The Socialist Labour Party, since its inception, has insisted upon the need for a clear and comprehensive grasp of the evolution of society and its various social institutions. We have emphasised this need, not because it is our desire to breed a group of “intellectual” theorists in our midst, but rather because we are convinced that clear thinking must precede intelligent action. It is necessary to know the past in order to understand the present, and by clearly grasping the salient features concerning both past and present we can the more clearly discern the future. The study of the past, therefore, throws a penetrating light upon the nature of existing social institutions, and clearly shows the functions they perform. To the Socialist the study of history is neither an academic nor an intellectual form of recreation. It is, on the contrary, an imperative duty. We analyse the past not so much for its own sake as for the invaluable assistance it renders in enabling us to forecast the future. If the study of history cannot help us to solve the immediate problems confronting humanity, then the time spent studying it were better employed doing something more practical.

Hence the Socialist Labour Party has directed its energies upon the organisation of Social Science Classes in various parts of the country. In a word, the Socialist Labour Party is first an Educational Force. And this explains its success as an Agitational Force. We are convinced that Capitalism cannot be successfully com-batted until it and its various institutions are fully understood.

Need for definitions

Social science, like every branch of science, uses terms which must be clearly denned. The reason for this is to avoid confusion. Definitions are absolutely necessary in chemistry. Without these the chemist, in making up prescriptions, might select prussic acid instead of some innocent compound which had the same appearance. While, therefore, a clear comprehension of terms is scientifically imperative, it would seem that many noisy dabblers in social science do not realise that grave dangers may arise by confusing the minds of the workers regarding the nature and function of social institutions.

As an illustration of what we mean, let the reader note the tragic confession made by a distinguished and well-meaning Labour leader regarding the melancholy dilemma of his organisation when it realised that State Socialism was not Socialism at all. Writing on this point, Mr. R. MacDonald woefully admits: — “Perhaps we have not always been careful to avoid confusion in the words we have used.” (Labour Leader, 7th August, 1916.) Here, indeed, is the fundamental error that causes untold blunders and failures—the confusion of terms and words. The aim, therefore, of this brief work is to show that a certain influential section of the Labour Movement has been using the term ” State ” without clearly realising exactly what the State is, and the function it plays in social evolution.

No attempt has been made to make the subject dealt with look either “scholarly” or “intellectual.” The facts are stated clearly, perhaps a little crudely, but in such a manner that the wearied worker may easily grasp the true nature and object of the political State. The following chapters are based upon a series of lectures delivered by the writer to the Birmingham and Derby Social Science Classes. In order that the subject may be studied in more detail, several books are referred to which may be purchased from the Socialist Labour Press. If this outline of the history of the State encourages members of the Labour Movement to study the subject for themselves, then the object of the writer and the aim of the Party will have been realised.

CHAPTER NINE: THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM 

Consolidation of the capitalist state

THE revolutionary middle class which had uprooted the feudal State, dominated by the Crown, did so on behalf of “freedom” and “equality.” We have already commented on the fact that by “freedom” the merchants and traders meant “freedom” to produce and sell commodities, and by “equality” the independent conditions necessitated by capitalists desiring a competitive system. Although the struggle was fought out in the name of freedom of thought and the equality of all members of the community, it is interesting to note that in the same year that Charles was executed the Revolutionary Government violated the ideals it had set out to establish. It gagged the press, silenced the pulpits, and endangered personal liberty. The persecution of John Lilburn, the political leveller, who advocated political democracy, demonstrates the point. Indeed the first act of the revolutionaries was to crush the levellers. Cromwell himself declared:—” You have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you.” The French Revolution is another illustration of the same fact. In France the bourgeoisie had no sooner captured the State than they brutally suppressed all criticism and declared against combinations of Labour.

