April 6th, 1859

A factory office in Stockholm, Norway

Noon

“Good morning, gentlemen; can I be of help to you?”

The manufacturer was a small, round man, dressed in the black wool suit and round hat that were the uniform of his class in Europe. In India, no doubt, he would wear a sari, probably of Chinese silk. Geir wished him joy of it.

“Indeed you can, Herr Gupta,” he said. “Specifically, you can sign this.” He held out the deed of sale. Blinking behind his glasses, Gupta took the contract, frowning.

“It is not the custom to sign what I have not agreed to beforehand,” he said.

“No, no, by all means read it first,” Geir agreed, falsely cordial. He’d seen this scenario play out a dozen times; the Indian businessman would be incredulous at first, then dismissive, then angry, and finally dismayed and silent.

It did not take Gupta long to read the document; when he looked up he seemed earnestly confused. “I think perhaps there has been a mistake, yes? You have corresponded with some other Gupta – an easy mistake, it is a common name – and he has agreed to sell you his factory for this sum; but you have come to the wrong place.” He held out the contract for Geir to take back; Geir made no move to do so.

“No, I’m quite convinced we have the right place,” he said instead. “Right, boys?” The three burly Strike Guards behind him variously nodded, grunted, and glared. Gupta’s eyes shifted as he really noticed them for the first time; the boys didn’t say much, and tended to disappear from the attention of men who dealt much in words. Now he saw the thick bare arms, bull necks, and barrel chests, and understood what they were there for; to his credit, if he was intimidated, it didn’t show.

“I see,” he said, his politeness icy now. “Gentlemen, I do not think we can do business together. You will please find the door just behind you.” He slammed his hand down on a bell on his desk; a few seconds later, the door to Geir’s left opened onto the factory floor, letting in the noise of machinery and several Swedes in overalls.

“Trouble, boss?” one of them inquired.

“I hope not,” Gupta said. “But these gentlemen seem to be having some difficulty finding the door. I suggest you guide them to it, yes?”

Geir’s eyebrows rose; so, word had gotten around and the foreigners were taking measures. Mobilising the workers seemed rather naive, though. He spoke quickly.

“So, you boys know that after we kick him out” – he jerked his thumb dismissively at Gupta – “you will be the new owners of this place, right? And share the profits? So, I suggest you don’t really want to show us the door; you want to show him the door.”

The blond in front, who seemed to be the leader, shrugged. “I don’t work here, so that don’t do me much good, does it?”

Geir nodded understanding; Gupta had hired outsiders for his protection squad – smart of him. But he had a way around that:

“Well then, would you like a job in the Strike Guards? Good pay, easy work, and you don’t take orders from foreigners and capitalists.”

The Swede rubbed his chin, making a scratching noise. There were four men behind him, outnumbering Geir’s three; but if it came to a real struggle, there would be knives and clubs flying, and even men on the winning side could easily get hurt – so he was willing to try to talk Geir out of the factory, while reserving the option of force.

“Well now, I took Mr Gupta’s money,” he said. “And it’s good money, too; and anyway we shook hands on it. So, perhaps some other time I’ll consider your offer; but today, no, out you go.”

Geir sighed mentally; false consciousness, the bane of the working classes. If only they could be made to see that their true interests lay with their comrades, and not in bourgeois ideals of honour, the Revolution would come far more quickly. But this was no study circle; fortunately, he had a better argument than the class-theoretical one.

“Today I brought three sturdy lads with me,” he said. “You’re six, so if you really insist I’ll go away peacefully. But that puts me in a really bad mood. I’ll go out, drink, brood over my misfortunes; and tomorrow I’ll be back and I’ll have the whole Stockholm Strike Guard with me. Three hundred working men angry at the exploitation of their fellows.” That rather overstated the strength of the Strike Guards he could summon on a day’s notice, but the Swedes exchanged worried looks; in any case he certainly had many more than their six. “Now Mr Gupta is just following his class interests, so we won’t do anything to him except throw him out; but you lot are class traitors. I wouldn’t expect gentle treatment, were I you.”

“Exploitation!” Gupta exploded. “What exploitation?! I give your fellows work! Without work in my factories, what would they do? Wander the streets until they starved?”

“Very likely,” Geir conceded. “It’s what you do with the product of their labour I’m referring to. You send it back to India, when it should stay right here and feed our hungry. But in any case, that has nothing to do with the matter at hand, which is that if you don’t sign this contract, I’ll be back tomorrow with a different one, with a worse price.”

“This is ten shillings on the daler, at most!” Gupta said, flinging the ‘contract’ to the floor. “And tomorrow the police will be here in force; I’ve six witnesses to your threats.”

