Fascism is merely the most recent and most virulent outburst of the anti-democratic virus which was inherent in industrial capitalism from the start. Indeed, the antagonism of such an economy to all forms of popular government was already emphasised by the classics. That antagonism was acute during the first century of the Industrial Revolution; subsequently it was latent for a few decades, giving rise to a false sense of security among democrats but only to develop into an all-pervading world-wide tendency in our days. For fascism is no more than the most recent form of the recurrent attack of capitalism to popular forms of government. The ruling classes had good reason to fear the establishment of popular government. They naturally opposed a development, which would eventually lead to an attack on the property system from which they benefited. In Lord Macaulay's words, the middle and the upper classes were convinced that they “never can without absolute danger entrust the superior government of this country to any class which would, to a moral certainty, commit great and systematic inroads on the security of property.” This was to acknowledge the fact that to the most numerous strata of society, viz., the working classes, democratic institutions offered a ready access to power, and thereby an occasion for the destruction of a property system of which they were the victims.
The various phases of this long struggle between capitalism and democracy can be hardly understood without taking account of its institutional background. Liberal capitalism had a two-fold effect on the development of popular forces: On the one hand, it urged these forces on to bigger and bigger efforts, in their endeavour to stave off the dangers involved in the market mechanism; on the other, it furnished new arguments to the ruling classes to help them to stem the democratic tide. On the one hand the working class attempted to protect itself against the disastrous effects of the market mechanism upon their lives, and for that reason pressed for political and industrial power, while on the other hand capitalists pointed to that self-same mechanism as a proof of the dangers of popular influences in politics. The political opposition of the property owners to the extension of the franchise was reinforced by the economic argument. The details of this double action of the market mechanism on the development of popular government are significant: market mechanism, modern capitalism could be established only after the customary or legal security of employment and land tenure had been abolished and replaced by the device of a free competitive market in regard to labour and land. Such an institutional mishandling of the elements of human existence, man and his natural environment, could not fail to call forth protective interventions on the part of society as a whole. They usually took the form of factory laws, social insurance, municipal socialism, trade union activities and practices. They were socially necessary in order to prevent the destruction of the human substance through the blind action of the automatism of the market, though from the strictly economic point of view that mechanism often reacted unfavourably to the intervention. Hypothetically, these bad economic effects of isolated interventions could be avoided through more comprehensive interventions, i.e. a deliberate and planned regulation of markets.
However, such a development, if achieved under the control of the working class, would have been of utmost danger to the privileges of property. Owners would have found themselves deprived of even the semblance of social usefulness and have become ripe for abolishment.
At this point, the market mechanism served as protection to the owners. Isolated interventions, though vital to the survival of society, tended to impair the mechanism of the market. Yet, at the mere hint of a more comprehensive or planned intervention, the market panicked and there was imminent danger of a complete stoppage of the productive apparatus. A ‘crisis of confidence’ intervened and the political forces responsible for the messes were promptly made to disappear from the scene. The performance was unfailingly a success. In vain did the popular parties attempt to exercise moderation and discipline: in the nature of things, their assurances carried no conviction. The mere possibility of their disregarding the sanctity of titles to property in an emergency, would threw security markets into a panic and governments out of office. Any comprehensive and planned reform of the capitalist system at the hands of the working class was therefore impossible, as long as the market mechanism and its regime of panic ruled the day.
Historically, three phases must be distinguished: The forcible setting up of a competitive national labour market and the refusal of the vote to the people; the period of false security, lasting a few decades; the crisis of democracy and the fascist attack on the political and industrial rights of the working class.
The first period was introduced by the warnings of the classics who insisted on the incompatibility of the new economy and the democratic institutions. After the enactment of the Poor Law Reform the struggle against Chartism dominated the scene. Not before another half century had elapsed after the introduction of a free labour market was the vote – most reluctantly – granted to the workers in this country.
During the second, short, period – from the introduction of universal suffrage to the outbreak of the Great War – capitalism and democracy seemed to flourish side by side. The illusion of harmony was the result of transitory factors, such as the enormous expansion of markets, the sharing of trade unions and labour parties of the benefits of the advance, as well as to the false impression created by the prosperous American scene.
