The People's Republic of Everything Page 4

The Fabians are gradualists, believers in parliamentary reforms and moral suasion. Not revolution, but evolution, not class struggle, but class collaboration. They call themselves socialists, and many of them are as well-meaning as a yipping pup, but ultimately they wish to save capitalism from the hammers of the working-class. But if they were truly responsible somehow for the state of these girls, they would have moved beyond reformism into complete capitulation to the bourgeoisie. But we must never capitulate, never collaborate!

  The irony does not escape me. I run a factory on behalf of my bourgeois family. I live fairly well, and indeed, am only the revolutionary I am because of the profits extracted from the workers on the floor below. Now I risk all, their livelihoods and mine, to complete the Dialectical Engine. The looms have been reconfigured; we haven’t sent out any cotton in weeks. The work floor looks as though a small volcano had been drawn forth from beneath the crust—the machinists work fifteen hours a day, and smile at me when I come downstairs and roll up my sleeves to help them. They call me Freddie, but I know they despise me. And not even for my status as a bourgeois—they hate me for my continued allegiance to the working-class. There’s a word they use when they think I cannot hear them. “Slummer.” A man who lives in, or even simply visits, the working-men districts to experience some sort of prurient thrill of rebellion and faux class allegiance.

  But that is it! That’s what I must do. The little match girls must strike! Put their prostheses on display for the public via flying pickets. Challenge the bourgeoisie on their own moral terms—are these the daughters of Albion? Girls who are ever-starving, who can never be loved, forced to skulk in the shadows, living Frankenstein’s monsters? The dailies will eat it up, the working-class will be roused, first by economic and moral issues, but then soon by their own collective interest as a class. Behind me, the whir and chatter of loom shuttles kicked up. The Dialectical Engine was being fed the medium on which the raw knowledge of my friend’s old letters and missives were to be etched. Steam, was all I could think. What can you not do?

  4. The Spark

  I was an old hand at organizing workers, though girls who consumed electricity rather than bread were a bit beyond my remit. It took several days to teach the girls to speak with their jaws beyond the Bryant and May slogan, and several more to convince them of the task. “Why should we go back?” one asked. Her name was once Sally, as she was finally able to tell me, and she was the second-smallest. “They won’t have us.”

  “To free your fellows,” I had said. “To express workers’ power and, ultimately, take back the profits for yourselves!”

  “But then we’d be the bosses,” the oldest girl said. “Cruel and mean.”

  “Yes, well, no. It depends on all of the workers of a nation rising up to eliminate the employing class,” I explained. “We must go back—”

  “I don’t want to ever go back!” said the very smallest. “That place was horrid!”

  The tedious debate raged long into the night. They were sure that the foreman would clout their heads in for even appearing near the factory gates, but I had arranged for some newspapermen and even electro-photographers sympathetic to Christian socialism, if not Communism, to meet us as we handed out leaflets to the passing trade and swing shift.

  We were met at the gate by a retinue of three burly looking men in fustian suits. One of them fondled a sap in his hand and tipped his hat. The journalists hung back, believers to the end in the objectivity of the disinterested observer, especially when they might get hurt for being rather too interested.

  “Leaflets, eh?” the man with the sap asked. “You know this lot can’t read, yeah?”

  “And this street’s been cleared,” one of the others said. “You can toss that rubbish in the bin, then.”

  “Yes, that’s how your employers like them, isn’t it? Illiterate, desperate, without value to their families as members of the female of the species?” I asked. “And the ordinary working men, cowed by the muscle of a handful of hooligans.”

  “Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, Sir!” the second-tallest girl said, brightly as she could. The thuggish guards saw her mandible and backed away. Excited, she clacked away at them, and the others joined in.

