The Daily Worker Newspaper, February 18, 1927, Page 6

THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1927 THE DAILY WORKER HING CO. " Published by the DAILY WORKER PUB aily, Except Sunday 88 First Street, New York, N. Y. Phone, Orchard 1680 SUBSCRIPTION RATES By mail (outside of New York): $6.00 per ‘year $3.50 six months 0 three months By mail (in New York only): 4.0 six months onths i make out chi irst Stree Address all r THE DAILY WORE pied ; ... .Editors Business Manager t New York, N. Y., under 1879. Entered as secon post-of March cinta eae ing rates oh ap SS The Voice of Britain’s Imperialists Two things cause the hypocritical smile of capitalist democ- racy to disappear and its lips to draw back from its teeth in a| | snarl. | 4 One is a strike or some other form of mass protest by work-| ers, the other is a revolt of colonial peoples against imperialist | UNION MINER: “Come On, We Need You.” “IMPERIALISM & WORLD POLITICS,” by Parker. T. Moon. 1926. $3.50. | tierce editors and public men are glow to attach the word “imperial- ism” to the United States. They still remember Wilson’s phrases. They are still deluded by the 50 non-aggressive years between the Mexican War of 1848 and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Now and then a voice is Maemillan, raised against “the American Empire.” One German paper recently com- mented on the danger that American capital faced from the Mexican revolu- tion and the evident sympathy which Central America feels for’ Mexico in its, struggle to emancipate itself from the leading strings of American finan- cial imperialism, Well-informed people no longer question the imperialistic role which the United States is playing. Prof. P. T. Moon, of Columbia University, in this book, lists the United States among the “ten imperialist nations of the world today,” Describing the pre-war world struggle for colonies, he first notes the failures and then writes, “of the more successful Empires of France, Britain, Russia, and America” . . . “All the great Powers save the United States boldly and frankly set themselves to the epic task, in the 19th Cen- tury, of carving out stupendous colonial empires; and even the United States, feeling the same urge to action, reach into the Pacific and into the Caribbean for modest parcels of colonial territory.” This is Prof. Moon’s summary of the position which the United States has obtained as a colonial empire. “Take this fairly consecutive list of quasi-dependencies—Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Panama, Nicaragua, and Liberia,—and add it to the list of territories and possessions, we obtain'a grand total that will put the United States colonial empire in the sixth place for area and for population, and in the second place for commercial influ- Lage the working class at home. But in no war with a rival does . MSE NEL at A LEED, ' story of the proceedings that Lewis offers efficiency. in place of | -not be funny if Mrs. McEntee found a flea on her favorite poodle rule. | Sir Mitchell-Thomson, who as chief civil commisSioner dur-| ing the general strike in Britain-was instrumental in putting the police force on a military basis, now has a new opportunity to dis-| play his talents in behalf of the empire. Sir Mitchell Thomson, | with Sir William Joynson-Hicks, home secretary, ably seconding | his motion, now declares that all those who oppose the shipment of | troops to China should be stood against a wall and shot. The Communists of Great Britain distributed leaflets among} the outward bound troop contingents urging them to refuse to} shoot down Chirlese workers and peasants for the benefit of lords, dukes, landlords and capitalists, and British imperialists are alarmed. They may well be nervous because once such things get/| started it is hard to tell where they are going to stop and in these} days of disillusionment of the once credulous masses it is entirely possible that Thomas Atkins may do one of two things—refuse | to shoot colonials or go a step farther and shoot a few imperialists or such of their lackeys as may be within easy range. * Middle ass liberals and social democrats will protest against sud’ crassmess as Sir Thomson exhibits. They will explain that he does net voice the sentiments of the saner section of the British fuling class and—this is exactly where they will be mistaken or consciously trying to deceive the masses. Not only is Sir Thomson in deadly earnest byt he speaks for that section of the British ruling class. which really counts—the so-called diehards who will hesitate at nothing to suppress, not only attempts to win the army and the navy to the side of the masses, | * but the struggles of the masses for better wages and improved working conditions. Those who laugh at threats like those made by Sir Mitchell Thomson are of two kinds—enemies of the working class and fools. The armies and navies of imperialist powers are organized and trained to fire at three targets—rival imperialist nations, Workers and peasants of the colonial and semi-colonial countries VI What did they think about it? Chaim Menzies was, as always, the the fury of an imperialist ruling class reach the high point it does | when the struggle is with the working class or with national liber- ation movements like that in China. It is when the working class of an imperialist nation makes} common cause with the colonial masses that the rulers have the greatest reason for worry and it is exactly the fear of this