The enduring conflict: industrial autocracy against political democracy

“ Sirs:—I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you and your class and its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog. ”

“ Believe me, lords, my tender years can tell
Civil dissension is a viperous worm
That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth. ”

“ We are calling upon their owners, as mankind called upon kings in their day, to be good and kind, wise and sweet, and we are calling in vain. We are asking them not to be what we have made them to be. We put power into their hands and ask them not to use it as power. If this power is a trust for the people, the people betrayed it when they made private estates out of it for individuals. If the spirit of power is to change, institutions must change as much. Liberty recast the old forms of government into the Republic, and it must remould our institutions of wealth into the Commonwealth. ”

“ So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you. Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned ere it is too late.
God and the Strong Ones By Margaret Widdemer
(Contemporary American poet)
“We have made them fools and weak!” ”

“ They were ill-paid and ill-treated, badly housed, worked for long hours at peril of life and limb; they lived in a community absolutely dominated by their masters; there was no other industry or source of wealth, and the politicians and the courts, the newspapers and the churches—everything was owned by “Copper.” It is the old, sickening story of the overthrow 359of American institutions, the subjection of political democracy to industrial autocracy. ”

“ And yet,—and yet is it so easy to give up the dream of democracy? Must industry rule men or may men rule even industry? And unless men rule industry, can they ever hope really to make laws or educate children or create beauty?
That the problem of the democratization of industry is tremendous, let no man deny. We must spread that sympathy and intelligence which tolerates the widest individual freedom despite the necessary public control; we must learn to select for public office ability rather than mere affability. ”

“ Industry is still an autocracy, as politics was in the days before the supremacy of Parliament. Power still descends from above instead of springing from below. It is a power limited no doubt by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the government of England used to be before the transference of sovereignty from the monarch to the representatives of his subjects. ”

“ The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The [256] children will be taught to curse you. The infant being molded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they—it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order. You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy in industry. There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. ”

“ That is the reason, and because the strong have crushed the weak, the strong dominate the industry and the economic life of this country. No man can deny that the lines of endeavor have more and more narrowed and stiffened; no man who knows anything about the development of industry in this country can have failed to observe that the larger kinds of credit are more and more difficult to obtain, unless you obtain them upon the terms of uniting your efforts with those who already control the industries of the country ”

“ American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. ”

“ In industry, monarchy and the aristocracy rule, and there are those who, calling themselves democratic, believe that democracy can never enter here. Industry, they maintain, is a matter of technical knowledge and ability, and, therefore, is the eternal heritage of the few. They point to the failure of attempts at democratic control in industry, just as we used to point to Spanish-American governments, and they expose, not simply the failures of Russian Soviets,—they fly to arms to prevent that greatest experiment in industrial democracy which the world has yet seen. ”

“ So shall we realize our democracy. It has never been anything more than the skeleton of a democracy; so long as industry is feudalistic it cannot be. But when the common man is emancipated and called into partnership by the captain of industry, we shall have a real democracy. No superhuman vision is needed to discern the fact that the confusions and corruptions of our political democracy are largely due to the disorganizing influence of this industrial feudalism, in constant contact with it, and continually thrusting its alien conceptions and ideals into the political arena. ”

“ It is time to bring back the government to its true character as an agency for the people. It is time to declare that offices, created for the people, are public trusts, not private spoils. It is time to bring each and every department within its true original limits. It is time to assent, on one hand, to the just powers of Congress, in their full extent, and to resist, on the other, the progress and rapid growth of executive authority. ”

“ They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people. ”

“ The "democracy gap" in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote or listlessly vote for the "least-worst" every four years and then wonder why after another cycle the "least-worst" gets worse. It is time to redress fundamentally these imbalances of power. We need a deep initiatory democracy in the embrace of its citizens, a usable brace of democratic tools that brings the best out of people, highlights the humane ideas and practical ways to raise and meet our expectations and resolve our society's deficiencies and injustices. ”

“ Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters. ”

“ The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct, it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life. ”

“ What they choose to "fact check" and what they choose to ignore or even promote is nothing more than a political activism group or political activism and it's inappropriate.
You look at what's happening, you look at where they're going, where they're coming from, I think you all see it yourselves. This censorship and bias is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation. Social media companies have vastly more power and more reach than any phone company in the United States. ”

“ In the United States, my administration has made clear to social media companies that we will uphold the right of free speech. A free society cannot allow social media giants to silence the voices of the people, and a free people must never, ever be enlisted in the cause of silencing, coercing, canceling, or blacklisting their own neighbors.
As we defend American values, we affirm the right of all people to live in dignity. ”

“ Currently, social media giants, like Twitter, receive an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they're a neutral platform — which they're not — not an editor with a viewpoint. My executive order calls for new regulations, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to make it that social media companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield. ”

“ Wrest once the law to your authority. ”

“ As the industrial revolution takes place, as the labor process takes on the co-operative form, as the tool of production becomes social, the idea of social ownership is suggested, and so the idea that things that are used collectively should be owned collectively, presents itself with irresistible force to the people of the twentieth century. So there is a struggle for industrial democracy. ”

“ As the bourgeoisie complained against the government being run by and for the nobles, so the proletariat complains against the government and industry being run by and for the bourgeoisie; and so, following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the proletariat will possess itself of the government, apply democracy to industry, abolish wages, which are merely legalized robbery, and run the business of the country in its own interest. ”

“ And now again we face such a crisis; only this time it is in the world of industry that we have to abolish hereditary rule, and to build an industrial commonwealth in which the equal rights of all men are recognized by law. Such is the task before us; go to it with joy and certainty, playing your part in the making of the new world, in which there shall be neither slavery nor poverty, in which the natural sources of wealth belong to all men alike, and no one lives in idleness upon the labor of his fellows. ”

“ Repeal the laws which grant the Privileges that lead to Monopoly; equalize the taxes; make the rich support the government in proportion to their wealth; restore public utilities to the public; put the power of self-government back into the hands of the people by Direct Legislation; restore our Constitutional system of finance; pay off the National debt and wipe out the National banking system; quit giving public money to pet banks for private benefit; remove all taxes from the necessaries of life; establish postal savings banks; return to us the God-given right to freedom of trade. ”

“ The rule of kings is passing away, but the autocracy of money and monopoly 282is seated on the throne and swaying a more imperious scepter.
But the people have it in their power to overthrow their oppressors. In this country, at least, we have the ballot. The duty of the hour is to study political economy, so that this weapon may be wielded intelligently and effectively. “Education” must be our watchword. It is only by education that we may hope to gain the three great essentials for perfect liberty and equality: direct legislation—direct money—direct taxation. ”

“ The danger of the hour, as it appears to me, is that our captains of industry will array against themselves the gathering might of resistless democracy and be trampled in the dust. It would be far better for them, and for the common man, and for all the rest of us, if they would keep the leadership of industry. Leadership they can have, if they have sense to claim it and wit to exercise it—leadership, but not lordship. Industrial democracy wants leaders, but not autocrats ”

“ The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support. ”

“ The old vicious cycle of empires threatened to repeat itself, the old story of the many led by the few. Always it had come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob. Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy. And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned. And there was autocracy again, and again the vicious circle. ”

“ Democracy is an expedient perhaps the only practicable expedient for pre- venting the concentration in any single individual or in any single class of what inevitably becomes, when so concentrated, a terrible engine of oppression. The autocratic emperor, served by a trained bureaucracy, seems to the Anglo-Saxon a perilously near approach to such a concentration. If democracy meant, as early observers imagined, a similar concentration of Know- ledge and Power in the hands of the numerical majority for the time being, it might easily become as injurious a tyranny as any autocracy. ”