  “How do you like that?” I said to both the guards and the press. “Innocent girls, more machine than living being. We all know what factory labour does to children, or thought we did. But now, behold the new monsters the age of steam and electricity hath wrought. We shall lead an exodus through the streets, and you can put that in your sheets!” The thugs let us by, then slammed the gates behind us, leaving us on the factory grounds and them outside. Clearly, one or more of the police agents who monitor my activities had caught wind of our plans, but I was confident that victory would be ours. Once we roused the other match girls, we’d engage in a sit-down strike, if necessary. The girls could not be starved out like ordinary workers, and I had more than enough confederates in London to ring the factory and sneak food and tea for me through the bars if necessary. But I was not prepared for what awaited us.

  The girls were gone, but the factory’s labours continued apace. Steam-workers attended the machines, carried frames of matches down the steps to the loading dock, and clanked about with the precision of clockwork. Along a catwalk, a man waved to us, a handkerchief in his hand. “Hallo!” he said.

  “That’s not the foreman,” Sally told me. “It’s the dentist!” She did not appear at all relieved that the factory’s dentist rather than its foreman, who had been described to me as rather like an ourang-outan, was approaching us. I noticed that a pair of steam-workers left their posts and followed him as he walked up to us.

  “Mister Friedrich Engels! Is that you?” he asked me. I admitted that I was, but that further I was sure he had been forewarned of my coming. He ignored my rhetorical jab and pumped my hand like an American cowboy of some fashion. “Wonderful, wonderful,” he said. He smiled at the girls, and I noticed that his teeth were no better than anyone else’s. “I’m Doctor Flint. Bryant and May hired me to deal with worker pains that come from exposure to white phosphorus. We’re leading the fight for healthy workers here; I’m sure you’ll agree that we’re quite progressive. Let me show you what we’ve accomplished here at Bryant and May.”

  “Where are the girls?” the tallest of my party asked, her phonographic voice shrill and quick, as if the needle had been drawn over the wax too quickly.

  “Liberated!” the dentist said. He pointed to me. “They owe it all to you, you know. I reckon it was your book that started me on my path into politics. Dirtier work than dentistry.” He saw my bemused look and carried on eagerly. “Remember what you wrote about the large factories of Birmingham—the use of steam-power admit of the employment of a great multitude of women and children. Too true, too true!”

  “Indeed, sir,” I started, but he interrupted me.

  “But of course we can’t put steam back in the kettle, can we?” He rapped a knuckle on the pot-belly torso of one of the ever-placid steam-workers behind him. “But then I read your philosophical treatise. I was especially interested in your contention that quantitative change can become qualitative. So, I thought to myself, Self, if steam-power is the trouble when it comes to the subjugation of child labour, cannot more steam-power spell the liberation of child labour?”

  “No, not by itself. The class strugg—”

  “But no, Engels, you’re wrong!” he said. “At first I sought to repair the girls, using steam-power. Have you seen the phoss up close? Through carious teeth, and the poor girls know little of hygiene so they have plenty of caries, the vapours of white phosphorous make gains into the jawbone itself, leading to putrefaction. Stinking hunks of bone work right through the cheek, even after extractions of the carious teeth.”

  “Yes, we are all familiar with phossy jaw,” I said. “Seems to me that the minimalist programme would be legislative—bar white phosphorous. Even whatever sort of Liberal or Fabian you are can agree with that.”

>   “Ah, but I can’t!” he said. “You enjoy your pipe? I can smell it on you.”

  “That’s from Wilkins, my driver.”

  “Well then observe your Mr. Wilkins. It’s human nature to desire a strike-anywhere match. We simply cannot eliminate white phosphorous from the marketplace. People demand it. What we can do, however, is use steam to remove the human element from the equation of production.”

  “I understood that this sort of work is too detailed for steam-workers.”

  “It was,” the dentist said. “But then our practice on the girls led to certain innovations.” As if on cue, the steam-workers held up their forelimbs and displayed to me a set of ten fingers with the dexterity of any primates. “So now I have eliminated child labour—without any sort of agitation or rabble-rousing I might add—from this factory and others like it, in less than a fortnight. Indeed, the girls were made redundant this past Tuesday.”

