A Revolt Against Futility.

Fellow workers,—

The above is the name of a new organisation which is not in any way connected with another organisation known as the National Unemployed Workers' Committee Movement. On the contrary, this organisation is the outcome of the inability of the N.U.W.C.M. as at present constituted to accomplish anything approaching a better standard of living for the workers, whether employed or unemployed.

Three Years Wasted.

We contend that the reason the N.U.W.C.M. after three years' attempt at organisation, has not accomplished anything, is because it has been dominated by professional politicians, many of whom have never been workers, and consequently know nothing of the working-class movement. This makes the movement a catspaw of political parties and has the effect of dividing the workers against themselves instead of uniting against the forces of Capitalism.

A Better Policy.

Therefore the principles on which the unemployed workers organise will be built as follows:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common; there can be no peace as long as hunger and want are found amongst the millions of the working people whilst the few who make up one employing class have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the earth and machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.

Not Work or Maintenance, but Abolition of Wagedom.

Instead of the Conservative motto of the N.U.W.C.M. "work at Trade Union rates or maintenance at Trade Union rates," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword: "Abolition of the Wage System."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with Capitalism. The army of production must be organised not only for the everyday struggle with Capitalism, but also to carry on production when Capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are forming the structure of the new Society within the shell of the old.

Direct Action.

Realising that poverty caused by unemployment cannot be permanently abolished by palliative methods, we advocate the intensification of the class struggle by the application of direct action whenever necessary and whenever possible.

No Affiliation to Labour Party.

We are opposed to affiliation to a counter-revolutionary party as the Labour Party or such a reformist party as the Communist Party of Great Britain.

We likewise oppose affiliation to such reactionary organisation as the Trade Union Congress, and reject the R.I.L.U. [Red International of Labour Unions] because it admits Trade Unions to affiliate.

We firmly believe in the application of a rigid dictatorship of the proletariat when the collapse of Capitalism arrives, but until that time does arrive, we strongly object to the dictatorship of a [small caucus?] of self-seeking politicians who make the "united front" an excuse for their own self-aggrandisement.

No Reformism.

We fully expect to be charged with trying to split the movement—that is a stock cry of the politicians—but that will leave us quite cold. Who has split the movement more than these pseudo revolutionaries? They have made discipline a fetish instead of trying to understand what it means. In effect, they say: "Unless you agree with all our reformist ideas, unless you submit to our dictatorship, you cannot remain in our movement," forgetting that the workers' psychology does not permit of mental slavery.

On behalf of the Joint Committee,

Alfred J. Mummery, Chairman.

G. E. Soderberg, Secretary.

* * *

The Unemployed Workers' Organisation.1

We publish on our front page the manifesto of a newly formed Unemployed Workers' Organisation, and in subsequent issues we shall give further space to the activities of this organisation in our columns.

We are glad to do so, because we believe that the basis of the organisation is sound in the main. We hope that it may develop into a sturdy fighting body.

The organisation appears to have sprung up spontaneously. As a matter of fact, it is the result of a steady growth of progressive opinion, and it is the natural outcome of that Left-Wing opinion which was a factor when the original unemployed organisation was formed of numerous diverse elements.

The original organisation, which now calls itself the National Unemployed Workers' Committee Movement, has drifted steadily rightward since its formation. Originally the object stated on its membership card was the overthrow of the capitalist system. Now its objects are stated on its card as follows:

"The objects shall be to educate and organise the unemployed with a view to establishing the principle of 'Work or Full Maintenance at Trade Union rate of wages.'"

The original organisation has also applied, unsuccessfully, for affiliation to the Labour Party. Its activities have been greatly modified by the desire to secure such affiliation. This was specially evident at the time of the march to London, when the great effort ended with unexpected tameness under Labour Party influences.

