Excerpt from Will Socialism Benefit the English People?: Verbatim Report of a Debate Between H. M. Hyndman and Charles Bradlaugh, Held at St. James' Hall on April 17th, 1884

Plause.) That do you say to that, then, for a system of production which is based on falsifying the very goods which the men have to produce? 1 say again it is anarchy, not order, when you use the force of nature to.produce rottenness instead of pure goods. (cheers) Again, what do we see around us to-day? A universal crisis in every industrial centre. There are men out of work at Shields, and there are many in the East End of Lon don who are unable to get anything to do, and it is getting worse. That state of things is not confined to this country, but it is all over the world. What is the reason of this great industrial crisis that comes once in every eight or nine or ten years 9 How do you account for it? We have our explanation, and it is this. We say - and remember what is the case to-day - there is wheat piled up in the elevators of Chicago and in New York._ There is food enough in America. Is there no one 111 London who' wants a lost 9 Is there nobody who would give a day's work for some of that wheat in our great industrial centres? Plenty of them; but you cannot bring the two together. There are gluts of commodities such as boots and shoes, and yet there are plenty of people with bare feet who would be glad to do a day's work in order to get them. Consider what this means. It means that you cannot bring the two sources of wealth together, the labor and the goods which have been produced. Thy? Because the class that owns the means of production cannot produce to a profit, which profit the very glut itself prevents. What is the reason, again, of that? It is this - that whereas mankind in the factories or upon the farm, and men'ell through our great industries, are working in social union, exchange is conducted at war; those who take the com modities after they are produced continue to produce more and more in order to undersell one another, and the worker has no command over the market, the result being this great financial crisis, which throws hundreds and thousands into misery day after day. (applause) we say that can only be remedied as the production is social, so the exchange must be social too; that the workers must control the system. Of exchange in the interest of the whole of the community' that it must no longer be conducted for the advantage of a, class; that the competition for gain above, and com petition for bare subsistence-wages below, must fade into a great organisation where both are conducted for the.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.