A close reading of the English and French middle class revolutions will show how similar the two events were in outline. If more blood was spilled in France than in England it was not due to “national characteristics”, but was due to a difference in the political conditions under which the respective revolutions were carried out. England had not the armies of Europe threatening her frontiers, as was the case with France, nor had she as powerful a landed nobility to contend with. When put to it, the English ruling class has shown itself as inhuman as any other ruling class. The notorious barbarities of Cromwell in Ireland, involving the massacre at Drogheda and the enslavement of those spared, is a case in point. In the same country, “during 1796 and 1797, the licence of the undisciplined ‘troops,’ the tortures, the burnings, floggings, shootings in cold blood, in which women and girls were not spared, make a sickening record. In the name of law, security, and religion, the anti-Jacobin government of Ireland and its agents showed that it could match the excesses of a Committee of Public Safety or the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris.”

The capitalist class in England, during its struggle to conquer the State and wrench it from the power of a semi-feudal monarchy, violently changed the form of government three times within a century. Towards the end of the seventeenth century there took place the execution of a King, the rise and fall of the Commonwealth, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and its overthrow, the making and breaking of Alliances with European Powers (firstly to smash Holland with the help of France and then to crush France with the help of Holland), the reign of terror at the time of the Popish Plot, and Civil War in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Here, indeed, are stubborn facts for the historians who attempt to explain English social evolution in the terms of racial or national characteristics. A keen student in summing up the events of the latter part of the seventeenth century, says :—” Foreign observers might well be justified in pronouncing the English people singularly fickle, unstable, turbulent, treacherous, and vindictive”! These qualities are, according to our nationalist and imperialistic historians, the special characteristics of “foreigners,” the State, when it overthrows capitalism, it will not, like all previous revolutionary classes, use the Stale to enforce its will upon either a subject or an enslaved class. Since the working class is both an enslaved and a subject class, and since there is no lower class in society, its emancipation will mean the emancipation of all classes. The triumph of the proletarian revolution will mean trim economic and political freedom; it will mean the abolition of the State because it will mean the abolition of all classes and propertied conflicts.

The opening of the eighteenth century finds the monied class exercising great influence over the activities of the State. “The diplomacy of governments were-placed at the disposal of commerce,” says Professor Ingram in his “History of Political Economy.” The literature of the period clearly shows that the merchant class had become powerful in every field of social activity. Defoe remarked that in England trade makes a gentleman, and that their “children come to be as good gentlemen, statesmen, parliament men, judges, bishops, and noblemen as those of him highest birth and the most ancient families.” And Swift said: ” Let any man observe the equipages in this town ; he shall find the greater number of those who make a figure, to be a species of men quite different from any that were ever known before the Revolution, consisting either of generals and colonels or of those, whose whole fortunes lie in funds and stocks.” He also remarked “that the power which used to follow land had gone over to money.” “Must our laws,” said Swift, “from henceforth pass the Bank and East Indian Company, or have their royal assent before they are in force? “Foreigners were particularly impressed with the powerful influence exercised by the capitalist merchants. Shortly after the rise of the commercial class to political power it carried out the following reforms: the establishment of the Bank of England, the extension of the Charter of the East Indian Company, the beginning of the National Debt which guaranteed a safe investment, the restoration of the currency which had been debased by the monarchy, and the building of a fleet strong enough to protect merchant ships and to challenge Holland, the greatest sea-trading nation of the time. These measures show how necessary political control was to the capitalists in order to extend their economic interests. “The same qualities,” says a capitalist apologist, “which gave them political freedom gave them also free enterprise in industry and commerce.” We here again observe the dynamic force behind the merchants’ political agitation on behalf of “freedom”.

