APRIL 15, 1921.
THE WORKERS COUNCIL 26 27 APRIL 15, 1921.
THE WORKERS COUNCIL certain principles or tactics, as proposed by the The Committee for the Third is aware of the Third International, should be carried on within difficulties it is likely to encounter along the lines the International, and not from without. The So of publicity. It is therefore advisable that ways cialist Party of the United States must, therefore, and means shall be considered for the establishment give its wholehearted support to the Third Inter of a publishing group of its own, or to affiliate with national and must arrange its organization and sympathetic workers publishing institutions for the propaganda accordingly.
purpose of procuring all the necessary pamphlets. The Committee for the Third shall develop a and a periodical publication.
systematic and persistent campaign of propaganda The Committee for the Third International, of for affiliation with the Third, utilizing for the pur the Socialist Party of the United States.
pose all the available space in the party press, as Among the original signers of this call are the well as other sympathetic publications, the forums following, who were delegates to the 1920 Socialist and business meetings of the party organizations, Party convention: etc. Particular stress shall be laid on the period Louis Engdahl, Chicago.
of propaganda prior to and during the coming Steven Bircher, Newark, party convention. For this purpose, the committee, Benjamin Glassberg, New York.
or its local and regional representatives shall be Alexander Trachtenberg, New York.
obliged to secure speakers and provide appropriate Samuel Holland, Chicago.
literature for all organizations where the matter of Charles Kolarik, Chicago.
the Third is up for discussion and action. Salutsky, New York.
credit, and by the system through which they are sible for small scale, planless farming to feed the forced to market their products. If it could be world. We must be not merely consistent, but also vividly presented to the farmers in its apalling frank with the farmer. It ought to be made clear detail that their multifarious reform projects of the that general agriculture will have to be conducted past fifty years, whether along the lines of drives on an enormous scale according to methods apfor financial relief, for control of carriers and ware proximating the exactness and mechanism of the houses, for subjugation of the big manufacturing factory system and that no vestige of private owninterests with which they have to contend, for the ership or control can be allowed to remain. It must development of co operative agencies, has yielded be made equally clear that there shall be a reconpaltry results entirely incommensurate with the ef struction of rural life that will guarantee to each forts expended, there would be a new state of mind family the inalienable occupancy of a suitable home among the rural proprietors. Moreover there exists with as much space and facilities as may be desirover large sections of the country an agricultural able for garden, family orchard, poultry, and dairy, wage proletariat which comes in the same class as according to the tastes of each family. Thus the the victims of the steel mills and the metal mines. valuable elements of the present system may perThere is no use of fumbling the situation. For sist (in much improved form) and at the same socialists to concede private operation of agricul time the demands of the consuming population may ture is falsity to the principles of the movement; be satisfied. It is entirely possible to work out not so much because provision for private propri line of appeal that will commend itself to the cometorship in this field after the weight of external mon sense of the vast majority of the agricultural exploitation had been removed from it, would erect population as soon as they can by some means be a specially privileged class as because it is impos Îifted out of the fog of the capitălist dictatorship.
The Plight of the American Farmer By PROF. ARTHUR CALHOUN The Resurrected Second International By LUDWIG LORE With very few exceptions, the agricultural group moment forget the overwhelming responsibility for in the United States is miserably victimized by the all the multifarious details of a complicated ecocurrent economic system. There are a few farmers, nomic operation which in most instances has to be perhaps, whose landownership more than offsets carried on with insufficient capital and with no the amount to which they are exploited by the cap assurance of reasonable returns. The real charm of italist system of exchange; but in most instances the farm home consists, not in the grain fields and the economic advantage of proprietorship is un the cattle pastures, but in the garden, the orchard, doubtedly far from compensating for the disad the poultry yard, and the other incidental surround vantage of having to operate under the conditions ings of the rural home, which usually are intended of an unjust and inefficient business regime. If primarily for family use and only incidentally as the American farmer had enough information and yielding a product for sale on the market. It is true enough training in logical thought, he would be an that many a farm income is considerably augmentabsolute revolutionist instead of an occasional in ed by the sale of products from these sources, but surgent.
they are secondary considerations to the average If statistics carried conviction, it would be easy general crop farmer. Moreover the claims of his to prove to the typical farmer that he belongs to the economic plant (his field agriculture) very often labor group and that he is in no sense a beneficiary entirely overshadow the needs of the home and of the current system. Figuring a moderate wage bring it to pass that his barns and machinery show for the farmer and the members of the family who an abundance of up to date equipment while the work with him, we find that his interest as a laborer home is still primitive and desolate of the essenis far in excess of his stake as a proprietor. Ordin.
