When Caroline Nelson returned to Europe after years on the West Coast, she explored the continent’s class struggle from her home in Saxkjoling, Lolland, Denmark reporting back to her U.S. comrades. Spending a month in England, I can not find the promised future articles on the situation there. Perhaps a victim of the crisis in Industrial Worker that would see it close shortly after these were published. Danish-born, San Francisco-based wobbly, revolutionary Socialist who became a syndicalist, pioneering feminist and birth control advocate Caroline Nelson (1868–1952) wrote for I.W.W. journals and the revolutionary Socialist Party press like Revolt and International Socialist Review., as well as books and translations. She was married to fellow-revolutionary, the iron worker union activist Carl Rave.

‘Workers in England’ by Caroline Nelson from Industrial Worker. Vol. 5, Nos. 7 & 13. May 8 & June 19, 1913.

Whoever says that the European worker is away ahead of the American worker, must be dreaming. I stayed almost a month in England, have been a month here in Denmark now, and am on the verge of taking a flight over to the “great Socialist country of Germany.” Denmark is also a great socialistic country. Here the party controls eleven cities out of seventy-one. But Socialism here simply means a political party of the craft unions, which plays the role of an opposition party to the Right and Left parties and I have not been able to find any Socialism in the “powerful” socialist press. But it is of England that I am going to speak at this time.

When one arrives in Liverpool they immediately discover that they have entered a new working class world of a lower order than the American. Ragged, dirty young girls and women are seen everywhere, carrying things about or scrubbing steps in front of the doors, including the restaurants and saloons in the downtown portion. One never sees such a sight in America where the women have a much higher standing, from the lowest to the highest, and that holds good even more so in Denmark, where the women have the municipal vote. But the women in America have a thousand times more influence without the vote than they have in this microscopic kingdom of Denmark. I thought this step-scrubbing was a Saturday’s performance in Liverpool, but the next day, Sunday, while the church bells were ringing, thousands of women were kneeling out on the sidewalk scrubbing to earn six cents. That is what the women get an hour in England for that kind of work.

Most of the teamsters were walking beside their wagons, which were loaded in a way to give them no seat. The men and the horses made a queer contrast walking side by side. in the streets, for the men were lean and ill-kept, while the horses usually fat and very well kept, and it was plain that there were strict orders to save the animals as much as possible.

Liverpool was the scene of the big dock strike. Tom Mann held the command so completely for a short time that the post master wrote him a note asking him to let the mail pass through the line of the pickets. Such a thing had never happened in England before, and the parliamentarians have been busy ever since trying to make nets in which to catch the working class so it will not happen again. The Insurance Law is one of them. It is like the woman’s garment in the tale, which clothed and unclothed her at the same time. By it, England’s ruling class not only get control over the existing labor union by gaining access to their books, because they handle insurance funds, but it gives the government an opportunity to help to form unions after their own heart. Finally, it makes pets out of certain organized trades by making them unemployed insured trades. There are seven of these: Building, Construction Work, Shipbuilding, Engineering, Ironfounding, Construction of Vehicles, and Sawmilling. The Board of Trade, which is sort of an industrial commission under the Crown, has the power to extend the unemployed insurance law to other trades or unions, but these seven are picked out for a starter.

The worker pays five cents and the employer pays five cents and the government pays three and one-half cents each a week. The worker can get seven shillings a week for fifteen weeks a year in unemployment pay; and when he is sixty years old, if he has deposited five hundred weeks’ payment, he can get the whole amount back with two per cent interest, minus that which he has drawn out in unemployment. The boss, at the end of each year, can draw one-third out for each worker if he has employed him for forty-five weeks. But if the worker loses his job through his own fault, he gets nothing. If it is proven that he can’t hold his job because he is incompetent, he is sent to an institute or place where he can acquire the necessary skill at the expense of the insurance fund. We therefore see that there is here an inducement for the worker to be good. Woe unto him who gets a bad record, for his whole worklife is open to both the employer and the government. He may as well commit suicide. And that is only the unemployed insurance part; besides it, there is also the regular compulsory insurance for sickness and old age. So that the man in these so-called insured trades are doubly insured, and therefore doubly under the hand of the government. The unemployment act applies only to a little over two million people, while the sick and old age part deals with about fourteen million. But there are so many interesting points in this that I cannot deal with here at this time.