Throughout the eighteenth century the political activities of the State witnessed a severe struggle between the landed and financial interests. The century is remarkable for its many wars caused principally by the hunger for colonies and markets required by the rapidly expanding industry of the country, and the desire to prevent any powerful nation from occupying the coastline of Belgium. The Tories of the eighteenth century, representing the landed interests, were on the whole opposed to the imperialism of the merchants; the former complained about the pressure of taxation, and the latter looked to war as a means of floating profitable loans and extending trade. In order to curb the power of the monied interests the Tories passed an Act (1711) preventing merchants from sitting in Parliament who did not draw at least three thousand pounds annually from land. Despite the disabilities thrown in the way of parliamentary representation by an obsolete electoral system, the merchants had no trouble in influencing the State. They were able to exact terms from various Governments by financing their policy through the Bank of England and National Debt. At the beginning of the eighteenth century they were able to buy up constituencies by indulging in wholesale bribery; and early in the nineteenth century the anachronisms of electoral representation were overcome by the sheer force of economic power moving in corrupt channels. “A seat could be bought at a known price as easily a ticket for the opera or the lottery or the stock of the National Debt.” In the same way peerages could be in bought. The landlords, or Tories, no doubt had the electoral system in their political interests ; but it has been well said:—” When seats were recognised as marketable commodities, those who had amassed wealth in manufactures and commerce were able to bid effectively for a place in the House of Commons.” The influence of Capitalism was stamped upon the State when in the King’s speech (1721) it was said: “Thus it was in commerce that the riches and grandeur of the nation chiefly depended.” The revolution of 1688 had not only been “glorious” so far as the trading interests were concerned, it had been, as Chateaubriand aptly said, “useful.” The political philosophers’ of the revolution duly discussed the basis of the State. Hobbes said it was power, and Harrington declared that it was property. Wren summed up both points by showing that that the one comes to the other.

the colonial system

The revolution which had made the merchants and landlords supreme in the State was used was used to extend the interests of these propertied groups. While the merchants had fought the monarchy to win ” equality” and “freedom,” it is interesting to note that neither freedom nor equality were extended to the workers at home nor to the people of other nations. The State gave the East India Company commercial control of India. This company of unscrupulous financiers was even granted State powers in India—i.e., it had the Sovereign power to make laws and enforce them by armed – i.e. We have here a vivid illustration of the fact that the State expresses and enforces the will of property.

There is no more tragic tale in the history of commercial greed than the brutalities perpetrated by the East India Company upon the Hindus. By commercially organised famines the natives were killed by hunger. Small wonder that the British and French commercial interests fought so bitterly against each other for the monopoly of the Indian trade. The colonial system of Christian Europe is a disgusting study. In a book entitled ” Colonisation and Christianity,” by Mr. W. Howitt, we read:—” The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.” During a quarrel with the Puritans of New England, who had emigrated from England, the British Government paid redskins to tomahawk the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers. And “the British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as means that God and Nature had given into its hands.” The cant phrase “God and Nature ” was a favourite one, and was used by most of the British Statesmen during the eighteenth century in furthering the interests of commerce. Thus Pitt used it against Spain in 1739; he used it again in 1776 and 1789. By this appeal to “God and Nature” the merchants achieved many things “which were baptised-in torrents of blood.” And Edmund Burke declared that “the laws of commerce are the laws of nature, and therefore the laws of God.” At a later period, during the agitation of Bright and Cobden for free trade, Dr. Bowring said that “Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ.” True to the laws of “God and Nature,” the British merchants ruined the commerce of Ireland and reduced the people to a state of helplessness and starvation. And, as though to add insult to injury, many modern historians and politicians have attempted to explain the “failure,” “rebellions,” and “suspicion ” of the Irish as something peculiarly racial, Due to its geographical position, lying close to the European markets and westwards towards America, the English merchants looked upon Ireland as a potential competitor, while the English landlords always distrusted Ireland because they regarded it as a-basis from which an enemy could attack England. Ireland has been the victim of a dominating English commercial class. Its economic and geographical environment explains the political and religious disturbances of the island. By a series of commercial laws the English State prohibited Ireland to trade; her harbours were closed to imperial commerce; her farmers were prevented from exporting wool, and the capitalists were forbidden to manufacture it. The British shippers, manufacturers, and farmer were, in plain English, a gang of conspirators using their National State to strangle the commercial and agricultural potentialities of a smaller nation. To the Irish this was the work c| Protestants. Thus the economic antagonism between the two nations helped to produce a religious antagonism, making Ireland the breeding; ground of Roman Catholicism. Likewise, in America, the colonial policy of the British merchants provoked the war of independence. “The Colonial system,” says Marx, “ripened, like a hothouse, trade; and navigation. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation “(of capital). ” The treasures captured outside Europe by -undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother country and were turned into capital.” In these things we can see an additional reason why the monied interests found it imperative to destroy the semi feudal State at home in order to control the army, navy, and taxation, and to use these State-controlled institutions as instruments to expand and develop the forces of capital.