“And they’ll stay all week, will they?” Geir returned. “The thing about being out of work is, you can afford to hang about all day waiting for an opportunity.”

Gupta smiled unpleasantly. “The thing about being an exploiter of the working man is, it’s very profitable. You made a mistake, Mr Randall; you gave us fair warning, going around to the factories one by one. The Indian men of business in this city are not stupid, you know. We’ve agreed to pool our resources, as when buying insurance. Bring your three hundred Strike Guards, by all means; and I will bring all the men that my friends and I can hire, and we will see who has the best of it.”

Geir frowned; that was a new one, and he had no immediate answer. Stockholm was full of desperate men, looking for work – any work; and the Movement didn’t have the sort of money that a wunch of bankers and industrialists could get together. The Strike Guards were paid largely in revolutionary fervour; they would be a match for hired headbreakers one on one, no doubt, but the odds would be worse than that. Besides, the police couldn’t well overlook a fight that would be well on its way to a full battle. Winking at a few coerced “sales”, when the victims were brown and foreign, was one thing; hundreds of armed men clashing in the streets would lead to Questions Asked in the Storting and heads rolling, if not stopped.

Geir pressed his lips together; time to cut his losses. “I’ll be back,” he said; an empty threat, but perhaps it would worry the exploiting capitalist swine.

“Whenever you are ready to offer forty-eight shillings in the daler, I shall be happy to discuss a sale with you,” Mr Gupta returned pleasantly.

Geir fumed as he walked away; but behind his stony face the gears were whirring, turning, planning new avenues of attack. If the factory owners could buy more knives than he could, then the thing to do was – what? And put that way, the answer was obvious.

Recruit someone with a gun.

———————————————–

May 1st, 1868

The same office

Morning

The factory was the same; a little shabbier perhaps, but still an ugly rectangle of brick, skylights letting in the minimum of sunlight, huge smokestacks pumping coal and sparks into the air. Everything else was different. This time Geir came, not with the workers’ own Strike Guards, but with a man in the blue uniform of the police; not with threats and illegal force, but with a copy of an Act of the Storting, signed and made law that morning by Christian MacRaghnall, Third of that Name, Emperor of the North Sea. All legal and above-board. As Gjest had said, to steal farms – and factories – you needed armies or lawyers. It had taken years, but Geir had found his lawyers, his politicians, his well-spoken workers and peasants who could get elected to the Storting with union money and speak their comrades’ cause; and now, at last, he returned to the place of his defeat, and all the armed force of the North Sea Empire was at his back.

Gupta was different too; not just the lines in his face and the greying of his black hair, but the way he held himself. There was defeat in the slump of his spine; no icy, polite defiance now. He stared sullenly at Geir.

“Mr Gupta,” Geir smiled. “We meet again.”

“You’ve come up in the world,” Gupta observed. “At least to the extent of recruiting a better class of thug.”

“Quite so,” Geir agreed; it was nice to have the police on his side for a change, but fundamentally the man was a lackey of the ruling classes – an ally of convenience, no more. It merely happened that, for a change, the short-run interests of the wealthy men who controlled the Storting, to reduce foreign competition, agreed with the long-run interests of the workers, to get the means of production out of the hands of a tiny elite. Foreign investors made a convenient place to start chipping away at the sanctity of property; with the precedent of expropriation once set, who knew where it might end? But the police were merely tools in that long-term power struggle, with no interest of their own; Gupta’s “thug” was entirely accurate, and entirely failed to ruffle Geir’s good mood.

“And I suppose you’ve moved on to recruiting a better sort of native muscle?” he asked in return. “Seems it’s not as easy to bribe men who aren’t desperate for bread, though.” He didn’t have a paper trail, but then, he didn’t need one; obviously the Indian factory owners – and the Russians, and the Chinese – had been funding the Kristelig Folkeunion‘s effort to scuttle the Nationalisation Act.

“Apparently not,” Gupta shrugged. The vote had not been particularly close. “Your poor men work hard for their wages; that’s why we come here. Your politicians, eh.”

“In any case,” Geir said, bored with the exchange, “this factory is now owned by the Norse people; and we no longer have need of your services. So, if you’d gather up your personal belongings, you know very well where the door is.”

“Right behind you, yes,” Gupta nodded. “But as for which of us will be walking out it, why, I suggest you take it up with the owner.”

“I have,” Geir said, annoyed. He held up his copy of the Act. “To wit, the hundred-and-seventy-third Storting, duly gathered in full session of Odelsting and Lagting, its Acts signed into law by Christian, King of Norway and Sweden, the Wends’ and the Goths’ King.”

