The Daily Worker Newspaper, July 26, 1924, Page 6

By ROBERT MINOR N the primitive jungle a naked savage leaps upon another man, crushing the skull of his “enemy;” then seizes the enemy’s possessions— weapons, clothing, food and woman. In modern times we read of “mur- derous” crimes that are more refined. A foot-pad shoots a wayfarer for pos- session of green paper money; the money will buy food, clothing, and woman. Still more refined: Two guilded youths of Chicago crush the skull of a twelve-year-old boy—for the psychological interest of the exper- ience—since they have no want of food, clothing or woman. Yet, they are killing to supply their peculiar needs, A trader in the New York poultry- market recently assembled a group of gunmen; at his direction they shot to death a rival merchant. The poultry monopolist, by proxy, killed a rival in order to obtain the market from which he will make a profit of money; and-with this he will buy food, clothing, woman and power. This is murder still more refined, more highly organized, more complex. But it is still in the realm of Murder. The poultry merchant is a murderer, as proven by the evidence found in his squalid little office on the New York river front. The Mass-Murderer In another part of New York, re- spectably removed from the water- - front, is a towering building of marble, steel and stone, where sits another contender for markets. This gentle- man deals, not in 75-cent chickens, but in $75,000,000 stocks and bonds. And he also murders to extend his market and his profits. But all things grow more complex as we go up in the world, and this is the top of the world. The stock-and-bond king is at the head of an enormous hierarchy of traders in steel, oil, cotton, coal, cop- per, grain and all the other como- dities from which profits can be made with which to supply themselves not merely with necessities but also with power of colossal magnitude, and fame, and the refined debaucheries. This hierarchy has practically finished with fighting among themselves for monopoly of the home market and for control of the factories, work- shops, mines and railroads, thru which the wealth is ereated. The victors in the home field are recog- nized, the hierarchy established. Thru control of the machinery of production and distribution, this hierarchy controls completely the life of the entire American, people. Upon the backs of scores of millions of wage workers and working farmers this hierarchy sits, creating nothing, but taking from the toiling population all that is created by their labor except barely enough to sustain their life and to keep them in capacity’ to work and reproduce their kind. The Complex System of “Gunmen.” To keep these toiling masses under control, the oligarchs pool their in- terests in forming a central control committee under the name of “govern- ment,” which creates an armed force, not a ragged crew like the gunmen of the slum poultry market, but highly disciplined troops and police. With the products of the labor of the working population, the hierarchy trades and gains its profits and its power. But the oligarchy must have always wider and wider markets in order to trade off the surplus products of the working masses for a profit. The home market, even when fairly well monopolized, is not sufficient to ab- sorbe the products of the home popu- lation. The toilers who made the products do not receive wages cover- ing the value of what they produced; therefore they cannot purchase all that they produced. The oligarchy must find a market outside of the home population. if And so the great business kings no less than the little “poultry king” are driven to look for and obtain at any cost a market for their commodities and to find sources for raw materials with which to keep their wage-serfs busy creating more commodities. There are vast territories in far-away continents, Asia, Africa, South Amer- ica, where the commodjties can be dis- posed of, and where enormous wealth of raw materials can be taken. A monster machinery of commerce is build up for this foreign trade and exploitation of natural resources. Capital itself can be exported to these lands with enormous gain; railroad and mining machinery is shipped and set up in these undeveloped terri- tories, and the labor there is ex- ploited at huge profits. The farther the “process goes, the greater the volume of surplus accumulates, and the more new territory is needed for further exploitation. It is an endless race for more, more, more! The Traveling Gunmen. The American agents of the dynasty of Morgan, Rockefeller, Sinclair and Doheny go into China or into Persia to sell and to take, to establish pro- fitable arrangements for the building of railroads, to obtain the richest fields and petroleum lands, and to establish police control so their invest- ments will not be in danger of loss. They are widening their “poultry market.” Together, the combined financial and business kings of Amer- be used. The American capitalists can’t make more goods at a profit, so they close down. Or, if the American capitalists win, the Germans have the trouble. That So-Called “Last War.” Ten years ago on this fourth day of August, a pistol-shot picked off a gold-braided agent of Austro-German imperialism in little outsof-the-way, jerk-water town of Sarajevo, in the Balkans. In the “natural” course of life, it shouldn’t make the slightest difference whether one royal buffoon among the world’s 1,750,000,000 popu- lation remained alive or dead. But this royal buffoon, the Archduke Fer- dinand, represented a whole complex system of Austro-German imperialism. In his gold-braided body was assaulted the whole complex structure of com- mercial-financial ambitions of German and Austrian capitalists. In his death was a blow, more symbolic than real, at the hopes of Berlin manu- facturers and finance-capitalists for the sale-of pots and pans and che- mises, and the investment of railroad engines in Asia Minor, and the corol- lary ambition to dominate the Balkan peninsula as the road to that market. WHO IS CARRYING THE BURDEN? ica, who have established their control over the home country with a hired, armed force of police and army, now need equally a “traveling” armed force—a navy and marines. These are formed, and when foreign peoples object to the taking of an oil field or. to some other exploitation method, the “traveling” police is sent to en- force the will of the capitalists. ‘The navy is the “traveling-salesman-of- last-resort” of the American capital- ists. Competitors But the