occur- rence which produces the coldblooded murderousness of a ‘Thomson. But the Communists have shown the workers of Britain the way and in spite of threats this is the way the British working! class will travel—sooner than even Sir Mitchell-Thomson thinks. first to speak. Perhaps his feel- ings had been hurt by the reference to tobacco; anyhow, he said it looked to him like it vas anodder colony; you didn’t change a colony by calling it a college, and a colony vas de vorst trap you could set for de movement. “You git people to go off and live by demselves, dif- ferent from de rest of de vorkers, and vedder dey are comfortable or, vedder dey ain’t—and dey von’t be —all de time dey are tinking about someting else but de class struggle | out in de vorld.” “That’s quite true,” said Bunny. “But we shan’t be so far from the world, and the purpose of our train- ing will be, not the colony, but the movement outside, and how to help it.” “De people vot are going to help de movement has got to be in it every hour. You git dem out vun mont’ and dey are no good any more; dey have got some sort of graft den, someting easy, dey are no longer vorkers.” “But this isn’t going to be so easy, Comrade Chaim—” “Listen to him! He is going to git nice young college ladies and gentlemen to come and live lives dat vill not seem easy to de vork- ers!” “You might as well admit, it, Bunny,” put in Harry Seager. “You'll have a nice polite place, with all the boys and girls wearing William Morris costumes. They'll work earnestly for a while, but they'll never be efficient, and if you really have any buildings put. up, or any food raised, you'll have regulation hard-fisted workingmen to do it. I know, because we're picking walnuts now!” “T don’t want a polite place,” said Bunny, “I want a gymnasium where people train for the class struggle; and if we can’t have dis- cipline any other way, how about this as part of the course—every student is pledged to go to jail for not less than thirty days.” “Attaboy!” cried Peter Nagle. “Now you're talking!” “Vot is he going to do—break de speed laws?” inquried Chaim, sar- castically. “He's going into Angel City and picket in a strike. Or he’s going to hold socialist meetings on street id corners until some cop picks him British Labor M. P.’s'who exposed the horrors of Polish] }P., Po ee pig Ag A prisons are now charged with being Communists. Because their| struggle, Comrade Chaim,” visit had the approval of Ramsay MacDonald the Polish fascist} _ “Yes, but he might run into some government trusted them, But the fact that they told the truth at a: aga aoeiset gine proves conclusively that they are Communists! The good presby- terian MacDonald is being continually imposed on. Join The Workers (Communist) Party. “Efficiency Unionism” at Miami The capitalist press has no difficulty in interpreting cor-| rectly the meaning of the proposal made by President Lewis of the United Mine Workers to the operators at- Miami in joint ses-| sion with the wage seale committee of the union. The New York World for instance states in its head to its a@ wage cut. | The terms are synonymous. The Lewis proposal for a! tribunal composed ef technical experts and lawyers to settle dis-| puted questions for the industry takes for granted that com- | pulsory arbitration is no longer a debatable question although | the membership of the union has never been allowed to pass upon it. The disastrous effects of such a policy are clearly apparent} in the anthracite fields. The left wing, by putting the issue squarely before the membership and consolidating all elements honestly willing to fight to save the union from the menace of “efficiency unionism,” will be able to defeat the Lewis machine. ; The advocacy of -such a policy as compulsory arbitration and efficiency methods when the union is faced with the pos- sibility of a strike on April first and needs to have its morale raised to the highest possible level is additional evidence of the utter disregard for the interests of the rank and file shown con- sistently by President Lewis and his henchmen. Mrs. J. McEntee of Philadelphia needed a housekeeper, so she inserted an ad for a housekeeper in a capitalist sheet. “In one day, more than 50 people applied for the position and the right girl was chosen,” writes the advertising manager, Which proves that there are more jobless than jobs in Philadelphia. Would it one of those days, despite her sagacity in picking the “right girl” out of fifty. him six mont’s.” “Well, that’s a chance we'll have Get Your Union to Telegraph C coal production is still non-union, | The union fields produce 35 percent of the soft coal in the United States, while 65 percent of Union wages are higher than non-union wages. But unless the Upton Ginclair 7 to take; the point is simply, no senior student is in good social standing until he or she has been in jail for at least thirty days in a class struggle case.” “And the teachers?” demanded Gregor Nikolaieff. “Once every three years, or every five years for the teachers.” “And the founder! How often for the founder?” Peter clamored in glee; but Dan Irving said the founder would have to wait until he had got rid of his money. They argued back and forth. Could you interest young people in the idea of self-discipline? Would your danger be in setting the standard too easy, so that you wouldn’t accomplish much, or in setting it too high, so that you wouldn’t have any students? Bun- ny, the young idealist, was for set- ting