The Revolutionary Age Vol. I, No. 19 Price Cents Chronicle and Interpretation of International Events Saturday, February 22, 1919 Bourgeois on Strikes and on Strikes and Deportations The was HE nind of the bourgeois is peculiar. It is a This labor unrest must be severely dealt with, They must have the jobs in order to live. We perverted thing. It is the mind of the master continued my bourgeois companion. The starve them into submission.
and the master is an enemy of life and human and the Bolsheviks inust be crushed. Haywood is a Isn this characteristic? Here is a man, full of ity.
dangerous man; he in jail now and he ll stay there. sympathy and courtesy in relation to his own family, had an insight into the bourgeois mind the other Those whom we can deport we ll jail.
to his own class, with absolutely not a spark of symday. was riding to New York from Boston, and asked him whether, in his opinion, the labor unpathy for the workers; kind toward his own, but in the smoker a gentleman sitting beside me started rest would last long and wliether it would have dan brutal to the workers.
a conversation. He was a clean cut fellow, very anigerous consequences.
But this is the psychology of the master.
able and courteous. Doing you a favor if you were No, was his confident answer. It a sort of workers are there, in their opinion, to work and keep of his class, or he thought you were was a pleasure epidemic and will die out; it all over the world. But the wheels of industry running; they are as necessary to him. Business was all over his appearance.
we ll wait, and can afford to wait; and we ll also use as the machine, and just as important or unimportThe conversation was of a fragmentary character. the iron fist. What we need is a State Constabulary ant. They have no rights. The sense of mastery deHe was very emphatic in his opinion that the only to use during strikes. The police are not enough; but velops contempt in the master toward those who good German is a dead German, very violent and work for him; and contempt becomes brutality.
implacable. He mentioned his wife a number of The bourgeois is a dual personality. They are not times, very beautifully and sympathetically; and in Are You in the Fight?
necessarily brutal, as such; they may have wells of speaking of his son, who was in France and had been sympathy and affection for their own; but the men, for one year under fire, a great love welled up in Three weeks, and the great textile strike in Lawrence, Mass. is as solid as ever, acquiring new strength and women and children of the working class are dirt his heart. His son, it was clear, was a comrade. On determination, under their feet.
the whole, in spite of his attitude toward the Ger The strikers, 30, 000 of them, are isolated, opposed Mastery (legrades the master and the slave. That mans, a pleasant old gentleman.
by press and state, having practically no money, but is inevitable. It is a perversion of life, and it perverts they are determined to wage the fight to the end.
Somethiing he said informed me that he was riding They are prohibited from holding demonstrations in the finest instincts. The gentleman was conversing from Lawrence, Mass. to New York, and that in the streets by a city government prostituting itself to with was not a brute; in fact, he was a fine fellow, a business way he was connected with the textile the mill barons. but the strikers fight. They are terror in his way: he was not at all conscious of the brutalmills. Naturally, steered the conversation to the ized by the police and their pickets arrested. They are strike. Immediately, a completely new man ity in his attitude toward workers, strikers and agitrefused permission to hold mass meetings on the comators.
mon by a murricipal government determined to crush shown to me a man who had sympathy for a the industrial revolt: but the strikers fight. They are When will the workers realize this? When will worker only if that worker was meek and abject; a rcfused satisfaction in the protest against these outthey realize that under the system of capitalist ecoman who believed in the most brutal means to make rages by the Governor of the State of Massachusetts: nomic mastery they are not humans, but beasts of the worker satisfied with his conditions; a man but the strikers fight, fight on and on.
lourden, machines for the production of profit? They who would go the limit in protecting his class interThe strikers have practically no money. They are living if you can call it living on short rations; but do not have the opportunity to really live; they live ests.
starvation does not lessen their determination, to work, to make profits. Under Socialism alone will There is a great labor unrest, he said. The Threats have been made to deport the strike leaders; they work to live, to make joy and happiness for all.
workers got good wages while the war fasted but the whole 30, 000 strikers thereupon made application My gentleman acquaintance was wrong. The labor for passports for all of them to leave the country. Can instead of saving it they spent it on drink and other you crush that spirit?
