employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts
all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best!
You may ask why this does not end in a deadlock. The answer is it is
producing deadlocks twice a day or thereabouts. The King’s speeches
in opening Parliament now contain regularly an appeal to the workers
and employers to be good boys and not paralyze the industry of the
nation by the clash of their quite irreconcilable interests. The
reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for
more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it
has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete
that everybody acts on strictly business principles. The mass of the
nation has been humbly and ignorantly taking what the employers offer
and working as well as it can, either believing that it is doing its
duty in that station of life to which it has pleased God to call it,
or not thinking about the matter at all, but suffering its lot as
something that cannot be helped, like the weather. Even late in the
nineteenth century, when there were fourteen million wage workers,
only a million and a half of them were in trade unions, which meant
that only a million and a half of them were selling their labor on
systematic Capitalist business principles. Today nearly four and a
half millions of them are converts to Capitalism, and duly enrolled in
militant unions. Between six and seven hundred battles a year, called
trade disputes, are fought; and the number of days of work lost to
the nation by them sometimes totals up to ten millions and more. If
the matter were not so serious for all of us one could laugh at the
silly way in which people talk of the spread of Socialism when what is
really threatening them is the spread of Capitalism. The moment the
propertyless workers refuse to see the finger of God in their poverty,
and begin organizing themselves in unions to make the most money they
can out of their labor exactly as they find the landlord doing with his
land, the capitalist with his capital, the employer with his knowledge
of business, and the financier with his art of promotion, the industry
of the country, on which we all depend for our existence, begins
rolling faster and faster down two opposite slopes, at the bottom of
which there will be a disastrous collision which will bring it to
a standstill until either Property drives Labor by main force into
undisguised and unwilling slavery, or Labor gains the upper hand, and
the long series of changes by which the mastery of the situation has
already passed from the landlord-capitalist to the individual employer,
from the individual employer to the joint stock company, from the joint
stock company to the Trust, and finally from the industrialists in
general to the financiers, will culminate in its passing to capitalized
Labor. The battle for this supremacy is joined; and here we are in the
thick of it, our country ravaged by strikes and lock-outs, a huge army
of unemployed billeted upon us, the ladies and gentlemen declaring that
it is all the fault of the workers, and the workers either declaring
that it is all the fault of the ladies and gentlemen, or else, more
sensibly, concluding that it is the fault of the Capitalist system, and
taking to Socialism not so much because they understand it as because
it promises a way out.
When this open war was first declared, the employers used their
command of Parliament to have it punished as a crime. The unions were
classed as conspiracies; and anybody who joined one was held to be a
conspirator and punished accordingly. This did not prevent the unions:
it only “drove them underground”: that is, made secret societies of
them, and thereby put them into the hands of more determined and less
law-abiding leaders. The Government at last found it impossible to
go on with such coercion; for the few cases in which the law could
be carried out had the effect of martyrdoms, producing noisy popular
agitations, and stimulating Trade Unionism instead of suppressing it.
Then the employers tried what they could do for themselves. They
refused to employ unionists. This was no use: they could not get
enough non-unionist labor to go on with: and the unionists whom they
had to employ refused to work with non-unionists. Then the employers
refused to “recognize” the unions, which meant that they refused to
negotiate questions of wages with the secretaries of the unions, and
insisted on dealing with their employees directly and individually,
one at a time. This also failed. Making a separate bargain with each
employee is easy enough in the case of a woman engaging a domestic
servant or an oldfashioned merchant engaging a clerk or warehouseman;
but when men have to be taken on by the hundred, and sometimes by
the thousand, separate bargaining is impossible. The big employers
who talked about it at first really meant that there was to be no
bargaining at all. The men were to come in and just take what they
were told were the wages of the firm, and not presume to argue. The
moment the formation of the unions enabled the men to bargain, the big
employers, to save their own time, had to insist on its being done with
a single representative of the men who was experienced in bargaining
and qualified to discuss business: that is, with the secretary of the
Trade Union; so that all the fuss ended in the unions being not only
recognized by the big employers, but looked on as a necessary part of
their industry. Finally the unions were legalized; and here, as in the
case of the Married Women’s Property Acts, the change from outlawry to
legal protection went a little beyond the mark, in its reaction against
previous injustice, and gave the Trade Unions privileges and immunities
which are not enjoyed by ordinary societies. The employers then found
that they also must act together in dealing with the Trade Unions.
