise of wages would result in a fall in the general rate of profit, but not affect the average prices of commodities, or their values, the question now ultimately arises, how far, in this incessant struggle between capital and labour, the latter is likely to prove successful.
I might answer by a generalization, and say that, as with all other commodities, so with labour, its market price will, in the long run, adapt itself to its value; that, therefore, despite all the ups and downs, and do what he may, the working man will, on an average, only receive the value of his labour, which resolves into the value of his labouring power, which is determined by the value of the necessaries required for its maintenance and reproduction, which value of necessaries finally is regulated by the quantity of labour wanted to produce them.
But there are some peculiar features which distinguish the value of the labouring power, or the value of labour, from the values of all other commodities. The value of the labouring power is formed by two elements -- the one merely physical, the other historical or social. Its ultimate limit is determined by the physical element, that is to say, to maintain and reproduce itself, to perpetuate its physical existence, the working class must receive the necessaries absolutely indispensable for living and multiplying. The value of those indispensable necessaries forms, therefore, the ultimate limit of the value of labour. On the other hand, the length of the working day is also limited by ultimate, although very elastic boundaries. Its ultimate limit is given by the physical force of the labouring man. If the daily exhaustion of his vital forces exceeds a certain degree, it cannot be exerted anew, day by day.
However, as I said, this limit is very elastic. A quick succession of unhealthy and short-lived generations will keep the labour market as well supplied as a series of vigorous and long-lived generations. Besides this mere physical element, the value of labour is in every country determined by a traditional standard of life. It is not mere physical life, but it is the satisfaction of certain wants springing from the social conditions in which people are placed and reared up. The English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard; the standard of life of a German peasant to that of a Livonian peasant. The important part which historical tradition and social habitude play in this respect, you may learn from Mr. Thornton's work on over-population, where he shows that the average wages in different agricultural districts of England still nowadays differ more or less according to the more or less favourable circumstances under which the districts have emerged from the state of serfdom.
This historical or social element, entering into the value of labour, may be expanded, or contracted, or altogether extinguished, so that nothing remains but the physical limit. During the time of the anti-Jacobin war, undertaken, as the incorrigible tax-eater and sinecurist, old George Rose, used to say, to save the comforts of our holy religion from the inroads of the French infidels, the honest English farmers, so tenderly handled in a former chapter of ours, depressed the wages of the agricultural labourers even beneath that mere physical minimum, but made up by Poor Laws the remainder necessary for the physical perpetuation of the race. This was a glorious way to convert the wages labourer into a slave, and Shakespeare's proud yeoman into a pauper.
By comparing the standard wages or values of labour in different countries, and by comparing them in different historical epochs of the same country, you will find that the value of labour itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the values of all other commodities to remain constant.
A similar comparison would prove that not only the market rates of profit change, but its average rates.
But as to profits, there exists no law which determines their minimum. We cannot say what is the ultimate limit of their decrease. And why cannot we fix that limit? Because, although we can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum.
We can only say that, the limits of the working day being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to such a prolongation of the working day as is compatible with the physical forces of the labourer. The maximum of profit is therefore limited by the physical minimum of wages and the physical maximum of the working day. It is evident that between the two limits of the maximum rate of profit and immense scale of variations is possible. The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.
The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.
2. As to the limitation of the working day in England, as in all other countries, it has never been settled except by legislative interference. Without the working men's continuous pressure from without that interference would never have taken place. But at all events, the result was not to be attained by private settlement between the working men and the capitalists. This very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economical action capital is the stronger side.
As to the limits of the value of labour, its actual settlement always depends upon supply and demand, I mean the demand for labour on the part of capital, and the supply of labour by the working men. In colonial countries the law of supply and demand favours the working man. Hence the relatively high standard of wages in the United States. Capital may there try its utmost. It cannot prevent the labour market from being continuously emptied by the continuous conversion of wages labourers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The position of a wages labourer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term. To mend this colonial state of things the paternal British Government accepted for some time what is called the modern colonization theory, which consists in putting an artificial high price upon colonial land, in order to prevent the too quick conversion of the wages labourer into the independent peasant.
