Correspondence
Your friend’s trouble seems to arise from an insufficient study of my reply to your queries. It was clearly stated there that the value of all commodities is measured by the socially necessary simple labour time required in their production. The fact, therefore, that the commodity cost 8d. to produce tells us as little about its value as does the fact that it sold for 3s. 6d. The cost of production says nothing as to the labour crystalised within it, nor does the price. Let your friend ask himself whether it is socially necessary labour dusting the blouse until the fleeting fashion had robbed it of its use-value and rendered it unsaleable.
A. E. J.
The following resolution was sent to the daily Press, and was in nearly all cases suppressed.
The attention of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of Great Britain having been drawn to certain articles now appearing in the “Daily Mail” from the pen of Robert Blatchford on the question of Germany versus England, the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of Great Britain wishes to repudiate the said articles as being against the best interest of the Working Class of both countries, and denies that Mr. Blatchford, who shows by these articles that he fails to grasp the Principles of Socialism, is in any sense of the word one of the founders of Socialism.
In sending us his ” Second Report,” Mr. W. R. Trotter, British Representative of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, says in his covering letter :
“Already there are evidences that the Salvation Army is making a desperate effort to recover lost ‘business.’ But after the exposures made of the methods of such organisations, there is little likelihood of the workers being misled as much as formerly and stampeded by their emigration schemes, which are generally undertaken in conjunction with some capitalistic enterprise for mutual profit to the consignor and consignee—the emigrant himself being the object of last and usually least consideration. Column after column of printed ‘advice’ given to emigrants by these societies may very well be summed up in one of their own phrases which is always emphasised : ‘Take the first job that offers.’
“There are rumours of many new schemes but no one of them has yet matured. Even the much ‘boomed’ Salvation Army Colony in Alberta is still the combined dream of the directors of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and the Salvation Army. We can say no more of this scheme at present, it being impossible to criticise a ‘Colony’ which does not exist in Canada.”
The report, which deals, be it said, with the doings of several “emigration societies,” makes excellent reading, and well exposes the cruel swindles perpetrated so generally upon the optimistic emigrant. There is, perhaps, no country in the world where Christian cant and arrant ignorance are found so closely united with the most intense and heartless exploitation as they are in Canada. And that the Salvation Army should take a hand in the villainous work was quite to be expected—for if there is a “hell and damnation” organisation that understands “biz” it is the S.A. We shall have more to say on the doings of Booth & Co. in our February issue.
AD-SUM,