50 Years Ago: Where All The Workers Are Capitalists

One of the busiest writers in defence of Capital is Dean Inge of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In an article in the Evening Standard (August 26th) illuminated by his photo, he discourses on “The Class War”. The gloomy dean has become very optimistic about the Kingdom of Capital, in fact, more hopeful than he is about the “Kingdom of God’’. This ‘cultured’ cleric, who spent twenty years of his life studying the mysteries of the ancient world, has spent about twenty minutes studying Socialism, and hence miles of articles denouncing ‘the horrid thing’.

Let us hear the words of the very reverend divine:,br>

  ‘all who are interested in social questions — and who can escape from these painful problems? — — should study the conditions in America, for there we have an alternative to Socialism in working order. Two results have followed. There is, as I was assured last year when I visited America, very little Socialism there now, because every working man is himself a capitalist. That is one result; the other is that no country has ever been half so prosperous as the United States is today’.

The ‘continued progress to equality’ is a fine phrase. While it may be true of the dead — the special field of the Dean — it certainly is not true of America. Not only so, but America is the country par excellence, where the gulf between the worker and the owner gets wider every day.

(From an article “A Land of ‘No Class War’ ” by Adolph Kohn, in the Socialist Standard, September 1926.)