On the Defeat of the Winnipeg General Strike 1919

Kingsley Makes Good Points: Present System Will Go If Workers Do Not Move to Destroy It

Comrade E. T. Kingsley was welcomed back to the Columbia on Sunday evening, and responded by giving his audience a calling-down for getting into trouble while he was away, e. g., going on strike about 24 hours after his back was turned.

Nothing except temporary gains, he said, had ever been won by the workers in a fight for better conditions; that struggle had now become more hopeless, than ever. On the other hand it was becoming more difficult for the masters to get recruits from the slave-class; it would soon be no longer possible for the rulers to use one section of the working class to shoot down, club, and jail the others. (Applause.)

Political action meant, for the workers, to strip the ruling-class of power; and for the rulers, to hold on to it. “That struggle must be short and decisive when the working class becomes politically wise. The working class will become triumphant, and, rise to the mastery of its own life and its own destiny,” (Applause.) The speaker did not think the rulers would dare to take the franchise away in these western nations, or they would have the revolution of violence which they dreaded.

The working class constituted all property, since it was the only source of revenue. Ownership and control of that class was bulwarked by the state. When they revolted, as at Winnipeg, they laid themselves liable to the fangs and claws of the state; the mounted police and the other thugs and ruffians of the rulers were put in motion. The state’s agents could invite the hotheaded to some overt act, and the strike was speedily broken. The masters could not be reached in the economic field; the strike was really against other members of the working class, i.e., against surplus labor. It was as hopeless as a horse balking in harness. All the strikes on top of the earth had never got the workers anywhere yet; wages were lower now than ever they had been. Marx’s iron law could more be overthrown in the selling of labor power than in the selling of anything else.

There could be no other struggle between slaves and their masters except to break the hold of the master class and regain their liberty. The struggle of the farmers for a better price for wheat was no evidence of a struggle against the master class; but they might take political action to break the power of that class. The workers of the city would do well to go with them; together they could conquer the earth and everything on top of it.

The speaker went on to show that of the essential things of life there was never any large accumulation. All that was left of the U.S. last year’s wheat supply of 800,000,000 bushels was about 18,000,000 bushels—perhaps a week’s supply. It was said that the City of London was built over again in every generation; many cities on this western continent were rebuilt more frequently than that. There was no accumulation, except of machinery and of bank accounts and similar credits. The Bolsheviki could wipe out that kind of accumulation with a wet sponge, without destroying a loaf of bread or a yard of cloth or any other useful thing.

There would never be any serious consideration of anything that could endanger the master class, so long as the workers kept talking about profiteers, etc. Their profits were only in figures. Money was simply a promise to pay, that could never be paid. The “surplus value” of Marx consisted of “figures in existence at the end of a year that were not in existence at the beginning.”

There was, in fact, nothing to pay with. Austen Chamberlain, Vanderlip, etc., were pointing out that the nations were absolutely broke. What they said was true; there were only gigantic debts piled up. This applied not merely to currency, but to stocks, bonds, and all the paper flim-flam of the financial class. If capital, then, was only debt, why shouldn’t it be wiped out! The destruction of capital was only the destruction of human slavery.

Less than one-third of the population of any country produced all the essential things of life for all the people of that country. The others were producing for solely a ruling-class purpose—the material substance of great cities, factories, railways, shipping, wharves, mines, “and all that kind of stuff.” And out of it all, the workers get nothing; the ruling-class got “their eats and a mass of figures that would reach the length of this house.”

What was breaking the system down was not what the masters consume, as they were an infinitesimal portion of the whole; it was that great mass of labor in the city, with its brokers, financiers, etc., that was eating the life out of modern civilization.

The proposal to operate these things for the common good was absolutely preposterous. Machines represented the ultimate in the exploitation of slavery.

Of all the worse-than-useless contraptions of modern civilization, the aeroplane was the most deadly and most damnable. One of these could carry enough of a new poison gas to wipe out every living thing in a city as large as Vancouver, down to the last blade of grass. The submarine and the atrocities of the poor Germans seemed like nothing now in the face of this “greatest and grandest chemical achievement of civilisation.”

This civilization would perish, even if the working class did not move to destroy it. It was just as truly based on human slavery as any that preceded it. It had made life an intolerable curse.