Shaw’s Classic Defence of Socialism for Women Part Two

George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, foreword by Polly Toynbee (London: Alma Classics 2012).

Trade Unions

He discusses the unions, which he describes as ‘proletarian capitalists’. They are there to protect the workers, who have to sell their labour just as the businessman has to sell the product they create. Unions are there to ensure the workers are able to charge the highest price they can for their labour. He also discusses strikes and lockouts, including the violence of some industrial disputes. Scabs need police protection against being beaten, and angry workers will tamper with the equipment so that anyone using it will be injured. They will also place fulminate of mercury in chimneys to cause an explosion if someone starts up the furnaces.

Party Politics and Socialism

Shaw describes the class conflict between the Tories, representing the aristocracy, and the Liberals, who represented the industrial middle classes. These competed for working class votes by extending the franchise and passing legislation like the Factory Acts to improve working conditions. However, each was as bad the other. The aristocracy kept their workers in poverty in the countryside, while the middle classes exploited them in the factories. The laws they passed for the working poor were partly designed to attack their opponents of the opposite class.

He goes on to give a brief history of British socialism, beginning with Marx, William Morris’ Socialist League, and Hyndeman’s Social Democratic Federation. These were small, middle class groups, disconnected from the British working class through their opposition to trade unions and the cooperatives. It was only when British socialism combined with them under Keir Hardie and the Independent Labour Party that socialism became a real force in working class politics. The Fabian Society has been an important part of this, and has made socialism respectable so that the genteel middle classes may join it as Conservatives join their Constitutional Club.

Shaw believed that socialism would advance, simply because of the numerical supremacy of the working classes, and that soon parliament would be full of Labour MPs. However, he also recognised that many members of the proletariat were anti-Socialist. This is because they depended for their livelihood on the businesses serving the idle rich. He called this section of the working class the ‘parasitic proletariat’. The working class is also distracted away from socialism through lotteries and so on.

Democratic, Parliamentary Socialism and Nationalisation

Shaw argues strongly that socialism could only be established through democratic, parliamentary action. General strikes wouldn’t work, as the employers would simply starve the workers out. The strikes intended to stop the outbreak of the First World War had failed the moment the first bomb dropped killing babies. Violent revolutions were purely destructive. Apart from the human lives lost, they destroyed the country’s vital industrial and economic structure. Socialism needed to build on this, not destroy it. Similarly, confiscating the capitalists’ wealth, either directly through nationalisation without compensation, or by taxing capital, was also counterproductive. The capitalists would simply sell their shares or unwillingly surrender them. The result would be bankruptcy and mass unemployment. This would result in further working class unrest, which would end in a counterrevolution.

The only way socialism could proceed would be by long preparation. You should only nationalise an industry once there was a suitable government department to run it. Compensation should be given to the former proprietors. This did not mean robbing the workers to pay their former exploiters, as the money would come from taxing the upper classes so that the class as a whole would be slightly worse off than before, even though the former owners were slightly better off.  You can see here and in Shaw’s warning of the ineffectiveness of general strikes the bitterness that still lingered amongst the working class after the failure of the General Strike of the 1920s.

Nationalisation could also only be done through parliament. There were, however, problems with parliamentary party politics. If the socialist party grew too big, it would split into competing factions divided on other issues, whose squabbles would defeat the overall purpose. Party politics were also a hindrance, in that it meant that one party would always oppose the policies of the other, even though they secretly supported them, because that was how the system worked. We’ve seen it in our day when the Tories before the 2010 election made a great show of opposing Blair’s hospital closures, but when in power did exactly the same and worse. Shaw recommends instead that the political process should follow that of the municipalities, where party divisions were still high, but where the process of legislation was done through committees and so on parties were better able to cooperate.

Limited Role for Capitalism

Shaw also argued against total nationalisation. He begins the book by stating that socialists don’t want to nationalise personal wealth. They weren’t going to seize women’s jewels, nor prevent a woman making extra cash for herself by singing in public or raising prize chrysanthemums, although it might in time be considered bad form to do so. Only big, routine businesses would be nationalised. Small businesses would be encouraged, as would innovatory private companies, though once they became routine they too would eventually be taken over by the state.

It’s a great argument for a pluralistic mixed economy, of the type that produced solid economic growth and working class prosperity after World War II, right up to 1979 and Thatcher’s victory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vox Political: Neil Kinnock Due to Attack Corbyn on Panorama Tomorrow

Mike today has also put up a piece commenting on an article from BBC News that Neil Kinnock has warned that the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be disaster for the party. He is quoted as saying “Unless things change radically, and rapidly, it’s very doubtful I’ll see another Labour government in my lifetime.” He calls the current situation the ‘greatest crisis’ in the history of the party. Mike pointedly asks whether he’s referring to the possibility of having a real socialist in charge of the Labour party, or genuine democracy in the party, and states, ‘Methinks he doth protest too much.’

