kept a loaf or two ahead of capitalism

English translation: managed to make ends meet / weren't starving

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English term or phrase:	kept a loaf or two ahead of capitalism
Selected answer:	managed to make ends meet / weren't starving
Entered by:	B D Finch

11:55 Aug 6, 2017

English language (monolingual) [PRO]
Social Sciences - History / revolutionary or reformatory way to socialism

English term or phrase: kept a loaf or two ahead of capitalism

On the right of the movement there were some who recommended concentrating on the immediate improvements and reforms which the working class might win from governments and employers, leaving the remoter future to take care of itself. Revolt or insurrection were in any case not on the agenda. Even so, few labour leaders born after, say, 1860 abandoned the idea of the New Jerusalem. Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), a self-made socialist intellectual who suggested incautiously, not only that Karl Marx's theories should be revised in the light of a flourishing capitalism ('revisionism'), but also that the putative socialist end was less important than the reforms to be won on the way, was massively condemned by labour politicians whose interest in actually overthrowing capitalism was sometimes extremely faint. The belief that the present society was intolerable made sense to woking-class people, even when, as an observer of a German socialist congress in the 1900s noted, their militants 'kept a loaf or two ahead of capitalism'. The ideal of new society was what the working class hope.

Danica Cvetković KudoZ activity Questions: 83 (3 open) (7 without valid answers) (2 closed without grading) Answers: 0 Serbia
Local time: 23:36

managed to make ends meet / weren't starving

Explanation:
Bread is the basic necessity. Keeping a loaf or two ahead of capitalism doesn't mean living in comfort, but managing to make ends meet with a small margin to spare.

I can't access the quotation that philgoddard mentions, but it is possible that the comment was meant ironically.

Selected response from:

B D Finch
France
Local time: 23:36

Grading comment

Yes, this meaning seems to me exact. Thank you!
4 KudoZ points were awarded for this answer

SUMMARY OF ALL EXPLANATIONS PROVIDED

4 +1

managed to make ends meet / weren't starving

B D Finch

Summary of reference entries provided

Here's the explanation

philgoddard

Further details

Charles Davis

Discussion entries: 1

Answers

7 hrs confidence:

peer agreement (net): +1

managed to make ends meet / weren't starving

B D Finch
France
Local time: 23:36
Specializes in field
Native speaker of: English
PRO pts in category: 12

Grading comment

Yes, this meaning seems to me exact. Thank you!

Reference comments

2 hrs peer agreement (net): +2

Reference: Here's the explanation

Reference information:
The writer has paraphrased an article in the International Socialist Review, but has mangled it, making it hard to understand.

I found it in Google Books, so I can't cut and paste the text, but here's the link if you're interested. The article says that they actually looked more healthy and well fed than the capitalists they were supposed to be fighting.

A cynic might say that this is an example of how academics spend all their time changing other people's work to make it look like their own. The quote was originally in English, not translated from German, so there was no need to reword it.

The article is by the editor, Robert Hunter, who later renounced socialism, and you can already see how he sees the movement's funny side. I recommend reading it: it's beautifully written and often witty.

Reference: http://books.google.com/books?id=t7kWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA322-IA4&l...

philgoddard
United States
Native speaker of: English

21 hrs peer agreement (net): +1

Reference: Further details

Reference information:
This is a follow-up to Phil's reference, which has provided the key.

Robert Hunter describes the working men he sees at the Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1906. The look pretty robust:

"They were not pale, anemic and undersized such as one sees in the East End of London, or in the factory districts of Lancashire, nor were they the tense, exhausted workmen that issue from the factories of the United States. It seemed as if they had escaped somehow the perfected system of labor-exploitation which exists with us. They looked as if they were getting a loaf or two of bread the best of the struggle with the capitalists. They were serious-minded, ruddy-faced, muscular and one could see that they had saved from the exploitation of the capitalists enough physical and mental strength to live like men during their leisure hours. I should be willing to wager that physically or mentally they could hold their own in the essentials with any other class in Germany."

This is from the International Socialist Review, vol. 7, no. 6 (December 1906). The congress had presumably just been held.

Hunter uses exactly the same passage in his book Socialists at Work (1908), pp. 1-2, but slightly changes this phrase:

"[...] They looked as if they were getting a loaf or two of bread the better of the struggle with capitalism. [...]"
https://es.scribd.com/document/351750781/Robert-Hunter-Socia...

Eric Hobsbawm, the author of your text (from Age of Empire), attributes his compressed version of the quotation to Hunter's second version, from Socialists at Work, but in a later book, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (2011), pp. 14-15, Hobsbawm gives another different version:

"As was obvious to both [Marx and Engels], large sections of the proletariat were not getting any poorer in any absolute sense. Indeed, an American observer of the solidly proletarian congresses of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1900s observed that the comrades there looked 'a loaf or two above poverty'."
https://books.google.es/books?id=5FW8MBZ9mFkC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA...

Obviously he is quoting from memory, and his (mis)quotation expresses what he understands Hunter's original phrase to mean.

Charles Davis
Spain
Specializes in field
Native speaker of: English
PRO pts in category: 52

Note to reference poster

Asker: The passages you have chosen are very illuminating. Thank you very much for your effort.

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kept a loaf or two ahead of capitalism

English translation: managed to make ends meet / weren't starving

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