Fool Me Once, Shame on You……..

A couple of years ago I spent a fortnight on holiday in Ireland. The first week was spent in a bungalow in Donegal, where at night, after pleasant days exploring the coastline or a trip inland to Derry or other places of interest, I read Engels’ “Anti-Duhring” again. The second week we spent in a beautiful cottage down in Kerry, literally yards away from the sea on the opposite side of he inlet to the Dingle. Having run out of my own books to read I picked up a Bible from in the cottage, and decided to read that.

I’d been intending to read the Bible for some time, and for several reasons. When I was at school I refused to participate in Religious Knowledge classes for the last couple of years. I excelled at history, and my history teacher tried to get me to do it for another ‘O’ level by encouraging me to see it as just History, but he was wasting his time. But he was of course right in a sense. The Bible is an important source of ancient history, provided you look beyond the mysticism, and have some knowledge of the times, and development of human civilisation. From that perspective alone I thought it was worth reading. I’d also decided that when you read Marx, or any of the great thinkers of the past they all had a sound knowledge of classical works including religious texts. So I had some time ago resolved to read some of the major works such as the Bible, Koran, and the I-Ching (the last I was particularly interested in as a student of Kung Fu. The intention had remained mostly that, an intention. When I first began to suffer with severe depression a few years ago I found great satisfaction in sitting in the garden reading classical works of fiction that had sat on my bookshelves often since I was a teenager without having been read. I had ploughed through Dickens, Jules Verne, Dumas, Walter Scott and others but the heavier stuff still didn’t beckon, so being on holiday with time to sit and relax and read was a great opportunity. As with everything I read now I kept a notepad at my side, making copious notes, examples of contradictions, and thoughts on how various events tied in with other bits of history. For example, as an illustration of just how class society had developed at the time, you should read the bit about Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, and what it says about Thou shalt not commit murder. In particular what it says about if you kill someone else’s servant, or if you accidentally beat your own servant to death.

Anyway that’s all a bit beside the point of what I wanted to say, but is a bit of a background or introduction, a bit like one of Ronnie Corbett’s monologues. What I wanted to talk about was three examples of what appear to be pretty much the same thing of how people get dispossessed. I originally wrote this back then, and it has been fairly prescient of what has happened over the last year or so.

Joseph and the Multicoloured Fleece

The first example, comes from the aforementioned reading of the Bible, and the well known Joseph whose rather flamboyant attire was the subject of a musical featuring the long forgotten Jason Donovan, and also Philip Schofield, who everyone tries to forget. I’m not interested in the first bit of the story where Joe gets stitched by his brothers, but with the later bit where he’s become an advisor to Pharaoh. When you read this bit of the story it is clear that what is being described is the beginning of class society. Basically, society is made up of a lot of people who are Nomads, and an increasing number of people who are giving up Nomadic life in 0order to settle down and become farmers. All of these people remain free, except for a few who are servants, though these do not appear to be actual slaves. This corresponds to the picture painted by Engels in “The Origin of the State, Private Property and the Family”, of the old tribal society being replaced by a society in which private property begins to be established under the ownership of individual families.

Now what Joseph does is to interpret the Pharaoh’s dream about 7 fat cows and 7 lean cows etc. and tells him that this is a premonition that there will be 7 bountiful years, followed by 7 years of famine. He urges Pharaoh to store up food during the bountiful years. Of course when the famine begins, all the other farmers not to mention the nomads begin to run out of food, and have to come to Pharaoh to buy food from his store. Before long Pharaoh has cornered the market, and become a monopolist supplier able to charge monopolist prices. The nomads have to give up their cattle and other chattels, the farmers give up first all their stored wealth in gold, and then, as things fail to improve they are forced to sell their land to Pharaoh in return for food. Eventually, they have nothing else left to sell except themselves. It is the beginning of slavery.