During the eighteenth century, so bent was the capitalist class on imperial expansion, that little legislative work was accomplished. The energies of the most brilliant of the capitalist and landlord Statesmen were directed towards consolidating the State. Thus, due to the rapid expansion of an industrial nation, with its numerous wars and expenditure, the Treasury Department slowly emerges as the central organ of State administration, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer becomes one of the great officers of State. Under the pressure of new political needs for economic ends, most of the present-day State committees were evolved. Hence the Cabinet arises as the motive power in the State of the politically dominant section of the nation. As the executive committee of the propertied interests the Cabinet assumes the Sovereign power of the nation. Prior to the Revolution many of the officers of the semi-feudal and monarchical State were personal attendants of the King. These offices lose their administrative and social importance and become merely ornamental and honorary. It was a fortunate thing for the development of the British State that the first two Georges were foreigners, who had great difficulty in speaking and understanding the English language. George I. surrendered one of the last privileges of the Crown when he ceased to sit in the Cabinet. During the riotous and turbulent period of the Industrial and French Revolutions, George III. attempted to claim several privileges. It is a point worth noting that the capitalist class in capturing the State seeks to destroy the powers of the Crown; but with the advent of the proletarian revolutionary movement the capitalists and landlords seek to throw a halo round the head of their ornamental but powerless monarch. This is caused by the desire of the threatened property rulers to create an additional buffer between the wage-earners and their emancipation.

So successfully did the Whigs—who were in power for an unbroken period of 50 years—do their work in consolidating the State on behalf of the propertied interests, that when the Tories at last assumed power they did not seek to carry through counter measures on behalf of the Crown, but used the State to protect the landed interests. During the eighteenth century the

British propertied class evolved that parliamentary system which afterwards became the model of most of the commercial States founded in Europe.

Although the monied and commercial interests had great influence in the State, nevertheless the capitalist class had not thoroughly finished its revolutionary work. Most of its political influence was of an indirect sort exerted by sheer pressure of its economic power. Up and down the country in the new industrial centres there were springing up numberless small manufacturers who, due to the obsolete electoral system, were not qualified to vote. It was the arbitrary manner in which constituencies were mapped out that led to the monied interests buying up votes and electoral districts. Corruption was caused by the anachronisms of the electoral laws. Towards the end of the eighteenth century him smaller capitalists agitated for the extension of the franchise. Their political propaganda founded the Radical party. But as the early Radicals were closely connected with the workers’ movement, we intend to deal with them in our next section.

the rise of the modern working class

During the eighteenth century an important development in the evolution of the working class—called by historians “The freeing of the workers”—took place. We have repeatedly drawn attention to the mobility required by commerce and commodity production. Industry also requires a mobile working class —i.e., a mass of labourers who can be moved up and down the country according to the exigencies of production. It was part of the work of the capitalist class to furnish industry with a mass of “free” labourers. It is interesting to watch how the “freeing” process was accomplished.

After the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), serfdom, which tied the serf-labourer to the lord’s estate, had almost’ disappeared. According to Macaulay:—”The petty proprietors who cultivated their own fields with their own hands enjoyed a modest competence. If we may trust the best statistical writers of that age, not less than 160,000 proprietors, who, with their families, must have made up more than a seventh of the whole population, derived their subsistence from little freehold estates. . . . It was computed that the number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than the number of those who farmed the land of others.” Many of those who did not own farms of their own worked as wage-labourers for someone, and also worked on their own piece of land, which generally was of 4 acres; they also had access to the common lands. Prof. Thorold Rogers, in “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” described the condition of the agricultural population in the fifteenth century as the “golden age of English Labour.” We have already examined the great enclosures movement which took place at the end of the fifteenth century, and which hurled a mass of propertyless workers on to the roads of the country and into the towns and cities. The filching of the people’s land plunged the agricultural population of England, “without any transition, from its golden into its iron age.” The expropriation of the country workers from the land was further extended when the rapacious nobility despoiled the great feudal estates of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation. These estates were taken over by royal courtiers, who sold them to speculating capitalist farmers, who drove the population in swarms off the lands. William Cobbett, in his “History of the Protestant Reformation,” provides valuable data which shows the greed of the ” spiritual” forces behind the Reformation, and also what it meant to thousands of luckless workers. During the eighteenth century the enclosures ruined the yeomen of England, the men who had played so heroic a part in Cromwell’s revolutionary army. Between the years 1702 and 1810 Parliament passed no less than 3,042 enclosure Acts. These Acts expropriated from the workers 2,500,000 acres of arable land and 1,750,000 acres of “waste.” These figures do not include enclosures which were not sanctioned by Parliament.

