What Price the Poor?
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What Price the Poor?

William Booth, Karl Marx and the London Residuum

Ann M. Woodall

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eBook - ePub

What Price the Poor?

William Booth, Karl Marx and the London Residuum

Ann M. Woodall

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About This Book

In this fascinating book, Ann Woodall investigates and compares the work and thought of William Booth and Karl Marx, who both arrived in London in 1849. She draws comparisons between their responses to the intractability of the poverty of the 'submerged tenth' of London's population, and argues that Booth's pioneering work in establishing the Salvation Army and the development of Marx's economic theory began in their interactions with the London residuum. Each recognised that much of the suffering was caused by the workings of laissez-faire capitalism and that its total solution required a challenge to the existing economic system. What Price the Poor? raises important questions about the relationship between theological discourse and the sociological imagination, and it firmly places the development of theoretical and practical social analysis and application within the context of social history. It will appeal to all with interests in classical sociology and the history of social activism.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351873161
Chapter 1
Introduction
William Booth and Karl Marx both arrived in London in the second half of 1849. Marx had visited London before but from 1849 it was to be his base. Booth’s arrival in London in 1849 was his first visit to the city. It became his base from 1865.
Karl Marx was born in 1818. By the time he arrived in London in August 1849, he was a married man with a family – and a reputation as a political activist which had caused his departure from several countries. He was also a polemicist: one year earlier he had collaborated with Friedrich Engels to produce The Communist Manifesto. Once in London, he had little opportunity for further activism, but his research and writings were to have an immense influence on world history. Yet the British authorities – unlike their continental counterparts – did not think that he posed any serious threat.
William Booth arrived in London a few weeks later, aged just 21. Finding work initially in the pawnbroking business, he soon became involved in full time evangelism. After some time as a Methodist minister, he became an itinerant evangelist. Seeing the East End as his ‘destiny’, he stayed there in 1865 to lead what was first called the ‘Christian Revival Union’. As this organisation grew in numbers and expanded the area of its work, it became successively the East London Christian Mission, the Christian Mission and eventually The Salvation Army.
Through their arrival in London both Marx and Booth were to be exposed to the impact of the industrial revolution on the working population of London. There they would also see those who were outside the industrial advance and were either unemployed or rarely employed. They were the underclass and were referred to by some of the social commentators of the day as the ‘residuum’, a word that spoke of society’s view of them as the ‘left-overs’. William Booth would refer to this same group as the submerged tenth, while Marx categorised them as relative surplus population. Within this group Marx made a further division between the reserve army of labour, who could well enter the workforce at certain points in the economic cycle, and the ‘lumpenproletariat’ who were either unemployable or permanently unemployed.
The similarity of the facts of industrial life that Booth and Marx observed can be drawn from the example of the matchmakers. In Volume I of Capital Marx wrote about conditions in the matchmaking industry:
The manufacture of matches dates from 1833, from the discovery of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this branch of industry has developed rapidly in England, and has spread out from the thickly populated parts of London … The manufacture of matches, on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness, has such a bad reputation that only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it … With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night labour, irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry.1
Booth wrote In Darkest England and the Way Out in 1890 and included in his proposals:
[W]e propose at once to commence manufacturing match boxes, for which we shall aim at giving nearly treble the amount at present paid to the poor starving creatures engaged in this work.2
The back cover of the 1970 reprint of Darkest England showed an illustration of the ‘Lights in Darkest England’ matches. These ‘Salvation Army’ matches were first produced in 1891 with the aim of both increasing the wages of the workers and eliminating phosphorus from the process:
For making these safety matches William Booth paid his workers 4d. a gross, instead of the usual 2½d., thus helping to stamp out necrosis (‘phossy jaw’) caused by phosphorus matches and enabling ‘a woman to earn a decent wage’.3
The three quotations above underline the differences in approach between Marx and Booth, with Marx eruditely detailing the conditions of the makers of matches as part of his total attack on capitalism and Booth rushing to produce a practical solution to a specific problem. Marx was seeking a macro-solution and Booth a micro-solution. Yet the quotations also show that Marx and Booth were absorbing comparable events and information into their thought and action. Exposure to the London residuum of the mid-nineteenth century constituted a key element in the intellectual development of both men.
The link between Booth and Marx is not simply that they were in London at the same time and were both interested in and affected by the unemployed population there. There was a certain homomorphism in the way that the London residuum impacted upon them.
Friedrich Engels wrote in Dialectics of Nature about the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa. It was a concept he had already defended in Anti-DĂźhring:
This is precisely the Hegelian nodal line of measure relations, in which, at certain definite nodal points, the purely quantitative increase or decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap: for example, in the case of heated or cooled water, where boiling-point and freezing-point are the nodes at which - under normal pressure - the leap to a new state of aggregation takes place, and where consequently quantity is transformed into quality.4
Marx used the concept himself in Capital when he wrote, ‘not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital. To effect this transformation, in fact, a certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be presupposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities.’5
The ‘nodal points’ in quantity that had a qualitative impact and influenced Marx’s thought were the size of the residuum in London and in particular the size of the reserve army of labour. The quantitative features of the East End that influenced Booth’s were the size of the residuum and the length of time the existence of the submerged tenth remained unchallenged. In addition he had been marked by the level of poverty he saw around him during his boyhood in Nottingham and, in later life, his work was to be affected by the size to which the Salvation Army grew.