The third period, that of crisis, was introduced by the Great War. Mass unemployment, insecurity of tenure for the producers, and irrational distribution of incomes had reached an unbearable pitch. The system had broken down and its radical reform could no longer be put off. In a number of countries the dilemma of a democracy versus capitalism emerged in the most acute form. The working class was constitutionally unfitted to carry out the reform on the basis of continuity of titles to property; yet it was unprepared to perform it under disregard of that continuity. Fascism was the alternative. The property owners, usually in alliance with the lower middle class, now found themselves able to carry out the reform by revolutionary methods, after having utterly and completely destroyed all democratic institutions while maintaining the continuity of their titles to property, and thereby their ruling position in society.
However, this short run ‘solution’ of the crisis was bought at the price of a degenerative process in industrial society. Once the market mechanism has been replaced by a system of regulated markets, an indefinite process of reform and reconstruction has become possible.
That most sensitive defence of capitalist property, the free market, has fallen. There is now nothing apart from brute force to prevent the abolishment of the privileges of the property owning classes, if only a democratic movement is in being. That is why every vestige of democracy must be eliminated under a fascist economy. But in order to prevent the re-emergence of any democratic nucleus in society, the individual has to be made incapable of functioning spontaneously as a responsible unit and the unity of mankind must be negated. The fascist virus must be allowed to complete its work.
Anti-fascism is grounded on the conviction that mankind will never allow itself to be destroyed by that virus. But once the poison fails to be totally effective, it must prove entirely ineffective. Post-fascist capitalism cannot hold out against democracy and the advance towards socialism.
About the turn of the century, some imaginative writers indulged in what were felt to be gloomy forebodings in regard to the future of our civilisation. Their prophecies centred in the fate of the working people which would be enslaved, and deprived of the attributes of common human equality. H. G. Wells's inverted utopias were haunted by the spectre of a labouring population reduced to a sub-human level, and in Jack London's awful visions of the people crushed under the iron heel of big business the crudities of physical torture were combined with abominations of psychological emasculation. A great religious mind had developed the same theme before. Dostoevsky, in a small masterpiece, argued that the demand for an “impossible freedom” of the people might be deflected by spiritual despotism into a condition of permanent immaturity gleefully accepted by the masses.1
To the contemporaries such predictions seemed fantastic to the point of political irrelevance. To-day we know better. We have come to organise in them the authentic features of that most ghastly social disease of our age, fascism. These were merely poetic anticipations of a cultural disaster.
What we may not realise, is the significant fact that, mostly unknown to these writers themselves, their prophecies were merely embroidering on a pattern of thought current a century before, i.e. at the time of the Industrial Revolution. These ideas universally accepted by contemporaries, later on fell in oblivion.
The point is of more than historical interest, indeed, it is a short cut to the understanding of fascism itself. The fascist development of our days is, in effect, a recrudescence of the old hostility of capitalism to popular government. Their incompatibility was recognised by capitalists and employers from the first. To the property owning classes it appeared as self-evident that under the factory system the common people could not be allowed to share in political control. Thus from the start the threat of slavery threw its shadow over the destiny of industrial society. True, by a remarkable lapse of the collective memory, the consciousness of the danger faded away during the last quarter of the century. Popular government was then widely introduced and it seemed safe up to the onslaught against its very foundations witnessed by our generation.
We propose to inquire more closely into these past trends of thought. What moved enlightened minds firmly to believe that capitalism does not admit of popular democracy? And what induced, later on, that false sense of security, under the sway of which universal suffrage seemed to harmonise so well with a flourishing market-economy only to be destroyed in great and important countries by a virulent anti-democratic outbreak in our day? The answer might provide us with a clue how to make industrial civilisation immune at last against the fascist virus.
Edmund Burke was the first among modern statesmen to be fascinated by the philosophy of the market. He was quick to discover in it still another argument in favour of his innate conservatism. His politics were anti-democratic also by economic conviction. Briefed by commercial corporations of Liverpool and Manchester he held the laws of the market to be the laws of God. Interference with the market was an unnatural act that would work its own defeat. Compulsory equalisation of incomes would merely produce misery, want, wretchedness and beggary; consequently, there should be allowed no increase in the number of the voters in England. No wonder that the paper currencies of the New England colonies tended to be worthless, having been issued by popular governments. Of Connecticut and Rhode Island he wrote with horror: “By the charters to these colonies the exorbitant power was given in the proprietary governments to single men, was here vested, and I apprehend much more dangerously, in the whole body of the people. It is to all purpose a mere democracy”.2 Since poverty of the masses was a law of nature, the people should be denied the deceptive privilege of applying ruinous remedies to their economic ills.