Nothing surprises one so much as the servility of the English worker. This is, no doubt, hereditary in all the old countries, and I am convinced that upon the American working class rests the responsibility of unfolding the real power that may set the rest of the world’s workers the example. I know many will laugh at this, but I think that it will prove to be true, particularly of the whole western country; for there only do we find the real, live spirit; there only do we find a relatively large number of workers who are highly educated, an education which they have chiefly acquired by their own effort. And let me also say that in no place or in no part of the world is it so easy to get the proper knowledge as in the great West. I am not patriotic. At the same time it is well to know the ripest spots of the world so that we may prevent these spots from decaying by too much effervescent effort that makes tremendous spasmodic activities and then falls back because the revolution is not accomplished at a dated time. Dear revolutionary enthusiasts, we have a work before us that is hardly begun, and we must work ourselves into our graves with no reward as far as we are concerned, but for the first time we have now a real revolutionary organization in the I.W.W.

The syndicalists in England would be only too happy if they could talk about an organization there. But at the present time they cannot do so. They dare not, as they are too few in numbers and too weak to offend the trade unions with the attempt of starting a new organization. And the twelve million unorganized workers are too ground down and too ill informed and too religious and patriotic to form any material basis for such an organization. Therefore they have to be satisfied with a League of Education. They have a Syndicalist paper that is printed once a month by Guy Bowman. About twenty thousand a month are sold, chiefly by bundle orders. Bowman is an excellent, enthusiastic man. He is a translator and journalist by trade and gives his time to the work for nothing. Tom Mann, the president of the league, has a large family to support and does not speak for less than thirty shillings and all expenses paid. Thirty shillings is $7.00 or thereabout, so we can understand that it is only well organized workers who can pay him. The day I left London he arrived to give a course of lectures for the Daily Herald. The Daily Herald is a paper that is publicly neither flesh, fish nor fowl, while privately its editors are supposed to stand for syndicalism.

They have a trick in England of telling you that in such and such places you will find highly intelligent workers with revolutionary tendencies. I was asked in London not to judge the workers by those in London; I was asked in Liverpool not to fudge the workers by those in Liverpool. Go to London, said the Liverpoolites. Go to Manchester and the manufacturing towns said the Londoners. I wrote to Tom Mann asking him if the workers in Manchester were really far in advance of the Londoners. He answered me telling that they were about the same.

All through my trip in America I was asked what I thought about syndicalist leagues instead of the so-called dual organization of ours. I could not give a very decided answer then. I can now, and that is that the I.W.W. is an organization embodying the principles of syndicalism, which must express itself in leagues where it is too weak to yet form an organization, except in France where the syndicats mean a different thing. It is therefore the sheerest waste of effort and energy to form Syndicalist Leagues in the United States. Such leagues hinder the very principle of syndicalism which means opposition to craft unionism, for industrial unionism. The English syndicalists are quite willing to admit that they will have to form an organization to carry out their principle.

In the meantime we know so little about the English workers, just as they know very little about us. The syndicalists there are actually under the impression that the syndicalist league, headed by Foster in America, is quite. a powerful thing. And the De Leon people have informed them that the I.W.W.’s don’t amount. to anything, that we are only hoboes. Meanwhile I am glad that we are sawing wood. Everybody has been so busy telling us that we are nobodies until a good many of us are foolish enough to take the suggestion.

