Upton Sinclair

“ I think of the millionaire youth I know, drinking himself to death; and the gay young society matron with a venereal disease in her blood and terror in her heart—I feel like calling upon the useful workers of America to organize and save the rich from the misery of being out of work!
What we want, Judd, is a world with neither rich nor poor, but with people who live by producing, and not by taking what others have produced. We want to make that sort of world, and we call to our aid all men and women who are willing to work for it. ”

“ The capitalists have created the magic lamp for us—this wonderful new Federal Reserve System; all we have to do is to turn out the present board of bankers’ bankers, and put in a new board of workers’ bankers, and create a hundred billion dollars of new money, and pay for the industries, and there you are! Not a court in the land can stop us, and if any capitalist tries to, he is a revolutionist, and we have criminal syndicalism laws for him!
This is “inflation,” we are told; and inflation raises the cost of goods, and so brings no benefit to the worker. ”

“ I told you that riches and poverty are not caused by the Will of God, nor yet by any implacable Economic Law, but purely and simply by the actions of men, driven by the basest of all human impulses, which is greed. And here you see, Judd, exactly what these actions are. Every time an ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench issues an injunction which smashes a strike, he is reducing the average real wages of the workers of America; he is taking away a little more from the poor, and handing it to the rich—and that is the job for which the rich set him up in office, and bought him his black silk robe! ”

“ All those billions of fraudulent dollars exist today in Wall Street, in the form of perfectly sound and respectable securities, standing on a par with all other vested property rights. You, and the rest of our toiling masses, continue to pay dividends and interest upon them; as the system stands, and so long as it stands, you must pay tribute to all that mass of stolen wealth, before ever you can have one penny in your own pocket, one morsel of food in your own mouth! ”

“ There are forty-two million Americans doing much the same thing, and the total of what they produce is a thumping pile of wealth. And who is to get it, Judd? How shall it be divided? In the great cities, in many-storied office buildings, sit white-handed gentlemen at flat-topped mahogany desks, and these gentlemen have no idea of ever crawling around in the muck, or sweating in the heat, or freezing their fingers in the cold, or soiling their white collars and breaking the crease in their trousers—no, Judd, they have not an idea of it! ”

“ No longer do we keep our workers on starvation wages, and ship all our surplus products abroad, to be consumed by Frenchmen and Italians and Turks and Chinamen and Hindoos, in return for paper promises to pay money to our capitalists! No longer do we have to go to war, to seize foreign markets from other capitalists! The workers now own the factories, and also they own the working capital, and they produce goods for use, and if we have foreign trade it is because we want things from abroad, and not because we have to get rid of our surplus product under penalty of starving. ”

“ The history of our country is a record of incessant struggles on the part of the poor, continually repressed and brought to naught by the rich. The most powerful weapon in this conflict has been, of course, the government; the rich have had it, and the poor have been trying to take it away from them, and have failed.
In their battle the rich have had four lines of defense. First, the elections; they put up the money, and subsidize a political party, and carry on a campaign of falsehood and abuse, and buy votes and stuff ballot-boxes, and so defeat the poor at the polls. ”

“ So the crisis comes on like a cyclone; and we shall find ourselves with our factories idle and millions of people starving, and no idea of the next step to take. There will be no time to teach the masses, no machinery for reaching them; but the desperate workers in our cities will hear the voice of the Communist soap-boxer, saying, “Take the factories, and produce goods for yourselves and your fellows.” The soap-boxer will ask: “Do you have to starve, because the majority has not voted you food?” He will ask: “Does a man have to remain a slave because the majority has not voted him free?” ”

“ Hundreds of thousands of people do not have to do useful labor in our society; they draw off the profits of other people’s labor, and the good things of life flow to them in a stream so great as sometimes to overwhelm them. And this flow is guaranteed them for life, and to their descendants to the end of time. All our political teachings, all our economic calculations, are based upon the idea that this state of affairs is permanent; the right of property to draw interest, dividends and profits is inviolable. ”

“ For twelve or thirteen years I had been expecting to see Socialism brought about by some sort of tax on wealth; but you made me realize how passionately every human creature hates taxes. Could one not find some easier way? I realized that all men like money, the more the merrier; and then came the war, and I saw our government making money by the billions, just by acts of Congress and the waving of a presidential pen. Then came the panic, and I saw our wonderful Federal Reserve System making more billions for the use of the big bankers and the trusts ”

“ I see now, Judd, that we shall forget taxes altogether, and take a leaf out of Wall Street’s new book; we shall make as many billions of new money as the emergency requires, and instead of having Wall Street put that new money off on us, we shall put it off on Wall Street!
I know some young workers in our country who call themselves social revolutionists, and are impatient when they hear me talk about compensation for the capitalists. These young people feel ugly towards the capitalists, and for this I do not blame them, seeing how they have been treated. ”