One phrase has crept into the manifesto of the Unemployed Organisation which requires discussion. It is a phrase of which all Communists have made use, both of late and also since the days of Marx, Engels and Bachunin [Bakunin]. We refer to the term "the dictatorship of the proletariat." This in its original use meant the rigid suppression of the middle and upper classes in so far as they may endeavour to resist the coming of Socialism and to combat the popular will.

Latterly, under the inspiration of Russian bureaucrats, the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" has been used to justify the dictatorship of a party clique of officials over their own party members and over the people at large. So far has the dictatorship been carried [out] that the parties submitting to it have become utterly sterile as instruments of education and action. In Russia the dictatorship has robbed the revolution of all it fought for; it has banished Communism and workers' control.

Liberty is an essential part of the Communist revolution. We must not sacrifice it to the ambitions of would-be dictators.

• 1This explanation of the Dreadnought's inclusion of the Manifesto, which was written by Pankhurst, appears in the same issue.

Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance.

Our desire is not to make poor those who to-day are rich, in order to put the poor in the place where the rich now are. Our desire is not to pull down the present rulers to put other rulers in their places.

We wish to abolish poverty and to provide abundance for all.

We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.

Such a great production is already possible, with the knowledge already possessed by mankind.

To-day production is artificially checked, consumption still more so.

How is production checked?

Production is checked by private ownership of land, the means of production and transport. In Scotland large areas of agricultural land are turned into deer forests. In every English county numerous large private parks are kept for the pleasure of single families. Production on farms is limited because farmers lack capital to enable them to employ the labour and materials necessary to work their land fully. Landowners with capital find more profitable means of employing their capital in agriculture or stock raising. Country landowners refuse to build cottages on their estates in order to preserve their own privacy. Landowners in and about towns put up the price of land till it becomes prohibitive to the purpose of building houses for any but the rich. Vacant plots remain for years until they are bought for factories or cinemas.

Production is also limited by inability to secure raw material owing to carefully organised cornering of supplies by persons who make money by such immoral practices, and by inability to pay the prices demanded for raw material.

Production is deliberately limited in order to secure high prices for short supplies, and because the market in which the produce can be sold at a profit is limited.

Production is to a minor extent limited by wage-workers in order to keep up the price of labour.

Consumption is cruelly limited by lack of means to purchase.

Our cities teem with people lacking the decencies and necessaries of life because they cannot afford to pay. Even Mr. Neville Chamberlain, a Tory Minister of Health, has admitted that a large proportion of the population of this relatively prosperous country is herded together under conditions which are scarcely human.

Entire nations are plunged into scarcity under which the poor die of starvation and even the middle and professional classes are reduced to hunger because the whirligig of finance has reduced the exchange value of the currency of such nations.

Capitalism offers no hope of ending this reign of poverty.

Millions of men and women, trained in the arts of production and transport, are unemployed, factories stand idle or run at half speed, land lies fallow, shops and warehouses teem with goods for which there are insufficient purchasers.

The majority of the population is not engaged in productive work. The greater part of the non-producers is employed in the buying, selling and advertising of the commodities produced by the minority. A large number of non-producers is employed in administering insurance doles, pensions, Poor Law relief and charity to the unemployed and to those whose wages do not suffice to maintain them. A considerable minority is living on rent and dividends drawn from the labour of the producers. This minority includes the people with a small unearned income just large enough to maintain them, and also the very rich who keep hundreds of persons uselessly employed in waiting upon them, who monopolise thousands of acres of land for their pleasure-grounds, and who sometimes consume inordinate quantities of manufactured goods to satisfy their insatiable desire for artificial pleasure and extravagant display.

This is the private property system.

We wish to replace it by Socialism.

Under Socialism the land, the means of production and transport are no longer privately owned: they belong to all the people. The title to be one of the joint owners of the earth and its products and the inheritance of collective human labour does not rest on any question of inheritance or purchase; the only title required is that one is alive on this planet. Under Socialism no one can be disinherited; no one can lose the right to a share or the common possession.

