Randolph Bourne

“ Then I admit that local groups of workers are able—either through lack of competition or clever politics or display of force—to exercise temporarily a decisive pull on the surplus and divert most of it to themselves. It is all a question of power. But as long, I tell him, as the employer is entrenched in property rights with the armed state behind him, the power will be his, and the class that does the diverting will not be labor. My friend, however, does not like these Nietzschean terms. He is sure that his workmen have just as much power to exploit him as he has of exploiting them. ”

“ I feel that his serenity is the normal mood of healthy activity, facing the modern world. Could he find anything but scorn for those of us who go around with the vestiges of what it is now priggish to call a "social consrience?" To him an industrial strike is like an exciting political contest or the recriminations between "two kid baseball teams." ”

“ That is why I can never make him understand what I mean by "exploitation." He thinks of it as something personally brutal. He does not see it inherent in a system, for which no one is "specifically to blame" only because all are equally guilty of short vision and flimsy analysis. ”

“ MY western friend who runs a prosperous stove-factory has been finding fault with my insistent use of the word " exploitation." My outlook on life is not sufficiently cheerful, and I am inclined to see malevolence where everything is, as they say at college, healthy, hearty and happy. ”

“ This is where we differ, and this is why thought will buzz in,an angry murky haze over eight-hour bills and individual contracts and collective bargaining as long as millions agree with him. He trusts rights, I trust power. He recognizes only individuals, I recognize classes. ”

“ When the state interferes with its militia and its injunctions, it is not flouting individuality, but merely doing its business of maintaining order and defending private property.
Our argument really hinges on whether to the workman all this excitement and deprivation and delusion is not part of the daily business of living. ”

“ What he will not admit is that any one is "specifically to blame." He does not imprison his men. They
come freely to him and ask for employment. He "gives them such compensation as makes the jobs attractive to them, in competition with all other jobs in city and country." He is fair and scrupulous. His company is in business to produce goods at such cost that people can afford to buy them. ”

“ He cannot make his plant a sanatorium— and when he says this the faintest note of irony steals into his robust voice—for his wage-earners. The stockholders have built a factory and not a philanthropic institution. ”

“ He hasn't been to Mesaba, but his friend the Duluth bread-dealer assures him that agitators were the cause of all the trouble. They always are. Trouble, to my friend, is a personal matter. He sees individuals, laboring as happily as they can expect to labor on this far from perfumed earth. ”

“ My friend admits that he has in his shop men who work in places that are noisy and dusty, in hot places, in rooms where paint is being sprayed. He has workmen who do their work at night the year round. ”