The Peasants Are Revolting

A few thousand years later the same trick was pulled off again – twice – once in Britain, then in France. In Britain it was done by force, in France by stealth. Slave society in the form of the Roman Empire came to an end when that empire collapsed. Slaves continued to exist, but they did not form the basis of the mode of production. The Dark Ages, which in my opinion are misnamed, were essentially a return to the type of communal societies that existed before slave society, but now with powerful clan or tribal chiefs, who were eventually to become the feudal aristocracy. Normandy for example, which is the classical feudal society, gets its name from the Norse Men who conquered and settled it. What these societies reintroduced was the ownership of the means of production by the majority of society, whether individually owned or collectively owned, for example, the clan ownership of land that persisted in Scotland and Ireland until a couple of hundred years ago or so, or the village commune in France.

In Volume I and III of Capital Marx sets out both the emergence of Capital and its concomitant the emergence of wage labour. He details the way in which labour is brought under the dominance of capital, a dominance e take for granted today, and yet was in no means natural or easy for capital to achieve. For example, back in the 15th century when capital first starts to appear it finds it almost impossible to exploit labour. The vast majority of people still own their own means of production – land on which to grow food, to keep cattle, sheep, pigs, foul etc.; a cotton spinner or later spinning wheel to spin wool or cotton, a loom or stocking frame to produce their own cloth etc. There is no reason why such people should work for someone else when they can quite easily with the help of all members of the family produce more than enough for their needs, and recent research has indicated that the lives of such peasants was in fact far more pleasant than was previously thought to have been the case. Even those that were landless had access to the common land on which to graze their livestock, and because their were few people who needed to find work wages were high – demand exceeded supply.

After the Plague the number of workers fell even more, and wages soared. In an attempt to ensure that wages were kept down, and workers could be found both for the Court, and for those growing number of artisans and traders that formed the nascent capitalist class the King introduced laws to limit the level of wages, and to set a minimum working day of 10 (though this included 2 hours for dinner). In practice the laws could not be enforced. Such Labour Statutes continued to be introduced right up to the 19th century as a means of trying to force people to become workers such was the resistance to the idea. According to Marx even as late as the last third of the 18th century i.e. after the Industrial Revolution as already got well under way, employers were complaining that it was impossible for them to make a profit because they could not get workers to do more than 3 or 4 days work as workers were able to earn enough during that time to but their food, clothing and shelter and saw no need to work to earn more than that, especially as they often retained their own livestock etc.

Clearly, if capital was going to develop it needed to be able to employ workers at a profit (according to Marx the early capitalists during this period often lived worse than the workers as they tried to accumulate capital), but more importantly it needed a much larger supply of them. The problem was solved for the capitalists by Parliament. For centuries the old landed aristocracy had been thieving land from the peasants. With an increasing demand for wool the landlords found it profitable to clear their lands and introduce sheep. The developments in agricultural technology meant that the old strip farming was no longer efficient, and large fields were needed. There was a confluence of interests between the old landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The former wanted the peasants of the land in order to thieve it for themselves, the latter wanted a large available cheap workfoprce. In addition to the continued outright thievery of peasants land and property Parliament now introduced the Enclosure Acts which demanded that all land be enclosed by hedges or fencing (the reason much of he English countryside is made up of fields broken up by hawthorn hedges). Peasants were also required to produce evidence of their ownership of the land. As often the land had been passed down over generations such title deeds rarely existed, and often when they did they were torn up and destroyed when they were produced. In Scotland where much of the land was owned communally by the clans, the heads of the clans who had been transformed into feudal aristocrats simply took ownership of the land and threw the inhabitants off. Marx gives a detailed account of the actions of the Duchess of Sutherland whose family had their residence here in Stoke at Trentham and whose family vault is being restored by Stoke City Council.

The amazing thing as Marx relates is that for centuries the Crown had been attempting to introduce a minimum 10 hour work day without success, but with the peasants being thrown off the land, dispossessed of their own means of production and thereby forced into the town to work in factories as wage workers the average workday without the need for any law became 18 hours even for children. In many ways though when you consider what New Labour want to do in relation to making people work till they are 68, nothing has changed.