The share is not so many feet of land, so much food, so many manufactured goods, so much money with which to buy, sell, and carry on trade. The share of a member of the Socialist Commonwealth is the right and the possibility of the abundant satisfaction of the needs from the common store-house, the right to be served by the common service, the right to assist as an equal in the common production.

Under Socialism production will be for use, not profit. The community will ascertain what are the requirements of the people in food, clothing, housing, transport, educational facilities, books, pictures, music, theatres, flowers, statuary, wireless telegraphy - anything and everything that the people desire. Food, clothing, housing, transport, sanitation — these come first; all effort will be bent first to supply these; everyone will feel it a duty to take some part in supplying these. Then will follow the adornments and amusements, a comfortable, cultured and leisured people will produce artistic and scientific work for pleasure, and with spontaneity. Large numbers of people will have the ability and the desire to paint, to carve, to embroider, to play, and to compose music.

They will adorn their dwellings with their artistic productions, and will give them freely to whoever admires them.

When a book is written the fact will be made known, and whoever desires a copy of it, either to read or to keep, will make that known to the printers in order that enough copies may be printed to supply all who desire the book. So with a musical composition, so with a piece of statuary.

So, too, with the necessaries of life. Each person, each household, will notify the necessary agency the requirements in milk, in bread, and all the various foods, in footwear, in clothing. Very soon the average consumption in all continuous staples will be ascertained. Consumption will be much higher than at present, but production will be vastly increased: all those who are to-day unemployed or employed in the useless toil involved in the private property and commercial system, will be taking part in actual productive work; all effort will be concentrated on supplying the popular needs.

How will production be organised?

Each branch of production will be organised by those actually engaged in it. The various branches of production will be co-ordinated for the convenient supply of raw material and the distribution of the finished product.

Since production will be for use, not profit, the people will be freely supplied on application. There will be no buying and selling, no money, no barter or exchange of commodities.

The terms Socialism and Communism had originally the same meaning.

They indicate a society in which the land, the means of production and distribution are held in common, and in which production is for use, not profit.

State Socialism, with its wages and salaries, its money system, banks and bureaucracy, is really not Socialism at all, but State Capitalism.

A recent leading article in the "Daily Herald" referred to the Port of London Authority as "a concrete illustration of Socialism as a working system."

A more gross mis-statement could hardly be made. It was a specially cruel mis-statement, since the dockers are on strike against the Port of London Authority.

Mr. Herbert Morrison, secretary of the London Labour Party, and a man of very moderate views, wrote to the "Daily Herald" to protest. He pointed out that the Port of London Authority has a chairman appointed by the Board of Trade, ten members appointed by the Admiralty, the Board of Trade, the City Corporation, London County Council and Trinity House, only two of whom are Labour representatives. These ten members, who might be remotely regarded as public representatives, though most indirectly appointed, are counterbalanced by no fewer than 18 members elected by private capitalist interests, including payers of dues, owners of river craft and wharfingers, the voting being upon the basis of the business done.

Mr. Morrison declared it unfair to "genuine democratic Socialism" to regard the P.L.A. "as Socialism in practice."

He added, however, this very curious statement:

"I could understand such a phrase coming from a so-called Communist who admires Soviets."

It is well that Mr. Morrison prefixed the adjective "so-called." Obviously the Port of London Authority is the complete opposite of the Soviets under Communism.

The Soviets are the industrial councils under Communism.

Though the term Soviet is Russian, we cannot look to the Russia of to-day to find the correct Soviet. The Russian Soviets now in being are apt to be composite assemblies of representatives, not merely of workers in industries, but of political organisations, national groups, trade unions, etc.

The typic Soviets, or those which will arise under Communism, are not composite bodies of this kind. They consist, firstly, of the workers in a factory, on a farm, in a dockyard, in a ship, in a coalpit, in a railway station, and so on. In each centre of production the workers will co-operate in organising their work. The large factory or works may have, if convenient, several sub-councils, each managing its own affairs. For questions of organisation affecting the whole works, either all the workers may confer, should occasion arise, or delegates may be appointed to hold any discussion and make any arrangements that may seem necessary, provided, of course, those whose delegates they are agree to what has been planned.