Accordingly, they formed unions of their own, called Employers’
Federations. The war of Capital with Labor is now a war of Trade Unions
with Employers’ Federations. Their battles, or rather blockades, are
lock-outs and strikes, lasting, like modern military battles, for
months.
Though some of the battles are about victimization (that is,
discharging an employee for actively advocating Trade Unionism, or
refusing to reinstate a prominent striker when the strike is over), all
the disputes in which ground is won or lost are about wages or hours of
work. You must understand that there are two sorts of wages: time wages
and piecework wages. Time wages are paid for the employee’s time by the
month, week, day, or hour, no matter how much or how little work may be
done during those periods. Piecework wages are paid according to the
work done: so much for each piece of work turned out.
Now you would suppose that the employees would be unanimously in favor
of time wages, and the employers of piecework wages: indeed this was
roughly so in early days. But the introduction of machinery altered the
case. Piecework wages are really only time wages paid in such a way as
to prevent the employee from slacking. He has to keep hard at it to
earn the wage; but the amount of the wage is arrived at by considering
whether what he can make in an hour or a day or a week at piecework
will enable him to live in the way he is accustomed to live, or, as
it is called, to maintain his standard of subsistence. Now suppose a
machine is invented by which he can turn out twice as many pieces in
a day as before. He will then find that he has earned as much in the
week by Wednesday evening as he had previously earned by Saturday.
What will he do? You may think, if you are a very energetic lady,
that he will put in the whole week as usual, and rejoice his wife by
bringing home twice as much money. But that is not what a man is like.
He prefers a shillingsworth of leisure to another shillingsworth of
bread and cheese or a new hat for his wife. What he actually does is
to bring her just what he brought her before, and have a holiday on
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, leaving his employer with no labor to
go on with, and perhaps with the most pressing contracts to be finished
by a certain date. To force him to remain at work the whole week the
employer has to “cut the rate”: that is, to reduce the piecework wage
by half. Then the fat is in the fire: the Trade Union resists the
reduction fiercely, and threatens that if the employees are to have no
benefit from the new machine they will refuse to work it. There was a
time when the introduction of machines led to riots and the wrecking
of newly equipped factories by furious mobs of handworkers. When the
mobs were replaced by Trade Unions the introduction of new machines was
often followed by strikes and lock-outs. But when the heated personal
disputes of hot-headed employers with resentful employees gave way
to cool negotiations between experienced secretaries of Employers’
Federations and equally experienced secretaries of Trade Unions, who
had settled similar difficulties many times before, it became an
established practice to readjust the piecework wage so as to allow the
employee to share the benefit of the machine with the employer. The
only question was how much each could claim.
On time wages the employee gets no benefit from the introduction of a
machine. The product of his labor may be multiplied a hundred times;
but he remains as poor as before. That is why in many industries the
employees insist on piecework wages, and the employers would be only
too glad to pay time wages: all the more because, when machinery comes
into play, the machine works the man instead of the man working the
machine, and slacking becomes either impossible or easy to detect.
But it often happens that neither the time wage worker nor the piece
wage worker has any say in the matter at all, for the very simple
reason that the introduction of the machine enables the employer to
“slack the lot” and replace them by girls who are only machine minders.
And we have already seen what the effect of women’s and girls’ labor
has on wages. Besides, Trade Unionism is weaker among women than among
men, because, as most women regard industrial employment as merely a
temporary expedient to keep them going until they get married, they
will not take the duty of combination as seriously as the men, who
know that they will be industrial employees all their lives. In the
Lancashire weaving industry, where women do not retire from the factory
when they marry, the women’s unions are as strong as the men’s.
