This is the challenge of the workers of Europe to the capitalist system. The workers are not satisfied; they are questioning. They mean to have the best that life has to give, and they are convinced that the capitalist system has denied it to them.
The world has had more than a century of capitalism. The workers have had ample opportunity to see the system at work. The people of all the great capitalist countries—the common people—have borne the burdens and felt the crushing weight of capitalism—in its enslavement of little children; in its underpaying of women; in long hours of unremitting, monotonous toil; in the dreadful housing; in the starvation wages; in unemployment; in misery. The capitalist system has had a trial and it is upon the workers that the system has been tried out.
During this experiment, the workers of the world have been compelled to accept poverty, unemployment and war.
These terrible scourges have afflicted the capitalist world, and it is the workers and their families that have borne them in their own persons. In those countries where the capitalist system is the oldest, the workers have suffered the longest. The essence of capitalism is the exploitation of one man by another man, and the longer this exploitation is practiced the more skillful and effective does the master class become in its manipulation.
The workers look before them along the path of capitalist imperialism that is now being followed by the nations that are in the lead of the capitalist world. Therethey see no promise save the same exploitation, the same poverty, the same inequality and the same wars over the commercial rivalries of the imperial nations.
The workers of Europe have come to the conclusion that the world should belong to those who build it; that the good things of life should be the property of those who produce them. They see only one course open before them—to declare that those who will not work, shall not eat.
The right of self-determination is the international expression of this challenge. The ownership of the job is its industrial equivalent. Together, the two ideas comprise the program of the more advanced workers in all of the great imperial countries of the world. These ideas did not originate in Russia, and they are not confined to Russia any more than capitalism is confined to Great Britain. They are the doctrines of the new order that is coming rapidly into its own.
Capitalism has been summed up, heretofore, in the one word "profit." The capitalist cannot abandon that standard. The world has lived beyond it, however, and without it, capitalism, as a system, is meaningless. If the capitalists abandon profit, they abandon capitalism.
Without profit the capitalist system falls to pieces, because it is the profit incentive that has always been considered as the binder that holds the capitalist world together. Hence the abandonment of the profit incentive is the surrender of the citadel of capitalism. While profit remains, exploitation persists, and while there is exploitation of one man by another, no human being can call himself free.
The capitalists are caught in a beleaguered fortress in which they are defending their economic lives. Profit is the key to this fortress, and if they surrender the key, they are lost.
This is the real struggle for the possession of the earth. Shall the few own and the many labor for the few, or the many own, and labor upon jobs that they themselvespossess? The struggle between the capitalist nations is incidental. The struggle between the owners of the world and the workers of the world is fundamental.
If Great Britain wins in her conflict with the United States, her capitalists will continue to exploit the workers of Lancashire and Delhi. Her imperialists will continue their policy of world domination, subjugating peoples and utilizing their resources and their labor for the enrichment.
If the United States wins in her struggle with Great of the bankers and traders of London. Britain, her capitalists will continue to exploit the workers of Pittsburg and San Juan. Her imperialists will continue their policy of world domination, subjugating the peoples of Latin American first, and then reaching out for the control over other parts of the earth.
No matter what imperial nation may triumph in this struggle between the great nations for the right to exploit the weaker peoples and the choice resources, the struggle between capitalism and Socialism must be fought to a finish. If the capitalists win, the world will see the introduction of a new form of serfdom, more complete and more effective than the serfdom of Feudal Europe. If the Socialists win, the world enters upon a new cycle of development.
The American worker is a citizen of the richest country of the world. Resources are abundant. There is ample machinery to convert these gifts of nature into the things that men need for their food and clothing, their shelter, their education and their recreation. There is enough for all, and to spare, in the United States.
But the American worker is not master of his own destinies. He must go to the owners of American capital—to the plutocrats—and from them he must secure the permission to earn a living; he must get a job. Therefore it is the capitalists and not the workers of the United States that are deciding its public policy at the present moment.
The American capitalist is a member of one of the most powerful exploiting groups in the world. Behind him are the resources, productive machinery and surplus of the American Empire. Before him are the undeveloped resources of the backward countries. He has gained wealth and power by exploitation at home. He is destined to grow still richer and more powerful as he extends his organization for the purposes of exploitation abroad.
The prospects of world empire are as alluring to the American capitalist as have been similar prospects to other exploiting classes throughout history. Empire has always been meat and drink to the rulers.
The master class has much to gain through imperialism. The workers have even more to lose.
