On the Class Struggle 1919

Kingsley on the Class Struggle: Is It Based on Enslavement of One Class in Society?

In taking up the subject of “the Class Struggle,” at the F. L. P. meeting on Sunday night, E. T. Kingsley observed that the very term implied human slavery. Such a struggle could not exist without a class of oppressed and a class of oppressors. All written history was the history of a civilization based on slavery; and they were justified in assuming that its original form, chattel slavery, existed many, many thousands of years prior to any written record. Slavery had been the corner stone of civilization down to the present time.

There had been many rebellions of slaves against their masters in pre-Christian times; but never any idea of wiping out one for all the system of slavery under which they suffered. Thus Spartacus and his band had for years waged a terrific war against the master class; yet there was nothing in that rising which bore the ear-marks of a revolution, with the object of wiping out that class entirely. So in the world of today, here and elsewhere, there were rebellions against the conditions under which the wage earners lived; but an analysis of the situation would show that the class struggle cannot express itself in any such fight for a mere amelioration of conditions.

The Marxian theory held that all value, as expressed in terms of exchange, had been put into commodities by the hand of human labor alone; their value was determined by the amount of necessary labor power embodied. There was no other basis upon which exchange value could be determined. The law of exchange was not a written law, not an enactment of legislators or governments; yet no power on earth, no combination of either capitalists or workers, could overturn it. For 4,000 years at least, working people had been attempting to do so—now here; now there—in their fights about wages and conditions; yet exchange value had never been altered by one iota.

Labor power was a commodity; bought and sold in the market; and all commodities were subject to the unwritten law of exchange. Efforts made to raise or sustain the rate of wages were along the lines of a trust; i.e., a combination of persons who have agreed to control prices in the market. The Standard Oil trust was an example. All went well till one or other of the combined concerns, through loss of trade, gave way and cut the price; then the trust went to pieces. It could not stand the pressure of an adverse market. The Standard Oil people never attempted that again, but organized the Standard Oil Company and crushed all competitors by merciless underselling. That was the only way.

A labor-power trust was equally futile. An increase of wages was always made up by a rise in prices. “The master class never lost a five-cent piece by any advance of wages it ever granted.” (Applause.) The iron law of exchange could not be violated by either masters or slaves; the market would always right itself. “It is impossible to get a copper away from them, as long as they are masters and the rest of us are slaves.”

It was absurd to think that John D. Rockefeller could put up the price of oil at pleasure. Orders would fall off, and the price would be shaded down to the correct point. The loss of trade would indicate that other things were being resorted to in place of oil. The Standard Oil Co., no longer tried to get a price that the market did not warrant. Similarly, increasing orders indicated that, the price was below what it ought to be; then it was shaded up, till the normal flow again was reached.

“We can agree on wages below which we will not work; but, unless the circumstances of the market determine that is the correct exchange value, that agreement will be broken.” Either the wage would be paid and taken back again; or the unemployed would be compelled, in spite of all their resolutions, to break that price. “Then the whole shebang falls down, as we have seen it many, many times.”

Many did not understand that there were slaves; that this was the most intensified slavery that the world ever saw. They were more powerless to back it, without overthrowing it altogether, than they ever were. The wage of labor throughout the world was never so low as at this moment, compared with the prices of things in the stores. The reason was that human slavery was more highly developed today; the slaves were skinned closer to the quick now than ever they were before.

There was nothing revolutionary in combines for rebellion against the market; they were an absolute denial of the class struggle. The conflict was between buyers and sellers, between whom no class struggle was possible. So a fight between strikers and scabs was merely a fight between slaves; there was no revolution in that. The price was dictated at all times by the number of jobs compared with the number of slaves.

The class struggle could only be a struggle for the conquest of political powers, so that the rule of the master class should be brought to an end and the earth set free for the workers—the ending once [and] for all of the wage question, the last form of human slavery. The fact of one man working for another was unnatural and positively deadly—to worker and master alike. It implied human slavery and government—somebody to govern and somebody to be governed. The talk about democracy under such conditions was all piffle. “What does government mean except to rob? That’s all it can imply—the edict of the master.”