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Class Warrior: On the 1921 Canadian Parliamentary Election. 1921

Class Warrior
On the 1921 Canadian Parliamentary Election. 1921

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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Foreword
  3. Introduction
  4. Part I: Selected Writings of E. T. Kingsley
    1. 1900   On Washington State’s Primary Law
    2. 1903   On Political Action
      1. On Reformism and Electoral “Fusion”
      2. On Trade Unions
    3. 1905   On the Single Tax
      1. On a Journey to Seattle
    4. 1906   On the Arrest of US Labour Leaders and State Power
    5. 1908   On the Socialist Movement and Travels across Canada
    6. 1909   On War
      1. On the Vancouver Free Speech Fight
    7. 1911   On Property
      1. On the Workers’ Awakening
      2. On Economic Organization
      3. On the Capitalist State
    8. 1914   On the Causes of the First World War
    9. 1916   On Carnage
    10. 1917   On Slavery and War
      1. On War Finance
      2. On the War Effort
    11. 1918   On the Bolshevik Revolution
      1. On Capitalism Getting Rich Quick
    12. 1919   On Control of the State by the Working Class
      1. On Reconstruction
      2. On Collaboration between Labour and Capital
      3. On Wealth
      4. On Gold
      5. On Class War
      6. On the Paris Peace Conference
      7. On Capitalist Civilization
    13. 1921   On the 1921 Canadian Parliamentary Election
  5. Part II: Selected Speeches of E. T. Kingsley
    1. 1895   On the Aims of Socialism
    2. 1896   On Socialism and the Economy
    3. 1899   On American Imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines
    4. 1903   On the Labour Problem
      1. On the Political Organization of Miners in Cumberland
      2. On Stirring the Emotions of His Audience
      3. On Wages, Profit, and Capital
      4. On the 1903 British Columbia Election
    5. 1905   On the 1905 Russian Revolution
      1. On Workers and Rockefeller
      2. On the Mission of the Working Class
    6. 1906   On the Paris Commune
    7. 1908   On Labour and Its Economies
      1. On the Working Class Using Clubs If Necessary
      2. On Working-Class Political Power
    8. 1912   On the Vancouver Free Speech Fight
    9. 1913   On the Vancouver Island Miners’ Strike
    10. 1914   On the Komagata Maru Incident
    11. 1917   On Conscription
      1. On Working-Class Opposition to Conscription
      2. On Conscription and Wiping Out Ruling-Class Laws
      3. On the 1917 Conscription Election
    12. 1918   On the Formation of the Federated Labor Party
      1. On Laws
      2. On Reconstruction
      3. On the Armistice and Postwar Moment
      4. On Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War
    13. 1919   On Lenin and Trotsky
      1. On the Belfast General Strike, Unemployment, and the Postwar Challenge to Capitalism
      2. On the Bolshevik Revolution
      3. On the One Big Union
      4. On the Class Struggle
      5. On the Machine
      6. On Capitalism
      7. On the Defeat of the Winnipeg General Strike
      8. On the Machinery of Slavery
      9. On Civilization
    14. 1920   On Mechanization of Production
      1. On the Paris Commune
      2. On the Collapse of Civilization
      3. On the Bankruptcy of the Capitalist System
  6. Part III: The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery
    1. 1916   The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery: Showing How the Chattel Slaves of Pagan Times Have Been Transformed into the Capitalist Property of To-day
  7. Part IV: On the World Situation
    1. 1919   On the World Situation
  8. Appendix
  9. Kingsley’s Speeches
  10. Index

On the 1921 Canadian Parliamentary Election 1921

This is the last published work by Kingsley that we have discovered. It was published in the British Columbia Labor News in December 1921, exposing the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Canadian ruling class in the midst of that year’s parliamentary election campaign.

Tariff Not a Campaign Issue: Old Parties Have No Real Issues Says Old Labor Party Campaigner

An election campaign is now on in this Dominion of Canada, for the purpose of electing a House of Commons, from which a government will be forced to preside over the destiny of the country and steer the “Ship of State” safely through reefs and tide rips of a possibly adverse fortune during another period of years. Probably no similar campaign has ever been marked with a more complete absence of issues or policy to be fought out by contending participants in the old parties for “public honors” than this one.

For good and sufficient reasons the political talent of the ruling class in human society has been rapidly deteriorating in quality of latter years. From an impartial survey of the situation throughout the world and of the political timber available to prop it up with, it appears that the intellectual bankruptcy of the political parties and henchman of the ruling class is well nigh established, at any rate as far as Canada is concerned. No duller mediocrity was ever displayed upon the public platform, nor by means of the other official pronouncements of the old line politicians and so-called statesmen and apologists of the present regime of plunder and rapine. And how could it be otherwise than that the rulers and their satellites should land in moral and intellectual bankruptcy once the industrial and financial establishments of that ruling class have gone over the precipice of manifest impossibility? It is quite the common thing for bankrupts and threatened bankrupts to go “bughouse” and even suicide in some cases. That is evidently the only alternative afforded our present rulers and their tools, in face of the utter impossibility of a further carrying on of their industrial and financial game at full tilt. That perhaps accounts for the weird cavortings and meaningless mutterings upon the part of alleged statesmen and leading publicists of today.

The culmination of a hundred centuries of human slavery and its vulgar trail of business, trade and commerce, was the precipitation of the most gigantic, bloody and destructive war ever yet recorded in history. The closing of this magnificent spectacle has been swiftly followed by every evidence of financial bankruptcy, accompanied with all of its attendant phenomena, by no means the least of which is a tremendous slowing down of industry and a threateningly dangerous condition of unemployment throughout the world.

The figures usually offered as an indication or expression of the wealth of the world, upon examination, turn out to be merely figures of debt, a debt that can never be paid for the good and sufficient reason that all that is produced is consumed equally as fast as it is brought forth. Small wonder that these figures at last reach such imposing dimensions that the bubble finally bursts and bankruptcy ensues.

To make a long story short, the history of the last ten thousand or more years has been the history of human slavery. Its culmination has been the delectable affair that broke out in 1914, the aftermath of which is still with us in the nature of the bankruptcy and collapse already mentioned. The utter impossibility of slavery has thus been clearly made manifest. The human race cannot live under it for any appreciable length of time. The accursed thing will eventually wreck itself, and man will perish unless a return be made to the path of liberty, and that sane manner of existence that actuates the life and purpose of all other living things.

Slavery, with its attendant trade and commerce, is doomed. It is now in collapse, and must go down and out. The vaunted industrialism of the ruling class has been tried in the balance and the result can be read by he who has eyes with which to see and a brain at all capable of reasoning.

The most that can truthfully be said for the boasted mechanical achievements of the past is that they have proven worthy of their creation, for they have been devised solely for the purposes of a ruling class and those purposes are summed up in the conclusion that they never did serve, and never can be made to serve any other purpose than that of intensifying and expediting the exploitation of slaves and turning the fruits of such exploitation to the account of their rulers.

In the face of these very easily verified facts, what supine twaddle it is to pretend that the “tariff,” for instance, or such other silly stuff can be termed a campaign issue. It is all too childish and empty to come forth from the mouths of even normal babes and sucklings. Such stuff can only issue from the caverns of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

E. T. Kingsley

—“Tariff Not a Campaign Issue,” British Columbia Labor News (Vancouver), 2 Dec. 1921, 1, 3.

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Part II: Selected Speeches of E. T. Kingsley
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