“ At present a great deal of labor-banking turns out to be shadow—there is no real control by labor, and all that happens is, some former labor officials become successful bankers. But that also will be remedied—the unions will have banks which they actually control, and whose funds they use for their own enterprises. What could be more pitiful than the present situation—the workers putting their billions of savings into capitalist banks, to be shipped on to Wall Street and there used for robbing labor, and financing anti-labor newspapers—and even breaking labor strikes! ”

“ It is strange to see a man like yourself, rather suspicious of unions, because of all the poison you absorb from the capitalist press—and yet at the same time profiting every working hour of your life from the sacrifices made by union men! Also it is strange to see employers who fight the unions, and denounce them, and boast of the contentment of their non-union workers—and make that contentment by paying the union scale, which otherwise neither the employer nor the men would ever have dreamed of! ”

“ The people who understand an industry are those who work in it; and the way to combine democracy with efficiency is to make each industry a self-governing unit, and confine the part of government to supervision, and the regulation of prices. Let us have an industrial constitution and an industrial parliament, and let every man become a citizen of industry, with a voice in the control, and equal rights with all other citizens. ”

“ That also is easy to answer: it has made them a football to be kicked about by rival greedy interests; it has made our government a fat oyster to be opened and eaten at the banquets of trust magnates. The lobbyists of the big manufacturing interests have swarmed to Washington with their pockets full of bribes, and our congressmen and senators have been hogs at a swill-trough. Our political conventions have been bargain-counters, where candidates have met in secret hotel-rooms with the agents of the trusts, and have sold their honor and the welfare of the people. ”

“ It is all at the service of the big banker-speculators, to be used in manipulating markets, [Pg 12] driving prices up and down, so that the insiders can buy while securities are low and sell while they are high. Here is concentrated the collective greed of all America, and men become frenzied with visions of sudden gain; they sell the goods they hope to have, and buy with the profits they expect to make, and the fires of avarice are fanned white hot, until the whole thing bursts like a crucible in a steel mill. ”

“ Some men put their savings, earned by honest labor, into a company, and buy machinery, and manufacture goods, and sell them at a competitive price, and so of course the profits belong to them, and it all is fair and square, and a beautiful system, under which the public gets an abundant supply of cheap goods. Such a pretty picture these capitalists manufacturers of school text-books prepare—with money they get from Wall Street, and which they parcel out, in the form of commissions to school boards and school superintendents! ”

“ But, say the newspapers and campaign orators of the “Grand Old Party,” it is the workingman as well as his boss who is “protected”; if it were not for the tariff, our wage scales would be dragged down to the levels of Europe; the labor-sweating foreigner would “dump” his goods on us! Well, Judd, for the workingman to try to improve his condition by a tariff, is as if a man should make himself rich by taking money out of his right-hand pocket and putting it into his left-hand pocket. If you look only at the left side of this man, you will think he is enjoying “prosperity” ”

“ Indeed, Judd, it is not too much to say that we want to make over our moral and mental life, so that we cease to admire the ideals of our exploiters—waste and the display of waste, plundering and the power to plunder. We want to teach ourselves and our children to admire useful labor, and social vision, and loyalty to the cause of those who produce. ”

“ First among the “actions of men” which have made poverty in America, I list our banking system: that is to say, the way men have behaved and are behaving with regard to money. This banking system has been constructed, just as artificially as a house is constructed, and its plan can be summed up in one phrase: to enable those who already have money to get as much more as possible. Many things about the system may seem complicated, but if you understand that basic idea, you will never be fooled.
One man raises grain, and another saws lumber. ”

“ But the same thing happens that we saw two hundred years ago with the French kings—the new generations become enervated and worthless, and the wealth of the community flows into the lap of idlers and parasites, who squander it in dissipation and display; the poor become discontented and rebellious, and the rumble of the approaching deluge is heard.
Our capitalist newspapers never get tired of harping upon the failures of government ownership, the waste and the graft. Private ownership is the way to efficiency! ”

“ If we try to kick the bosses out, and seize the factories, and run them by workers’ councils—obviously, that may mean civil war. The bosses have the factories, and they have machine-guns and airplanes and poison gas—a system for wiping out the lives of thousands of workers, if necessary. One of the embarrassments of physical force revolution is that it may fail, and the workers, instead of getting the factories, may get castor oil and Fascist clubs. There is a big group of our masters who think that is what the workers need, and would take delight in administering it. ”

“ Such things are the meaning of a strike to workingmen; and suddenly a grim personage in a black silk robe lifts a club and smashes these hopes over the head! As I write, some clothing workers of New York are on strike, and a judge has issued an injunction, forbidding them, not merely to picket the shops of their boss, but to go within ten blocks of the place! In the West Virginia coal fields, they are now forbidding mass-meetings, forbidding the use of money in unionizing the mines, and even the use of tent-colonies for the families of miners who have been ejected from company houses! ”

“ At the present time the policies of American labor both political and industrial, are a generation out of date; our workingmen are like the Moros in the Philippines, fighting machine-guns with bows and arrows. ”