Notes by the Way
An article in the Conservative Detroit Free Press recently has been given wide publicity everywhere. It was quoted in the Senate at Washington and has aroused much controversy. The article was based upon personal investigation in the great city of millionaires and motor-cars.
It stated that in the city receiving hospital every 7 hours and 15 minutes a patient died from starvation. The writer of the article also has a large number of sworn statements from eye-witnesses to the effect that man after man was carried out of Grand Circus Park, the city recreation ground, suffering from intense hunger and exposure. This park, in the very heart of the city, is overlooked by most of the palatial hotels there. It is now full of homeless and penniless men and women who have little to eat and nowhere to sleep.
The extraordinary industrial efficiency and high profits of this great American inferno exist side by side with the largest army of out-of-works and “down-and-outs” American history has ever known. Is it any wonder that the capitalists there are trying very hard to make the writer of the article divulge the source of his information?
Communists and reformers alike want America to adopt the European so-called dole system. They must be completely blind to the misery which at present exists in Europe alongside of the much-vaunted unemployment insurance.
Michael Farbman, a frequent visitor to Russia, writes in the semi-official magazine, The British Russian Gazette and Trade Outlook (November, 1931). He closes a survey of the Five-Year Plan in agriculture thus : —
“But it must not be imagined that they have reached a definite stage in their development. Institutions which involve millions of persons and demand a fundamental change not only of agricultural technique but of social, political and cultural relations, require time to develop. Hundreds of problems are now being raised by this new system : problems of work, the question of the mutual relations between members, the division of profits, the evolution of social, cultural and political characteristics, the relation to tile State and to its organs, to other Kolhozi and to individual peasants. These and many other problems are clamouring for solution. It is too early yet to say in all cases what these solutions will be ; but it is perhaps possible to trace some general tendencies. But this must be the subject of another article.”
Those who talk glibly of “Socialism in Russia” should note the problems still facing them, as viewed by a very sympathetic observer.
“I have often argued in these columns and elsewhere that should a war break out, the Socialist and Labour movement in this countrv ought to concentrate upon the demand that our Government should meet its war bills out of current revenue. No more borrowing. No more post obits. No more tick. No more war debts. Pay as you go. If the wealth is here to waste, very bad, let it be wasted, blown up, destroyed. But do not let it be borrowed before it is destroyed“.—”Forward,” November 28th, 1931.
This utterance comes from the ex-Labour Minister, the Right Hon. Thomas Johnston, the Editor of Forward.
This champion of the I.L.P., instead of opposing war and the system that makes for war, simply suggests how war should be paid for.
He assists the capitalists to find the cheapest ways to run their wars without burdening the future capitalists with heavy debt. Not “No More War,” but “Cheaper Wars” is this I.L.P. leader’s new slogan. Socialists are not concerned in advising the rulers how to run wars. We are engaged in showing the workers how to stop all wars by stopping the cause—production for profit for an idle class.
K.