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Title: Forward! Author: Freedom Press (London) Date: November, 1887 Language: en Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 2, No. 14, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=2995, retrieved on April 12, 2020.
After the summer's apparent listlessness and inaction, the Revolutionary
movement has started into fresh life, and, with that awakening, has
entered upon a new phase of development.
The keynote of the new departure was struck last month by the unemployed
of Norwich in the little placard, written and posted by unknown hands,
which so seriously alarmed the local authorities that they swore in 200
special constables. "NOTICE TO ALL CONCERNED: The unemployed do not
intend to starve any longer. If employment is not found for them, they
will soon make some."
As the result of the Government house-to-house inquiries at the close of
the slack season last winter, it appears that among 29,451 men 8008 were
out of work. At the beginning of September there were from 400 to 600
men, women and children utterly homeless, sitting night after night in
and near Trafalgar Square--criminals in the eye of the English law, in
that they were vagrants wandering about with no visible means of
subsistence. From the statistics collected by the S.D.F. and the Pall
Mall Gazette last year, it appears only too certain that at least
600,000 able-bodied men and women were out of work in London before the
frost set in this October, and that calculation leaves unheeded the
hundreds of thousands slowly starving on wages inadequate to maintain
healthy life in a human being.
Yet this mass of misery is nothing new, nothing unusual. The distress is
at present merely normal, say the committee of superior persons gathered
in the Lord Mayor's comfortable parlor. But if the distress is the old,
old story, the attitude of the sufferers is changed. What is new is the
rising determination to suffer no longer.
Last winter the unemployed were so many isolated units, each man and
woman tramping wearily and hopelessly from one property-monopolist to
another, imploring for leave to work,--meekly accepting any odd job
which kept him or her hanging, as it were, upon a single hair above the
pit of starvation. With the exception of such spasmodic outbursts as the
window-breaking in London and the Norwich riot, the people of late years
have made no protest against the inhumanity of those men who appropriate
to themselves the wealth of society, and live in luxury and ease on the
labor of others, whilst masses of their fellows are starving. The only
conscious and definite revolt came from small knots of
Socialists--impracticable visionaries even in the eyes of their
fellow-workmen.
Suddenly the scene is changed. The people are no longer tramping, each
helpless and alone, entreating work as a boon. They are boldly meeting
together and demanding work as a right. They have made common cause, and
withstood and defeated like men the attempts of the police--the hired
guardians of property-monopolists--to drive them, their sufferings and
their wrongs, out of sight. And they have done this at the bidding of no
leaders, in obedience to the rules of no organization. Their action is
the spontaneous outgrowth of the pressure of social needs and the
ferment of ideas among the masses themselves.
The movement is small as yet, and formless, but nevertheless it is the
beginning of the end. For the first time since middle-class Radicals
threw dust in the eyes of the English people, and turned the revolt of
the workers against capitalist and landlord tyranny into an agitation
for the extension of the franchise, the inhabitants of London have
swarmed unbidden and unsummoned into its streets and squares and parks
to discuss, not a political, but a social grievance, and successfully
asserted their right to do so.
At last the people seem to have lost all faith in patiently waiting for
better days on earth to grow out of the "enlightened self-interest" of
their masters, as they have lost all hope of the off-chance of better
days in heaven And the impulse is forming and growing in them to seek
better days here and now by their own initiative, by the common action
of those men who are equals and brothers in toil and misfortune. In the
development of that impulse lies the salvation of society.
There is only one effectual relief for the suffering of the unemployed
and ill-employed alike. To employ themselves; to substitute for the
wage-system free and self-organized cooperation among the workers, for
the direct supply of the needs of all.
Is it mockery when, instead of Government relief works, we Anarchist
Socialists preach such a remedy to starving men, who have nothing to
work with, and no food or shelter whilst they work? No. To advise
desperate men to wring temporary scraps of relief from the terrors of
their oppressors--that is the mockery; for it puts into the hands of
those oppressors the means to retain their monopoly of wealth and power
by ineffectual concessions, and so to prolong the misery they cause.
The unemployed cannot employ themselves. Why? Because all they need for
their work--food, clothes, shelter, tools, machinery workshops,
factories, land--are monopolized by individuals, who will not let these
things be used unless they can make a profit out of the labor of those
who use them. The first thing, then, that the unemployed, and those
whose lives are stripped of all joy by excessive work and miserable pay;
and all who feel the wrongs of their fellows as their own, have to do,
is to put an end once and for all to this monstrous monopoly of
property. To lay hands directly on those stores of wealth which have
been created by the workers, and from which all who work have a just
claim to supply their needs.
The monopolists will resist? Then let them. The fight must be
fought--and won; for it is the price of human development. We cannot
shirk it and be men. And for those who fall in the struggle, it is a
happier fate than slow starvation in a rat-hole, or to be chevied by the
police from one door-step to another.
Then, when existing wealth and the laud are free and common to all,
self-employment will no longer seem a mockery to the workers, and every
able-bodied man or woman who is unemployed will be so because he or she
is a thief, a lazy vagabond who chooses to live idly on other people's
labor.