Even devoted friends of the labouring classes believed that the popular vote would destroy the new economy and all its achievements. A Robert Owen opposed the extension of the franchise to the masses. A Godwin declared himself an enemy of revolution. In principle, they agreed with Malthus and Ricardo that not politics but education alone could meet the needs of the situation. Philanthropists and economists differed only in the kind of education they wished to see applied. Godwin and Owen urged the claims of perfectibility, and might have wished to raise the labouring people morally and intellectually above the level of the upper classes of society; Malthus and Ricardo argued the finality of the laws of poverty and population, and wished to see them indelibly impressed even on the humblest mind. For nothing short of a rationally gained certainty of their being doomed to toil in misery would ever make the poor submit willingly to their fate. The Rev. Malthus personally instructed newly wed couples in the economics of population. “The working classes feel,” wrote Harriet Martineau in all sincerity, “that while they are at work they ought to be comfortable; and they will not acquiesce while they see that those who work less are more comfortable, and they are not told why”. She continued: “This is what remains for us to do: to find out why, and to make everybody understand it.”3 She personally undertook to teach the poor by means of her famous Illustrations to political economy. Invariably, the moral of her stories was that while the abolishment of outdoor relief was a cruel but beneficial measure, the extension of the franchise would be both dangerous and futile… Jeremy Bentham, the master mind of the Age of Reform, regarded subjections as the natural state of man, and inequality as his natural condition. Apart from a handful of Jacobins and Democrats, who, incidentally, showed a marked disregard of economics, no one stood for the principles of popular government in this country. France had had a political revolution; England's revolution had been in the industrial field. And it was precisely this economic revolution which banned any step toward the political enfranchisement of the common people.
The practical principles of market-economy and of popular government were published simultaneously. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year in which Major Cartwright published his democratic credo of manhood suffrage (1776).4 Although no one connected these events at the time, by the end of the century their conflicting implications began to dominate political discussion. Economists were agreed that the whip of hunger was needed to make the wage system workable and to swig the mechanism of a competitive labour market. A simple reference to the irrefragable rules of the market sufficed to justify the condition that Major Cartwright's Democrats, as well as, later on, the Chartists were a public danger. Had not Malthus proved with mathematical precision that only the self-restraint of the poor could make avoidable such harsh checks on the growth of the population as were periodically inflicted through war, pestilence and famine? Did it not follow that poor-relief was a curse in disguise, since it only made the number of poor redundant, and thus condemned them to a cruel death? Did we not have the world of David Ricardo for it that wages could never rise above the bare subsistence level, and that any attempt to raise them higher must result in general destitution? And had not Arthur Young, himself only shortly before an open sympathiser of the French Revolution,5 been compelled to concede that riots involved a more dangerous threat than even the failure of resources? Only if the poor bore their lot patiently, would they be safe from starvation, only if they resigned themselves to their misery could they survive at all. They must, therefore, be kept away from the levers of government, which they would otherwise try to use to wreck the property system on which the community, including themselves, depended for their subsistence. The answer of the students of the new economy to the demand for universal suffrage was an irreducible negative. The incompatibility of democracy and capitalism had been established as an axiom.
In the Chartist decade theory was put into practice. Never in all her history had a larger number approached the rulers of this country in the name of a more fervently held creed than those millions of the lower ranks whose signatures were affixed to the ridiculed rolls of parchment. Their petitions were in vain. Robert Peel called the demand for extension of the vote to the people ‘nothing more nor less than the impeachment of the Constitution of the country’. In this he was right, for had they been invested with the vote, the Chartist millions would undoubtedly have used it to annihilate the economic order that was torturing them.
Lord John Russell insisted on the danger of combining the economic system founded on private property with political democracy.
As our society is very complicated – he said – and property is very unequally divided, it might come that a parliament issued from universal suffrage might destroy and shake those institutions (namely, property [K. Polanyi]) which are often of the utmost value in holding society together.