The workers make up the great bulk of the American people. Fully seven-eighths (perhaps nine-tenths) of the adult inhabitants of the United States are wage earners,clerks and working farmers. All of the proprietors, officials, managers, directors, merchants (big and little), lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, and the remainder of the business and professional classes constitute not over 10 or 12 percent of the total adult population. The workers are the "plain people" who do not build empires any more than they make wars. If they were left to themselves, they would continue the pursuit of their daily affairs which takes most of their thought and energy—and be content to let their neighbors alone.
The mere fact that the workers are so busy with the routine of daily life is in itself a guarantee that they will mind their own business. The average worker is engaged, outside of working hours, with the duties of a family. His wife, if she has children, is thus employed for the greater portion of her time. Both are far too preoccupied to interfere with the like acts of other workers in some other portion of the world. Furthermore, their preoccupation with these necessary tasks gives them sympathy with those similarly at work elsewhere.
The plain people of any country are ready to exercise even more than an ordinary amount of forbearance and patience rather than to be involved in warfare, which wipes out in a fortnight the advantages gained through years of patient industry.
The workers have no more to gain from empire building than they have from war making, but they pay the price of both. Empire building and war making are Siamese twins. They are so intimately bound together that they cannot live apart. The empire builder—engaged in conquering and appropriating territory and in subjugating peoples—must have not only the force necessary to set up the empire, but also the force requisite to maintain it. Battleships and army corps are as essential to empires asmortar is to a brick wall. They are the expression of the organized might by which the empire is held together.
The plain people are the bricks which the imperial class uses to build into a wall about the empire. They are the mortar also, for they man the ships and fill up the gaps in the infantry ranks and the losses in the machine gun corps. They are the body of the empire as the rulers are its guiding spirit.
When ships are required to carry the surplus wealth of the ruling class into foreign markets, the workers build them. When surplus is needed to be utilized in taking advantage of some particularly attractive investment opportunity the workers create it. They lay down the keels of the fighting ships, and their sons aim and fire the guns. They are drafted into the army in time of war and their bodies are fed to the cannon which other workers in other countries, or perhaps in the same country, have made for just such purposes. The workers are the warp and woof of empire, yet they are not the gainers by it. Quite the contrary, they are merely the means by which their masters extend their dominion over other workers who have not yet been scientifically exploited.
The work of empire building falls to the lot of the workers. The profits of empire building go to the exploiting class.
What advantage came to the workers of Rome from the Empire which their hands shaped and which their blood cemented together? Their masters took their farms, converted the small fields into great, slave-worked estates, and drove the husbandmen into the alleys and tenements of the city where they might eke out an existence as best they could. The rank-and-file Roman derived the same advantage from the Roman Empire that the rank-and-file Briton has derived from the British Empire.
Great Britain has exercised more world mastery during the past hundred years than any other nation. All that Germany hoped to achieve Great Britain has realized. Her traders carry the world's commerce, her financiers clip profits from international business transactions, her manufacturers sell to the people of every country, the sun never sets on the British flag.
Great Britain is the foremost exponent and practitioner of capitalist imperialism. The British Empire is the greatest that the world has known since the Empire of Rome fell to pieces. Whatever benefits modern imperialism brings either for capitalists or for workers should be enjoyed by the capitalists and workers of Great Britain.
Until the Great World War the capitalists of Great Britain were the most powerful on earth with a larger foreign trade and a larger foreign investment than any other. At the same time the British workers were amongst the worst exploited of those in any capitalist country in Europe.
The entire nineteenth century is one long and terrible record of master-class exploitation inside the British Isles. The miseries of modern India have been paralleled in the lives of the workers of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. Gibbins, in his description of the conditions of the child workers in the early years of the nineteenth century ends with the remark, "One dares not trust oneself to try and set down calmly all that might be told of this awful page of the history of industrial England."[58]
Even more revolting are the descriptions of the conditions which surrounded the lives of the mine workers in the early part of the nineteenth century. Women as well as men were taken into the mines and in some cases, as the reports of the Parliamentary investigation show, the women dragged cars through passage-ways that were too low to admit the use of ponies or mules.
England, mistress of the seas, proud carrier of the traffic of the world, the center of international finance, the richest among all the investing nations—England was reeking with poverty. Beside her factories and warehouses were vile slums in which people huddled as Ruskin said, "so many brace to a garret." There in the back alleys of civilization babies were born and babies died, while those who survived grew to the impotent manhood of the street hooligan.