The nodal points will form the focus of the following chapters. The next chapter, The Pawnbroker’s Apprentice, examines the level of urban poverty in the decades prior to 1850, looking at the evidence, including the writings of influential thinkers of that time, and arguing that the urban poverty that arose in the aftermath of the industrial revolution was such that people like the stockingers of Nottingham lived lives that were qualitatively different from those of the poor of previous generations. It was in the face of such poverty that William Booth served his apprenticeship to a Nottingham pawnbroker and the person he would become was forged in the interaction between this poverty, its political impact and evangelical Christianity.
The Reverend William focuses on Booth’s life between 1850 and 1870 and the development of his thought and work. This period included Booth’s critical decision to base his future work in Whitechapel. The size and density of the London residuum was crucial to this decision and the chapter examines the living conditions of the people of Whitechapel, their work, poverty and lifestyles and the impact these had on Booth. The first interactions between Booth and the London residuum took place in these two decades and of pivotal importance to the discussion of Booth’s development is the way in which he was drawn back to the poor, to those whose lifestyles resembled those of the stockingers who had haunted him in Nottingham and how, in order to succeed, he had to relearn in London the lessons of his early days.
The Revolutionary Philosopher focuses on Karl Marx’s treatment of the underclass in his writings, with the emphasis on the changes that can be traced to the influence of what he learnt after 1849 about the London residuum, including its size. In particular Marx’s developing understanding of the relative size and importance of the reserve army of labour and the lumpenproletariat within the relative surplus population is scrutinised through the differences noted between his writings about the underclass of London and that of Paris.
The Philosopher as a Prophet? moves the examination of Marx’s writings into the sphere his ‘vision’ of the resolution to the problem of the poverty caused by the advance of capitalism. Because for Marx there is no individual redemption except through a ‘redemption’ of society, the focus of the chapter is on the function of the reserve army of labour in creating the conditions for that redemption, the overthrow of capitalism, and also on the new society that would emerge.
The Making of a General looks at the development of Booth and his organisation from 1870 to 1890, the date of the publication of In Darkest England and the Way Out, outlining the proposal for his social scheme. The chapter focuses on the major part played by the long-term poverty in the East End of London in bringing about the decision to launch such a scheme. The seeming permanence of poverty played a parallel role to that of the size of the residuum in 1865 in drawing Booth back to a focus on the poor. Booth is shown within the context of a widely growing public interest in the problems of the East End.
Because Booth was involved in high profile social issues he cannot be judged solely within the religious sphere and needs to be assessed in relation to others who were commenting on and tackling similar problems. The Making of a General’s Mind examines the writings of two economists whom Booth claimed as influences. These were Robert Flint and W. H. Mallock. Their influence on what Booth wrote can be traced but it also becomes clear the Booth never belonged to one school of thought but ‘cherry-picked’ those ideas that were able to be used to further the goals he had set himself.
The General in Command considers the results of the Darkest England Scheme in terms of meeting its own goals and in its effect on the Salvation Army; for example, was its incomplete implementation eventually negative or positive for the organisation? The chapter also examines the impact of the increasing size of the Salvation Army on its work and ethos, and on Booth himself.
Fifty Years On, the concluding chapter, looks at Booth’s social scheme in terms of its impact on the two elements of Marx’s surplus population, the lumpenproletariat and the reserve army of labour. It also assesses the work of the Salvation Army under the three categories of Marx’s criticism of religion. In addition an assessment is made of the role played by the London residuum in the development of the thought of Booth and Marx.
The real link, then, between the two men, Marx and Booth, is the impact of the size (and, to a lesser extent, the permanence) of the residuum. The outcome for both men was to broaden their conception of the lowest level of the poor, the lumpenproletariat, to see them as victims of a capitalist system that needed to be changed. For Marx the new element was to see the different layers in what he had previously simply termed pauperism and to understand that many of those layers were necessary to capital and all were a result of the capitalist impulse. For Booth the new element was to see the solution to the needs of the poor as calling for a challenge to the system that created a residuum and not simply a challenge to individual members of the residuum.
The truth of Engels’ theory of the dialectics of numbers is implicit in the play Major Barbara, which is centred on George Bernard Shaw’s view of the Salvation Army. Andrew Undershaft, whom Shaw described as the hero of the play, is an arms manufacturer and the father of Major Barbara. At one point in the play Undershaft offers to contribute twopence to the work of the Salvation Army, to receive the reply from his daughter, ‘You can’t buy your salvation here for twopence: you must work it out.’ 6 However as the play progresses Undershaft’s offer of a donation of five thousand pounds is gladly accepted by Barbara’s leaders causing another character to exclaim, ‘Wot prawce selvytion nah?’ 7
Can a parallel be drawn between the result of a difference in size of a donation and the impact on William Booth and Karl Marx of the size of the London poor? That is the question discussed in this book.
Notes
1  Marx, 1886, p. 356.
2  Booth, 1970, p 110. The book will be referred to as Darkest England. The scheme that grew out of the plan of the book and was accounted for in the Darkest England Trust will be referred to as the Darkest England Scheme.
3  Booth, 1970, back cover.
4  Engels, Anti-Duhring, in Marx/Engels, Collected Works, Vol. XXV, pp. 42-3.
5  Marx & Engels, 1987, p. 115.
6  Shaw, 2000, p. 99.
7  Shaw, 2000, p. 107.
Chapter 2
The Pawnbroker’s Apprentice
Introduction
William Booth arrived in London for the first time towards the end of 1849. London was pivotal in the development of Booth’s thought and work, but many of his beliefs and ideas had already been formed, or at least seeded, by his experiences as a pawnbroker’s apprentice in Nottingham. Crucial in the early crystallisation of Booth’s ideas was the profound and chronic poverty he faced daily across the pawnbroker’s counter. Such poverty was a new phenomenon in England, resulting from industrialisation and the resultant urbanisation of a large proportion of the rural poor.
To live in urban poverty in the mid-nineteenth century was a qualitatively different experience from that of the poor in previous centuries, with a new degree of suffering. This was particularly true for the stockingers of Nottingham as they progressively lost their livelihood in competition with industrial capitalism.
In old age William ...

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