The Storytellers One by Roger Mansfield (Schofield & Sims Ltd, Huddersfield 1971)

 

Maybe he wasn’t joking, Ernie thought. Bob was clever with hands and brain, the stop-gap of the shop with micrometer and centre-lathe, a toolmaker who could turn off a candlestick or fag-lighter as soon as look at you. ‘Do you mean it about a .303?’

Bob pulled into a lay-by and got out. ‘Keep clear of the headlights,’ he said, ‘but catch this.’ Ernie caught it, pushed forward the safety catch, the magazine resting in the net of his fingers. ‘God Almighty! Anything up the spout?’

‘I’ve a clip in my pocket. Strictly for rabbits’—Bob smiled, taking it back.

‘A waste,’ Ernie said. ‘The twelve-bore would do. Mixer-matosis has killed ’em all off, anyway.’

They drove on. ‘Had it since I left the army,’ Bob told him. ‘The stores was in a chronic state in Germany at the end of the war. Found myself with two, so kept one. I have a pot-shot with it now and again. I enjoy hunting—for a bit of recreation.’

Ernie laughed, wildly and uncontrolled, jerking excited shouts into the air as if trying to throw something out of his mouth, holding his stomach to stop himself doubling up, wearing down the shock of what a free-lance .303 meant. He put his arm around Bob’s shoulder by way of congratulation: ‘You’d better not let many people know about it, or the coppers’ll get on to you.'

‘Don’t worry. If ever they search, it’s a souvenir. I’d get rid of the bolt, and turn another off on the lathe when I needed it.’ ‘Marvellous,’ Ernie said. ‘A .303! Just the thing to have in case of a revolution. I hope I can get my hands on one when the trouble starts.’

Bob was sardonic: ‘You and your revolution! There wain’t be one in our lifetimes, I can tell you that.’ Ernie had talked revolution to him for months, had argued with fiery puritanical force, guiding Bob’s opinion from voting Labour to a head-nodding acceptance of rough and ready Communism. ‘I can’t see why you think there’ll be a revolution though.’

‘I’ve told you though,' Ernie said loudly. 'There’s got to be something. I feel it. We work in a factory, don’t we? Well, we’re the backbone of the country, but you see, Bob, there’s too many people on our backs. And it’s about time they was slung off. The last strike we had a bloke in a pub said to me: ‘Why are you fellows allus on strike?’ And I said to him: ‘What sort o’ work do you do ?’ And he said: ‘I’m a travelling salesman.’ So I said, ready to smash 'im: 'Well, the reason I come out on strike is because 1 want to get bastards like yo’ off my back.’ That shut ’im up. He just crawled back into his sherry.’

(From 'The Other John Peel' by Alan Sillitoe.)

The People of the Abyss by Jack London (Journeymen Press 1903)

These people who try to help!  Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures.  In the nature of things they cannot but be failures.  They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.  They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.  They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants.  They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers.  They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs.  The very money they dribble out in their child’s schemes has been wrung from the poor.  They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.  Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along?  This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of ninepence.  She is being robbed.  Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.  They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day.

And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie.  They do not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.  And the lie they preach is “thrift.”  An instant will demonstrate it.  In overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.  To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income—in other words, to live on less.  This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living.  In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard.  And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry.  And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure.

January Socialist Standard 2008: Democracy Gets A Re-tread

January 2008 Socialist Standard

Editorial

Why the Green Party is wrong

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Why the minus 16.3 percent happy face?

Cooking the Books #1 Dreaming of a super cycle

Cooking the Books #2 Bottom line building

Material World Iran in the crosshairs

Greasy Pole Money, Money, Money...

50 Years Ago Upset in Accra: Dr. Nkrumah upsets his friends

Main Articles

Jack London’s The Iron Heel London’s widely read book of this title was published a hundred years ago. But how realistic was it and how much of a socialist was Jack London?

And they call this Democracy? “It’s a truism, but one that needs to be constantly stressed, that capitalism and democracy are ultimately quite incompatible.” (Noam Chomsky).

The nature of human nature The cultural anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said that what cultural anthropologists were really interested in was “the nature of human nature”. So what do they think it is?

“Socialism is Illogical and Irrational” Free-market capitalism, left to its own chaotic and predatory devices would self-destruct in very short order.

The thoughts of Premier Brown (thirty years ago) In 1975 Gordon Brown edited The Red Paper on Scotland, a collection of articles by leftwing Labour activists.

The trouble with gods Those fortunate enough to live in relatively secularized societies should not underestimate global power of religion

What they did to Thomas Hardy The writer Thomas Hardy died, eighty years ago, in January 1928. Here’s what we said at the time.

Simon the Sociobiologist Cartoon strip

Letters, Reviews, Obituary & Meetings

Letters to the Editor: 'Silly Ceremony'

Book Reviews: 'Chew On This' by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson; 'All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal' Edited by Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts; 'The Class War Radical History Tour of Notting Hill' by Tom Vague

Obituary: Edmund Grant

Socialist Party Meetings: Birmingham, Central London, Manchester, Norwich, Salisbury & West London

Voice From The Back

Land of the Free; Death in a Harsh Society; Heiress on the Run; Old Age Fears; Promises, Promises; The Price of Gold