King Capital’s Civilisation
Here in America the machine shops are running night and day, seven days a week, making guns and shells for the mighty work of Civilisation. In the great steel works named after the meek and lowly Nazarene, the “Bethlehem” Steel Plant, they are verily beating ploughshares into swords. They are assiduously making munitions for the Allies to show that Capital— American Capital—is not neutral when there is a chance of making profits.
Ships leave these ports every day loaded to the full with instruments of death. Other ships leave here loaded with hospital supplies to repair the civilising influence of American shells. Still more ships leave with food for Poland, when American guns have driven the Poles starving and homeless into the wilderness.
This is civilisation ! Socialism will break up the home, destroy the family, rob parents of their children. So sang the war lords just a little while ago. Did Socialism desecrate the homes of Belgium, of Serbia, of German South-West Africa ? Did Socialism destroy family life in the blackened towns and villages of war-bled Europe and Asia ? Ask the mothers and fathers of a dozen nations mourning their slaughtered boys if it is Socialism that has robbed them of their sons.
Workers of every country and of all races are making munitions here for the Allies. At one machine is a German, at another an Austrian, at a third a Pole from Russian Poland. So great is their need for work. And as they pass out of the factory gate one sees them asked to give to the Red Cross and the War Sufferers Relief Fund. One day it is a fund for Poland, another day for Serbia, and still another day for the Jewish victims of the war. They give their pence and once more hurry on with the work of making guns and more war sufferers. And in Congress President and politicians are talking of building a huge navy and providing a large army in case of attack by those who win this war
War loan after war loan is being floated here first by one country then by another. And they are eagerly taken up by the American lovers of peace—and pieces; for war loans bear heavy interest. Soon, maybe, they will promote an American war loan, and the same financiers will buy that : it all brings grist to the mill—and death to the million.
Wonderfully varied are the pleas used to entice men into the different armies. In England it is “King and Country,” in Russia the “Little White Father,” in Germany “Emperor and Fatherland,” and in Turkey it is “For Allah.’
Here in the towns on the American side of the Canadian Border they appeal to all Americans who want a change and “love adventure,” to join up in the Canadian Army.
Notices to American immigration authorities have recently appeared in the newspapers here to register the large numbers of young men who are flocking over the border to escape the call of the Motherland. They do not seem at all anxious to join, and many Canadian papers such as “John Canuck” (the Canadian “John Bull”) bitterly denounce the French Canadians for their hostility to the war, while Members of Parliament from Lower Canada are attacked for their treachery to “Canada and the Empire.”
One of the most striking facts showing how artificial is this clash of races is the life of the same races resident in America. Here German and French, Austrian and Italian, Turk and Greek, and men and women of all the belligerent countries, work together in harmony and friendship. The only friction is that which exists even among true-born Americans—the friction between workers and employers, which goes on all the time, independent of colour, race or creed.
Whilst their brothers are killing each other in Europe at the order of those who rule, they remain quite diffident and watch the struggle as though it were on the stage. A change of place leads men and women coming here from Europe to realise more than anywhere else in the world what shibboleths racial and national differences can become, for here the exploiters are of every race, and the toilers live in poverty, no matter what language they speak.
American war correspondents from the German and Turkish lines have been telling the horrible and gruesome story of what war really is. And the scenes depicted by them almost outdo those of any other war in history, not even excluding the horrors of Sedan and the fearful massacres of the Russo-Japanese War. Picture shows are busy showing the German official pictures, and they are a confession of the terrible sufferings of the German soldiery. Imagine a picture of a long line of men on a railway platform who have had their legs blown off, being taught how to walk by doctors, and you can guess what Capitalism has reduced Civilisation to.
This is not the last war, as they say in England it is. America is ravaged with war fever, and a great campaign is being waged on “Preparedness.” Leading politicians and others are urging men to enlist and get ready for the coming fray. America has its Blatchfords in the alleged Socialist Party, like Charles Edward Russell and Meyer London. The latter, who represents the poverty-stricken East Side of New York in Congress, told the House that American Socialists would rally to the flag and defend the country if it were attacked Russell, in “Pearson’s Magazine,” is out-Blatchfording Blatchford.
Even “our Allies” have placed orders for years ahead with the American Armament Ring. Brave European officers are here in hundreds with a permanent job of inspecting munitions before shipment.
How many mare crimes of capitalism shall we see ere the toilers realise that, no matter who wins, they lose every time ? When will they understand that after they have done fighting in the trenches they have to fight in the mine, mill, and factory ? Let the workers of the nations join together for Socialism, for that is the only way to rescue civilisation.
In March 1871 the toilers of Paris gained control of the administration of that city and showed the world what workers could do when even partly freed from the clutch of King Capital. When the brutality of the bourgeoisie broke out the toilers fought behind the barricades. One workman, fighting against hopeless odds, was asked what he was fightimg for, and the answer was a lesson for all time “For Humanity !”
Can those on the stricken fields of Europe today say that ? No, they are fighting for the old firm—”The Ruling Class, Limited.”
A. KOHN, Detriot, U.S.A.