Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/31

Rh Against this picture many objections may be raised. It seems to me too optimistic and makes the sum of the wages come out much bigger than it is or was in reality.

In reckoning the wages the author did not allow for unemployment. He, moreover, took for granted that a number of important factors bearing on the conditions of the working classes remained the same wherever the alterations could not exactly be determined. As a statistician he had naturally the right to do so, but these are precisely the factors which alter more and more in a direction unfavourable to the workers. Thus, for example, the proportion between male and female, skilled and unskilled labour, &c.

The greatest objection, however, is that the computation is limited to but a few trades, all of which, with the exception of agriculture, are very well organised, and that the author takes for granted that the condition ol the entire working class has, on the average, improved in the same proportion as that of the organised workers who, even in England, form a fifth of the workers of all trades. It is not uninteresting to consider the alterations in the wages of this class of workers. The rates, in comparison with those of 1860 (the latter taken as 100), were:—

We see that the increase of wages by 40 per cent, from 1860 to 1891, which Bowley calculates for the whole of the English working classes, does not even hold good for the entire labour aristocracy. With the exception of the cotton spinners, who in England are not without reason conservative and the patterns for all dreamers of "social peace," the average is only exceeded by the gasworkers, the sailors and the miners. The gasworkers owe their rise partly to the influence of political action, which in larger towns has brought to the municipal employees some improvements. In the case of the gasworkers, considerations of competition and exploitation through private enterprise enter least into account. Partly also the rise in 1891 must be accounted for by the sudden advent of the "new unionism" which aroused so many hopes, but soon fizzled out. Still more, even than in the case of the gasworkers, does the rise of wages in 1891 appear sudden, almost accidental, in the case