In France, the same thing was effected by stealth. It was more akin to Joseph and his advice to Pharaoh. After the Great Revolution the peasants benefited from land reform. But their gains were fairly quickly reigned back. Improvements in agricultural techniques along with the peasants natural desire to improve their output following the gains they had made from the land reform, increased agricultural output. The increase in supply began to reduce the prices of agricultural products. At the same time the peasants had been encouraged to borrow fairly substantial sums of money at low interest rates to invest in their land, again increasing output and reducing prices. But then just as the fall in prices began to bite, the government both raised taxes and interest rates rose (partly because falling prices meant a greater need to borrow). The peasants began to be ruined, and had to sell their land, becoming like their English counterparts though in smaller numbers wage workers.

Would You Credit It

Before WWII few people owned their own homes, but from the 1950’s on a growing number of people began to do so as real wages increased. Today the number of homeowners in Britain is reported to be around 70%, though this is not true as many of these merely rent their homes from the Building Society that owns the mortgage on the house. Even so a fairly large number of people do own their own home. Despite the fact that this is portrayed by capitalist apologists as in some way comparable to the ownership of shares in factories and other means of production it isn’t for the simple reason that owning your own home is not a source of profit, whereas owning means of production is.

However, this home ownership is not without benefits for the working class. Having somewhere to live is one of the most important things human beings have to provide for, and consequently it is one of the biggest sources of expenditure. If you really do own your home – as opposed to having to pay out on a mortgage for it – then a large cost and therefore a heavy requirement to earn money to cover that cost is removed. Indeed, if the house has a reasonable size garden it is possible as many people did during the 1930’s to grow a reasonable portion of your own fruit and vegetables thereby reducing your dependence on waged work further. This is not to suggest that everyone could become replicas of Tom and Barbara on the Good Life, but that this ownership does provide a degree of independence that did not exist when people every week had to find rent. Together with the introduction of Welfare Benefits it has put a limited bottom under the level of wages people have to accept in return for selling their labour power. At a time when capitalism was expanding following the War this was perfectly acceptable for capital, it helped to reduce social tension, and make the system more secure. But the current attacks on living standards, the movement to increasingly temporary work contracts, and the attempts to reduce pensions and increase the length of the working life (which goes hand in hand with already increased intensity of work) shows this period is coming to an end as western capital is massively uncompetitive compared to capital in Asia and Eastern Europe.

Within that context there are striking parallels with some of the above instances of workers or peasants being dispossessed. Consumer capitalism has always relied on people wanting more consumer goods, and planned obsolescence was part of that. From the inception of the mass production of consumer goods at the beginning of the last century consumer credit went hand in hand with fuelling that demand. It was what fuelled the massive boom of the 1920’s, which made the bust of the 1930’s that much the greater. But until recently their were limits on the amount of consumer credit that people could take on. Until a decade or so ago if you wanted to buy a house the Building Society would only lend twice your annual income, and you had to provide at least 10% deposit. Now, Building Societies will lend anything up to six times income, and often with no deposit. Not surprisingly, this has increased demand for houses pushing prices up enormously and making them unaffordable for many first time buyers. Now, to get round this parents are being encouraged to go into debt, and thereby give up the security they had in their own home, in order to provide financing to their children to buy overpriced housing. In addition people both in the UK and US (its not so true in Europe) are being encouraged to give up the security of owning their own home, in order to borrow money to buy the latest consumer goods (which if they waited a year would be available at a quarter of the price anyway). Every other advert on the telly is to encourage people (whether you have CCJ’s, are a previous bankrupt, own your own business etc. etc. in other words all the people who should not be borrowing money at ridiculously usurious rates of interest) to solve their current debt problems by going into even more debt for the rest of their lives – either that or they are adverts promising you money for nothing from a law suit if you slip on a wet floor.

It has all the hallmarks of the way Pharaoh disposed the Egyptians and Hebrews, and the way the French peasants lost their lands. People are being encouraged to go into more and more debt to buy more and more things they really don’t need, and which would be available at a fraction of the cost if they waited a few months to buy them, and in the process they are being dispossessed of the small amount of wealth and security that workers had won since the second world war. Once again they are being fooled into giving up what they had gained, and of course that is exactly what capital requires when it wants to screw people to work even harder for less money, and to work until they drop to pay up the lifetime of debt they have accumulated.

But capitalism digs its own grave. When the crunch comes that dispossession will be all the more keenly felt, and all the more reason to dispossess, the dispossessors.