For arrangements which may have to be made for an entire industry, or for a group of industries in a given area, delegates will be appointed and instructed in the same way from the workers in the various centres, and will make their reports in due course.

No professional class of delegates will be created. The delegates will be chosen from amongst those actually working, and will return to their work when the occasion for conference has passed.

No authoritarian control will be imposed, but an efficient system of statistical and information bureaux will knit together the workers' council organisation.

The object of the Workers' Council is not to govern a race of slaves, but to supply the needs of free people.

The forerunners of the Workers' Councils under Communism are those which have already begun to spring up under Capitalism. The war-time shop stewards' and workers' committee movement in this country was an example of this. Similar, but more advanced movements developed in other countries at the same period. In Germany these are still maintained.

In the Russian Revolution of 1905 Soviets or Workers' Councils arose, and also in the Revolution of 1917. In the German and Austrian Revolutions of 1918, and the various revolutionary outbreaks which have since occurred, the Workers' Councils have been the medium through which the workers have acted.

Men and women call themselves Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Individualists, thinking they thus explain their views to themselves and others. Yet question them, but a little; you will discover how few of them have any clear conception of what they mean by their labels. Thus it is that many fail to recognise a brother of their faith, unless he bear a label, discourse he never so fully and clearly upon his beliefs and ideals.

When we are considering the as yet intangible things of the future, the life of our hopes beyond our present experiences, precise thinking is difficult; prolonged research and meditation are necessary to arrive at any clearness of aim. Therefore behind the labels we find abundant confusion. The advocate of such an extreme form of State interference with the liberty of the individual as compulsory birth-control is found to label himself Individualist. Zealous upholders of Capitalism also label themselves Individualists, though Capitalism could not be maintained an hour without the power of the State forces, which protect private property, and prevent those who have not enough to satisfy their needs from despoiling those who have something to spare.

Self-styled Anarchists are found who have not thought out a single fundamental of a society without law, and who support variously nationalisation of the land, the single tax, and other State organised panaceas, Trade Unions with their centralised mechanism and oppressive officialdom, and petty trading and production for profit, which, like the larger Capitalism, necessitates law and its forces to protect the property-holder from being dispossessed.

So-called Socialists are found whose idea of Socialism consists in various reforms of the Capitalist system: Parliamentary legislation to secure such things as more liberal charity towards the poor or closer supervision over them, higher taxation or taxation on a new basis, municipal trading, State Capitalism, State subsidies and other encouragements to great Capitalism, or, on the other hand, war on great Capitalism, and State encouragement of small Capitalism, and other confused and conflicting expedients.

Self-styled Communists are found whose aims differ little if any from those of the most confused and vague of the reformists.

'What is Socialism, what is Communism, what is Anarchy?' ask a multitude of would-be converts, weary of the cruelty and waste of Capitalism and eagerly desiring an alternative. For answer they receive only confused denunciations of existing things; no hopeful vision of the new life which the labelled ones are supposed to advocate is vouchsafed them. They turn away empty and discouraged.

Programmes become cramping and conservative influences if men and women worship them as holy writ, and refuse their thoughts permission to go on before an accepted formula. Yet without discovering for ourselves what our aims really are, without defining them so that they may be understood by others, how shall we work for them, how shall we sow the seed that shall create a movement to achieve them?

Our aim is Communism. Communism is not an affair of party. It is a theory of life and social organisation. It is a life in which property is held in common; in which the community produces, by conscious aim, sufficient to supply the needs of all its members; in which there is no trading, money, wages, or any direct reward for services rendered.