Lord Kinnock warns against Jeremy Corbyn re-election (again – at length)

I don’t take Kinnock’s comments seriously for a variety of reasons. Firstly, as some of the commenters point out, he rapidly changed his ideological tune after losing two elections. Pjay Mac, Pablo N and Nanma Vanda make the point that Kinnock entered the House of Lords after years of violently opposing it, and that he’s speaking now as a member of that very privileged group. After he left office in Britain, Kinnock also went off to the EU to accept a very well paid post there as a Commissioner, all paid for by the European taxpayer, of course. And yes, it is precisely the type of unelected office that UKIP made much of in their pronouncements about the anti-democratic nature of the EU.

What hasn’t been mentioned yet, but should, is that Kinnock is directly responsible for New Labour. A few years ago Lobster published a little piece arguing that Kinnock was right in his 1986 book, Making Our Way (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). This was when he was still a socialist. The former Labour leader realised, quite correctly, that British manufacturing had suffered from underinvestment due to the concentration of Thatcher’s government in promoting the financial sector and the City of London. Then Kinnock lost the 1987 election, and began the process of ‘modernising’ the party in line with Thatcherism and the perceived ascendancy of free market neoliberalism. It was Kinnock, not John Smith, who began the process of abandoning manufacturing industry, embracing privatisation, and crucially the winning the support of the City of London through promising them that a future Labour government would deregulate the sector and govern with a ‘light touch’. As part of his campaign, he launched the ‘prawn cocktail offensive’, in which Gordon Brown and Mo Mowlam dined with leading bankers and financiers.

He is the politician ultimately responsible for the creation of New Labour and Tony Blair. As such, he is hardly likely to give his backing to an old fashioned socialist like Jeremy Corbyn. This would mean effectively writing off three decades and more of ideological change, and recognising that he has led the party up a social and economic dead end. Just as Thatcherism has done to the politics of not just this, but many other nations around the world.

As he is very definitely not going to do that, his opinion simply has no validity.

It’s not even historically true. The Labour party has suffered a series of profound crises in its long career. It has split several times. The ILP and Social Democratic Federation left in the 1920s and 30s. It was also divided over the question of forming a coalition government in the ’30s. The party’s defeat in the 1951 general election also led to a reformulation of what it stood for, in which Hugh Gaitskell tried to drop Clause 4, and Tony Crosland argue instead that the party should abandon any attempt at further nationalisation, and concentrate instead for ‘taming’ capitalism so as to provide better wages and conditions, not just for the workers, but for everyone. The infighting that breaks out within the Labour party has been so regular, that a BBC commenter way back in the 1980s or 1990s one remarked that every generation has seen a battle for the party’s soul.

I think there is one difference, in that the infighting this time is particularly bitter as the Labour Right – the Blairites are so right-wing and have effectively stopped being members of the Labour party in terms of ideology and policy. They have little in common with traditional socialists, like Corbyn, who are actually centre-left, let alone the real far Left, despite the guff spouted by Kinnock and the other neoliberal cheerleaders.

Kinnock is wrong about Corbyn, and definitely wrong about the wonders of privatisation, the unregulated free market and cutting welfare. He is simply another Tory chattering voice attacking the real socialists and Labour members supporting Corbyn. Treat him as such.

Gun Rights, the Second Amendment and Early 20th Century Preparations for Revolution in Britain

One of the major issues that concerns the Republicans, and particularly the extreme right-wing of that party, is gun rights. They point to the Second Amendment in the Constitution guaranteeing American citizens the right to bear arms, which they view as one of the key democratic freedoms in America. They see it as the article in the Constitution that enables Americans to fight back against a tyrannical government. Hence the hysterical rage amongst the NRA and people like the conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, at the mere mention of gun legislation. This is always greeted with cries of ‘They’re coming for our guns!’ and the defiant snarl that they’ll only be able to take the weapon, ‘from my cold, dead hand’.

I’ve also seen a quotation from George Orwell trotted out to support gun rights. I can’t remember the exact quotation, but it’s something like the household gun on the wall being the mark of the free worker. Now Orwell’s quote could be a remark on many things. In the 19th century the poaching laws introduced by the wealthy farmers during the Napoleonic Wars were bitterly resented, because many agricultural workers believed they had the right to poach rabbits on their employer’s land as part of the perks of the job. And this became more important as the economic situation deteriorated and poverty and starvation more common.

It was also an attitude shared by the Social Democratic Federation, an early British Socialist party, which was one of the organisations that formed the Labour party. The SDF was Marxist, although its founder, Hyndeman, had fallen out with Marx himself as he had not credited Marx with the party’s programme. Pelling in his ‘Short History of the Labour Party’ notes that in period running up to the First World War and the debate about rearmament, several members of the SDF, most notably Will Thorne, believed

in a form of conscription known as ‘the citizen army’, which was based on the idea that a revolution could best be effected when all members of the working class had some training in the use of arms. (p. 29).

