On Capitalism Getting Rich Quick 1918

How Capitalism Gets Rich Quick

The workers generally have an extremely hazy idea of that most elusive subject—finance. And yet a little consideration will show that the system of figure-juggling is not at all mystifying. The following article is one of the best from the pen of Mr. E. T. Kingsley—the noted Canadian Socialist—and shows how easy the capitalists accumulate figurative wealth, and convince the workers it is the genuine article.

It is generally understood that it is impossible for a man to lift himself over a fence by his bootstraps. The freak who comes along with weird ideas of some mechanical contrivance that of its own volition will run perpetually, thus upsetting all old and long established facts in regard to the law of gravitation and the generation of power, is usually laughed at for his simplicity and his pains. A great number of people are quite firmly convinced that something cannot be gotten for nothing except somebody suffers a corresponding loss. But all of these fixed convictions and facts are completely upset once we enter the realm of trade, commerce, finance and wealth accumulation. Herein we find that something can be gotten for nothing and without anybody suffering any loss whatsoever; a nation can lift itself over a financial fence by its financial bootstraps (credit) and oftener it does so the wealthier it becomes, and that too without there being any more wealth in existence than there was before, and service and other things can be paid for although it can be clearly shown that there is nothing and can be nothing either in the heavens or the earth wherewith to make such payment.

The Marxian Theory

“The wealth of the world appears to us as an accumulation of commodities,” says Marx. Now it so happens that all of these commodities are brought into existence solely by the labor of human beings. There is nothing else that enters into them. If they who produce them are to be separated from them, it must be done without any payment being made in return, for the very manifest fact that there is nothing outside of these commodities themselves that possess any exchange value. And surely nothing can be utilized for the purpose of making payment unless it does possess exchange value equally great in volume to the things or service for which payment is to be made. As labor produces all exchange value and that value is appropriated by the master class, which, by the way, never produces anything but trouble for others, it stands to reason that such appropriation can only be effected by force, inasmuch as there is no other way to bring it about. And that is the way it has always been done in the past. It is also the way it is done now.

Whatever the slaves get in the way of food, clothing, shelter and other creature comforts they do not get as payment for what they have done, any more than a horse or ox gets paid for what they do when their owner and master measures out to them the oats and hay requisite to their continued existence. The wages of slaves cannot be termed payment for anything. If slaves could work without anything to eat, drink, or wear they would undoubtedly be compelled to do so and there is every reason to believe that they would be fully as zealous in hanging to their jobs as they are at present, for above everything else the real slave is happy only when working. But as they cannot continue to work unless they are fed it becomes necessary for the masters to dole out to them such sustenance as may be actually needed to keep them in working condition. And that is all there is to wages, even at the best.

Money—The Sacred Ikon

The master does not measure out grub to his human slave as he measures out oats to his horse or bones to his dog. He gives the slave money instead. Money is merely a promise to pay. As payment is impossible, for the reason already set forth, the only thing the slave can do with the promise is to swap it off with somebody who will give him a bite to eat or some other useful thing in exchange for it. This thing called money, therefore, really becomes merely an order against the stock of commodities that have already been produced and not yet consumed, or such as may be produced in the future.

As this money passes from the hands of the slave who has received it from his master into the hands of some merchant or holder of some of the swag created by workers and stolen from them by their rulers and masters, the slave proceeds to consume that which he gets and the promise (money) continues upon its merry way as a thing endowed with immortality; a promise to pay that cannot be redeemed because there is nothing with which to effect that redemption. It remains as a perpetual charge against the future; a means of shifting the plunder taken from slaves from hand to hand in the glorious process of satisfying the hunger and feeding fat the ambition of the ruling class and its precious array of parasitical pimps, sycophants, boosters, sleuths, cut-throats and hangers-on.

As all that the slaves bring forth by their labor is consumed as rapidly as it is produced, there can be no lasting accumulation of wealth in the form of commodities. The food production of each year is consumed during the succeeding twelve months. The same is true of all other thing brought forth, even the most durable lasting but a comparatively short time. Enormous quantities of certain products, especially in times of most glorious war, are instantaneously consumed as soon as brought forth, for the delectable purpose of mutilating the landscape and daubing and smearing it with the blood and guts of human chattels that an all-wise providence evidently created for that specific purpose.

Accumulated Wealth—The Plunder of the Past

But though there is neither an accumulation of wealth in the form of commodities, or an accumulation in the form of slaves, for, as already stated, both of these forms of wealth are eaten up, worn out, or shot to oblivion as the case may be, there is a constant accumulation of what is termed money. But as money is nothing but a promise that cannot be kept, an order that cannot be redeemed, a credit that cannot be liquidated, a debt that cannot be paid, it may be readily seen that its accumulation is solely an accumulation of figures representing an impossibility. Stripped of all camouflage, these figures represent only the amount of the plunder taken from slaves during the past and placed to the credit of the thieves who took it.

The amount held by any given person or concern merely indicates the magnitude of the debt, which the future owes to such person or concern and cannot pay, for wealth that has been stolen from the slaves of the past by their brutal and thieving rulers and masters. All investments, bonds, stocks, deeds, mortgages, debentures, bank accounts, currency and other paper evidences of so-called wealth belong in the same category. The sum total of all this camouflage constitutes all the records the world has of the plunder that has accrued to the ruling and robbing class since that precious family of rogues founded their empire upon earth by placing the shackles upon the limbs of slaves. It now runs up into the hundreds of billions of dollars, which of course is but a mere bagatelle in comparison to what the actual total should be. But these few hundreds of billions are all the figures the world now has. The balance, a few hundred trillions more or less, no doubt, has been lost through carelessness or bankruptcy. And the most interesting part of this whole business is that it is only by repudiation that this precious debt can be gotten rid of.

Were it not for the repudiation of the past—bankruptcy is repudiation, don’t forget that—the world’s wealth would no doubt now be at least as many trillions as the present billions of which our rulers so loudly and patriotically boast. And these impossible figures, representing but a part of that which has been stolen from slaves and consumed during the past constitute all there is to the world’s wealth or capital, as it is commonly termed. And around this absurd fiction is daily being woven the most grotesque fancies and weird hallucinations that have ever thrust their roots deep down into the empty noodles of masters and the semi-empty stomachs of their work-infatuated slaves. This getting rich by adding up figures is quite a simple matter, and eminently quite a simple matter, and eminently satisfying withal. Figurative wealth is far easier to accumulate than the real article. It is also easier to get rid of. A wet sponge will do the job.