But let us now come to old civilized countries, in which capital domineers over the whole process of production. Take, for example, the rise in England of agricultural wages from 1849 to 1859. What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries. Ricardo has justly remarked that machinery is in constant competition with labour, and can often be only introduced when the price of labour has reached a certain height, but the appliance of machinery is but one of the many methods for increasing the productive powers of labour. The very same development which makes common labour relatively redundant simplifies, on the other hand, skilled labour, and thus depreciates it.
The same law obtains in another form. With the development of the productive powers of labour the accumulation of capital will be accelerated, even despite a relatively high rate of wages. Hence, one might infer, as Adam Smith, in whose days modern industry was still in its infancy, did infer, that the accelerated accumulation of capital must turn the balance in favour of the working man, by securing a growing demand for his labour. From this same standpoint many contemporary writers have wondered that English capital having grown in that last twenty years so much quicker than English population, wages should not have been more enhanced. But simultaneously with the progress of accumulation there takes place a progressive change in the composition of capital. That part of the aggregate capital which consists of fixed capital, machinery, raw materials, means of production in all possible forms, progressively increases as compared with the other part of capital, which is laid out in wages or in the purchase of labour. This law has been stated in a more or less accurate manner by Mr. Barton, Ricardo, Sismondi, Professor Richard Jones, Professor Ramsey, Cherbuilliez, and others.
If the proportion of these two elements of capital was originally one to one, it will, in the progress of industry, become five to one, and so forth. If of a total capital of 600, 300 is laid out in instruments, raw materials, and so forth, and 300 in wages, the total capital wants only to be doubled to create a demand for 600 working men instead of for 300. But if of a capital of 600, 500 is laid out in machinery, materials, and so forth and 100 only in wages, the same capital must increase from 600 to 3,600 in order to create a demand for 600 workmen instead of 300. In the progress of industry the demand for labour keeps, therefore, no pace with the accumulation of capital. It will still increase, but increase in a constantly diminishing ratio as compared with the increase of capital.
These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.
At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"
After this very long and, I fear, tedious exposition, which I was obliged to enter into to do some justice to the subject matter, I shall conclude by proposing the following resolutions:
Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities.
Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages.
Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.
The Latest From The "Minnesota Hands Off Honduras Coalition" Blog
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the Minnesota Hands Off Honduras Coalition Blog
Markin comment:
This is a great site to follow the situation in Honduras that, no question, gets almost no bourgeois media play. In English and Spanish which is a great help to arouse our Hispanic brothers and sisters here in the "heart of the beast" to help out in the struggle.
Markin comment:
This is a great site to follow the situation in Honduras that, no question, gets almost no bourgeois media play. In English and Spanish which is a great help to arouse our Hispanic brothers and sisters here in the "heart of the beast" to help out in the struggle.
The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart Now And Her Co-Workers Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Justice For Lynn Stewart Defense Committee for the latest in her case.
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-The Founding Conference Of The Fourth International (1938)-"On The Molinier Group"
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering
and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts. The "star" system in the French movement which was at the heart of this dispute is still with us today by the way. And not just in France.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Markin comment on this document
Everybody, and that most notably included Leon Trotsky, knew something was going awry with the Bolshevik Revolution by 1923 for many reasons, some of them beyond correction outside of an international extension of the revolution, especially to Germany that would provide the vital industrial infrastructure to aid the struggling Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and this is important to note about serious revolutionary politics and politicians in general, the fight in 1923 still needed to aimed at winning the party cadre over. That was the failing point of many oppositionists, inside and outside the party, then.
By 1933, with the rise of the virtually unopposed rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany clearly putting paid to the Communist International’s (read: Stalin’s) erroneous strategy, working inside the party, or acting as an expelled fraction of the party, was no longer tenable. Like earlier with the First and Second Internationals the Communist International was now dead as a revolutionary organizational center. Time now to gather, by fits and starts, the cadre for a new international- the Fourth International
Needless to say in trying to organize a new international in tough times, with not enough seasoned cadre, not enough not-Leon Trotsky leadership, not enough money, and not enough, well, of anything internal bickering
and personality disputes are going to slow down any efforts. The "star" system in the French movement which was at the heart of this dispute is still with us today by the way. And not just in France.
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