Small wonder that the “enclosures had combined to dislocate, and in some cases extinguish altogether, two classes of the old order—the yeoman and the cottager.” Between 1801 and 1831 Parliament facilitated the stealing of 3,511,770 acres of common land from the agricultural population. It is well to observe that the defender of the enclosures take up the position that the expropriation of the land was justified by social necessity. Mr. C. Grant Robertson, in ” England under the Hanoverians,” argues: — “That as a whole enclosure was inevitable, the indispensable condition and the result of more scientific and economic agriculture; that in the long run it added enormously to the productive resources of the nation; that without it the new population could not have been fed, the industrial revolution stimulated, and the strain of the great war endured, is generally accepted.” Our authority, while revelling in sympathy for the dispossessed, makes no reference to the “sacred” rights of property and the violation of “individual” rights. The history of the enclosures provides the historic precedent that when any class in society has political power, enforced by industrial organisation; it may expropriate the property of any other class in the interests of society.

We see, therefore, that the expropriation of the agricultural population “freed “a great mass of workers who had no other resource than to offer themselves as wage-earners in the rapidly growing industrial districts.

In the towns and villages a great number of workers maintained themselves by domestic manufacture and by working partly on the land. These workers were supplied with raw materials by the merchants. So long as industry was in its handicraft stage these cottage workers were able to live in relative comfort. But they were ruined by a twofold process. “While the enclosures deprived the day labourer of a solace, often a resource, they completed the ruin of the manufacturing cottagers.”15 The domestic handicraftsmen slowly came under the domination of the merchants who supplied them with raw materials. With the rise of large work-shops, wherein great numbers of workers were employed, and in which the labour process was subdivided and intensified, a corresponding cheapening in production naturally resulted, against which the smaller domestic producers could not compete. These domestic craftsmen were ruined and they were compelled to join the ranks of the “free ” labourers. By such means as those outlined above there appeared upon the social stage the modern working class—a mass of propertyless proletarians who, in order to live, were ” free ” to sell themselves to the owners of the means of wealth-production, the capitalist class. So long as the workers in the handicraft or domestic stage of industry saw any possibility of becoming masters a working-class movement was impossible. In the period preceding the Industrial Revolution the tools and implements of production were easily acquired, and it was a simple matter to become a master. But with the rise of the factory system—with the opening of huge factories containing highly expensive, complex machines—with the beginning of industrial Capitalism, it became practically impossible for a wage-earner to become a factory owner. The respective class and position of capitalist and wage-worker became almost as rigid as a caste; each was indeed a status. It is from the beginning of the factory system, therefore, that we get the bona-fide modern working-class movement. The capitalist class in its great achievement of having destroyed within society the power of the old feudal nobility, let loose the elements which created its great class antagonist—the proletariat. Thus, as Engels says, the capitalist class had no sooner extricated itself from the power of the landed nobles than it was dogged by the shadow of the wage-earning class. The great activity of the capitalist class in the eighteenth century was pregnant with the events which made possible the industrial Capitalism of the nineteenth century. Its great historic work during the eighteenth century consisted in establishing and consolidating the parliamentary State at home and in extending the Empire abroad. The capitalist class assisted the landlords to expropriate the workers from the land, by means of which the latter got the lands and the former got the “hands.” These things made possible and facilitated the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which in its turn socialised the labour process whereby all economic wealth is created—and it also meant the triumph of Man over nature. These achievements may be considered the historic mission of the capitalist class and its social contribution to humanity. Thus the capitalist class, by concentrating and centralising the instruments of wealth production, made possible the social production of wealth. But the capitalist class did more; it brought into being the working class, whose great mission it is to socialise the distribution of the socially produced wealth.