370 THE CLASS STRUGGLE DOCUMENTS 371 Knights of Liberty in Oklahoma (The Liberator)
TULSA, NOVEMBER 9th, advocate of the National Guild idea, not long ago disparaged the project of a British Labor Party on the ground that it was useless for the workers to seek political power until first they had the economic power in their hands. But as a matter of fact this anthithesis disappears in the British Labor Party program. Mr. Orage and his National Guild collaborators rightly insist that the strength of the capitalist position is organically bound up with the commodity theory of labor, the view that man labor is a measureable marketable commodity separate from his personality and subject to the law of supply and demand like any other commodity. Repudiate this theory, and the capitalist synthesis naturally collapses. But something else of even greater consequence happens. Over against the commodity theory it is maintained that the worker has as direct an interest in the product of his labor as his employer, and that the only proper relation between the capitalist and the actual producer is that of partnership.
The logic of this view leads at last to the doctrine of national ownership with democratic control; its immediate result is to change entirely the status of the worker. He is no longer a mere economic unit at the mercy of the chances of the market, but a partner whose claim upon profit is of a piece with that of the owner of capital, and whose full maintenance, in health and strength, whether trade be slack or brisk is a permanent charge upon the proceeds of industry.
It is this view of the worker status that is practically expressed in the Labor Party demand for the establishment of a national minimum standard of life. It raises the worker above the insecurities of a fluctuating market and puts the commodity theory of labor out of commission. The worker is no longer a hand but a partner in the great game of production. Mr. Gompers, with all his zeal for improving the external conditions of the worker leaves him in his old status; for that reason it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he represents an obsolescent order; and that the British Labor Party points the road of advance. Editor Note: In this story of persecution and outrage at Tulsa, Oklahoma, told in the sworn statement of one of the victims, there is direct and detailed evidence of one of the most menacing by products of the war. Here in Tulsa, as in Bisbee and Butte and Cincinnati, patriotic fervor was used by employers with the connivance or open co operation of local officials, as a mask for utterly lawless attacks upon workingmen who attempted to organize for better conditions.
This false resort to loyalty on the part of certain war profiteers is emphasized in the recent Report of the President Mediation Commission. These cowardly masked upper class mobs, calling themselves Knights of Liberty and mumbling hypocritical words about the women and children of Belgium, will not succeed in terrorizing the labor movement of America, nor will they tend to make it more patriotic.
On November 9, 1917, seventeen men, taken from the custody of the city police of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were whipped, tarred and feathered, and driven out of the city with a warning never to return.
In a letter dated December 21, a resident of Tulsa, writes. think it is only fair to say that the bottom cause of this trouble locally was that a few men, presumably belonging to the came into the oil fields something like a year ago and were meeting with considerable success in getting oil field workers especially pipeline and tank builders to fight for better wages and shorter hours. Not long after the outrage was committed in Butte, Mont. on the crippled leader (Frank Little. the home of Edgar Pew in this city was partly destroyed by some kind of explosion and Mr.
and Mrs. Pew narrowly escaped being killed. The news agencies at once published it as a dastardly act of the Mr. Pew is the vice president and active manager of the Carter Oil Co. which by the way, is owned and controlled by Standard Oil and is one of its largest producing subsidiary companies. few weeks after the Pew have not touched upon the unconcealed difference between Mr.
Gompers and British labor on the immediate issues of international labor policy. This is a development out of the radical divergence in economic outlook which have endeavored to explain. Mr. Gompers still moves within the ante bellum ideology. He finds the particularist universe which he inhabits large enough for himself and for American labor; the strength of the British Labor Party on the contrary is that it has begun to think in universals. Its program for Great Britain is not a class ascendancy but a living and working society, and for the world not the particularism of nationality but the generous hope of a free cooperative commenwealth. Names of informants are withheld for reasons of safety. The names are in possession of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York, which has the case in hand. Several men are now reported in the press to be under arrest in Oklahoma for dynamiting the home of Mr. Pew and the oil refinery, none of whom have any connection whatever with the