I wanted to tell you something definite about the workers of England, but I am so glad to be able to clear up this league business that I can safely put it off to some other article. I can only say that the workers in England receive so low pay on the whole that it is a mystery how they live at all. Prices of provisions are very nearly as high as in the States at that. Good beefsteak, butter and fresh eggs are therefore out of the reach of even the skilled worker’s family. A locomotive driver gets about twelve dollars per week and that is double what most of the other railroad workers receive. Most of England’s workers live in slum conditions, where good Christian charity workers take them in hand from their very birth and shape their minds. They are so law. abiding that they hate England’s revolutionary upper-class women who are willing to fight for their right and don’t mind blowing up a little private property. I went out to Hyde Park one Sunday and got there just in time to see a crowd of workers ready to mob Mrs. Drummond, a suffrage speaker. I talked to a docker) one day and in the midst of our economic conversation he suddenly began to tell me about his soul, which he was much more anxious about than his body.

II.

It is not easy to gain much actual knowledge about the working class of any country in a short time. All one can do with such limited time and means as a worker possesses is to strain every nerve to see and hear as much as possible, to get statistics of wages, cost of living, hours of labor, etc., and also to attend labor meetings and lectures and interview different leaders of different labor creeds. When one has done this one feels, in the language of the scriptures, heavily laden. And how to extract from this, short articles for the “Worker,” is a problem that I fear I cannot solve with very much satisfaction.

If I should tell the absolute truth of my observation in the labor world since I left the Pacific Coast, according to my understanding, I should have all the labor leaders, and that includes some of those inside our own organization, down on my neck. Because each leader acts very much like a Moses who has a monopoly of the road out of Egypt. It is what he gets paid for. He is a sort of a new priest who has a doctrine he preaches and another he lives. Bernard Shaw’s witticism to the effect that socialism would get along a great deal better without the socialists, could be applied. to the working class with its leaders. Yet, in America, our leaders do not play such a high hand as do those in England. Simply because the psychology of the workers in America is of a different order. Leaders are, after all, but the creature of those they lead, catering to their ignorance and prejudice, and the workers of Europe are, on the whole, ill informed. They drag their thousands of years of slavery and oppression behind them as a prisoner does. his ball and chain.

The workers of England in the last couple of years have stirred mightily and rattled their economic chains. Whether this is a spasm, or whether it has behind it a sustaining quality, remains to be seen. The dock strike last summer in London was completely defeated. During my stay in London I lived in the Ratcliff Settlement, situated in the heart of the worst part of the slum district, where the dockers live. No, I should not say live, for they and their families do not live. Their homes are like ratholes, where in one and two rooms they bring up numerous children. I think it was Robert Hunter, or some other “learned” comrade, who wrote an article to the effect that slums consisted of cheap sports, small thieves and gamblers and riff raff in general–of unmarried people that didn’t count. However much that may be true in our western undeveloped town, it is pure nonsense regarding both the New York and London slums. A school teacher took me to his school in the slums and called a half dozen children to ask them how many brothers and sisters they had. Each youngster counted up a family of from five to ten members.

Looking over those ragged, under-fed children, I asked:

“What do they do when they leave school?” “What do they do,” the teacher repeated sadly. He was a man of keen feeling and gulped down a lump in his throat. “When they are fourteen years old the girls get in the laundries or sweat factory, and the boys become van boys or get some other blind-alley occupation (a van boy is a boy who sits in the back of wagons to see that nothing falls off them) and when they are about eighteen years they follow their fathers on the docks, marry and bring their large families into the world. Thus turns the life here in the slums in a vicious circle. I see no end to it. In the midst of winter my children come to school bare-footed. I have to get shoes for them, then they come without stockings, and I have to go out and beg the merchants for stockings.” “Can they study?” I asked further.

“They can after a fashion, but not like child that comes from parents that can take care of him. Their minds wander; they have no strength to sustain any effort. When they get too listless I know that they are starved and send them to the free lunches given by the London County Council.”

I went to see the free lunches that cost the Council six cents a meal. It consisted of stew, potatoes and bread, no butter, sugar or milk, that are so necessary to build up a healthy body. The children were only entitled to those lunches once a day in school days. During the strike the Council helped to break it by refusing to feed the children. The capitalists first render the workers helpless and then throws them on the state, which in turn can control them for the capitalists’ benefit.

