The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

A machine can produce ‘surplus value’. In fact, it is a device for doing precisely that. It takes advantage of the laws of nature to make work easier and quicker. And its cost is not related to how much profit it will make for me, but to the labour (and materials) that went into its production. Marx’s demonstration of the inevitable downfall of capitalism is based on a fallacy that is little more than a schoolboy howler.

The rest of his theory deserves little more attention. Even if the profit-motive is made to vanish by repression, as in Soviet Russia, the result is not a state of loving brotherhood and innocent freedom. In no communist country has the state shown the slightest sign of disappearing. Marx indignantly denied that his communist state would be a regimented system that would undermine the freedom of the individual. In fact, the freedom of the individual has always been the first thing to vanish in a communist-controlled country.

In short, Das Kapital is full of promises that could never be fulfilled because they are based on a false view of human nature. The central fallacy lies in the mechanistic concept of human nature: the notion that man’s ideas and values are totally governed by his economic circumstances. This in turn means that Marx’s philosophy ignores a basic reality of human nature: that man works best when he is driven by a sense of purpose: that is, by ‘the profit-motive’ in its broadest sense. A man who badly wants anything, from the girl next door to a new car, will pour an enormous amount of concentrated effort into obtaining it. Place him in a commune and tell him he is working for ‘the common good’, and even if he is a good communist, some of his enthusiasm will evaporate. In communist countries, the result has been almost permanent economic crisis due to inefficiency. China and the Soviet bloc are the most powerful living argument against the doctrines of Das Kapital, a demonstration that Marx’s blueprint for Utopia has no relation to actuality.

Then why did Kapital come to exercise such widespread influence? Because Marx possessed Savonarola’s talent for emotional invective. He himself told a correspondent ‘It is certainly the most terrible missile that has ever been aimed at the bourgeoisie.’ Marx could always marshal his ‘economic facts’, his starving Irish, his miners dying of silicosis, his foundrymen scalded to death with boiling metal, his seamstresses coughing away their lungs. And the tone of scientific precision proved irresistible to a new generation of socialists, from Bernard Shaw to Lenin and Trotsky. Marx, like Luther, had arrived at precisely the right moment in history.

He almost came too late. By 1867, when Kapital appeared, he was fifty years old, and was an exhausted and embittered man. His aggressive and domineering nature meant that he was not greatly loved. And there were certainly no signs that history was moving obligingly towards the revolution. The German prime minister, Bismarck, was as determined as Frederick the Great to increase the power of Prussia. He and Austria had defeated Denmark in 1864 and divided Schleswig-Holstein between them; then he picked a quarrel with Austria and defeated her in the ‘seven weeks war’ of 1866. Having united the German states, he granted them a constitution, ‘to keep the liberals quiet’, then went on to allow France to pick a quarrel with Prussia about the throne of Spain. It took only a few weeks for the Germans to defeat France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The defeat set off a civil war in France, and the working men of Paris set up their own government, or Commune. It was put down with brutal ferocity, with the deaths of 20,000 ‘communards’ and the arrest of 40,000 more. Then France returned to prosperity, the era of Maupassant and Zola and the post-impressionists, and all threat of revolution receded. Fortunately for world communism, Russia remained as backward as ever, and its tsars continued to behave like Louis XVI, denying even the most reasonable demands of the liberals. So eventually, Das Kapital provided the match that lit the Russian revolution of 1917.

By then, Marx had been dead for thirty-four years. His last years were slightly more comfortable; Engels settled an annuity on him, and Marx was able to send his daughters to a ladies’ seminary, go abroad for holidays, and gamble on the stock exchange. If he had been able to live like that forty years earlier, he would never have become a revolutionary. For Marx, like Voltaire, thirsted for revenge. Like Voltaire, he never lived to enjoy it.

A CENTURY OF CRIME

Daniel Defoe died in the age of Dick Turpin; Karl Marx in the age of Jack the Ripper.

This statement symbolises the immense social changes that had taken place in a century and a half. Turpin was a popular hero, who played to the crowd as if his execution were a first night. The Ripper was a public enemy who frightened everybody, like some nightmare creature from the collective unconscious; one old lady collapsed and died when she heard the news of his latest murder. The criminals of the age of Defoe were outside the law, but they were not outside the sympathy of the London poor. In the Victorian age, even the common burglar had become an alarming, half-mythical creature – due largely to Dickens’s portrait of Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. The criminal had become ‘alienated’ from society, and society regarded him as a dangerous outcast.