In the long run the reserves of the employer are so much greater than
those of the employees that though John Stuart Mill’s statement in
the middle of last century that the wage workers had not benefited by
the introduction of machinery is no longer quite true, yet they have
gained so little in comparison with the prodigiously greater national
output from the machines, that it is putting it very mildly to say that
they have not only not gained but lost ground heavily relatively to the
capitalists.
50
DIVIDE AND GOVERN
The weakness of Trade Unionism was that the concessions wrung from the
employers when trade was good were taken back again when trade was
bad, because, as the employers commanded the main national store of
spare money, they could always stop working without starving for longer
than their employees. The Trade Unions soon had to face the fact that
unless they could get the concessions fixed and enforced by law, they
were certain to lose by the lock-outs all they gained by the strikes.
At the same time they saw that Parliament had put a permanent stop to
the sweating of very young children in factories; and though, as I have
explained, their members had been driven by poverty to object to this
reform, nevertheless it convinced them that Parliament, if it liked,
could fix any reform so firmly that the employers could not go back on
it. They wanted a permanent reduction in the then monstrous length of
the factory working day. The cry for a reduction to eight hours was
set up. At first it seemed an unattainable ideal; and it is still very
far from being completely attained. But a ten hours day for women and
children and young persons seemed reasonable and possible. As to the
men, they were told they were grown-up independent Britons, and that it
would be an outrage on British liberty to prevent an Englishman from
working as long as he liked. But when the women and young children
go home the factory engine is stopped, because its work cannot go on
without them. When the engine stops the men may as well go home too, as
their work cannot go on without the engine. So the men got the factory
hours shortened by law “behind the petticoats of the women”.
And how did the employees, who had no votes at that time, induce
Parliament, in which there were only landlords, capitalists, and
employers, to pass these benevolent Acts of Parliament for the
protection of the employees against the employers?
If I were to reply that they were acts of pure conscience, nobody
nowadays would believe me, because Capitalism has destroyed our belief
in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. But
even Capitalist cynicism will admit that however unconscionable we may
be when our own interests are affected, we can be most indignantly
virtuous at the expense of others. The Intelligent Woman must guard
herself against imagining that the property owners and employers in
Parliament a hundred years ago had read this book, and therefore
understood that their interests were the same, though their occupations
and habits and social positions were so very different. The country
gentlemen despised the employers as vulgar tradesmen, and made them
feel it. The employers, knowing that any fool might be a peer or a
country gentleman if he had the luck to be born in a country house,
whilst success in business needed business ability, were determined to
destroy the privileges of the landed aristocracy. This had been done
in France in 1789 by a revolution; and it was by threatening a similar
revolution that the English employers, in 1832, forced the King and the
peerage, after a long popular agitation, to pass into law the famous
Reform Bill which practically transferred the command of Parliament
in England from the hereditary landed aristocracy to the industrial
employers.
You know what a popular agitation means. It means a little reasoning
and a great deal of abuse of the other side. Before 1832 the employers
did not confine themselves to pointing out the absurdity of allowing
a couple of cottages owned by a county aristocrat to send a member
to Parliament when the city of Birmingham was not represented there.