Lord Macaulay summed up clearer than anybody else the reason why capitalism was thought to be incompatible with popular government. Rejecting the Chartist petition, he said:
I conceive that civilisation rests on the security of property […] This principle follows: that we never can without absolute danger, entrust the superior government of this country to any class which would, to a moral certainty, commit great and systemic inroads on the security of property.6
If Burke referred to Connecticut and Rhode Island as ‘mere democracies’, because they had introduced popular forms of government, Lord Macaulay, levelled the charge of mob-rule against the whole of the United States of America. His much quoted letter to the Hon. H. E. Randall of New York repays careful perusal. Although some of his forecasts were to be strikingly falsified, his basic argument came closer to the inherent logic of fascism, than anything written before or after:
You are surprised to learn – he wrote – that I have not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson, and I am surprised at your surprise. […] I have long been convinced that institutionalism purely democratic must sooner or later destroy liberty or civilisation, or both […] In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here and sometimes a little rioting. But it matters little for here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select, of an educated class, of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly, yet gently, restrained. The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again; work is plentiful, wages rise and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness […] It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government and has the rich, which are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy […] As I said before, when society has entered on this downward progress, either civilisation or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own institutions […] Thinking this, of course, I cannot reckon Jefferson among the benefactors of mankind.7
Macaulay's assumptions, in 1857, were almost identical with those of Burke, in 1757. The laws of market economy prohibit any intervention in economic life in the part of the working people. Unemployment and destitution, which must periodically occur, are overcome by a self-acting mechanism as long as the poor are prevented from interfering with the system. Yet if they have the power to meddle, they will do so. That's why in a country with universal suffrage, in the long run, civilisation can be rescued only by a dictatorship. In modern terms: Fascism alone can save capitalism, once the fatal mistake has been committed of enfranchising the working people.
It is easy to get used to the sound of words, and, eventually, forget their meaning. A term the significance of which seems to have been lost on account of its frequent use is that of commodity as applied to human labour. Actually, this usage, which is general today, connotes a state of affairs which has come into being as the result of a unique development.
The normal meaning of commodity is that of goods produced for sale; the distribution of which is therefore controlled by the market, i.e. by supply and demand interacting with price. To say that human labour is a commodity is to assume that it is possible to deal with it as if it were produced for sale, as if its supply depended upon price, as if in the natural course of things human beings were engendered in response to the urge of making profits.
Actually, nothing of the kind is the case. What we call labour has not the slightest resemblance to a commodity. It is simply an aspect of man's life, which is neither detachable from him, nor capable of being hoarded, or transported, or manufactured, or consumed. To be able to speak of its sale, a device must be used: a contract for services must be construed and inferred that the fulfilment of the contract involved the transfer of the invisible and immaterial commodity labour from the seller to the buyer. It is only by means of such a construction that the term commodity can be made to apply to human labour.
However, legal fictions are mere instruments of thought which by themselves do not affect the actual world. The invidious element which changed the course of civilisation lay in the human implications of that fiction.
For if labour is to be handled as a commodity then, the vast majority of human society, or rather of its adult males, must be at the disposal of the market on which that fictitious commodity is being bartered.
Now, nothing could be more contrary to the traditional organisation of human society than the existence of such a market. We do not mean the occasional hiring of some type of labour, or the fact that some individuals earn their living by selling their labour. This is frequently the case in societies of almost any type, while for the rest economic life is embedded in social relations. It is regulated by a variety of motives none of which bears more than a faint resemblance to profit or gain.
The origins of the labour market proper go back to the end of the eighteenth century. Until then the sixteenth-century organization of labour was prevalent with its public regulation of all relevant aspects of labour. Wages were assessed by the authorities, the term of contract was fixed in not less than one year, hours and other conditions of work were set out by law. Although the Statute of Artificers (1563) protected the labourer, craftsman, ‘manufacturer’, its main purpose was, of course, to provide agricultural workers for the landlord and set an upper limit to wages. Wage earners had no occasion to higgle and haggle over pay. The unemployed were taken care of by the poor law and the poor house, which offered only a miserably shelter, yet was not meant to be punitive; the apprenticeship classes of the Statute limited the supply of labour; the Act of Settlement made the labourer practically a serf of the landlord but at least ensured his right to relief in his home parish. This established security of employment, of income, of standards. As long as the system was in being, no labour market was possible.
The pressure for the establishment of such a market came from those who had first conceived of the new social mechanism. Lord Mansfield proclaimed from the Bench, in 1767, that labour was a commodity like any other. Burke preconized the laws of commerce as the laws of God, only was consistent in protesting against any interference with market wages. Since the just price of the Middle-Ages was the result of such interference, it was unjust when applied to labour. The employer, he said, had a right to expect a profit when employing labour, consequently the assessment of wages would amount to an unconstitutional ‘tax’ on the employer, for it deprived him of something that was his by natural right.