it high; and Harry Seager said that people would volunteer more quickly to die than they would, to get along without tobacco. And he wanted to know, what were they going to do about the Communists. Harry was no politician any more, he was a social revolutionist, and only waiting for the day of action. Regardless of what socialist party. members might wish, they couldn’t keep Bolshevik students out of a college, and even if they did, the ideas would bust in. Bunny answered by setting forth his ideal of the open mind. Why couldn’t the students do their own educating, and make their own de- cisions? Let the teachers give the information, they were asked for; and then let the students thresh it out—every class rogm and open forum, and no loyalty except to research and freedom? They were all willing to admit that there would be no use starting a sectar- ian institution, to advocate one set of doctrines and exclude the others. Also, it took a partisan of each doctrine to set it forth fairly. So then, here was Bunny pinning them down: “Chaim, would you be will- ing for Harry to explain his ideas to your class? Harry, would you give Chaim a chance to talk?” Bunny could see his own job—the arbitrator who kept these warring fractions out of each other’s hair! Then said Chaim, the skeptic, “I vant to know, vot are you going to do about sex?” Bunny admitted that this wor- ried him, “I suppose we’ll have to conform to bourgeois standards.” “Oh, my God!” cried Peter Nagle. “Let the bourgeoisie begin!” Jacob Menzies, the student, had just been reading a book about Ruskin, the old time Socialist col- ony in Tennessee. It was the sex problem which had broken up that unorganized fields are organized, the employers will be able to cut the union wages. Dean |. Duke’s New Dr. Wilbur Cornell Davison, above, newly appointed dean of the medical school at Duke (Duke’s Mixture) Uni- versity, at Durham (Bull Durham), N. C. This is no joke. Duke, the tobacco king, has endowed a private college at Durham. Presumably the medical department will not be al- lowed to cure, any tobacco habits. colony, he declared; and his father chimed jn, “It vill break up any colony dat ever exists under capi- talism! Pere is only vun vay you, can make vun man live vit vun voman all his life, and date is to shut dem up in a house togedder and never let dem out. But if you let dem get vit odder couples, den right avay vun man finds he vants some odder voman but de right vun,”” “But then,” said Dan Irving, “according to bourgeois standards, they get a divorce.” “Sure ting!” said Chaim. “But not in a Socialist colony! If dey vould do it in a colony, it vould be a free love nest, and you vould be on de front page of de papers, and de American Legion come and bust you in de snoot!” (To Be Continued). Park Avenue Nursed By Mr. H. Gordon Duval Who Likes His $-Bill H. Gordon Duval is the founder of the Park Ave. Association and an ambitious fellow at that. _we find that he has many ways of making his association grow, and incidentally to bring in the shekels at the same time. His method is as follows: He has two divisions. His residential divi- sion consists of one thousand mil- lionaire residents. who pay him $26 a year each to maintain Park ave- nue’s exclusiveness, The second d@ision consists of merchants who ‘pay Mr. Duval $52 a year. each for the use of the names and addresses of the inhabi- tants living in the wealthiest gold coast district in the city. When it is all said and done, Mr.” Duval is quite happy, thank you, and may ,soon join his clients in the mi ire class. ° WITHDRAW ALL U. S. WARSHIPS FROM NICARAGUA ! NO INTERVENTION IN MEXICO! ence.” opulent European predecessors. “ALPHA,” Masius, $2. You may sit around a table in a Greenwich Village speakeasy, expose jan adamappled neck to its dim lights, |spit lava—and announce the birth of |proletarian art. But proletarian art |won’t be born. It ain’t born that way. | Here is an honest book by a young Hungarian writer which represents the reaction of a sensitive artist to this cockeyed world. It is a bitter, negative book that exposes our slimy civilization—but it is not at all proletarian. No more proletarian than R. U. R. Alpha is a young artist who wastes his time “drawing pretty pictures, playing with girls and attending Emery Balint, Macy- sexual mix-up and drives a young and profound disgust with the rapid life drive him into an extended drunk. Young Alpha winds up in the hospital. 7 Then comes the»war. Alpha, like a good many other young men, plunges into it in the hope of per- sonal salvation. Like a good many other young men, he is bitterly dis- appointed. Its brutality breaks him. He comes out: of it half-mad. He goes to live in a little village where he is tolerated by an old peas- ant woman, who knows him. The boys and girls of the village run after him and call’ him names. Alpha is half-mad. One afternoon Alpha goes into a little cafe, where swinish officers and pot-bellied business men guzzle beer and leer at the thinly-covered bodies of cafe prostitutes. In a burst. The village burns down. Alpha meets his death at the foot of a cross beneath the heels and the pitchforks of the angry villagers. * * * The book is expressionistic—and its episodes are, with one or two ex- ceptions, convincing. Balint’s bitter- ness is not a matter of words; it’s not a pose. Its intensity often makes it unpleasant for the reader who is accustomed to words. Is “Alpha” proletarian? I do not think so. But that is not a