. HUNGRY ENGLAND.
Hunger and Work. By J. Kuczinski. (Lawrence and Wishart 3s. 6c1.)
"-I HOPE every Trade Union will get this book," writes Mr. Coppock, general secretary of the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives, in his introduction- to Mr. Kuczinski's statistibal study of wages. Reading it, one agrees ; but not altogether for Mr.- Coppock's reasons. To him, and to the author, Hunger and Work is conceived as an addition to the armaments of the class war.' It "involves the uncom- fortable alternatives, on the part of those who are satisfied with existing conditions, of deliberately blinding themselves to the rottenness of things in the rather forlorn hope of justi- fying their sympathetic pretensions, or of openly disclosing themselves as class enemies." Either, in fact, you are a Worker, or a Boss or jackal of the Bosses. If you are a Worker, Mr. Kuczinski will show you where you stand. If you are a Boss or a jackal, he will force you to unmask.
But is this really a recognisable picture of our society ? There are the Bosses, and no doubt some of them are as cynical exploiters of their fellow-men's needs as Mr, Kuczinski, or Marx before him, ever maintained. There are the workers with a grievance, who form Mr. Kuczinski's subject matter. But between these two categories lies a great mass of public opinion which falls into neither definition. They have, they feel, considerably more to lose than their chains. They may be of the aristocracy of labour, drawing their four or five pounds a week and far more akia to the bourgeoisie than to the forty-five shilling labourer—who, indeed, might well have a grievance against the Trade Union restrictions which keep him out of their profitable fields of employment. But these one may grant to Mr. Kuczinski ; they are class-con- scious. -They may be salary -earners of any grade. (No one can be a "worker," Mr. Kuczinski makes clear in one of his tables, who earns more than £250 a year.) They may be small shopkeepers, teachers, professional people
of various kinds. Some are politically conscious, some are not. One cannot generalise about them as Veblen could about the Idle Rich or as Marx could about the Proletariat. But one thing is reasonably clear ; they hold the balance. They endured, and broke, the General Strike. They queued up on January 1st, 1932, to pay their income tax. They are socially inert, as fallen snow is inert ; other countries have seen the avalanche when Fascism has set their amorphous mass in motion. (That Fascism has thoroughly fooled them is neither here nor there.) They are unimaginative, well- meaning, and, taking them by and large, extraordinarily ignorant of social matters. They are nobody's class enemy. And it is to them—to the neutrals and not to the already converted and the inconvertible—that Mr. Kuczinski really ought to appeal if he wants to rouse a profitable and con- structiv e dissatisfaction.
This may seem much ado about nothing. But in fact it is a serious criticism. Mr. Kuczinski achieves a most valuable and well arranged collection of material, from unimpeachable sources, relating wages and the cost of living over the whole range of industry, sorting out the effects of short time, over- time, and unemployment, and producing a deeply disturbing picture. But his manner of presenting it is the literary equivalent of shouting at one's hearer from a distance of six inches. That is not the way to get assent to an argument, still less adherents to a cause.
Compared with his literary manners, the occasional short- comings of his statistics and their interpretation are of minor importance. He makes a great outcry about the decline in wages, as a share of the national income, since the slump of 1931; though this decline is merely the cyclical counterpart of the relative rise which accompanied the slump years. Profits being a residue and wages a fixed charge, what else would Mr. Kuczinski expect ? To use such evidence as this to support the proposition that, historically, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, is transparently disin- genuous. The careful reader, however, will note that the dubious expedients and doubtful generalisations all occur in the final chapter, where the author turns from an objective picture of standards of living to the denial ot social progress under capitalism. Elsewhere, secure in the strength of his case, he refrains. On whether the cure for the state of affairs which he discloses—ten million people living below the Rowntree poverty line—is the Overthrow of the Capitalist System, or a determined attack on economic friction and waste, or a system of family allowances, readers may differ according to their lights. But the more people can be brought to a realisation of the facts, the more likelihood there is of a
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