The British Empire girdled the world. For a century its power had grown, practically unchallenged. Superficially it had every appearance of strength and permanence but behind it and beneath it were the hundreds of thousands of exploited factory workers, the underpaid miners, the Cannon Gate of Edinburgh and the Waterloo Junction of London.
Capitalist imperialism has not benefited the British workers. Quite the contrary, the rise of the Empire has been accompanied by the disappearance of the stalwart English yeoman; by the disappearance of the agricultural population; by the concentration of the people in huge industrial towns where the workers, no longer the masters of their own destinies, must earn their living by working at machines owned by the capitalist imperialists. The surplus derived from this exploited labor is utilized by the capitalists as the means of further extending their power in foreign lands.
Imperialism has brought not prosperity, but poverty to the plain people of England.
There is another aspect of the matter. If these degraded conditions attach to the workers in the center of the empire, what must be the situation among the workers in the dependencies that are the objects of imperial exploitation? Let the workers of India answer for Great Britain; the workers of Korea answer for Japan, and the workers of Porto Rico answer for the United States. Their lot is worse than is the lot of the workers at the center of imperial power.
Empires yield profits to the masters and victory and glory to the workers. Let any one who does not believe this compare the lives of the workers in small countries like Holland, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland, with the lives of the workers in the neighboring empires—Russia, Germany, France and Great Britain. The advantage is all on the side of those who live in the smaller countries that are minding their own affairs and letting their neighbors alone.
The workers of the United States are to-day following the lead of the most powerful group of financial imperialists in the world. The trail is a long one leading to world conquest, unimagined dizzying heights of world power, riches beyond the ken of the present generation, and then, the slow and terrible decay and dissolution that sooner or later overtake those peoples that follow the paths of empire. The rulers will wield the power and enjoy the riches. The people will struggle and suffer and pay the price.
The American plutocracy is out to conquer the earth because it is to their interest to do so. The will-o'-the-wisp of world empire has captured their imaginations and they are following it blindly.
The American people, on November 2, 1920, gave the American imperialists a blanket authority to go about their imperial business—an authority that the rulers will not be slow to follow. First they will clean house at home—that housecleaning will be called "the campaign for the establishment of the open shop." Then they will go into Mexico, Central America, China, and Europe in search of markets, trade and investment opportunities.
Behind the investment will come the flag, carried by battle-ships and army divisions. That flag will be brought front to front with other flags, high words will be spoken, blood will flow, life will ebb, and the imperialists will win their point and pocket their profit.
Behind them, in November, and at all other times of the year, there will be the will, expressed or implied, of the working people of the United States, who will produce the surplus for foreign investment; will make the ships and man them; will dig the coal and bore for the oil; will shape the machines. Their hands and the hands of their sons will be the force upon which the ruling class must depend for its power. They will produce, while the ruling class consumes and destroys.
The trail is a long one, but it leads none the less certainly to, isolation and death. No people can follow the imperial trail and live. Their liberties go first and then their lives pay the penalty of their rulers' imperial ambition. It was so in the German Empire. It is so to-day in the British Empire. To-morrow, if the present course is followed, it will be equally true in the American Empire.
One of the chief charges against the Germans, in 1914, was that they were not willing to leave their neighbors in peace. They were out to conquer the world, and they did not care who knew it. It was not the German people who held these plans for world conquest, it was the German ruling class. The German people were quite willing to stay at home and attend to their own affairs. Their rulers, pushed by the need for markets and investment opportunities, and lured by the possibilities of a world empire, were willing to stake the lives and the happiness of the whole nation on the outcome of these ambitious schemes. They threw their dice in the great world game of international rivalries—threw and lost; but in their losing, they carried not only their own fortunes, but the lives and the homes and the happiness of millions of their fellows whose only desire was to remain at home and at peace.
Germany's offense was her ambition to gain at the expense of her neighbors. Lacking a place in the sun, she proposed to take it by the strength of her good right arm.This is the method by which all of the great empires have been built and it is the method that the builders of the American Empire have followed up to this point. The land which the ruling class of the United States has needed has heretofore been in the hands of weak peoples—Indians, Mexicans, a broken Spanish Empire. Now, however, the time has come when the rulers of the United States, with the greatest wealth and the greatest available resources of any of the nations, are preparing to take what they want from the great nations, and that imperial purpose can be enforced in only one way—by a resort to arms. The rulers of the United States must take what they would have by force, from those who now possess it. They did not hesitate to take Panama from Colombia; they did not hesitate to take possession of Hayti and of Santo Domingo, and they do not propose to stop there.