criticism against the book. | How can a genuine piece of liter- | ature be other than negative in a de- |caying society? You may invoke the revolution at. the end of a poem or |a novel and express the pious wish | that the revolution will change things does not make your work of art proletarian. Literature is rooted in its social background; you can’t get proletarian literature until you get a complete change of social struc- ture. Take a native example. Mike Gold has done some fine things, best stuff is negative. It is a sweep- ing condemnation of a putrid society which confines children in dark East Side tenements, which murders steel workers, which drives factory girls to prostitution. But Dickens did that, Capek, like Balint, is a Commun- ist and an excellent artist. But his work is negative and bitter, too. Capitalist society, he tells us, makes automatons of men; capitalist so- ciety brings out the ugliness in men. Capek is an excellent artist, but he is not a “proletarian” artist.. How can he be when bourgeois society is putrid and the proletarian society still unborn? Harry Freeman. “ESSAYS be! REVOLT,” by Jack London. ‘anguard Press, New York. $.50. How quaint these latter-day So- cialist_ manifestos sound! I can’ pic- ture the first president of the Inter- collegiate Socialist Society (now the harmless League for Industrial De- moeracy) giving his famous lecture on “Revolution” to the students at Harvard in the fall of 1907. Jacl: ‘London, handsome, picturesque,—one ) booze parties. He gets involved in a} girl to: suicide. A troubled conscience | of frenzy, he sets fire to the cafe.) | (which, of course, it will), but that). . But hi jetarian writer? Capital is being exported; trade is being built up; territory is being “acquired.” The United States has all of the imperial trappings of its less SCOTT NEARING. of the first of the financially suc- cessful short. story writers,—must have seemed the original Superman to the college lads of the time. I Sometimes even imagine that many of ‘the present members of the exe- cutive committee of the L. I. D.,, The World Tomorrow and the patrons of the Community Church must have been converted by the dynamic per- sonality and the vivid logic of the author of “The Cal! of the Wild” and “Martin Eden.” Someone has even told me that the man who writes some of the sanctimonious editorials for the New York World, Walter Lippman, was one of his earliest converts to the cause of the Revo- lution, “TI received a letter the other day,” wrote London in one of his insurree- tionary essays., “It was from a man in. Arizona. It began, ‘Dear Com- | tade.’ It ended ‘Yours for the Re- | volution,’ I replied to the letter, and | by letter began, ‘Dear Comrade.’ li | ended, ‘Yours fot the Revolution.’ in the United States there are 400,000 Inen, of men and women nearly 1,- | 000,000, who begin their letters ‘Dear Comrade,’ and end them ‘Yours for the Revolution.’ In Germany there are 3,000,000 men who begin their letters ‘Dear Comrade’ and end them ‘Yours for the Revolution’; in France, 1,000,000 men; in Austria, 800,000 men: in Belgium, 200,000 men; in Italy, 250,000 men; in Eng- land, 100,000 men; in Switzerland, 100,000 men; in Denmark, 55,000 men; in Sweden, 50,000 men; in Hol- land, 40,000 men; in Spain, 30,000 ists.” I guess you can see that Jack Lon- don was a stickler for statistics,— especially those in round numbers. You can also assume that these sta- tisties were compiled before the archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, and long before many of those who were in habit of begin- ning their letters, ‘Dear Comrade,’ and ending them ‘Yours for the Re- volution,’ had a chance to whoop it up for their respective ruling-class governments during the recent blood- fest. . | I found that all things were com- | modities,” wrote Jack London in another essay, “What Life Means to Me.” . . . “The one commodity that labor had to sell was muscle. The honor of labor had no price in the market-place. . . I learned further that brain was likewise a commodity. But a lahorer was worked out ot broken down at forty-five or fifty. . As’a brain merchant I was-a | success,” He sure was. London published 48 books in 16 years, and many of them were best-sellers. Some were trans- lated in numerous foreign languages. And of course several were jazzed into the movies. Was London a pro- Not if the test of a proletarian writer is one who ex- presses in prose or poetry the frus- trations and hopes of class-conscious workers, as a class. True, London wrote about workers in several of his novels. But they were all after “tachless.” They were, with few ex- ceptions energetic careerists. Like the semi-autobiographical Martin Eden they didn’t enjoy working on oyster-ships, in sweaty laundries, or even being footloose hobos. They all wanted to get up in the world, to be deserving of the “little lady of the big house.” b Jack London brandished the epi- thet revolutionist as a description of himself and ‘his ideas; but he was gullible enough to swallaw Kipling’s dubious doctrine of the White Man’s Burden, believed joyously in the su- premacy of the Nordics, and clung to socialism, it would seem, chiefly to give an additional luster of bra- vado and romanticism to*his cereer. “For,” according to a contemporary critic, socialism, to London’s middle- class cont 8, was an adven- ture more desperate than the rush for gold in the Klondike,” Sender Garlin. ¥y men—comrades all and revolution- cxpeaneesiees