agents of the American oligarchy are not the only ones who are seeking fields abroad. Other capitalist countries are ruled by financial kings who also are feverishly seeking the same markets and sources of wealth. Mr. Rockefeller’s agent runs into an equally shrewd agent for the British Royal Dutch Shell Oil Combine, looking for possession of the same oil lands. Mr. Morgan's man runs afoul of an equally sleek agent of Mr. Ballin of Hamburg, who also has a great, brand-new and capable fleet of merchant ships trying to horn in and unload a mountain of surpfus wealth that the efficient German oligarchy has wrung out of the un- paid toil of Teuton workers. There are clashes here. Ambassa- dors fly around government offices, wheedling, bargaining, threatening and bribing to obtain preference for their own “nationals”—which is to say for their own home capitalists, whose commercial outposts all am- bassadors are. If the German ambas- sador wins, the Germans begin to lay out the railroads and to survey the mining properties, German capitalists grow fat; and the American capital- ists are unable to sell their surplus goods, unable to dispose profitably of their surplus capital. There are then, in America, more goods than can be sold—this is called “overproduction,” for goods are made to be sold, not to And so the world war began. * It is a sleepy fool indeed who does not at last know that the great finance capitalists of each country control the government of that country, and that thru the mouths of their govern- mental puppets the great capitalists give commands to armies and navies, to go hither and yon, to make, war and to make peace. The armed forces of each country are to the great capitalists of that country simply an enlargement of what the corps of gunmen were to the “poultry king” of the slums of New York. Arming the Millions. But with the strain of world-com- petition, the finance-kings try to crush each other by having the big- gest army. In a certain stage they hire as many wage-soldiers as they can get; then in a later stage, they seize a whole population and by fcrce compel every able-bodied young man to become a conscripted gunman for them. Whole populations are thrown at each other’s throats. The traveling salesmen are rein- forced; machine guns take the place of sample-cases; gun-pointers take the place of mining engineers. In August and September, 1914, the inhabitants of Europe and half ‘of Asia driven into the slaughter such as no savage in the jungle could view without trembling. Ten million men were killed and many millions more left alive in mutilated condition. More and more millions were brought into the fire. The German financial their aristocratic part- the chess-game BO power- ful in the world, played off the lives of English workingmen, Canadiat The Real World War is Coming farmers, Australian African miners—so many hundred thousand lives for this oil field, so many for beating the Germans to that sea-port, which opens to a good market—so many British working men left ‘as stinking corpses on the Gallipoli coast, in exchange fof so many pounds sterling worth of future trade in the Black Sea. The great, « dark masses of India’s oppreased people were dipped into and thrown into the gamble for trade. And so on, and so on. But conscript armies are a danger- ous thing. It were safer to stick to the New York poultry-merchant’s plan of hir- ing a few mercenary gunmen. But when one oligarchy starts conscrip- tion, the others have to follow to keep from being overwhelmed. Conscript armies have to be kept “psycholo- gized”—in a maze of illusions about “democracy” and “country,” and utterly ignorant of their mission. This is hard to do except in a victori- ous army. _ One of the great oligarchies among the Allied. Powers, had military defeats that faded the illusions. Russia broke out in revolution. Eco- nomic collapse plunged the masses of workers into unendurable hunger and rage. The exploited masses began to understand what they were doing, and got out of the war; then the masses of workers and peasants formed their own. frame-work of organization, and banished, executed or jailed their home-grown mass-murderers. Then, for the first time, the tall, marble palaces of state were raided and the evidence against. one gang of the in- ternational “poultry merchants” ex- posed. Forever the illusions are ex- ploded. The crudest and coldest blooded death-plots for gain are shown to be the whole substance of the “diplomacy” of all imperialist powers without exception. America is Brought In Great Russia had opened a new era of history. 2 The cold calculators in Paris and London banks, pouring over the led- gers of death, saw that they were going to lose the contest; the other cold calculators in Germany were going to win, and this would mean a colossal loss of francs and pounds to French and British capitalists, loss of the hoped-for profits for decades to come, loss of the power and the ease for which they did their trading and made their war. They needed a “loan” of several mil- lion men. They applied to their pawn- broker, Mr. J. P. Morgan, in New York. Mr. Morgan is popularly supposed not to own the population of the United States. But—speaking of him as the symbol of the hierarchy of which he is the most spectactilar head —when he was approached by his clients and asked for the loan of the lives of four miliion men, Mr. Morgan was able to comply with the request. Within a few days a hundred thon- sand printing presses owned by the American capitalist oligarchy were grinding off the “psychological mobi- lization orders.” Morgan’s ministers of God were shouting hate from a score of thousands of pulpits. Mor- gan’s Democratic congressmen and Republican congressmen were pass- ing laws which would snatch up four million of the most useful young men, tie them in bundles called regiments and ship them to Europe as a loan from the Morgan bank to the Bank of England and the Bank of France. _ The American imperialist-financiers’ + interests were involved. Morgan and his associates in coldly sending these American boys to murder and to be murdered, actéd no less criminally than did the stum murderer in New York, or the guilded youths of Chi- cago. The Morgan oligarchy made from fifty to seventy-five thousand of millions of dollars out of the 77,000 American boys they killed—nearly a .|million dollars per boy. Shut up! you mother, the war was for such pur- poses and nothing more. The exposures made by the Russian Bolsheviks when they captured the (Continued on page 7.)