The Daily Worker Newspaper, February 19, 1927, Page 10

-e- JIMMY WILLIAMS IMMY WILLIAMS was figuratively crushed. His head was in a terrible whirl of figures, facts, theories and beliefs. The pet platitudes and Amer- icanisms that he had been taught in his high school had been pinned to earth and dissected—even as a cat in his biology class has been anatomized. He cherished these illusions tenaciously, these illusions which had been carefully instilled in him by a patriotic faculty. He, a son of old stock Americans —most of whom had never had the opportunity to acquire some schooling—-was most ardent in his ac- eeptance of the patriotism that had been served him in ever so many forms in school. Among a group of indifferent and common-place students, he had been an outstanding scholar and a zealot in everything that smacked of the military or was the least bit colored with red, white and blue. He was the pride of his mother and the joy of his principal, an old bigot of the Andrew Jackson type, withou! any of Jackson’s pretensions of democracy, a kluxer and an American Legionary. But now something was decidedly wrong. He had stepped into a local forum of working men and women, and had listened, with drooping jaw, to a young traveling lecturer tell some fundamental facts of the country in which he, Jimmy Williams, Diamond H; S. 1926, lived. Now he -was walking home, wondering whether it was true, what the speaker had said concerning America, his Americs, an America of forespacious lands, .a gem of the ocean, and home of brave and free. He pondered worriedly whether the lecturer’s explanation of ra ec hatred and the use of the church in a community were worthy of second thought; tut these new heresies came penetrating into his consciousness li’ e morning sun through dirty glasses. He recalled to» easily the various picturesque epithets that his fat}- ev applied to the “Hunkies and Polacks” with who» he worked side by side in the company-owned cov! mining town of Diamond. He could too vividly r:- member the chuckling, abysmal, rather coarse con- tempt with which-his father held the diggers, whom he helped fleece in his position as checker in the min». He thought furiously, and strove manfully to brine some order into the chaos which had been his con- tented mental life; but the crumbling of his pustv illusions could no more be withheld than the sun in its daily journey. Poor Jimmy! Even his quict home did not look the same as he entered the dim hallway. . .And surely, with certain precision, tho Herculean axeman, Truth, was demolishing his false gods. He was still pondering one warm Monday in September, a month later. (Now, however, he proudly confessed to reading Ingersoll and some guy “Bookherin,” he called him. His former teach- ers and his preacher had already learned to cover their ears when he started on his bland, sincere heresies; they were sure that it was only a passing stage, to be suffered along with the other little idiosyncrasies of youth). Today, he reflected, he was going to paint the steeple of the company church wherein, every Sunday, a -company-paid preacher held forth on the blessings of heaven to ODE TO CHINA By ADOLF WOLFF China Vou have arisen From the slumber of centuries. You stand up straight Stretching your mighty limbs Like an awakened giant. China “cu are emerging C "yom the slough of feudalism Yen are breaking the chains of tradition “a ave shaking off “he alien vultures “vho have been feeding Uvon your prostrate body. China Your towering form Rising against the sky Of the red dawn Casts a long shadow Warning of doom To all despoilers. China Yon are sounding the death-knell ©? Imperalism’s sway Your Victory Is the promise of liberation Cf all oppressed peoples. By SIMMONS GUINNE a few herded, bovine “Polacks” whose life on this earth was a sordid hell. Reflecting thus, he made his way to the church, found his way up the new pine stairs to the belfry, and laboriously clambered through the trap-door to the roof, which sloped upward sharply to the steeple. He arranged his “basket” with deliberate care, so that. it might face the purple mountains instead of the smudgy district in which most of Diamond toiled, and set to work. Morning brightened into an acute whiteness, sharply intensified by the rolling grayness of the mines and its environs; and still Jimmy swung gently in his basket, plying his brush with the ab- sent air of one who is thinking. With the coming of mid-afternoon came an abating in his efforts, akin to the diminishing of the strength of a pendu- lum of a grandfather clock that has not been wound for many days. Now he merely sat with the brush in his lap,- staring dreamily at purple and green hills, oscillating gently in the light autumn brecze, tis basket making the least bit of a musical creak #s it swayed back and forth: . .swayed. . .mak- ine him feel his drowsiness. . .God, but he was sleepy. . .and this gentle swaying was so~ nice oe HOES Suddenly he was jerked to full consciousness by the music of picks and shovels. Steeples were danc- ing, florid men in black frocks brandished little black books. . .and ever the miners were digging, digging, digging with the relentless fury of men possessed, their picks and drills beating a strange tattco which kept remarkable time with the de- reoniae thumping that was threatening to pound his breast-bone to pieces. . . “Ah, those godamn fool Polacks going to that church, Don’t they know it’s all false, false, the whole rotten thing. . . * * * Tt is the next Sunday. The preacher has just completed a terrifying sermon on retribution as exemplified by the death of Jimmy Williams. A few men listen and dimly doubt; others do not listen and do not care. . .But everywhere among the rough-skinned, dull-eyed audience there is a sort of powerful restlessness, like the nodding of tall grasses in the breeze, or the motion of a-cattile herd when the clouds become a stormy black. “Legal Foundations of Capitalism” ® soun ® comsoxs r Reviewed By J. Shafer. This book deserves a review for two reasons: First, because Commons is known as a liberal labor economist; second, ,it is a treatise on economic theory written from the point of view of a class collaborationist