The Daily Worker Newspaper, September 10, 1927, Page 9

~~ THE WAY THAT LABOR IS GOING By ROBERT MITCHELL EBER the title, “The Way That Labor Is Going,” Mr. H. G. Wells of England and the world gen- erally has written a very bad article in particular for the American capitalist class. It is no accident that such an article should appear in the New York Times, the foremost organ of the American bour- geoisie. It would not be too much to say that only in America could such complete comic opera pro- phesising be passed off as a genuine oracle. It is hardly necessary to elaborate on Mr. Wells’ intelligence. Nor is it important to call attention to the superficiality of his analysis and the num- erous contradictions in the main thesis of his argu- ment. We find here the mind of the coupon clipper at its worst! Because he has written on a subject so impor- tant, however, and because there is at present a certain confusion and pessimism as to the way that labor is going, it is of the greatest consequence that every opportunity be taken to help clear up the issue. : To begin with the critical side of the discussion first: Wells begins by denying the existence of the capitalist system as such. It is all a figment of our imagination, a mere word concocted for the fearful, The same is true of “labor.” It just doesn’t exist! Once it did as matter of fact lead a hard and toil-driven life but it is ‘progressively being abolished from the face of the earth. Hence there is not and in fact there cannot be any con- flict between any. real forces in the actual world. Like the forces themselves, the conflict is also a figment of our deranged minds. “I believe this conflict between capital and labor is . - a struggle about theoretical def- initions having only the remotest relationship to any fundamental realities in life.” The whole conflict is but a form of our most re- cent madness, a sort of “conflict” complex, so to speak; and to.be cured of the world-wide disease we need but to disabuse our minds of the passions and frenzies which somehow have taken possession of them. But lest we mistake him for the {atest follower of Berkleyian idealism or Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science, Wells makes haste to provide an objective basis for his charge: “Tf we abandon this romantic, this Victor Hugoesque conception of ‘labor’ as living in rags and slums and begin to incorporate semi- skilled and skilled workers with savings, insur- ances and other property and a certain mini- mum of education, and peasants with leases or owning land, we shall cease to. have any defi- nite boundary to stop us; and before we know where we are we shall find ourselves in per- plexity, whether in this or in that case we are dealing with a capitalist or a worker, ‘exploiter’ or ‘exploited’.” There you have it! The worker is not really a worker. If you but look at him in the proper way, © he will reveal to you his real capitalist nature. But is it not true that Carver, economist of Harvard fame, created a whole American revolution on the strength of his having torn from the capitalist worker his, proletarian disguise? And is it not equally true that even the ghost of this dead “revolution” has been discredited in America ex- cept perhaps among the leaders in the American labor movement? ‘ But here is the ghost of Carver come back from across the Atlantic to haunt us in the garments of Wells! ; Yet this is the main and only support of Wells’ argument. That the facts even in the most pros- perous of all countries, the United States, show that only a very small percentage of the people have shared in the increasing wealth of the country, is apparently beyond the grasp of these coupon clip- pers of a decaying capitalism. It is not hard to credit the reported statement of Lenin when in re- ferring to Wells after the latter’s visit to the Krem- lin, the proletarian leader exclaimed: “That is a little. bourgeois! Aye, aye, what a Philistine!” * * a As for labor’s specific direction, we cannot dis- cover any. “Labor” which once was, but which now more and more is not, naturally enough, can hardly be discovered to be going any particular place at all! “We may come to a world of capitalists pro- fessing to be a labor community,” Wells hazards. “Or we may follow quite other and more rational lines. of development.” Just what these may be is known only to Wells and the future. Wells on his part maintains a completely wordy silence! The logical conclusion from his premise, however, is that with the increasing accumulation of wealth and goods there is bora *= he an increasing use and a The hand of friendship the boss extends. more widespread consumption of this wealth; the multiplying output of the machine will result in the increased sharing of all classes in the outpourings of goods and the now admittedly bad capitalist sys- tem will solve its contradictions through the sheer preponderance of accumulation.. The mountain of wealth will so increase in height and proportions that at last, toppling over upon the masses, it will load all and sundry with its bounty. ‘ * cd * What is wrong with this picture? It is the world from the eyes of the savings bank president, the insurance salesman, the real estate broker—the world of the coupon clipper. Maintain your gaze only on the stock of consumable goods and you do not need to inquire as to fundamentals of our