TALKS WITH WORKERS.

Northern Advocate, 22 December 1919, Page 3

TALKS WITH WORKERS.

RUNNING A BUSINESS

THE DEAD PARTNER,

Th e fact that a firm has lasted for two centuries, in the same trade in the same city, shows that so far as it is concerned the three essential partners—Labour, Brain and Capital— must have worked together. For clearly, if one of these partners had left the firm the business would have come to an end. Of much that has recently occurred in Russia, ia country bountifully endowed by nature to be the fit home of a great and wealthy people, we known nothing > or next to nothing. Of one outstanding fact we are sure. Dire poverty and its awful companions—disease, terror, and death—stalk through the land. We know why. One of the partners is dead. Capital has been killed.

No man will ever go right in studying the social question unless he has clear and correct notions about (1) capital; (2) capitalists; and (3) the relation between them.

Take a big works, say a shipyard on the Clyde, belonging to a limited company. The hooter goes in the evening and all the men stream out to their homes. Finally the yard is left silent and still, with only the night watchman on duty. He walks about amongst the capital—the buildings, the slips, the machinery, the raw materials, the half-finished liner. These ar c the visible items of the company's capital, and they are generally the more important part of it. There are, of course, items the watchman could not see with his eyes—the company's credit, its bank balances, the book debts, the patent rights, and so on.' Capital means all these things.

The capitalists in this case are the persons whose names ar e inscribed in the share-register of the company. Some of them, no doubt, are very wealthy. Others may be quite »?jjoor. Some perhapSj have the whol e of their life's savings invested in the company. They have worked hard, and to them their capital means that in their old age they will get some of the fruits of industry that they have denied themselves in their prime.

Now, since capital is things and capitalists are persona, it looks at first sight as if it would be quite easy to "kill" the capitalists without affecting the capital. In Russia the killing has quite often been literal putting to death. No one in this country proposes that, at any rate not openly; but many people who claim to be "advanced" thinkers want to persuade out workers to put an end to capitalists. Live they certainly may; own capital they may not. And this is said to be a paying proposition from Labour's point of view. One partner being d*'ad, it is assumed that his share will remain to be divided between the others.

This theory ihas grave defects from higher points of view. Looking at it, however, m«i*'ly as economies, we see that it leaves out of account the allimportant truth that capital, the thing, only does its share in the work of producing by being used up. In the shipyard, you will see coal and steel excellent specimens of capital, being rapidly used up under your eyes, and these must be replaced daily or even hourly. The. that bricklayers ar.e at work pointing one of the buildings and that are repairing the railway line shows that the more substantial forms of capital are also used up, and want replacing..

On any given day, cither by Act of Parliament or by a sufficient use of machine-guns, it would be possible, to kill off th,e capitalists, and leave the capital as it then stood; but, unless a new set of capitalists were called into existence, there would b*> no capital Jeft as soon as tho existing stock was used up. There can be no industry without capital. So much is clear. There can be no capital without capitalists. If that also is not clear to any worker ) let him K>ok at what is happening in Kussia.