The Individualist emphasises his dislike for coercion by the collectivity, his desire that the individual shall be free. We also dislike coercion and desire freedom; we aim at the abolition of Parliamentary rule; but we emphasise the interdependence of the members of the community; we emphasise the need that the common storehouse and the common service shall provide an insurance against want for every individual.

We aim at the common storehouse, not the individual hoard. We desire that the common storehouse shall bulge with plenty, and whilst the common storehouse is plenished we insist that none shall want.

We would free men and women from the stultifying need of making their own individual production pay; the peasant toiling uncounted hours with inadequate tools, the fear of incapacity and want always dogging his thoughts; the little business man counting his losses and profit with anxious mind; the wage-slave selling his labour cheaply and without security; the artist debarred from the effort to improve his skill and quest for his ideals by the insistence of the economic spur.

We aim at the common service; we desire that all should serve the community, that no longer should there be divers classes of persons; the hewers of wood and the drawers of water; the intellectuals, the leisured classes, who are merely parasites. The Individualist cries: 'Freedom.' We answer: 'Thou shalt not exploit.' 'Thou shalt not be a parasite.'

Yet we would have nothing of dictatorship: we believe that a public opinion can be treated which will produce a general willingness to serve the community. The exception to that general willingness will become, we believe, altogether a rarity; we would not have the occasional oddity who will not join the general effort disciplined by law; the disapprobation, even the pity of his fellows will insure his rarity.

The thought: 'I will not produce because I can secure a better living as a non-producer,' whether it be the thought of an employer, or of an unemployed worker, is a typical product of Capitalism. A society in which that thought predominates is inevitably one of poverty and exploitation. The thought: 'I will not produce if I can avoid it' falls like a blight upon society to-day. It is the inevitable product of the capitalist system.

Let us produce in abundance; let us secure plenty for all; let us find pleasure in producing; these thoughts must pervade the community if it is to be able to provide, in lavish measure, plenty for all-in material comfort, in art, in learning, in leisure. At such a community we aim. We emphasise the need for the Workshop Councils.

The Individualist fears that even the autonomous Workshop Councils may lead to the circumscribing of personal liberty. We however desire the Workshop Councils in order to insure personal liberty.

In the Communist Society at which we aim all will share the productive work of the community and all will take a part in organising that work.

How can it be done?

In these days of great populations and varied needs and desires people are not willing to return to the stage at which every individual or family made its own house, clothing, tools, utensils, and cultivated its own patch of soil and provided all its own tools. A return to productive work, a discarding of artificial and useless toil, we desire and expect to see, but work in which many workers co-operate we expect and desire to retain.

The building of engines and ships and all sorts of machinery, the construction of cables, weaving and spinning by machinery, and numberless other things are dependent on the co-ordinated work of large numbers of people. It is probable that developments in the use of electricity and other present and future inventions, will tend to render less economically necessary than used to be the case, both the vast workshop and the vast city. Moreover the influence of profit-making being eliminated, the unhealthy and uncongenial massing together of people will be checked. Nevertheless for at least a very long time, the large scale production wrought by many inter- related workers, will remain a necessary condition of maintaining both plenty and leisure for all.

If large numbers of people are working together and if the varied needs of large populations are to be supplied, the work will come either to be directed from above or from below. Unless each individual in the work shop is an independent co-operator, taking a conscious share in the organisation of the collective work, then all the workers in the shop must be under the direction of a manager; and that manager must either be appointed by those whom he directs or by some outside authority.

The same principle applies throughout the entire field of production, distribution, and transport; unless the workshops co-ordinate themselves, unless they themselves arrange their relationship with their sources of supply and the recipients of their products, then that co- ordination must be affected by an outside authority with power to enforce its authority.

In order to promote the liberty and initiative of the individual, as well as for the welfare of the collectivity, therefore, we emphasise the need for the autonomous workshop councils, co-ordinated along the lines of production, distribution and transport.

First published in Workers' Dreadnought, 3 November 1923. Taken from the Antagonism website