ember 13th. 1919.
THE COMMUNIST Page Three Where is the Power. Continued from page that we are rapidly approaching a dictatorship by the organized workers. Therefore the frantic, ruthless and violent methods to defeat the big strikes and to check further organization.
It is not unionism and its dictation, however, which is being Penghter all it is very easy to accomodate prices and methods production to higher wages and shorter hours. There is plenty bi margin for profits without child labor and even with old age pensions. Many such concessions can be made, with nothing but benefit 10 the profit system, as actual experience in many countries has shown a hundred times over.
But here is always the danger and it is a glaring danger in these revolutionary day that there may be such a thing as labor organi:1011 with the purpose of permanently dominating the system of production in favor of the masses of the nation. That is, dictation not as to the interests of some special group or groups of workers (a spurious dictation which can always be easily circumvented and which demands nothing more than somewhat better forms for somewhat less than one tenth of the workers)but a real dictation against the permanent interests of the profit systein. a system.
It is not only that the strikes become bigger, due to the fact that the single employer lays down the conditions for more workers and that all the employers in a single industry tend to become more oi a unit even where the industry is not in fact a monopoly.
It is not only that the strikes become more constant and general, due to the aggravated condition of prices outstripping wages.
But the fact of such colossal strikes leads to the government interference now going on, in part an interference against the suecess oi the strikes, in part an interierence against the anarchy of the capitalist system.
State Capitalism makes it emphatic to the working class that its fight is not against thd employer as an employer that this is only a sort of ſeinting and sparring but against all the employers in a hicap operating through the governmental power.
State intervention against these big strikes must make it aparent to the working class 11ot only that the government has decisive power, but that this now, in the United States, the Innower of the bourgeoisie exercised dictatorially against the class.
There is another item to be considered, a fundamental fact in these struggles, and that is the breakdown of the caste lines among the workers themselves. While the capitalist press is playing up the alien prejudice in every possible way by a prejudice propagada only surpassed in extent and vileness by the prejudice campaign against the Bolsheviki and the whipping up of anti negro sentiment there is quictly goin on the effective blending of nationanties and languages in the steel strike and the coal strike.
But it is not only the racial lines which account for caste ideals in the labor movement: it is even more the crait lines. These are being broken down by the changes in industry itself, by the inevitable tendency of the machine process toward a common level of semi skilled labor.
As a net result of these tendencies the class idea comes ever more insistently to the front, and at the same time it is seen that the class struggle centers around the State and its control. talism is compelled to become more orderly, to recognize the interdependence of business entrprise and the social liie, by reason of the miners withholding their labor for a few weeks. We experience State Capitalism, the open class government of the capitalists, in absolute control of the economic life of the nation.
Even the elective camouflage is dropped; the control is exercised through appointive administrators, themselves of the highest intimacy with and fidelity to the profit system.
The power to compel State Capitalism is the power to compel Communism! The power to compel a revolution within Capital ism, its voluntary acceptance of centralized control, is the power to achieve a revolution against Capitalism.
The strike which can loree Capitalism to seek reiuge in the State for its own continuity can go further. It can force Capital ism to accept administative control at the hands of the workers theniselves; it can turn this control into the drastic climination of profits as a permanent policy, to the point of absolute elimination of profits in all business which is already so far centralized that capitalistic initiative exists no longer. For example, there is the coal industry itseli. More mines are already in operation than are needed, if the work were better managed and if the mining was more intensive and eificient. The profit incentive now only makes for more wastefulness though it formerly served to get the mines opened up: it is tinie for central control of the coal mines in the interests of conservation and better management.
There are many persons who believe that this can be done industry by industry, with the workers of the particular industry in control. That is to overlook entirely the fact that everything depends on the ultimate political power, the State. So long as there is a State which represents the class power of the capitalists it is a mere playing with toys for some group of workers to have something to do with the management of their own industry At the most it might mean an intrenchment of this particular group within the scheme or State Capitalism. That is the gist of the lumb Plan and or similar schemes for government ownership which accept the capitalists State as the final organ oi control.
The first requirement of the revolution against Capitalism is the setting up of a State power of the working class; firstly, to overcone the anarchy due to the breakdown of capitalistic enterprise (just as such administration is set up today to preserve the profit system against its own disturbances. secondly, to make permanent the social control of the economic life of the nation in favor of the working masses, by eliminating the profit element, e. by transfer of ownership to the people collectively, proceeding from the most advanced and important industries downward, until there is final elimination of all ownership which allows one man to exploit the labor of others.
This State power will be of a new distinctive character, corresponding to the new purposes of control. The State of the working class is called THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT because it frankly avows as its object arbitrary subjection of the economic life of the nation and of the world to the purposes of the working masses. This name also emphasizes the temporary character of such a State, in that it can only last as long as there is a capitalist class to be brought under labor control by dictatorship.
The power to strike in the basic industries is the power to establish THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT. if the strike makes its appeal in behali oi the whole working class, not alone in belali of one group of organized workers. That appcal must be the Communist reconstruction of society.
Let the workers of America think over the coal strike and they will understand and accept Communism.
Comment on a Commenter (Continued from page 2)
Brest Litovsk. It was because there was no Recimy and the remnants of the army of the former czar refused to fight that the Bolshev agreed to the treaty oi BrestLitovsh. The Red Army was created when the Cost generals with the help of Allied Imperialism tried to drown the revolution in the head of the workers.
The criticism which follows this is worth quoting a full. Mr. Karr says: Russia was one of the Allies, from falling into the hands of Germany, after Bolshevist Russia had crawled in the dirt before the Kaiser and had become a pliant tool of the German imperialists.
We suggest that Mr. Karr crawl in the dust to the fect of the editor of his own paper and have the editor read to him. from the column just above his comment on Williams, the following remarks about 113 American dead just returned from Archangel. Now that so many things hidden while the war was in progress are being brought to light, cannot the country be told why these 113 honored dead were sent to die in battle and hospital, of wounds, disease and hardship? Is it not time that the origin of the Archangel expedition received some of the same official attention and full publicity given the last sad act on the Hoboken pier?
The mourning parents of the dead, to say nothing of millions of other Americans, would like an answer to that as yet unanswered question. By what authority were American soldiers sent to a distant country, against which there had been no declaration of war, and left there to suffer and die in a bootless and hopeless winter campaign against sarage fanatics, who were so far from being recognized enemies of the United States that President Wilson was meanwhile sending emissaries to treat with them in friendly wise and invite them to conference. Se manner he (Williams) pictured the landing of small Allied forces in Vladisostok, Archangel and Odessa as great and wanton invasions of Soviet Rus, with never a hint that they were sent to those ports to prevent vast stores of monitions, shipped to Russia when If your own paper thus strongly characterizes the sending of American soldiers to Archangel, Mr. Karr, is Mr. Williams fan atically partisan in raising the same objection? Or do you argue that the writer of the above quoted paragraph is also fanatics ally partisan toward Soviet Russia.