Now I’ve no doubt that the idea of radical, working-class Marxists bearing arms ready to start the revolution is something that scares the right witless. Gun rights are all right for right-wing Whites, but when Blacks and the radical Left get them, it’s a major threat to decent American society. The Young Turks and Secular Talk have pointed out that the authorities in America suddenly became interested in limiting access to guns after the Black Panthers started walking around with them. The Panthers had read the Constitution, and found that nowhere in it did it say that only Whites could carry firearms. And so even before they started shooting people the American government got very alarmed, and started passing laws to limit gun ownership.

Back in the 1990s parts of the Survivalist movement grew so concerned about what they saw as the new Communist threat and the imminent collapse of society, that they started forming informal ‘militias’. Somehow I doubt very much that the same people, who formed and joined these, would be comfortable knowing that their opponents on the radical left back in the very beginning of the 20th century, shared their ideas and desire to acquire firearms training to overthrow a tyrannical government. The only difference being that it was a right-wing, economically conservative government that they viewed as oppressive. I can’t see them being terribly enthusiastic about that little episode of British history at all.

Ernest Bevin’s Reforms for the Disabled

Yesterday I managed to get hold of Francis Williams’ biography of the great trade unionist and Labour politician, Ernest Bevin, Bevin was born in Winsford in Somerset, and started his political career in Bristol, where he joined the Bristol Socialist Society, a branch of Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation, and founded the T.G.W.U. with Harry Gosling. He later became foreign minister under Clement Attlee.

Among his achievements was legislation compelling firms to employ the disabled, and setting up the Disabled Person’s Employment Corporation to promote factories for them. Williams describes this work as follows:

This constant feeling for men and women as human beings came out strongly in the training schemes he set up to try to make sure that as far as war conditions allowed people were fitted into the sort of job they would do well and feel successful at. And it showed particularly in his anxiety to give disabled men and women the best possible chance to establish themselves in the community. One of his dearest ambitions found its expression in the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act which established a register of disabled persons – not those disabled in war service only but all disabled over sixteen – and made it compulsory for firms with over twenty persons to engage a percentage of employees from this register. He set up a Disabled Persons’ Employment Corporation to start factories for those unlikely to obtain work on their own account and launched vocational training and industrial rehabilitation courses, including a residential rehabilitation centre, to help the disabled to master new skills. In all this he emphasized that what must be kept in mind was not only that it was important for the nation to be able to command all the labour resources possible but even more the effect upon a disabled man’s own sense of status, of his feeling of being needed and of having a place in the community, if he could master new skills. Feeling so strongly about this he put this side of his Ministry’s work directly in charge of his Parliamentary Under Secretary George Tomlinson, later Minister of Education, because ” George cares for people’. (Ernest Bevin: Portrait of A Great Englishman (London: Hutchinson 1952) 224).

The contrast with the present administration is striking. Instead of caring for people, it has put the departments supposedly supporting the most vulnerable under petty sadists and tyrants, like Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey. Instead of empowering the disabled and unemployed and supporting their feelings of self-worth, they have done the exact opposite. And instead of actively supporting the employment of the disabled in workshops set up specifically for them, they have done the opposite and closed Remploy’s workshops down.

IDS touted his Universal Credit and welfare reforms as the greatest since the abolition of slavery. This spiteful and malicious individual is massively deluded. The real reformers were Bevin and his fellows. IDS, McVey and their cronies have done nothing but destroy their legacy of equality and empowerment.

19th Century Campaigns for Trade Union and Working Class Representation in Parliament

One of the issues that desperately needs to be tackled is the electoral disenfranchisement of the working class. The existing political parties have, to a greater or lesser extent, adopted neoliberal economics and concentrated on gaining middle class support to the exclusion of the working and lower middle classes. In the case of the Conservative party, this has meant little difference in the way the party fundamentally sees itself. It has always represented industry and the traditional social hierarchy against the working class, although under the influence of Thatcher its policies have become much more extreme. New labour, however, aimed at gaining middle class support while neglecting the very people it was formed to fight for in the first place.

I am planning to write a much longer post about the formation of the Labour party, and how it was explicitly formed by trade unions and various Socialist parties and organisations, such as the Independent Labour Party, the Social-Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society, to represent the interests of the working class in parliament. The aspirations of trade unionists and working people to be represented in parliament goes back long before the official foundation of the Labour party. Many were active in the Chartist campaigns for the enlargement of the Franchise.