The scientist's conclusions were if anything even harsher. Joseph Townsend invented the famous paradigm of the goats and the dogs. The scene was set on the lonely and uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez, in the Pacific Ocean. According to a current story, privateers had kept goats on there who multiplied at a great rate, providing the pirates with food on their occasional visits. The Spanish government, bent to destroy the goats, landed a bitch and a dog. These also multiplied being richly provided with food, in the shape of roaming herds of goats. In the course of time, the goats were decimated by the dogs, and the dogs found their supply of food restricted. Only a definite number of the fastest and sturdiest of both species survived. Hunger, Townsend proclaimed, was the magistrate that kept the balance even. No other authority was needed. This, he argued, was the way of forcing the poor to work without legal compulsion. To this end it sufficed to abolish the Poor Laws which prevented the poor from starving, and the labour market would then see to it that there should be no unemployment. All that was required was the destruction of the traditional organisation of society with its security from starvation.8
This tremendous innovation did not prevail without meeting with serious obstruction. The countryside was deeply steeped in tradition. To deprive the settled folk of status meant to destroy the fabric of the rural community. And this at the time when the fires of the French Revolution were lighting up the political horizon and the demand for home-grown food made landowners embark on wholesale enclosures. This left villagers without the use of the pasture, sometimes even without a cottage to live in. At the same time demand for ‘manufacturers’ in the towns was raising wages above the level the rural employers were able to pay permanently. Depopulation of the countryside threatened to impinge on the reserves of agricultural labour vital to husbandry in Spring and Autumn, that is, the times of peak demand. All this was subversive of the authority of squire and parson, a danger to the largest industry of the country, agriculture, in short an uprooting of the political and economic foundations of rural society. The present was not governed by the future but by the past. Not the needs of yet unborn industrial civilisation, but the known requirements of a hereditary system fashioned the course of development. In vain did the machine cry out for ‘hands’ and demand a transformation of the common people into soldiers of their ‘labour’. The owners of land and the agricultural employers refused to give way. Instead, they erected a barrier to the spread of market-institutions, and above all to the most formidable of them, the labour market. This was the significance of the famous ‘allowance system’, commonly associated with Speenhamland.
The coming of Speenhamland was unspectacular, but its ending was all the more dramatic. Its introduction dates from 1795, when family allowances based on a sliding scale were first recommended by a group of English magistrates little suspecting the impact of this initiative; it was abolished in 1834, by one of the most deliberate and ruthless acts of social legislation ever put on the Statute book.
The circumstances which surrounded the passing and enforcement of this Act – the notorious Poor Law Reform – evoked the anti-democratic spirit which was to inform all specifically capitalistic policies during the nineteenth century.
Speenhamland was a compromise between the semblance of a market mechanism and the ‘right to live’. The recommendations of the magistrates of Berkshire ran as follows:
When the Gallon Loaf of Second Flour, Weighing 8lb 11oz shall cost 1s.: then every poor and industrious man shall have for his own support 3s. weekly, either produced by his own or his family's labour, or an allowance from the poor rates, and for the support of his wife and every other of his family, 1s. 6d. When the Gallon Loaf shall cost 1s. 4d. Then every poor and industrious man shall have 4s. weekly for his own, and 1s. and 10d. for the support of every other of his family. And so in proportion, as the price of bread rise or falls (that is to say) 3d. to the man, and 1d. to every other of the family, on every 1d. which the loaf rise above 1s.9
Labourers would be ‘selling’ their labour on the market, and higgle and haggle for wages, but actually they would be assured of a minimum income which would not cure them from want but prevent them from starving. The amount of the dole was dependent upon the price of bread and supplemented by separate allowances for the wife and every child, allowances also depending for the amount on the bread price; if the ‘wage’ paid by the employer was less than the dole plus allowances the labourer would apply to the local vestry administering the poor law and the wages would be supplemented from the rates so as to meet the required scale of family income. From the employer's point of view this meant that if he chose to pay wages lower than those set by the scale, then he was free to do so and the wage he paid would be supplemented from the rates. From the point of view of the Poor Law authorities, the system could be regarded as easing the burden of the maintenance of the poor by allowing a dole to be paid in wages. Finally, from the point of view of a capitalist system, formally, it permitted the determining of wages through a labour market, while actually removing the social cutting edge of that mechanism.