tials of comfort and health. The home loses rather arily, however, the farm family does not receive than gains by its close association with an indusanything like a fair labor income and if the facts trial process. Indeed, over large areas, the farm were thoroughly familiar the farmer would have population has no kitchen gardens and no orchards to reckon himself as the victim of a sweated indus and absolutely none of the other features that are try. It is largely the fact that farm ownership supposed to glorify rural life. The South is covered provides a steady job and, where the land is good, with a pauperized population of helpless serfs yields an element of property income to supplement whose life in the home is substantially equivalent or conceal the smallness of the labor income that to the horrors of the slum.
obscures the real situation and sustains the capital socialist approach to the rural problem will ist psychology on the farm.
have to include such considerations as the shrinkA further element in the farmers resistance to ing proportions of the farm population; the incommunistic proposals is the general confusion be creasing proportion of farm tenancy in such areas tween the farmstead as an industrial plant and as as possess sufficient fertility to yield a considerable a homestead. The advantages of homeownership economic rent; the enormous burden of farm are assumed, and then the concept is unwittingly mortgages, whose orror is much the same whether extended to cover the whole farm, as if the whole they rest upon a man working out of tenancy, in area were the home. In reality, much of the benefit the direction of possible unencumbered ownership of having a sure place of abode is negatived by or upon a farmer whose ownership is slipping away the fact that the family is required to live in the from him; the oppression of the whole farming midst of the industrial plant and can never for a class by the parveyors of machinery, supplies, and The conference of the 21 International that was on, whose secretary you have become, to our great held in Vienna from the 25th to the 28th of Feb surprise, consisted only of persons of your calibre, ruary was met with open hostility by the supporters all further discussion would be superfluous. Someof the Third International everywhere. Their op how this asurance sounds strongly like the Antiposition was more than the prejudiced criticism of a Semite who had a habit of assuring every Jew with political opponent. It was rooted in the conviction whom he came in contact, Ah, dear Sir, if all Jews that this new International is only an endeavor to were like you, there would be no Anti Semites.
resuscitate the old Socialist International, under a But Adler finds it necessary to prove beyond new firm name. Certainly there is nothing that di all doubt, that only mere formalities divide himself vides the leading spirits of the 242 from the old and his colleagues of the 242. from Ramsay MacdonSecond International, but their attitude on war ald and the Second. For this reason he defines his policies. Beyond that they are heart and soul in position toward the Russian revolution so as to accord. Friedrich Adler, the press agent of the leave no doubt as to where he stands.
Vienna Conference, expresses this quite openly in It was this anarchy in the International that a letter written to Ramsay Macdonald, now secre gave Lenin the opportunity to throw the workingtary of the Second International.
class, not only of Russia, but of the whole world. Circumstances have forced us in the last two into one of the most dangerous experiments, without years, in order to clarify our position upon political consulting the representatives of the class conscious questions of immediate importance, to discuss fre proletariat in other countries. Thus the leading quently and at some length our differences with the personality of the new International takes his Third International. Those points that separate us stand definitely and aggressively against the Rusfrom the Second International have, meanwhile, sian revolution. The presence and active participabeen left practically without discussion, because tion of Martow and Abramowitz in the Conference they are concerned, in the main, with socialist po and in the committees served only to underscore licies during the war. discussion of principles with what was already obvious.
the Second Internatonal will be, above all, a discussion of socialist action in times of war, of that position which we have become accustomed to call al, whatever may become of it, was inevitable. It Nevertheless the creation of the 242. Internationsocial patriotism.
gives expression to the natural after war developFriedrich Adler finds it unnecessary to discuss ment of those proletarian parties which do not apthe policies of the Second after the war. He knows prove, on the one hand, of open coalition with the nothing of Noske massacres, he has forgotten bourgeois government, and which, on the other, Scheidemann coalition manoeuvres, he no longer cannot be content with a negative position of the remembers Thomas ministerialism, he recalls neither working class parties in every country. The world Branting short lived ministerial honors nor Henwar which ended not with a proletarian revolution derson or Clynes strictly socialistic labor poli but with a military victory of one of the two impericies that left the cart of the British Labor movealistic groups, did not realize the cherished hopes of ment hopelessly stuck in the mud.
the loyal workers. They had believed what their If the Second International, the letter goes labor union and party leaders had told them, had