Most people thought it quite natural that great folk should have great
privileges, and cared nothing about Birmingham, which they had heard
of only as a dirty place where most of the bad pennies (Brummagem
buttons) came from. The employers therefore stirred up public feeling
against the landed gentry by exposing all their misdeeds: their driving
of whole populations out of the country to make room for sheep or
deer; their ruthless enforcement of the Game Laws, under which men
were transported with the worst felons for poaching a few hares or
pheasants; the horrible condition of the laborers’ cottages on their
estates; the miserable wages they paid: their bigoted persecution of
Nonconformists not only by refusing to allow any places of worship
except those of the Church of England to be built on their estates, but
by nominating to the Church livings such clergymen as could be depended
on to teach the children in the village schools that all Dissenters
were disgraced in this world and damned in the next; their equally
bigoted boycotting of any shopkeeper who dared to vote against their
candidates at elections; with all the other tyrannies which in those
days made it a common saying, even among men of business, that “the
displeasure of a lord is a sentence of death”. By harping on these
grievances the employers at last embittered public opinion against the
squires to such a pitch that the fear of a repetition in England of the
French Revolution broke down the opposition to the Reform Bill. The
employers, after propitiating King William IV by paying his debts, were
able to force Parliament to pass the Bill; and that event inaugurated
the purseproud reign of the English middle class under Queen Victoria.
Naturally the squires were not disposed to take this defeat lying down.
They revenged themselves by taking up Lord Shaftesbury’s agitation for
the Factory Acts, and shewing that the employer’s little finger was
thicker than the country gentleman’s loins; that the condition of the
factory employees was worse than that of the slaves on the American
and West Indian plantations; that the worst cottages of the worst
landlords had at least fresher air than the overcrowded slums of the
manufacturing towns; that if the employers did not care whether their
“hands” were Church of England or Methodist, neither did they care
whether they were Methodists or Atheists, because they had no God but
Mammon; that if they did not persecute politically it was only because
the hands had no votes; that they persecuted industrially as hard as
they could by imprisoning Trade Unionists; and that the personal and
often kindly relations between the peasantry and the landlords, the
training in good manners and decent housekeeping traditions learnt by
the women in domestic service in the country houses, the kindnesses
shewn to the old and sick on the great estates, were all lost in
the squalor and misery, the brutality and blasphemy, the incestuous
overcrowding, and the terrible dirt epidemics in the mining and factory
populations where English life was what the employer’s greed had made
it.
All this, though quite true, was merely the pot again calling the
kettle black; for the country gentlemen did not refuse the dividends
made for them by the employers in the mines and factories, nor
refuse to let factories and slums be built all over their estates
in Lancashire; nor did the employers, when they had made fortunes,
hesitate to buy country estates and “found families” to be brought up
in the strictest county traditions, nor to disparage trade as vulgar
when the generation that remembered what their grandfathers were had
died out. But the quarrel between them explains how it was that when
Parliament consisted exclusively of landlords and capitalist employers
or their nominees, and the proletariat had no votes, yet the Factory
Acts got passed. The Acts were the revenge of the squires for the
Reform Act.
Also, the poor were not wholly voteless. The owner of a freehold
worth forty shillings a year had a vote; and a number of odd old
franchises existed which gave quite poor people a certain weight at
elections. They could not return a Labor member (such a thing was then
unheard of); but they could sometimes turn the scale as between the
Conservative landlord and the Liberal employer. If the Conservatives
and Liberals had understood that their political interests were the
same, and that they must present a united front to Labor, the employees
would have had no hope except in revolution. But the Conservatives
and Liberals did not understand their commercial interests. The
Conservative clung blindly to his old privileges: the Liberal followed
the slot of his new profits as thoughtlessly as a hound follows the
slot of a fox. Both of them wanted to be in Parliament because it gave
them personal importance, opening the way to the front bench, where the
Cabinet Ministers sit, and to knighthoods, baronetcies, and peerages.
The Liberals considered themselves the party of reform because they
had carried the Reform Bill, and, as the employees wanted all sorts
of reform very badly, took it for granted that they would always vote
gratefully for the Liberals.
