Notes and Clippings
HUSTLE !
Word of dire import to the wage-slave. Yet not without its use, persistently, pitilessly reminding him that increased toll on brain and sinew must be demanded from him to meet the conditions that the ever-increasing mad whirl of competition creates.
The Daily Chronicle, year of grace 1908: “Wanted, in progress department with some experience of motor-car components, to hustle: THE WORK THROUGH THE SHOPS.”
“Some experience” only of the inanimate machine, of tank and sparking plug, of valve and tire, but a firm grip of the possibilities of the human mechanism ; its thew and sinew, its mental capacity, its fears and its hopes, its breaking-point, expressed in terms of surplus-value units.
A correspondent of Justice (12.12.08) cries aloud for “more capital,” in order that the work of the Twentieth Century Press (T.C.P.) may grow and still further flourish.
Whew ! This in the “Organ of Social Democracy.” Oh Harry Quelch ! Oh Father of British “Socialism,” behold your pupil !!
“Capital means wealth which is employed by its owners for the purpose of profit by the labour of others,” (Catechism of Socialism, issued by T.O.P., authors, Bax and Quelch).
“Profits . . . are derived from the surplus-value wrung from the unpaid labour of the workers” (same work, same authors, same bedrock truth).
Anent this precious piece of correspondence, a Peckham comrade writes “A certain W. A. Woodroffe, in response to an appeal to Social Democratic Party members to take up shares in the T.C.P., sends for two more shares on behalf of the Camberwell Branch, of which he is a member.
“Is this the W. A. Woodroffe who is employed by the T.C.P., and who played such an ignoble part with the Executive Council of that body when the straight members came out ?
“If so, the fear he has of many members of the S.D.P. being wholly ignorant of the ‘important’ part played by the T.C.P. in the movement can be dispelled by a true account of the events which led to the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.
“The question would then resolve itself into an enquiry as to whether the enlightened and disillusioned rank and file of the S.D.P. would find their view coincide with those of W. A. Woidroffe as to what could, or should be done with ‘more capital.’ ”
The inner history of that historic movement shall be told to readers of THE SOCIALIST STANDARD at an early date. We guarantee that nothing which has hitherto appeared in our organ will be more replete with interest, more illustrative of the dirty method of an organisation dominated by “middle-class quacks,” and bound hand and foot to a concern which demands “more capital,” than such a recountal.
Meanwhile, I would ask my enquiring comrade whether this same worthy was the individual who spoke at some length at the Old Kent Rd. Baths when Hyndman, “the great Socialist Orator,”—so the handbills read—denied, in answer to a question, that he or the S.D.P. had ever supported Burns after his secession from the ranks of the S.D.P. ?
Further, whether it was the same W. A. Woodroffe who declarded his gratitude to the said “Great Socialist Orator” for his great and surpassing condescension in emptying himself of his glory and stepping out from the ranks of the upper class to patronise and beam on the working classes ?
Pah ! Its offence is rank. It smells to Heaven. A draught of Marx (translated by Harry Quelch.)
“The petty bourgeois, always speaks of one side, and the other side. Two opposing, contradictory currents dominate his material interests, and in consequence his religious, scientific, and artistic views, his morality, in fact, his whole being.
“If he is besides, a man of intellect, he will very soon be able to juggle with his own contradictions, and to elaborate them in striking, noisy, if sometimes brilliant paradoxes. Scientific charlatanism and political compromises are inseparable from such a point of view.”
“There is in such case, only a single motive, individual vanity, and, as with all vain people, there is no question of anything beyond the mere effect of the moment, the success of the hour.”
Could Genius go further in limning the psychological outlines of the Hyndmans and Blatchfords ? Through the mental features of the latter, especially, leers out the baneful figure of the Anarchist Prondhon, of whom the above (in “Misère de la Philosophie”) was written.
And—Que le diable faites-vous dans cette galère, Harry ?
Is it a place within the meaning of the—no, not the Act, pardon—of Socialism ?
A. REGINALD