But a labour market that does not threaten the unemployed with the sanction of hunger, is a useless organ under capitalism. While Speenhamland was almost universally acclaimed in the beginning, its long run effects were horrible beyond words. In the short run it appeared as a method which satisfied everybody without cost to anybody. The employer could pay as low wages as he liked, the labourer was under no compulsion to exert himself, parents were free of the responsibility for their offspring, the offspring were free of authority of their parents, young people could marry without care for the future, and if they chose not to marry, their bastards were no worse off for it, the squire and the parson's sway over the village was never more complete. Peace and quiet reigned in the countryside. No wonder that it was popular. In the long run labouring populations of districts of England, whether agricultural or manufacturing, were being artificially pauperised. There was no bottom in wages. Even worse, farmers were reluctant to employ such persons who were not on the rates. The effects of economic laws were sharpened by these psychologies; once a pauper, always a pauper was a true saying. Inside of a generation the self-respecting cottagers and labourers were turning loafers and malingerers; a veritable cultural catastrophe engulfed their ancestral civilisation; they resembled more detribalised natives of a modern colonial area dispossessed by hut taxes and debased by gambling and prostitution than the inheritors of an ancient culture. For the decencies of settled life wore off quickly in the promiscuity of the poorhouse, where a man could feel all the more safe the lower he had sunk in the estimation of his fellows. The total effect was one of utter demoralisation. The poor rate had become the public spoil… To obtain their share the brutal bullied the administrators, the profligate exhibited their bastards which must be fed, the idle folded their arms and waited till they got it; ignorant boys and girls married upon it; poachers, thieves and prostitutes exhorted it by intimidation; country justices lavished it for popularity, and Guardians for convenience… Eventually, together with the rising rates the productivity of labour itself deteriorated, thus sapping the strength of this crazy system… Speenhamland meant docile labour and a low level of wages, all round, thus more than compensating the rate payer for his plight. But no capitalist system could prosper on pauper labour. After 1815, high prices and extensive farming came to an end, and were replaced by low prices and a less wasteful use of labourers.
The pauper who pretended to do his work merely to be entitled to benefits proved a too expensive worker even at very low wages. Eventually, the gliding scale itself was affected and the bread allowance was reduced. By the end of the 1820s the condition of the agricultural labourer in large parts of the countryside had deteriorated further. No wonder that the urban workers could not maintain standards in the face of inexhaustible industrial reserve army represented by the ever increasing number of pauperised labourers of the countryside.
The demand for a genuine labour market was now renewed with a hundredfold emphasis.10
Owen's description of his workers. Harriet Martineau. Engels and Manchester. The 1833 Report. (Even though exaggerated).
The impossibility of establishing a self-supporting economic class. The truth of the economic argument i.e. that wages would rise…
The Poor Law Reformers argued that humanitarianism must go. Inverted humanitarians. Figures and Facts.
The re-education argument. Abolish the right to live, without establishing the right to work. Consequently compelling the labourer to accept any kind of wages, or voluntarily apply for admission to the Poor House transformed into a workhouse. (Not sent to the workhouse, but admitted to it). Less eligibility principle. At the same time, rationalisation of administration, purification from corruption, creating moral and hygienic standards.
This type of re-education of the masses involved something akin to psychological torture. Although of a mild kind, it was nevertheless meant to create unbearable conditions, such as would be preferred only to rank starvation, and not even that unconditionally. Often the genteel poor preferred starvation.
Such re-education involved dictatorial methods. One of the assumptions was: final inferiority of the people. They are altogether subhuman. They are ignorant and deserve to be so. They are powerless and rightly so. Contempt, in institutionalised forms, was the only adequate response. It might have been often deserved – that indeed is our point. But the inhuman situation had to be retained whether deserved or not… The disfranchisement of the pauper followed from this lack of civil status… From here derived the idea that civil institutions should be shaped in such a way as to educate the poor. Education would morally endanger him if it were gratuitous etc. etc.
The political disfranchisement followed from this also as a political necessity. How could the tortured be put by their torturers in power, without danger of their removing their torturers? But that would have been the end of the labour market.
Hardly any middle class Mitläufer [follower] joined the Chartists.
The anti-working class feeling now hardened into a metaphysical conviction of the moral superiority of the owning classes over the propertyless classes and the corresponding human inferiority of the latter as compared with the former.11