unrest will not end it will become stronger and more unnecessary things. They should have known that The inen, women and children of the Lawrence mills general: the workers must and will strike, more and the war wouldn last forever. It is stupid of them are maintaining the fight. Inspired by their courage. more; Gompers will not check the revolts of the to expect that, now the war is over, they should get textile workers in other towns are considering a strikethe same high wages. In the Lawrence mills they a general textile strike. great industrial strike in workers Gompers will himself be repudiated; the all the textile mills seems to be coming; and this masters cannot starve the workers into submission made as inuch as 30 and 40 a week.
general strike would Aame through the country, inthe workers are coming to realize that they must My cue was to innocently indicate surprise, and action everywhere. That would be a great event. act definitely and finally to become masters of their asked about the newspaper reports that the strikers That would give a mighty onward push to the emanciearned about 16 a week.
own lives by becoming masters of the shops, mills pation of the American working class.
and mines in which they must work in order to live.
But money is needed. Money is needed to feed the The unskilled workers get that, was his answer. women and children; money is needed to buy even the We are in a revolutionary age; in an age when Are the unskilled in the majority, askedt.
portion of necessaries required to sustain life. Capitalism is breaking down, and the working class Moncy is needed to spread the strike. Yes.
realizing its enormous power and the necessity for Will you help? Now. The textile workers carn 30 or 40 a week Send money to SILIN, 885 Washington Street, action. The State Constabulary and deportations cannot frighten the workers. club and a gun canbut the majority are unskilled, and they earn only Boston, Mass.
not purchase food for the workman family or yield 16 a week.
him joy in life: luman needs will prove mightier The strikers are pro German, continued the nice the State Constabulary, with their horses, their shot than guns and clubs. Deporting men and women gentlemen. Ime Kaplan, their leader, was against guns and their clubs, can move from place to place cannot deport their ideas: wherever there are workthe draft. He a bad man and we re going to deport casily and quickly, and maintain order against strik ers, there is oppression; wherever there is oppreshim. This with absolute assurance, as if he was ers and Bolsheviks. We ll get a Constabulary soon. sion, there are revolts and strikes; wherever there the government: but isn liis class the government. Then Santel Gompers return will help matters. are strikes and revolts, Socialism develops, revol These foreign workers are terribly ignorant. They Gompers is a very sensible and able man. The union tionary Socialism. Oppression, strikes and Socialism fall for the Bolshevik stuff. But (exultingly) we re oficials are doing all they can to deal properly with are an expression of the human needs of the working just deporting 54 of these dangerous agitators, and the employers; in Lawrence they are against the class: and these needs are universal, therefore revwe ll «leport more.
strike: but Bolshevik agitators are getting the men olutionary Socialism is universal. Deport every single There seems to be a good deal of protest against against their officials. Gompers will stop this. We agitator and Socialist. and to inorrow, out of life these deportations, suggested.
must have conciliation and arbitration, instead of itself, will develop a host of new agitators and Social Not very much, he answered. But even that strikes. It was the union officials who prevented a ists, tempered and made as steel by the fires of rewe ll prevent.
Thousands are being prepared for revolution in Seattle.
pression.
deportation, and they will be shipped across the coun American manufacturers must meet foreign com Capitalism degrades man and perverts life. Life try and out quietly and secretly; no one will know petition, and in order to do this the high wages paid itself will conquer Capitalism, life itself will revolt anything about it ercept the government, so that during the war must come down. Labor must be reas against the power that stultifies life.
there won be any agitation about it.
enable, if Gompers can make labor reasonable, we ll My conversation with the bourgeois gentleman, He said this in a quiet, unemotional, matter of fact it in our own way.
in the smoker in which were other bourgeois gentletone, as tlie enormity of depriving a man of even asked him what would be the result of the Law unen, soldiers and workers, confirmed my faith. It the little opportunity for defence that the law affords rence strike.
is coming! Strikes more strikes then the Revwas a natural thing. They ll be beaten, he answered confidently. olution, and Socialism.
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