Part 46

No matter what imperial nation may triumph in this struggle between the great nations for the right to exploit the weaker peoples and the choice resources, the struggle between capitalism and Socialism must be fought to a finish. If the capitalists win, the world will see the introduction of a new form of serfdom, more complete and more effective than the serfdom of Feudal Europe. If the Socialists win, the world enters upon a new cycle of development.

XIX. THE AMERICAN WORKER AND WORLD EMPIRE

1. Gains and Losses

The American worker is a citizen of the richest country of the world. Resources are abundant. There is ample machinery to convert these gifts of nature into the things that men need for their food and clothing, their shelter, their education and their recreation. There is enough for all, and to spare, in the United States.

But the American worker is not master of his own destinies. He must go to the owners of American capital--to the plutocrats--and from them he must secure the permission to earn a living; he must get a job. Therefore it is the capitalists and not the workers of the United States that are deciding its public policy at the present moment.

The American capitalist is a member of one of the most powerful exploiting groups in the world. Behind him are the resources, productive machinery and surplus of the American Empire. Before him are the undeveloped resources of the backward countries. He has gained wealth and power by exploitation at home. He is destined to grow still richer and more powerful as he extends his organization for the purposes of exploitation abroad.

The prospects of world empire are as alluring to the American capitalist as have been similar prospects to other exploiting classes throughout history. Empire has always been meat and drink to the rulers.

The master class has much to gain through imperialism. The workers have even more to lose.

The workers make up the great bulk of the American people. Fully seven-eighths (perhaps nine-tenths) of the adult inhabitants of the United States are wage earners, clerks and working farmers. All of the proprietors, officials, managers, directors, merchants (big and little), lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, and the remainder of the business and professional classes constitute not over 10 or 12 percent of the total adult population. The workers are the "plain people" who do not build empires any more than they make wars. If they were left to themselves, they would continue the pursuit of their daily affairs which takes most of their thought and energy--and be content to let their neighbors alone.

2. The Workers' Business

The mere fact that the workers are so busy with the routine of daily life is in itself a guarantee that they will mind their own business. The average worker is engaged, outside of working hours, with the duties of a family. His wife, if she has children, is thus employed for the greater portion of her time. Both are far too preoccupied to interfere with the like acts of other workers in some other portion of the world. Furthermore, their preoccupation with these necessary tasks gives them sympathy with those similarly at work elsewhere.

The plain people of any country are ready to exercise even more than an ordinary amount of forbearance and patience rather than to be involved in warfare, which wipes out in a fortnight the advantages gained through years of patient industry.

The workers have no more to gain from empire building than they have from war making, but they pay the price of both. Empire building and war making are Siamese twins. They are so intimately bound together that they cannot live apart. The empire builder--engaged in conquering and appropriating territory and in subjugating peoples--must have not only the force necessary to set up the empire, but also the force requisite to maintain it. Battleships and army corps are as essential to empires as mortar is to a brick wall. They are the expression of the organized might by which the empire is held together.

The plain people are the bricks which the imperial class uses to build into a wall about the empire. They are the mortar also, for they man the ships and fill up the gaps in the infantry ranks and the losses in the machine gun corps. They are the body of the empire as the rulers are its guiding spirit.

When ships are required to carry the surplus wealth of the ruling class into foreign markets, the workers build them. When surplus is needed to be utilized in taking advantage of some particularly attractive investment opportunity the workers create it. They lay down the keels of the fighting ships, and their sons aim and fire the guns. They are drafted into the army in time of war and their bodies are fed to the cannon which other workers in other countries, or perhaps in the same country, have made for just such purposes. The workers are the warp and woof of empire, yet they are not the gainers by it. Quite the contrary, they are merely the means by which their masters extend their dominion over other workers who have not yet been scientifically exploited.

The work of empire building falls to the lot of the workers. The profits of empire building go to the exploiting class.

3. The British Workers

What advantage came to the workers of Rome from the Empire which their hands shaped and which their blood cemented together? Their masters took their farms, converted the small fields into great, slave-worked estates, and drove the husbandmen into the alleys and tenements of the city where they might eke out an existence as best they could. The rank-and-file Roman derived the same advantage from the Roman Empire that the rank-and-file Briton has derived from the British Empire.

Great Britain has exercised more world mastery during the past hundred years than any other nation. All that Germany hoped to achieve Great Britain has realized. Her traders carry the world's commerce, her financiers clip profits from international business transactions, her manufacturers sell to the people of every country, the sun never sets on the British flag.

Great Britain is the foremost exponent and practitioner of capitalist imperialism. The British Empire is the greatest that the world has known since the Empire of Rome fell to pieces. Whatever benefits modern imperialism brings either for capitalists or for workers should be enjoyed by the capitalists and workers of Great Britain.

Until the Great World War the capitalists of Great Britain were the most powerful on earth with a larger foreign trade and a larger foreign investment than any other. At the same time the British workers were amongst the worst exploited of those in any capitalist country in Europe.

The entire nineteenth century is one long and terrible record of master-class exploitation inside the British Isles. The miseries of modern India have been paralleled in the lives of the workers of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. Gibbins, in his description of the conditions of the child workers in the early years of the nineteenth century ends with the remark, "One dares not trust oneself to try and set down calmly all that might be told of this awful page of the history of industrial England."

Even more revolting are the descriptions of the conditions which surrounded the lives of the mine workers in the early part of the nineteenth century. Women as well as men were taken into the mines and in some cases, as the reports of the Parliamentary investigation show, the women dragged cars through passage-ways that were too low to admit the use of ponies or mules.

England, mistress of the seas, proud carrier of the traffic of the world, the center of international finance, the richest among all the investing nations--England was reeking with poverty. Beside her factories and warehouses were vile slums in which people huddled as Ruskin said, "so many brace to a garret." There in the back alleys of civilization babies were born and babies died, while those who survived grew to the impotent manhood of the street hooligan.

The British Empire girdled the world. For a century its power had grown, practically unchallenged. Superficially it had every appearance of strength and permanence but behind it and beneath it were the hundreds of thousands of exploited factory workers, the underpaid miners, the Cannon Gate of Edinburgh and the Waterloo Junction of London.

Capitalist imperialism has not benefited the British workers. Quite the contrary, the rise of the Empire has been accompanied by the disappearance of the stalwart English yeoman; by the disappearance of the agricultural population; by the concentration of the people in huge industrial towns where the workers, no longer the masters of their own destinies, must earn their living by working at machines owned by the capitalist imperialists. The surplus derived from this exploited labor is utilized by the capitalists as the means of further extending their power in foreign lands.

Imperialism has brought not prosperity, but poverty to the plain people of England.

There is another aspect of the matter. If these degraded conditions attach to the workers in the center of the empire, what must be the situation among the workers in the dependencies that are the objects of imperial exploitation? Let the workers of India answer for Great Britain; the workers of Korea answer for Japan, and the workers of Porto Rico answer for the United States. Their lot is worse than is the lot of the workers at the center of imperial power.