who wants to perpetuate our present capitalistic system. Unionists and students of labor problems have a high regard for the author because of his relations to the mens’ clothing industry and his book, “The History of American Labor.” Hence it becomes important to explain the author’s attempt to justify and glorify the present capitalistic system under the cloak of economic Science. He arrived at his theory through experience with the U. S. courts in his attempts to draft bills on labor legislation and protective measures for the small businessman against the trusts. As he put it, “This led to a testing of economic and legal theories in the drafting of bills as an assjstant to legisla- tive committees in Wisconsin. It was this ex- perience that led directly to the theoretical problems of this book. We had to study the decisions of the courts, if the new laws were to be made constitu- tional and that study ran into the central questions, “What do the courts mean by reasonable value?” Thus the science of economics as expounded by Commons is not the study of the system of pro- duction and distribution of wealth in a given society arrived at through an historical analysis of the _means of production and economic forces resulting from them and their change, but a study of U. S. Supreme Court decisions. The decisions of the big corporation lawyers who usually sit on the Supreme Court and who decide legal questions in favor of the big interests, are the sources of his economic theory. Then what is economics according to Commons? “It is a science of probabilities of official and pri- vate transactions in utilizing both human and na- tural resources for ethical, economic, and public purposes.” In other words it becomes a branch of business psychology, purely speculative; the actions of social economie forces are controlled by the de- cisions of the Supreme Court or expectations of such decisions in the light of previous experience. His theory is the so-called political theory. It “starts not with commodities but with purposes of the future, rules of conduct that give rise to rights and duties, liberties, private property, governments and associations.” . . . “Theory of human will in action and of value and economy as a relation of man to man.” : His definitions of value, property and liberty are made in the light of bourgeois democratic class- collaboration. “Property means anything that can be bought or sold and since one’s liberty can be bought and sold, liberty is assets, and therefore liberty is property.” Commons, by defining labor power as property, does away in one blow with the propertyless class in the United States and makes everyone a property holder including children of the tender age of five or six. Everybody has labor power to sell and the good capitalist is there to buy it. “Value lies not in the visible things or person but in the will to acquire, to use, to control, to enjoy and so to get an expected benefit of profit out of things or persons. things but our good will over things, and when we say that liberty is valuable and liberty is therefore property, what we mean is that the free and bene- ficial exercise of the will in dealings with natyre’ and other people is économically valuable and there- fore is property.” Thus the exchange value of the labor power of the worker depends on the good will.of the boss who pays for it because he wants to control it or use it and is based on the em- ployer’s “anticipation for the present value not of physical things, but of the hopes of the future aroused through confidence in the now invisible but expected transactions of the future.” In attempting to bring out the stability of the capitalistic order, he points out that whereas under wr What we buy and sell is not | the feudal system differences between the king and the barons were settled by war, in bourgeois demo- cracy, “the subject person is not permitted to choose any alternative when once the superior person has decided . . . when the decision of the competent official whether executive, legislative, or judicial is once made, the subject or official must obey of course.” Professor Commons seems to forget the American revolution or the Civil War when, in spite of the decision of King George in one ease, and the ballot box in another case, the “subjects” resorted to arms to settle existing differences on the econ- omic field. Just as the physiocrats based their economic theory on the divine order, so does the porn in this case base his theory on the democratic state. “The state is what the officials do, and what they do is to proportion the behavior of citizens by offering inducements in the directions which they consider important and away from directions which they reprobate.” The question is, where do these officials come from, who puts them into power, how come they approve high tariffs to protect the steel trust, the sugar trust, and other trusts, and that they reprobate measures to protect the farm- 9 who constitute a large portion of the U. S. popu- ation. : The state, according to Commons, is a tool in the hands of each citizen. “To the extent that the individual is clothed with the sovereign power of the state, does he rise from the nakedness of slave - . . into the armament of citizen, and his going concern rises from a conspiracy into a corporation. It is'these substantive powers and remedial powers that modern capitalism owes its power of expan- sion, for it is they that enable the businessman who is citizen of a great enduring nation to extend his sway from the arctic to the anartic from occi- dent to orient.” There you are—imperialism in a nut-shell— merely due, according to Commons to the “State” which is a “group of officials,” that give every citizen a chance to exploit the rest of the world. To sum up, the capitalistic system is stable and permanent, the supreme court balances the rela- tions between the social forces of society, that ex- change value is nothing definite but based on the ‘speculative anticipation of the businessman, and that everybody in U. S. is a property holder because every individual has labor-power to sell. 4‘ CAR Rig MAIS 123.00 CHIE a oe a NE EE Pe TE TNA RTOS ACE YS A RE AINE NE Rs