The Daily Worker Newspaper, December 24, 1926, Page 10

a With The Authors THE MATERIALISM OF LITERARY CULTURE. is no news to the readers of The DAILY WORK- ER that life is to be understood from bottom to top as an expression of effort at adjustment to the material environment. Overwise readers may be so familiar with all the ins and outs of this idea that they can not get any more thrills out of the applica- tion of it; but the general run of those that see this review would very likely find new light and new interest in V. F. Calverton’s latest essay/in literary eriticism. His earlier work, “The Newer Spirit,” is familiar to many of us, and his newest venture fully bears out the hopes we felt when we saw how boldly and keenly the new path set out through the jungle ef literary interpretation. The only unfavorable criticism the present re- viewer has seen. of Calverton’s work amounts to no more than saying that he has not exhausted ther subject,—a shortcoming natural enough in view of the fact that no one else has done anything worth while toward a fealistic socological interpretation ef English literature, at least since Vida Scudder’s “Social Ideals in English Letters,” which was a not- able groundbreaker a couple of decades ago, In the latest product of Calverton’s encyclopedic earning, “Sex Expression in Literature” (Boni & Liveright, 1926), the reader may learn to grasp the correlation that exisis between the forms of literary expression and the underlying economic and social structure. On the one hand it appears that a ripened parasitic class, whether aristocratic or bourgeois gives vent to loose if not lascivious expression in the realms of letters, while a climbing business class @isciplines itself to the point of restrained and puri- tanic expression, This contrast is exhibited to the full in a series of intensely interesting chapters in The Story of 1906 the well-known leader of the bourgeois + Constitutional-Democratic Party, and member of @he government duma, Doctor I. Shingarev, made a @horough investigation of two villages in the Vor- enezh Gubernia (Mokhovatki and Novo-Zhivotinnoe). The material which he obtained from this investi- gation he published under the title of “The Dying Village.” on In his work Shingarev said that as a result of not having any land, of indescribable poverty and perma- ment starvation, the village population is slowly but surely dying out. INCE then the villages have gone thru the mis- fortunes of the imperialist war, more than once they found themselves on the front during the Deni- kin escapade, they suffered from the famine of 1921, ebolrra, Spanish influenza and typhus, Therefore, when the Moscow Scientific-Research Enstitute of the Timiriazey Agricultural Academy de- cided to investigate several districts for the purpose of detailed information on the influence of the Revolution on the village, it chose in the first place, the above-mentioned villages (Novo-Zhivotinnoe and Mokhovatki) as a most favorable objective in view of the histori¢ document already in hand, which had already determined their previous economic condi- ton. During a period of two and a half months the expedition of the Institute thoroughly investigated fhe economic condition of these villages and brought Back very rich statistical material, each figure of which is the best evidence of what the October Revolution has given the village. Since 1917 the land portion, for examplé, In Mo- khovatwi and Zhivotinnoe has increased 12 times on account of the landowners’ land. At the same time when, during Shingarey’s investigation there was @.1 dessiatin of land suitable for tillage for each person of the population, and no meadow land at all, at the present time there is 1.12 dessiatin of land wguitable for tillage and 0.12 dessiatin of meadow land for each person. 5 In the time of Shingarey the peasants paid the landowners five roubles as rent for each dessiatin ef land, and apart from that, they also paid govern- ment, Zemsky and Communal taxes amounting to about 25 roubles for each homestead. However, the fneome from a dessiatin of land did not exceed 10-14 roubles. Thus, after deducting the cost-of seeds wand the payment of taxes and rent, his hard labor al- jowed the peasant to live in sem!-starvation even in the years of good harvests, In 1925 all the taxes of the peasants on the aver- we amountéd to about 12 roubles for a homestead, and the poorer homesteads (about 20 per cent) are entirely freed from paying taxes. Then again the tmprovements in tilling the soll raised the harvest in the peasant farms to 60 poods on the dessiatin, instead of the former 24. Correspondingly, the wholesale income from a dessiatin increased trom 6 to.8 thmes. which are depicted the ups and downs of noble and bourgeois from Elizabethan England to the present, The fact that sex expression is the touch-stone is but an incident: to the theme. No one meed to:run to the book for new sex stuff. In fact if the author had selected a milder title and if he-had selected a sponsor with another flair than that of Harry Barnes (who writes the introduction) only-:an abnormally keyed reader would have been much impressed by the use of sex material in the book. In fact, the author is interested in demonstrating the materialist conception of culture rather than a sexual conception of anything, { Very likely some highly sophisticated readers will say that Calverton has told them nothing new,—that they could have gone and written the hook them- selyes. What of it? If the theory held by Calver- ton is sound, then the book is the expression of an epoch and not of an individual. Indeed we might say that in the person of Calverton, *the rising pro- letariat passes judgment on what the