Under this delusion a Liberal Government made a bid for popular
support by offering votes to the working class. The Conservatives at
first opposed this so fiercely that they turned the Liberals out at the
next election; but a very clever Conservative leader named Benjamin
Disraeli, afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield, a Jew who had begun his
political career, like Karl Marx, as a champion of the proletariat,
persuaded the Conservatives that they were really more popular in the
country than the Liberals, and induced them to make the very extension
of the franchise they had just been opposing. Naturally the employees,
when they got some votes in this way, used them to get more votes; and
the end of it was that everybody got a vote, including at long last the
women, though the women had to make a special and furious fight for
their inclusion, and did not win it until the national work they did
when they took the place of the absent men during the war of 1914-18
shamed the country into enfranchising them.
The proletarian voters who could formerly only turn the scale between
Conservative and Liberal can now turn out both Conservative and
Liberal, and elect candidates of their own. They did not at first
realize this, and have not fully realized it yet. They began by timidly
sending into Parliament about a dozen men who were not called Labor
members, but working class members of the Liberal Party. It became the
custom for Liberal Governments to give a minor ministerial post to some
mild middle class professor who was vaguely supposed to be interested
in factory legislation and popular education, and who was openly
treated as a negligible nobody by the rest of the Cabinet.
Meanwhile Socialist societies were growing up among students of Karl
Marx’s famous exposure of the sins of Capitalism, and of a very widely
circulated book called Progress and Poverty, written by an American
named Henry George, who had seen within his own lifetime American
villages, where people were neither poor enough to be degraded and
miserable nor rich enough to be idle and extravagant, changed by the
simple operation of private property in land and capital into cities
of fabulous wealth, so badly divided that the mass of the people were
weltering in shocking poverty whilst a handful of owners wallowed
in millions. These Societies broke the tradition of proletarian
attachment to the Liberal Party by making the workers what Marx called
class-conscious, a phrase which the Intelligent Woman has probably met
several times in the papers without knowing any more clearly than the
newspaper writers exactly what it means. The voters who had believed
that there were only two parties in politics, the Conservatives and the
Liberals (or Tories and Whigs), representing the two great religious
parties of the Churchmen and the Dissenters, and the two great economic
interests of the country farmers with their landlords and the town
men of business with their capitalists, were now taught that from the
point of view of the employee there is not a penny to choose between
Conservatives and Liberals, as the gain of either means the employee’s
loss, and that the only two parties who really have opposed interests
are the party of the propertied class on the one hand and the party of
the propertyless proletariat on the other: in other words, the party of
Capital and the party of Labor. What mattered was not the Parliamentary
struggle between the Liberal Mr Gladstone and the Conservative Mr
Disraeli as to which should be Prime Minister, or between their
successors Mr Balfour, Mr Bonar Law, and Mr Baldwin of the one party,
and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr Asquith, and Mr Lloyd George
of the other. To the class-conscious proletarian all that is mere
Tweedledum and Tweedledee: what is really moving the world is the Class
Struggle, the Class War (both terms are in use) between the proprietors
and the proletariat for the possession of the land and capital of the
country (the Means of Production). When a man realized that, he was
said to be class-conscious. These terms are misleading because they
imply that all the proletarians are in one camp and all the bourgeoisie
in the other, which is untrue; but as the Intelligent Woman who has
read thus far now knows what they mean, let them pass for the moment.
The Socialist Societies had begun badly by treating Parliament as
the enemy’s camp; boycotting the Churches as mere contrivances for
doping the workers into submission to Capitalism; and denouncing Trade
Unionism and Co-operation as mistaken remedies. Under Marx and Engels,
Morris and Hyndman, Socialism was a middle class movement caused by the
revolt of the consciences of educated and humane men and women against
the injustice and cruelty of Capitalism, and also (this was a very
important factor with Morris) against its brutal disregard of beauty
and the daily human happiness of doing fine work for its own sake. Now
the strongest and noblest feelings of this kind were quite compatible
with the most complete detachment from and ignorance of proletarian
life and history in the class that worked for weekly wages. The most
devoted middle class champions of the wage workers knew what housemaids
and gardeners and railway porters and errand boys and postmen were
like; but factory hands, miners, and dockers might as well have been
fairies for all their lady and gentleman sympathizers knew about them.