The people of the world know these things. The inhabitants of Latin America know them by bitter experience. The inhabitants of Europe and of Asia know them by hearsay. Both in the West and in the East, the United States is known as "The New Germany."
That means that the peoples of these countries look upon the United States and her foreign policies in exactly the same way that the people of the United States were taught to regard Germany and her foreign policies. To them the United States is a great, rich, brutal Empire, setting her heel and laying her fist where necessity calls. Men and women inside the United States think of themselves and of their fellow citizens as human beings. The people in the other countries read the records of the lynchings, the robberies and the murders inside the United States; of the imperial aggression toward Latin America, and they are learning to believe that the United States is made up of ruthless conquerors who work their will on those that cross their path.
The plain American men and women, living quietly in their simple homes, are none the less citizens of an aggressive, conquering Empire. They may not have athought directed against the well-being of a single human creature, but they pay their taxes into the public treasury; they vote for imperialism on each election day; they read imperialism in their papers and hear it preached in their churches, and when the call comes, their sons will go to the front and shed their blood in the interest of the imperial class.
The plain people of the German Empire did not desire to harm their fellows, nevertheless, they furnished the cannon-fodder for the Great War. America's plain folks, by merely following the doctrine, "My country, right or wrong—America first!" will find themselves, at no very distant date, exactly where the German people found themselves in 1914.
The historic record, in the matter of empire, is uniform. The masters gain; the workers pay.
The workers of the United States will not be exempt from these inexorable necessities of imperialism. On the contrary they will be called upon to pay the same price for empire that the workers in Britain have paid; that the workers in the other empires have paid. What is the price? What will world empire cost the American workers?
1. It will cost them their liberties. An empire cannot be run by a debating society. Empires must act. In order to make this action mobile and efficacious, authority must be centered in the hands of a small group—the ruling class, whose will shall determine imperial policy. Self-government is inconsistent with imperialism.
2. The workers will not only lose their own liberties, but they will be compelled to take liberties away from the peoples that are brought under the domination of the Empire. Self-determination is the direct opposite of imperialism.
3. The American workers, as a part of the price of empire, will be compelled to produce surpluswealth—wealth which they can never consume; wealth the control of which passes into the hands of the imperial ruling class, to be invested by them in the organization of the Empire and the exploitation of the resources and other economic opportunities of the dependent territory.
4. The American workers must be prepared to create and maintain an imperial class, whose function it is to determine the policies and direct the activities of the Empire. This class owes its existence to the existence of empire, without which such a ruling class would be wholly unnecessary.
5. The American workers must be prepared, in peace time as well as in war time, to provide the "sinews of war": the fortifications, the battle fleet, the standing army and the vast naval and military equipment that invariably accompany empire.
6. The American workers must furthermore be ready, at a moment's call, to turn from their occupations, drop their useful pursuits, accept service in the army or in the navy and fight for the preservation of the Empire—against those who attack from without, against those who seek the right of self-determination within.
7. The American workers, in return for these sacrifices, must be prepared to accept the poverty of a subsistence wage; to give the best of their energies in war and in peace, and to stand aside while the imperial class enjoys the fat of the land.
If the United States follows the course of empire, the workers of the United States have no choice but to pay the price of Empire—pay it in wealth, in misery, and in blood. But there is an alternative. Instead of going on with the old system of the masters, the workers may establish a new economic system—a system belonging to the workers, and managed by them for their benefit.
The workers of Europe have tried out imperialism and they have come to the conclusion that the cost is too high. Now they are seeking, through their own movement—the labor movement—to control and direct the economic life of Europe in the interest of those who produce the wealth and thus make the economic life of Europe possible.
The American workers have the same opportunity. Will they avail themselves of it? The choice is in their hands.
Thus far the workers of the United States have been, for the most part, content to live under the old system, so long as it paid them a living wage and offered them a job. The European workers felt that too in the pre-war days, but they have been compelled—by the terrible experiences of the past few years—to change their minds. It was no longer a question of wages or a job in Europe. It was a question of life or death.
Can the American worker profit by that experience? Can he realize that he is living in a country whose rulers have adopted an imperial policy that threatens the peace of the world? Can he see that the pursuit of this policy means war, famine, disease, misery and death to millions in other countries as well as to the millions at home? The workers of Europe have learned the lesson by bitter experience. Is not the American worker wise enough to profit by their example?
