To the Editors: I read your magazine regularly and find it interesting, informative and also puzzling. What puzzles me is that you advocate socialism and at the same time oppose social reforms. I always thought that socialists saw nothing inconsistent in working for the establishment of socialism while at the same time participating in the fight for immediate demands. I believe democratic socialism can be achieved when and if a majority of the people become convinced that it is a desirable alternative to the present order. But I rather doubt that I shall see socialism in my time. In...
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Once again, in order to “adjust itself to the market,” American capitalism has found it necessary to throw workers out on the street. The latest government figures released (February 11) place the unemployed at 3,078,000, or 5% of the labor force. Even these figures are challenged as too low. Walter Reuther, president of the CIO, cites the Jobless at 3,750,000, while the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (Ind.) added exactly one million to the government figures above. What happened? Simply that the manufacturers produced beyond the effective demand of the consumers, and now the process becomes one of...
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The Western Socialist, July-August, 1953 The workers mill around in small groups. A buzz of excitement sweeps through the room and spreads rapidly. The huge steel-cutting machines lapse into silence. The conveyor lines halt as if struck dead by some unseen hand. Everything is at a standstill. A wildcat strike is being born. The workers await its delivery. A chief steward has been fired. Or perhaps the line has been speeded up, and the workers walk off in protest. Or perhaps. . . rumors. . . facts. . . confusion. . . unrest. . . A group of men...
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What should be the attitude of socialists toward trade unions? this not a mere academic question. There are well-informed Marxists who contend that unionism should regarded in much the same light as reforms, since unions, like reforms, cannot abolish the ills of capitalism. Regarding unionism, the following proposition was posed by a socialist recently “The evils which exist within present society. Be they war, crime, poverty. Or exploitation, have no solution other than the abolition of private property relationships. To fight anyone specific evil is not only a losing battle in itself, but a divergence from the real fight....
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America, we have often been told, is the great land of “Liberty”. They boast there of their “Liberty Statue” and their “Declaration of Independence”. There is scarcely a snob in the American States who will fail to trace his ancestry to the “liberty-loving” English, or omit to recall with pride the landing on Plymouth Rock of the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers from old England. Perhaps Col. Bob Ingersoll, the Freethinker, was not unwise when he suggested what a pity it was that Plymouth Rock hadn’t landed on the Pilgrim Fathers. The liberty known to the American workers is much the...
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The Job
From the Sept-Oct 1949 issue of the Western Socialist To a worker, a job is almost a matter of life and death, for he is dependent on it for his daily wants – food, clothes and a place to sleep. If he cannot find a job, or is without one for any length of time his situation become desperate and it has occasionally happened that protracted unemployment has led to suicide. The alternatives the worker has to wage labor are few, if any, because the means by which he lives and propagates his species are owned and controlled by...
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