London Radicals and the Mid-Victorian Campaign for Votes for Working Men

Henry Pelling, in his A History of British Trade Unionism, 4th Edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1987) notes in many areas artisans had held the freeman’s franchise before the Great Reform Act of 1832. This was particularly true of Liverpool in the 1790s, where local politicians were careful to win the support of the Shipwrights Society.

The first time a trade union candidate stood for election to parliament was in 1852 when William Newton of the Engineers Union stood as the Radical candidate for Tower Hamlets. He did not, however, have the support of his union, and only polled a thousand votes, which was insufficient to get him elected. Nevertheless, this marked the entry of working people into parliamentary politics.

Pelling goes on to describe the way the trade unions again became active in the 1860s campaigning for the further extension of the voter to include the working class:

In the early 1860s, however, a number of factors brought union officials into politics. They had already been drawn into an unprecedented public debate about the merits of unionism at the time of the London builders’ strike, which revealed the existence of a number of potential allies of trade unionism among the professional classes. There were, for instance, Christian Socialists such as J.M. Ludlow and Thomas Hughes, who were both barristers, and there were Positivists, that is, adherents of the positive social philosophy of the Frenchman Auguste Comte, such as Professor E.S. Beesly of University College, London, and another barrister called Frederic Harrison. Several of these men had been involved in the preparation of the report on trade unions presented to the 1860 meeting of the National Social Science Association. Contact with such sympathizers, and the desire to reciprocate their support by helping them in any parliamentary elections that they chose to fight, were no doubt factors pulling Applegarth and his colleagues more fully into the political arena. But in any case, the union leaders felt not only that they could benefit from political activity but also that they had a right and a duty to participate. This view was clearly expressed in an Address to the Trade Unions published by a newly founded body called the Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association, and actually written either by Applegarth [Robert Applegarth, secretary of the Amalgamated Carpenters] or by George Howell, a young bricklayer who shared his views:

We do not wish you to relax one iota of your efforts in reference to the amelioration of our social condition … Nor do we wish to turn our trades societies into political organisations, to divert them from their social objects; but we must not forget that we are citizens, and as such should have citizen’s rights. Recollect also, that by obtaining these rights we shall be able more effectually to secure our legitimate demands as Unionists. (Pp. 50-51).

Pelling notes that members of Applegarth’s organisation and supporters were in the reception committee which welcome the great Italian nationalist, Garibaldi, when he visited London in 1864, supported the North against the South during the American Civil War, and that a number joined the International Workingmen’s Association. Most of the London union leaders also fully participated in campaign of the Reform League, formed in 1865, to gain the vote for working men. A committee of trade union supporters was formed to assist Thomas Hughes when he stood as a Radical for Lambeth. Other politicians were also assisted by trade union support, such as Joseph Cowen in Newcastle, who was greatly aided by John Kane of the National Association of Iron-Workers. (pp.51-2).

The Bristol Trades Council and the Entry of Working Men into Parliament and on the Council

In Bristol in the 1880s the local Trades Council turned away from supporting the Liberals and started campaigning for the direct representation of working men in politics. David Large and Robert Whitfield describe the campaigns of the trades council in Bristol on behalf of working class representation in their pamphlet, The Bristol Trades Council 1873-1973 (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Assocation 1973):

Nevertheless, by 1885 the Council had become dissatisfied with the meagre results of this policy. It was well aware that for some time there had been a growing agitation in the city for direct representation of labour on local bodies and eventually in parliament. Consequently it issued a stirring invitation to ‘fellow workmen’ to subscribe 1/- a year to create a great ‘Local Labour League’ to achieve this. The Council urged that the distinguished part played by the T.U.C. Parliamentary Committee in shaping legislation had demonstrated ‘The Royal Right of British Workmen to seats in the British Senate’ and now when ‘the long neglected Tillers of the Soil were about to exercise the vote for the first time, ‘the toilers of the town should fraternize with them and ‘be astir’ to take hold of what was within reach, seats on local bodies even if running a candidate for parliament was still out of their reach. The Council’s call was heeded. The Labour League was established and in 1886 scored its first success when John Fox, a prominent member of the Trades Council, was returned unopposed in the school board elections to the chagrin of the Liberals, who had done all they could to take him under their wing and prevent him standing as a Labour candidate. A year later a more spectacular victory was won when R.G. Tovey, who doubled the role of secretary to the Trades Council and the Labour League, became the first labour councillor by winning St. Paul’s. (p. 6).

At the moment there is considerable debate over the demographic representation of ethnic and minority groups in parliament. MPs and various political and civil rights organisations outside parliament, like Operation Black Vote, are keen to see more Black and Asians MPs in line with the size of their communities in the British population, along with far more female MPs. However, parliament is still predominantly upper and very middle-class. This should be changed as well. More working people should be voted into parliament to represent the needs and aspirations of their class, rather than the increasing narrow interests of a middle class, neoliberal elite.