FOOTNOTE:[58]"Industry in England," H. deB. Gibbins. New York, Scribner's, 1897, p. 390.
[58]"Industry in England," H. deB. Gibbins. New York, Scribner's, 1897, p. 390.
[58]"Industry in England," H. deB. Gibbins. New York, Scribner's, 1897, p. 390.
Advertising imperialism,169America, conquest of,27America first,170America for Americans,202American capitalists,218" " program of,226" empire, costs of,160" " course of,158" " development of,15" " economic basis of,74" " growth of,161" imperialism,23" Indian,29" industries, growth of,178" people, ancestry,159" protectorates,207" Republic, disappearance of,72" tradition, failure of,12" worker and empire,256Anti-imperialism,68Appropriation of territory,213Automobile distribution,183Bankers, unity of,150Bethlehem Steel Co.,132British Empire, gains of,198" " position of,234" Labor, position of,250Business control,148Canada, investments in,206Capitalism and Bolshevism,244" " war,225" breakdown of,248" law of,223Cherokees, dealings with,33Class government,10" struggle, in Europe,254Coal reserves,180Cohesion of wealth,86,118Competition, ferocity of,223Competitive industry,75Conquering peoples,26Conquest of the West,49Council of Action, organization,250" " National Defense,148Cuban, independence,66" treaty,208Dictatorship, possibility of,222Dominican Republic, relations with,209Education for imperialism,169Empire and British workers,258" characteristics of,15" definition of,16" evolution of,22" prevalence of,17" price of,20,264" stages in,19" workers and,262Empires, the Big Four,231Europe, financial breakdown,249" revolution in,246Financial imperialism,135Foreign investments,131France, gains of,197Government and business,99Great Peace,36Great War,143" " advantages of, to the United States,157" " next incidents of,235" " results of,240Guaranty Trust Company,136Hawaii, annexation of,62" revolution in,63Hayti, conditions in,210Immigrants, race of,160Imperial alignment,229" goal,222" purpose,165" sentiments,166" task,237" " nature of,228Imperialism, advantages of,256" beginnings of,65" challenge to,243" cost of,261" establishment of,72" failure of,243" psychology of,170Imperialists, training of,219Incomes, in the United States,115Industrial combination,81" organization,78" revolution,76International exploitation,128" finance,135" Harvester Co.,133Investing nations,127Investment bankers,86Investments in the United States,130Italy, gains of,197Job ownership,94Labor, colonial shortage of,38Landlordism,105Land ownership,103" policy,104Latin America,203Liberty, desire for,8Manifest destiny,171Mastery, avenues of,92Mexican War, provocation of,55" " success of,56Mexico, conquest of,54Monroe Doctrine,202" " logic of,207National City Bank,138Navy League,146Negro civilization, in Africa,40" slaves, values of,47Negroes, numbers enslaved,43New Europe,246Next War, contestants in,236" " preparations for,241" " pretexts for,238New Orleans, struggle for,50Ownership, advantages of,114Panama, relations with,213" revolution in,215" seizure of,214Patriotism,147Peace Treaty, provisions of,224" " results of,194Personal incomes, sources of,116Philippines, conquest of,69Plutocracy,117" control of,148" dictatorship of,92" domestic power of,153" economic gains of,151" growing power of,143Popular government,9Population, increase of,50Preparedness,145Press censorship,210Product ownership,96Profiteering,151Property, Indian ideas of,30" ownership, security of,107" rights, and civilization,113" rights of,103" safeguards to,108Public opinion, control of,98Resources of the United States,179Revolution in Europe,246Russia, Allied attack on,245" world position of,231Slave Coast,39" power, defeat of,61" trade, America's part in,44" " beginnings of,39" " conditions of,43" " development of,42Slavery, and expansion,60" beginnings of,39" in the United States,45Slaves, early demand for,41Southwest, conquest of,51,57Sovereignty, source of,11Spanish War,65Standard Oil Co.,134Surplus, disposal of,123" pressure of,121Teutonic peoples,26Texas, annexation of,52Timber reserves,180Transportation facilities,183Undeveloped countries,124United States, capital of,181" " financial power of,154" " past isolation,192" " position of,221" " products of,184" " resources of,179" " shipping,188" " wealth and income,189" " world attitude to,263" " world power of,177Wealth and income,189" of the United States,89" ownership,90Western Hemisphere, and the United States,200World conquest,218Workers' business,257Yellow peril,232