Correspondence
Strange as it may seem, I, one of the army of workers, the class which is the only useful class, am classed as above. And I am unemployed ; I can find no man who will give me work to do, that I may earn sufficient to keep the life within me. I can work ; I like to work ; I can’t get it.
Not alone, however. I take up the daily papers ; I read of the great things a Liberal Government is doing for the class I belong to.
I read of their latest benefaction, an institution in each town where we unemployed men and women may go and register our names and qualifications, so that intending employers may look over the books and pick out the suitable ones. And I read that in every place where such exchanges have been opened, a struggling mob of masterless beings have fought to have their names placed on the lists—4,000 in Manchester on the opening day, many more in London, from every industrial centre there comes word of hundreds of men like myself, wanting a master and finding none.
I see it is the beginning of a brighter day for English workers ; that honest workers at last have found their chance. A minister of Christ speaking last week said in a short lime all loafers and idlers will be known by name throughout England, and that this was desirable to the honest man willing to do a day’s work. I am one of those honest men. but I have been more fortunate than others in having a roof over my head and plenty to eat while I hunted for the elusive job.
But I ask myself what inducement has any man to remain one of these honest workers, when he has worked so hard as to nearly break down in health, helped also by the knowledge that another waited for his place when he failed. Some day he is told that his services are no longer required, as business is slack. In vain he looks for a job ; he sees the same thing is common all around ; men who have worked their best are flung out to the cold at another’s whim. What is there in honest labor? A fortune for the lazy man who owns the job, starvation for the poor wretch who is bought to work the job.
I also see where a progressive muck-raker (literary) has discovered that by going about the thing properly, double the money made by a casual labourer can be made by artistic begging.
But the man who does that is a loafer ; the man who begs for work an honest working man, much lauded by the clergy and other intellectual prostitutes. Both beg for the same thing—a living. The one starves but is praised for his virtues ; the other lives and is cursed for his vices.
The dawn of a brighter day will come, methinks, when the other slaves discover as I have done, that we are mere bundles of merchandise, bought and sold in the market for the price of subsistence, though in ourselves having the power to create many times more wealth that we never get.
The reason we starve is because, bur wages equalling only a small portion of the wealth we create, we are unable to buy it all back. The remedy is to dispossess our masters of the power they hold by government to-day, and remove ourselves from the category of merchandise, make ourselves men, by the simple act of getting control of the forces of Nature and using them for ihe benefit of all instead of for a class of parasites.
There can be no unemployed then—all can supply their needs whenever they choose to do so. No more “honest workers” ; no more idle loafers, but a race of MEN.
F. S. F.
The Social-Democratic Party in Germany occupies a similar position to the party similarly named here. Its programme (the Erfuter Program) consists of the theoretical part, based on the teachings of Marx—the Materialist Conception of History, the Surplus Value theory and the Class Struggle—and the pratical, consisting of reforms and palliatives ; and we allege that the whole existence of the German S.D.P. has been spent in the advocacy of those reforms, to the detriment of Socialist propaganda. In the early days of our party we held the erroneous view—still entertained by the S.L.P. of Gt. Britain and America—that the German workers must obtain certain reforms because the revolution from feudalism to capitalism was not complete. But we found that conditions there make a Socialist Party quite as possible as here. A small number of members of the German S.D.P. take up our position and work for the formation of a straight party. As to our use of the expression “our German comrades,” it were a sorry state of affairs were we not in a position to so express ourselves, while Bebel’s action’in 1906 speaks for itself.
E. VON BEEG (Queen’s Park).—The oath of allegiance to the King required of M.P.s would not prevent a Socialist M.P. taking his seat