On Capitalism 1919

Kingsley on Capitalism: “The Old Man” Did Not Mince Matters Last Sunday

A bigger audience and lustier singing featured [at] the Columbia meeting on Sunday evening, when E. T. Kingsley once more took the situation in hand, being welcomed with warm applause on his appearance. Chas. Lestor made a live-wire chairman, being also greeted with applause; he explained that the Grand Old Man was going east to awaken the comrades there to a realization of the catastrophe impending—“what is likely to happen and the steps they are to take.”

Comrade Kingsley remarked that no great credit was to be given to any individual for having interpreted the revolution to his fellows; that was done, not by individuals, but by the development of the institutions pertaining to how man gets his living. For 10,000 years, these had been based on human slavery; that was no less true today than in the times of chattel-slavery or serfdom. The workers were as much enslaved now as then, and more ruthlessly and completely exploited.

The lever by which this had been brought about was the steam-engine, that “monster” which was invented about 150 years ago, with the whole series of tools and machinery accompanying. Hand-production had been necessarily laborious and slow, especially with regard to non-essential products; but as to the necessities of life, it had never been a very serious matter when the workers were not enslaved and their product seized by others. It was when the rulers discovered how to harness the powers of nature, that there came the possibilities of luxury beyond the wildest dreams of olden times.

The supreme culmination of all ruling-class effort had come in the last four years. Collapse was now at hand; and the ruling class was just as powerless to stem the tide as were the workers—just as much at sea as the most unlettered working man. There has been intense industrial activity, resulting in immense profits and accumulation of capital; then came the armistice, involving the break-down of the whole business. It was found impossible to put back into productive industry the men who had been put to slaughter; it seemed beyond their power to make the transition back from war to peace.

The burden of producing essential things had been continually sloughed on to a decreasing proportion of the population; hence the increase of town population. Thus civilization became top-heavy with a vast army of non-essential producers; and the whole establishment broke down. Machinery was used to produce more machinery. Lack of markets for the product resulted in unemployment and turmoil, and so there were all kinds of begging schemes to keep the thing going; since the war was over, these things were more and more in evidence. (Hear, hear.). More men were unemployed now than when the war broke out, and never were wages so low as at the present time.

It was, however, only by consent of the working-class that such an abominable system was allowed to exist for one moment. There was no reason on earth why a master should treat a slave otherwise than as a slave—“with the lash on his back if he doesn’t do what he is told, and do it well.” (Applause.) As long as slaves were bargaining with their masters, they were still slaves; and the masters were still masters. “I don’t care whether he bargains alone or bargains by the million; the circumstances and conditions of the market determined the price of every commodity.” Labor history for centuries past showed that no power on earth could upset the unwritten laws of the market with regard to exchange.

With “collective bargaining” it was just the same; there was no difference in the average wage. “So long as one man has to work for another, he can’t get more than a living—and no extraordinarily fat living at that.” No living thing worked unless it was enslaved. It was not work to get a living; it was a life of joy, of pleasure, of everything that was desirable. But just as soon as men were enslaved, “it became necessary to invent some word to express their misery and their agony—and that damned word was W-O-R-K.” (Laughter and applause.)

The speaker proceeded to repudiate the belief that machinery lessens the toil of producing the necessities of life, and argued that it could only be utilized in exploitation and in production for a market; and he declared that “a market can’t exist till slavery first exists.” Transportation never aided in producing a morsel of food; its function was to take the product away from the producer and secrete it in the market. It was all of a piece with the mechanism of war and of cities. “It is the presence of slaves that makes this combination of great cities that are sapping the health of the country districts.” The city producer was as much a parasite as his master—producing stuff to keep the mechanism going, and not the necessities of life for himself or anybody else. The majority of the machinery would be of “absolutely no use whatever to the slave class, the moment that slave class becomes free.”

Comrade Kingsley confessed to losing all patience with working men asking their masters for privileges. “When I find a great mass of workers asking a handful of masters for favors, I get right down on my marrow-bones and pray they won’t get ’em.” (Loud laughter.) What was worth having was worth taking. Just as long as they allowed the ruling-class to make the laws to govern them, they’de [sic] get it where the chickens got the axe. In spite of the O. B. U., collective bargaining, etc., “the other fellow still owns the shop, the factory, the mill, and the mine—and beyond all that, he owns you.” With a surplus of labor, the price of the worker was broken, in spite of his rules, “even if he swears on a stack of bibles nine miles high.”

The speaker concluded with a warning as to the wide-spread destruction that threatened the workers in the cities in case of anything like a sudden collapse of the system. Cut off from the country districts with their food supply, they would die by countless thousands. The workers of the city and country had got to act together; then they could conquer this whole western continent and undo that which the ruling-class had been fastening on them for 10,000 years. To wipe out the wage system, and all that it implied, must be the ultimate object of the revolutionary working-class; and so to become a class of free men and free women.