RUSSIA AS PROOF

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22730, 16 November 1935, Page 21

RUSSIA AS PROOF

NEED OF CAPITALISM H. L. MENCKEN'S ARGUMENT LESSON FROM SOVIETS On one thing American Reds agree: capitalism is down with a multitude of boils and will presently be ready for the coroner, writes H. L. Mencken in the Reader's Digest. Soon, they would have us believe, the immoral spectacle of any man putting another man to work for him will vanish as too horrible to be borne, and the iniquity known as profits will cease. It all sounds lofty and noble, but it is nonsense all the same. Capitalism is not only not dying in the world; it is perhaps more solidly established than it has ever been for 100 years, and nowhere more solidly than in Russia. What was the chief thing that all Socialists complained of before Socialism got its big chance over there? It was the fact that the workman, under capitalism, had lost control of "the means of production," his tools. So long as the work of the world was done in small units and by simple man power, the workman's tools were his own property. He was a free agent, knuckling to no boss. But when machinery came in all this changed. It brought in complex tools of large size and heavy cost. The merchants of the time, enterprising men with ready money, supplied the funds ■needed to buy the new machinery. Thus capitalism was born. The capitalist, then as now, took various risks. Above all, he had to gamble on the chance that someone would invent better machines and so make his plant useless. And when times were good he demanded enough compensation to cover, if possiblehis losses when times were bad. NOT PERFECT. That this system was, and is, far from perfect no one denies. A capitalist who ia hoggish still has plenty of chances to oppress his workmen. But his powers now have well-defined bounds, and for years past those bounds have been steadily narrowing. Workmen have learned to organise for their own protection, and laws have been passed to aid them. Factories are safer and more healthful, and profits have been taxed heavily. There has resulted an enormous improvement in the condition of the workman. Communists and other frauds deny it, but it is a plain fact that he lives better than ever before, with more security and leisure. Even allowing for his chief remaining affliction, unemployment, he etill goes through life more pleasantly than his predecessors. He eats better food, lives in a better house, wears better clothes; his children are better educated, and when he is sick he is better cared for. All of ue share in this vast improvement, deriving direct and valuable advantage from the fact that such things as railroads exist, and great textile mills, large-scale farms, steam printing presses, cheap automobiles, ready-made clothes, electric and gas plants, canned foods, and mass entertainment —all of them the offspring of the viper of capitalism, and impossible to imagine without it.

Impossible to imagine? Yes, even in Russia. The Bolshevists, when they seized that country, were pledged to " wipe out capitalism and restore to the workers complete control of the means of production." Yet the Russian workman to-day is the slave of a kind of capitalism so grasping that it would not be tolerated anywhere else. It not only owns his tools; it also owns the miserable quarters in which he lives, the meagre stores from which he must get his food and clothing, and the schools in which his children are taught. He must take whatever job, and whatever wages, it deigns to offer him. The moment he resists its mandates he becomes a slave in law as well as in fact, and may be put to forced labour without any compensation whatever. The Russian worker barely gets enough to eat. All the rest of the product of his labour goes into capital. It is squeezed from him and put into grandiose power plants, enormous factories, and other such overgrown enterprises, or amassed in cash for the purchase of foreign supplies. The man whose labour earns it has no more to do with its management than a garage attendant has to do with the running of the Standard Oil Company. It is controlled absolutely by the politician-capitalists who now own and operate the Russian Government. The Bolshevists have made one change only in the capitalistic system, and that is to bar out all the ordinary capitalists and gather the whole capital of the country into their own hands. The people of the United States would resist such a change stoutly because they know that there are evils much worse than private capital. We have still a very long way to go before capitalism is really tamed, but everyone not an idiot must know that we have made some progress since the skullduggeries of Jay Gould, which went unchallenged in 1875, or the devices that seemed clever to Rockefeller in 1885. Our politicians have performed a useful function in watching the capitalists and keeping them within bounds. Capital is uneasy while the politicians are on the rampage. Contrariwise, capital is one of the chief bulwarks of the people against the frauds of politicians. Over and over again in American listory its influence has been successfully thrown against some demagogue v/h.3 would have ruined the country if he had got into office. So long as the capitalists' and the politicians remain at odds, watching each other and sounding alarms, there is some chance for the rest of us to come by our own. But when one outfi takes over all the powers and becomes omnipotent, as has happened in Russia, there can be only woe for everyone else. Not only have the Russians lost all their property: they have also lost all their liberties. Not or.ly are tLev forbidden to have anything that their bosses do not choose to give them; they are also forbidden to say anything, or even think anything, that their bosses do not want to hear. INEVITABLE RESULT. This is the inevitable result of Bolshevism at all times and everywhere, by whatever name it may be called. As soon as the natural and ages-old opposition between accumulated capital and political power breaks down, and one side ensulfs the other, all the rights and liberties of the people are destroyed. It makes no difference which side wins. If the politicians win we have the kind of slave State that now offends the world in Russia. And if, helped by the fear of Bolshevism, the capitalists win, then we have the kind of slave State that now offends the world in Italy and Germany. Both abolish free speech, a free press, and the right of free assemblage the instant they get into power. Both reduce the citizen to a subject and the subject, to a serf.

Without the accumulation of capital this country would have remained a wilderness. We owe to it not only our material resources, but also our spiritual possessions—schools and univerities/ libraries, orchestras, magazines, and newspapers, parks and playgrounds. We have, of course, wasted much of our accumulated capital. A part of it has been dissipated in silly ostentation by individuals who have, too much of it,

and a much larger part has been made off with by politicians. But when all is said, the fact remains that the library of Congress is a really noble monument to the industry and thrift of the American people, and that the Johns Hopkins Medical School is another, and the Philadelphia Orchestra a third, and the Bureau of Standards a fourth, and so on. I might add a long list of privatelycontrolled institutions. Can any sensible man fail to see that the Pennsylvania railroad, for example, is immensely more than a mere snap for its stockholders —that its public usefulness far transcends its private value? Or the Bell telephone system? Or the New York Times? Or the great chain of grocery, drug, shoe and tobacco stores? "A BURLESQUE." Every Red has something to say against these typically American enterprises, but he forgets that every one of them is imitated in Russia—imitated incompletely to be sure, but still with unconcealed envy. Russia, in truth, becomes a sort of inflated burlesque of the United States, with all of the evils of capitalism and none of the solid benefits. Its trains are filthy and never on time, its telephones do no work, its newspapers contain no news, its rolling mills and automobile works pay starvation wages and are always breaking down. There you have all the proof that is needed of the necessity of capitalism in the modern world. And there you have equal proof that private capitalism, whatever its defects, is enormously more competent than the capitalism of professional politicians. Nine-tenths of the burbling against capitalism which now goes on in the United States is done by mountebanks who. dream of getting on top by changing the rules. That is all that you will find in the doctrine that capitalism will presently be ready for the coroner.