economic processes. You may with Wells be contented to anticipate a future in which we shall all be “capitalists professing to be a labor com- munity.” View only the rising tide of goods and savings and you do not need even to inquire as to who. exactly owns these goods and accumulates these savings. For you it will be sufficient evidence of the coming millenium if some 8 per cént of the stock. ownership of the country is in the hands of the workers, if about three-quarters of one billion is represented as workers’ “savings” in a country whose estimated wealth is some four hundred bil- lions. Separated from the field of production in which almost the whole of modern conflicts arise it becomes natural for the coupon clipper to view a temporary and insignificant phenomena such as the rise in labor banking in‘the light of a fundamental process. When we turn to the field of production for the facts of our inquiry, the analysis of»the Carvers, the Wellses, the Wolls assumes its proper propor- tion as the analysis of “absentee” minds. Is there a capitalist system? Yes, it is the system of re- lationships in which commodity production, mono- poly and concentration in the productive processes, plays an ever-increasing role; it is the system in which the machine is playing a more and more im- portant part in that production and in which the ownership of the machine is providing its owner, the capitalist, an ever-increasing power and control over the workers; it is the system in which the wage relationship between two groups in society is throwing these groups even in the United States in an ever increasing opposition to each other, and in which millions of farmers and middle-men are year- ly being added to the enlarging masses of the dis- possessed, Are there evidences of these assertions or are they, as Wells maintains, merely our “delusion” having no relationship to any “fundamental reali- ties in life’? Of the fact of commodity production, and the increasing degree of mergers and -mono- polies, let one but turn any day to the financial sec- tion of the New York Times. “Every @ay is mer- ger day,” as Bert Wolfe has aptly put it. Is the machine playing an increasing role in production. Even Wells makes this one of his main arguments but it is the characteristic of the bourgeois mind esi Nae, that it fails to draw the proper conclusion from thft recognition. It speaks of putting the machine “to the services of mankind,” and other such drivel, not understanding that under the capitalist system witk the ownership of the machine in private hands, the increase in the effectiveness of the machine can only be accompanied by the increase in power of the owner of the siachine. And of the third considera- tion, the increasing conflict arising out of the dyna- mics of the wage system, one need but cast his view from the miners’ struggle and the agricul- tural problem in the United States to the conflicts in the British working class wage relationship, the crisis caused by the Dawes plan in Germany, etc. Only the kind of “absentee” mentality possible im our universities alone, would fail here to dis- cover a class of “labor.” Only the mind of decay- ing bourgeoisie. such as represented in Wells could be unable to discern here the dynamics of a specific and characteristic form of production, a system. If we add to these considerations such facts as stare us in the face, from the recently “unsuccessful” naval disarmament conference between the United States, Great Britain and Japan, if we consider in its essential significance the world revolutionary movement now arising in the Orient, we will be forced to “accept” the fact, not only of an existing capitalist system, but of a pretty much alive im- perialism as well! q * * * Now where is labor going? This question when labor is viewed from the point of view of produc- tion, takes on an entirely different meaning. Labor, in the modern sense of the term, is a creation of the existing instruments of production, just as the whole capitalist system is such a creation. We observe that developing capitalism, so far from con- verting the workers into capitalists, is throwing millions. into the ranks of proletariat. Only a kind of vicious metaphysics is capable of distorting this admitted numerical increase of labor into a progres- sive “elimination” of labor, simply because here and there the amount of consumable goods is in- creasing. Secondly, with the increase in the number of the workers we are witnessing an increase in its consciousness of class. In the United States this is true only in the sense that there is an increasing restlessness and even apathy on the part of the workers, by some mistaken as a form of stupidity, but a condition actually arising out of an element- ary recognition of the hopelessness of the old methods of struggle. Anyone who has had to deal» with numbers of workers during the last year or two has found this prevalent though vague “feel- ing,” which goes far to explain the existing diffi- culty of organization work in such fields, for in- stance, as the building trades. A more*careful analysis of this phenomenon will unquestionably lead to the conclusion that labor is on the: verge of widespread action, not yet, of course, revolutionary action, but militant movement, very certainly. And in the past few months there have been {more than passing indications of this fort. i