previously dominant, classes have chosen to call universal art and to judge by standards evolved from the brains of dilettante critics. It is not too much to say that a new era of literary criticism is now open and that it will show us how to understand literature as an expression of social sorane rather than as a flight of vapory, footless genius. —A. W. Calhoun, BOOKS RECEIVED— Men In War, By Andreas Latzko, Boni and Live- right. Dubliners, By James Joyce, Boni and Liveright. The Time of Man, By Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Viking Press. Fe, ~ A. I, Shingarey found that the birth-rate in the villages investigated, even in prosperous years, was very little above the mortality, and whenever there was the slightest drop in the harvast it also drop- ped. The recent investigation gave a complete pic- ture of the situation. It was found that during the past 25 years there were five occasions when the position of births and deaths gave the following picture: in 1906 there were 34 deaths and 27 births, in 1913, 39 deaths and 36 births, in 1916, 27 deaths and 21 births, in 1917, 21 deaths and 16 births. Beginning with 1922 the birthrate rapidly begins to prevail over the death rate and in 1925 in Zhivo- tinnoe there were 56 births and 19 deaths. In the history of the village for 36 years there was never a year when the birthrate was so high! Finally, during the nine months of 1926 there were only 3 deaths, but 25 births. ‘Thus, the investigation gives us the full right to state that the title given by Shingarev, “The Dying Villages” is at the present time not applicable to us. A member of the Soviet militia responding to a call for aesistance. Their duties correspond to those of policemen in America, except that they protect the workers, not the capitalists, ae oe ~ in the Wake of the New In the Wake ews, (Continued trom page 1) wing-leadera. The British capitalists were able do this same thing until a few years ago, but no mger, ‘with the result that “he British prototypes the Greens, Wolls, Sigmans and Lewises are los ing their hold.on the masses who are compelled to go to the left for guidance, while the right wing leaders snuggle closer and closer to the capitalists. hs eedtictgeucnl rgd of the labor faker in the United States. And as there may be those im the rad+ cal movement whose supply of revolutionary optim- ism needs replenishment, a few squirts of that politi- eal elixir will not be wasted on those whose faith has attenuated. Years of plenty are usually foltow- ed by years of famine and vice versa. Progress {s a fickle maid who takes one step backward for every two steps forward on the way to the marriage bureau. But it 4s as inevitable that socialism will supplant capitalism as that capitalism supplanted feudalism as an economic system. The right wing labor leaders, with their banking enterprises, and insurances companies, scab coal companies and in- vestment companies may dazzle the eyes of a sec- tion of the working class with their “conquests” for the time being, but stili despite all those spurl- ous achievements, the workers must toil so that the capitalists can mak: profits and the only bene- ficiaries from the capitalistic schemes of the labor skates are the skates and the employers, outside of the crumbs thrown to the aristocracy of labor for the moment. 'N the debate ‘between Scott Nearing and Professor Le Resignol of Nebraska, which took place last Sunday in Chicago, the professor was quite hope- ful that the working class were on the way to be- coming capitalists thru the policy of purchasing ede Ress * stock in corporations, and by organiziing labor Two Villages banks. Scott Nearing punctured his opponent’s op- timism when he showed by statistics that the total capitalization of all the labor banks was only 1% per cent of the capitalization of all the other banks in the United States and that the National City Bank of New York alone, was mors powerful finan- cially than all the labor banks combined. As for the argument that the workers can own the cor- Porations provided they purchase all the stock, our reply is that landlordism can be abolished provided every tenant owns his own home. Consecration. O wreathe red roses on my brow. - And arm me with the sword of hate, And give to me the deathless vow, And point my charger at the gate Where bastioned folly foully stands With sneering lips and bloody hands. Empowered ease, what tho | fall? X | swear that ! shall rise again! And thru my death, a battle call Shall bring to horse a thousand men, With roses red upon their brow, To charge thee as | charge thee now. Then fill-for me the rebel’s cup, And let me drain the blood-red wine; On revolution let me sup And round my limbs the Red Flag twine; I swear, for life dr death, to be The knight of Martial Liberty! - —Henry George Weiss, Proletarian Odes. By C. A. MOSELEY Ill, » A Jazz Santa Claus. Would it not be just truly shocking To find on Christmas in your stocking, Along with garters, ties and collars, A present of a billion dollars? Now don’t, in language quite profane, Suggest that I have used cocaine. Or that my forearm bears the scars Of frequent hypodermic jars, Or even dare insinuate That it has been my awul fate, My, fine mentality to lose Just understand before you scream That this is no hot opium dream, A billion dollars is the gift With which old Santa Claus will 1ift The weight of woe from off the backs Of those who have, with legal tacks, _Natled down the nation’s raw-skinned hide And clinched the tacks on the jnaaide. In dividends and other ways A billion dollars Wall Street pays In thirty days of this December To folks who really can’t remember When, with the privilege to ghirk, They did their last real bt of work,