“Ah,” Gupta said. He sneered in a way Geir couldn’t quite place; you couldn’t call it triumphant, exactly, but it wasn’t the expression of a man who was about to slink off in utter defeat, either. “But that Act applies to factories owned by foreign citizens.” He rang the bell on his desk again, and just as had happened nine years earlier, the door to the factory floor opened. This time, though, the man who entered was dressed in a top hat and well-tailored suit, and had the neatly groomed beard that was the style among the merchant families of Stockholm. Geir recognised him; Norvald Rendell had been one of the principal backers of the Act outside the Landsorganisasjon.

“Geir,” the capitalist greeted him; they had become familiar in the course of campaigning for the Act. “Come to visit my factory?”

“Your factory?” Geir said. “But -” he gestured helplessly at Gupta.

“Mr Gupta, seeing which way the wind blew, very sensibly agreed to sell me his factory last night, rather than have it expropriated today. And I am, of course, a citizen of the North Sea Empire; and so my factory is not subject to the Act. I believe a fair number of similar deals may have been signed in the hours before the Storting voted.”

“You, you -” Geir sputtered in helpless rage. Norvald gave him an edged smile.

“Capitalist?” he suggested. “Or perhaps, exploiter? Well, quite so. Come now, Geir! You’ve got exactly what you wanted: Every factory on Norwegian soil is now owned by Norse citizens, and their profits will stay right here and, as you say, feed our hungry. At least, that was the argument you made in public. Were you, perchance, hiding some ulterior motive?” He cocked his head, mock-inquiring.

“Where the devil is the capital for all this coming from?” Geir asked, ignoring Norvald’s rhetorical question. Of course the whole point had been to have factories owned by the public, from which position he could have campaigned to have them given to their unions; not to mention that, if they were sold and not expropriated, the effect of the precedent was lost.

“Well, in the circumstances, we’re not paying full price, of course. I believe most of Mr Gupta’s countrymen may be taking back thirty or so shillings in the daler.”

“Twenty-five. If that.” Gupta interjected sourly; Norvald nodded, accepting the correction.

“But still, you are of course correct that it would be difficult for us to come up with such sums in metal on short notice. Fortunately, Mr Gupta and his friends have contacts in India with, apparently, quite a lot of capital that they haven’t been able to find good investments for.”

Geir swallowed. “And at what rate have these, these speculators” – he almost spat the word – “so generously lent you their money?”

“Ah, you are worried that we will be passing the produce of the workers to India as before, just under the name of ‘interest’ in place of ‘profit’? Fear not.” Norvald smiled angelically. “Thanks to your selfless struggle in the public interest, we were in quite a strong bargaining position – after all, if no deal was made, the worthy oriental gentleman would be going home with nothing. So, we are paying a mere six percent. I believe, taking one with another, and accounting for the present value of a future income, that may bring the return on Norwegian investments up to, say, forty shillings in the daler.”

“Thirty,” Gupta contradicted. “After accounting for the risk that you’ll renege on the loans.”

Norvald shrugged. “The Amsterdam market agrees with you; I don’t. If I had any free capital I would buy some of those loans myself. The men who took the loans, after all, depend as much on the sanctity of credit as you do.” He looked at Geir. “And property, to be sure. We don’t want any sort of precedent to be set.”

Geir and Gupta united in giving the Norwegian capitalist loathing glares, which he bore with the equanimity of a man who has just increased his fortune three or four times at the expense of class enemies and foreign competitors. “And now, gentlemen, if there’s nothing further, I believe you both know where the door is.” He gave the policeman a prompting glance, and the constable grinned; he might or might not have followed the discussion, but he understood that his ultimate employer, the Norse capitalist, had scored over the foreigner and the rabble-rouser. He tapped his baton meaningfully in his left palm. “Move along, then, sirs.”

Geir longed for a dozen Strike Guards to explain class solidarity to the grinning idiot; but it was no use. The baton wasn’t very impressive as a weapon, but it was ultimately backed by bayonets, and rifles, and grapeshot. The May Massacre had shown very well what happened when the working class tried to oppose the army directly. He swallowed bitterness. “This is not the end,” he told Norvald. “We tried working within the system, and this is what it gets us?”

“That’s the nature of the system,” Norvald shrugged. “And that’s also why the system has an army to protect itself from the losers.”

“You may find,” Gupta said, “that there are other armies in the world.”

Norvald smiled tolerantly. “Oh, come now. They certainly talk a good game in Delhi; but who is going to send armies halfway around the world for a few tens of millions of riksdaler? Besides which, you and what navy? No, no, there’ll be no war. You might as well expect these lads” – he gestured to Geir – “to finally organise their Revolution.” He smiled at Geir’s expression. “And I’ll be the first against the wall, eh? That’ll be the day!”

“Yes,” Geir said. “That will be the The Day.”