Yet the crimes of the eighteenth century were worse than anything the Victorians had to endure. In the summer of 1751, a farmer named Porter, who lived near Pulford, in Cheshire, engaged some Irish labourers to help with the harvest. One August evening, there was a crash at the door as someone tried to force his way in; the farmer evidently kept it locked as a precaution. Five Irishmen smashed their way into the house, grabbed the farmer and his wife – who were sitting at supper – and tied them up. Porter was ordered to reveal the whereabouts of his cash box, and tried delaying tactics; at this the gang threatened to torture them both. A daughter who had been listening outside the door now rushed into the room, flung herself on her knees, and begged for her father’s life; she was also tied up and threatened. She gave way, and told the gang where the valuables were kept.

The youngest daughter, a girl of thirteen, had hidden herself; now she escaped out of the rear door, tiptoed to the stable, led out a horse and rode across the fields to the village. She went to the house of her brother and told him what was happening. The brother and a friend armed themselves – probably with knives and hatchets – and hurried to the farm. A man was on watch; they managed to approach so quietly that he was taken unawares, and promptly killed. Then they rushed into the parlour, and found the four men holding the farmer – who was naked – and trying to force him to sit on the fire to reveal where he kept his savings. One robber was promptly knocked senseless; the other three fled through the window. The rescuers organised a pursuit, and caught up with two of the robbers on Chester bridge; another man, the ringleader, was caught on a ship at Liverpool. All four men were tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence of the youngest was commuted to transportation for life. The ringleader, Stanley, managed to escape on the eve of his execution. On 25 May 1752, the other two – named M’Canelly and Morgan – were hanged, ‘their behaviour [being] as decent as could be expected from people of their station’.

This kind of house storming was commonplace during the crime wave of the eighteenth century. The robbers organised themselves like military units. A house that was to be attacked was watched for days until the gang knew when they could burst in, and when they were likeliest to be safe from interruption. Stealth and skill were unnecessary in the actual operation; it was conducted like a siege of a town. The M’Canelly and Morgan case shows that the burglars of the mid-eighteenth century had already discovered a method of torture that became common in France at the time of the Revolution – when the robbers were known as chauffeurs – warmers. (Professional drivers were later called chauffeurs because the earliest cars were steam driven, so that the driver was literally a stoker, or ‘fireman’.) We have seen that the streets of London were unsafe even by day; footpads operated openly in all the parks and open spaces, while highwaymen waited in every wood and thicket along every main road.

In the year after the execution of M’Canelly and Morgan, the novelist Henry Fielding, who had been a magistrate for thirteen years, declared that he could halt the London crime wave if the treasury would place £600 at his disposal. The secretary of state took him up on his offer. Fielding was a magistrate at Bow Street, so the force he created became known as the Bow Street Runners. Their job was simply to patrol central London, get to know the gangs – who had become accustomed to operating quite openly – and try to catch them in the act. Good intelligence work was more important than actual detection, because ever since the Elizabethan age, London’s thieves and criminals had behaved as if they were one of the medieval guilds. During the reign of Queen Anne, the city marshal of London, a man named Charles Hitchin, was a notorious transvestite and sodomite who acted as a receiver of stolen goods and blackmailed thieves for sexual favours. When a bucklemaker named Jonathan Wild, who had spent four years in prison for debt, regained his freedom in 1714, he decided to model himself on Hitchin, and was soon the most prosperous receiver of stolen goods in London. When a thief stole a watch he came straight to Wild. So did the watch’s owner. For a sum of money, the watch was restored, and Wild and the thief split the fee. No one complained because the victims were glad to get back their property. Thieves who refused to co-operate were sent to the gallows. Wild prospered for ten years, but in 1725 – the year Catherine Hayes was burned – he was arrested on a minor charge of assisting a thief to escape. The authorities succeeded in convicting him on another minor charge – restoring stolen goods without prosecuting the thief – and he was hanged on 24 May 1725. Fielding wrote his first novel about Wild. And he also saw clearly that the London crime network could be smashed by anyone who took the trouble to get to know the thieves. This is what the Bow Street Runners did, and the criminals had become so accustomed to immunity that they were captured by the dozen. Fielding says he had the immense satisfaction of reading the morning papers, and watching the reports about murders and street robberies diminish day by day until they ceased altogether. He had only used a half of the £600 voted by the government.