On the Bankruptcy of the Capitalist System 1920

Kingsley Says the Present System Is Now Bankrupt

E. T. Kingsley, speaking at the Columbia theatre last Sunday, presented in a concise manner the logical facts which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the present system of wage slavery, from an international viewpoint, no longer performs the function of maintaining the sustenance of the social groups, hence the beginning of the end.

Products are all consumed as fast as they are produced, leaving nothing to pay with only promises to pay, which do not constitute payment. For example, a season’s wheat is consumed from harvest to harvest, the product is consumed, but the paper that comes into being with this function, for all time, remains a future charge against the community; wheat production increasing on the ratio of increasing consuming power, the same applying to all commodity production, and then again the charge against the community increases the debt, a debt to which prominent statesmen point to as being “the increased wealth of the world,” but in reality being nothing more or less than a stupendous debt that can never be paid.

Present day conceptions of property point out the demarcation ’twixt the “respected member of the community,” and the “bum.” Property, as an example, with no machinery produced by the slaves, and with no slaves to operate, never did and never will constitute property of utility. On the legs of the wage slaves of the world rest the burden of a world’s market, and its productive features. The human slave chattels are bought and sold when stocks, bonds and debentures change hands, the exploitation of human energy constitutes and determines the value of property.

A man is on his way to a soup kitchen at the moment that he becomes insolvent through lack of collateral; just so are the nations bankrupt. Exchange rates vary, with the United States currency standing at the peak, and at that only worth 50 cents on the dollar, with perhaps Austria at the base, with a situation which is so acute that it requires 60 krones to purchase a street car ticket, with the countries of the world between the peak and the base currency values, mere promises to pay and the whole shebang is on the road to the International poor house.

The “wealth” of the world wholly consists of promises to pay, continuous charges against the community, the interest on these I. O. U.’s are compounded, which merely adds another set of figures to another mass of paper, which can never be retired. Capital is a lie from its inception to its demise. Its cumbersome machinery is useful only for this present capitalist system, which it works, working to carry it to its own destruction. Machinery that carries the product away from the slave that produced it to the slave in some other portion of the globe, whose slaves in turn are repeating the same process. A world gone mad, rushing the produce around the globe and rushing it back, and starving slaves watch the whole proceedings and say, “How long, good Lord, how long!”