The Ratcliff Settlement is a university settlement where religious well-to-do women imagine that they are doing a lot of good work by teaching the dockers’ wives how to cook and sew and pray. Half the time the poor things have nothing to cook or sew on. The ships don’t come in. The gang sits weary on the wharf. But Mr. Docker has to be there just the same. He can’t go and do a couple of hours’ work some other place. The ship may come in any time.

Wishing to live among the workers, I could not get room any other place than in this settlement. There are no rooms for rent for lone women in slums. In fact, it was impossible for me to hire a room in a working class family outside of the slums. I tried several houses that had signs in the windows, and was met by suspicious indignation from the wives. Their rooms were only for men. A working girl has to furnish her own room in England if she has no folks or relatives to live with. A bare room. in the slum district is three shillings a week, and she is lucky if her wages amount to seven shillings a week. And let me say right here that the slums are inhabited by bona fide workers that count, and count with a vengeance, in favor of the capitalist class. It is calculated that every seventh child in London is born in the slums. The greater part of the workers in England live in slum conditions in the large cities and factory towns. And even in the countries they are packed into small houses, and are so poor that they cannot afford meat more than once a week. These slum people count even away out in the colonies, where the employers constantly send for the best of them. Yes, even the weary old and young street roomies, that line up every afternoon for a “flop” in a pine box overnight,

During the dock strike those armies disappeared; they became strike-breakers. The workers are gullible, or they could never swallow such nonsense that the poorest paid didn’t count. Among the socialists do we constantly meet with this lofty proclamation–that the slum proletariat don’t count! It is on a par with the idea that the migratory workers don’t count. The working class can’t be free by lofty assertions and shoulder shrugs of nice leaders, who look condescendingly through their well-fed bellies down on the lean and the hungry. Those people need information that shall free them instead of that which binds them and keeps them willing slaves, where the only recreation within their reach is the ale house. A part of the working class cannot stab another part without in the long run stabbing itself.

It is calculated in England that a working class family cannot live and bring up a family on less than thirty shillings a week, while the ordinary wages are from three to six shillings a day. An employer told me that for common labor he could hire all the workers he wanted for three shillings a day. In the suburbs out of London a worker can rent a cottage of six rooms for from six to eight shillings a week, but then his carfare will amount to three shillings a week. No one can blame him if he prefers to save his three shillings and stew in two rooms. Ten times to one it is a matter of absolute necessity.

The socialists are hopelessly divided among themselves in England, have split into four or five parties, each claiming to be the one. George Barnes, M.P., claims that socialism is making headway by leaps and bounds and proves it by calling attention to the nationalization of the telephone, municipal house-building, feeding of the school children, etc., but admits that the workers are badly sweated and badly treated, also he admits that while he is a socialist, the theory of socialism does not work in practical politics–this was in a lecture. Mr. Hyndman in an interview informed me that the workers in England were a hopeless lot with no backbone, and that they had been betrayed by their leaders in and out of Parliament; that Ramsey McDonald was nothing but a shrewd politician, who for the present had been sent to India to find out how to put down the cry of the rebellious natives, who were most shamelessly sucked dry by the English. It is a very “honorable” mission for a socialist to be on, but a politician can do more dirty work under one party name than another, perhaps. But Hyndman while admitting how miserably the workers had failed in the political field to do anything for themselves through parliamentary representatives, would not admit that as syndicalists upon the industrial field they could do anything. It was the going back to the breaking of the machinery. No, according to Hyndman, socialism will come very soon in England, because things are going from bad to worse, but it will not be the working class that is going to bring it. Those half- starved cowards can do nothing. It will be by some blow that will be struck England from without.

In the meantime it looks very much as though England’s ruling class is going in for state capitalism. There is talk of putting through a right to work bill, besides all the other national reforms that have been put through. That the workers come more and more under the control of the government, I shall show in my next article.

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.”

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v5n07-w215-may-08-1913-IW.pdf

PDF of issue 2: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v5n13-w221-jun-19-1913-IW.pdf