  “And what do you plan to do for them?” I said. “A good Fabian like you knows that these girls will now—”

  “Will now what? Starve? You know they won’t, not as long as there are lampposts in London. They all contain receptacles. Mature and breed, further filling the working-men’s districts with the unemployable, uneducable? No, they won’t. Find themselves abused and exploited in manners venereal? No, not possible, even if there was a man so drunk as to overlook their new prosthetic mandibles. Indeed, we had hoped to move the girls into the sales area, which is why their voiceboxes are rather . . . focused, but as it happens few people wish to buy matches from young girls. Something about it feels immoral, I suppose. So they are free to never work again. Herr Engels, their problems are solved.”

  For a long moment, we both stood our ground, a bit unsure as to what we should do next, either as socialist agitators or as gentlemen. We were both keenly aware that our conversation was the first of its type in all history. The contradictions of capitalism, resolved? The poor would always be with us, but also immortal and incapable of reproduction. Finally the dentist looked at his watch—he wore one with rotating shutters of numerals on his wrist, as is the fashion among wealthy morons—and declared that he had an appointment to make. “The steam-workers will show you out,” he said, and in a moment their fingers were on my arms, and they dragged me to the entrance of the factory as if I were made of straw. The girls followed, confused, and, if the way their metallic jaws were set was telling, they were actually relieved. The press pestered us with questions on the way out, but I sulked past them without remark. Let them put Doctor Flint above the fold tomorrow morning, for all the good it will do them. Soon enough there’d be steam-workers capable of recording conversations and events with perfect audio-visual fidelity, and with a dial to be twisted for different settings of the editing of newsreels: Tory, Liberal, or Fabian. Indeed, one would never have to twist the dial at all.

  We returned to Wilkins and our autocarriage, defeated and atomised. Flint spoke true; as we drove through the streets of the East End, I did espy several former match girls standing on corners or in gutters, directionless and likely cast out from whatever home they may have once had.

  “We have to . . .” But I knew that I couldn’t.

  Wilkins said, “The autocarriage is overburdened already. Those girlies weigh more than they appear to, eh? You can’t go ’round collecting every stray.”

  No—charity is a salve at best, a bourgeois affectation at worst. But even those concerns were secondary. As the autocarriage moved sluggishly toward the airship field, I brooded on the question of value. If value comes from labour, and capital is but dead labour, what are steam-workers? So long as they needed to be created by human hands, clearly steam-workers were just another capital good, albeit a complex one. But now, given the dexterity of the latest generation of steam-workers, they would clearly be put to work building their own descendents, and those that issued forth from that subsequent generation would also be improved, without a single quantum of labour-power expended. The bourgeoisie might have problems of their own; with no incomes at all, the working-class could not even afford the basic necessities of life. Steam-workers don’t buy bread or cloth, nor do they drop farthings into the alms box at church on Sunday. How would bourgeois society survive without workers who also must be driven to consume the very products they made?

  The petit-bourgeoisie, I realized, the landed gentry, perhaps they could be catered to exclusively, and the empire would continue to expand and open new markets down to the tips of the Americas and through to the end of the Orient—foreign money and resources would be enough for capital, for the time being. But what of the proletariat? If the bourgeoisie no longer needed the labour of the workers, and with the immense power in their hands, wouldn’t they simply rid themselves of the toiling classes the way the lord of a manor might rid a stable of vermin? They could kill us all from the air—firebombing the slums and industrial districts. Send whole troupes of steam-workers to tear men apart till the cobblestones ran red with the blood of the proletariat. Gears would be greased, all right.

  We didn’t dare take an airship home to Manchester. The mooring station was sure to be mobbed with writers from the tabloids and Tory sheets. So we settled in for the long and silent drive up north.

  I had no appetite for supper, which wasn’t unusual after an hour in an airship, but tonight was worse for the steel ball of dread in my stomach. I stared at my pudding for a long time. I wished I could offer it to the girls, but they were beyond treats. On a whim, I went back to the factory to check in on the Dialectical Engine, which had been processing all day and evening. A skeleton crew had clocked out when the hour struck nine, and I was alone with my creation. No, with the creation of the labour of my workers. No, the workers. If only I could make myself obsolete, as the steam-workers threatened the proletariat.

  The factory floor, from the vantage point of my small office atop the catwalk, was a sight to behold. A mass of cloth, like huge overlapping sails, obscured the looms, filling the scaffolding that had been built up six storeys to hold and “read” the long punched sheets. A human brain in replica, with more power than any Difference Engine, fuelled by steam for the creation not of figures, but dialectics. Quantitative change had become qualitative, or would as soon as the steam engines in the basement were ignited. I lacked the ability to do it myself, or I would have just then, allowing me to talk to my old friend, or as close a facsimile as I could build with my fortune and knowledge. All the machinery came to its apex in my office, where a set of styluses waited in position over sheets of foolscap. I would prepare a question, and the machine would produce an answer that would be translated, I hoped, into comprehensible declarative sentences upon the sheets. A letter from Marx, from beyond the grave! Men have no souls to capture, but the mind, yes. The mind is but the emergent properties of the brain, and I rebuilt Marx’s brain, though I hoped not simply to see all his theories melt into air.

  With a start, I realized that down on the floor I saw a spark. The factory was dark and coated with the shadows of the punched sheets, so the momentary red streak fifty feet below was obvious to me. Then I smelled it, the smoke of a pipe. Only a fool would light up in the midst of so much yardage of inflammable cotton, which was perplexing, because Wilkins was no fool.

  “Wilkins!” I shouted. “Extinguish that pipe immediately! You’ll burn down the factory and kill us both! These textiles are highly combustible.”

  “Sow-ry,” floated up from the void. But then another spark flitted in the darkness, and a second and a third. Wilkins held a fistful of matches high, and I could make out the contours of his face. “Quite a mechanism you’ve got all set up here, Mister Engels. Are these to be sails for the masts of your yacht?”

  “No sir, they won’t be for anything if you don’t extinguish those matches!”

  “Extinguish, eh? Well, you got a good look, and so did I, so I think I will.” And he blew out the matches. All was dark again. What happened next was quick. I heard the heavy thudding—no, a
heavy ringing of boots along the catwalk and in a moment a steam-worker was upon me. I wrestled with it for a moment, but I was no match for its pistons, and it threw me over the parapet. My breath left my body as I fell—as if my soul had decided to abandon me and leap right for heaven. But I didn’t fall far. I landed on a taut sheet of fine cotton, then rolled off of it and fell less than a yard onto another. I threw out my arms and legs as I took the third layer of sheet, and then scuttled across it to the edge of the scaffold on which I rested. Sitting, I grasped the edge with my hands and lowered myself as much as I dared, then let go. Wilkins was there, having tracked my movements from the fluttering of the sheets and my undignified oopses and oofs. He lit another match and showed me his eyes.

  “Pretty fit for an older gentlemen, Mister Engels. But take a gander at the tin of Scotch broth up there.” He lifted the match. The steam-worker’s metallic skin glinted in what light there was. It stood atop the parapet of the catwalk and with a leap flung itself into the air, plummeting the six storeys down and landing in a crouch like a circus acrobat. Remarkable, but I was so thankful that it did not simply throw itself through the coded sheets I had spent so long trying to manufacture, ruining the Dialectical Engine before it could even be engaged. Then I understood.

  “Wilkins!” I cried. “You’re a police agent!”

  Wilkins shrugged, and swung onto his right shoulder a heavy sledge. “’Fraid so. But can you blame me, sir? I’ve seen the writing on the wall—or the automaton on the assembly line,” he said, nodding past me and toward the steam-worker, who had taken the flank opposite my treacherous driver. “I know what’s coming. Won’t nobody be needing me to drive ’em around with these wind-up toys doing all the work, and there won’t be no other jobs to be had but rat and fink. So I took a little fee from the police, to keep an eye on you and your . . .” He was at a loss for words for a moment. “Machinations. Yes, that’s it. And anyhow, they’ll pay me triple to put all this to the torch, so I will, then retire to Cheshire with old Lizzie and have a nice garden.”