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Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 21, 1919
Can the Capitalists Run the World without Ruin, Waste, and War?
From the New York Rebel Worker of April 15, 1919:
CAN THE CAPITALISTS RUN THE WORLD?
The March [April] Liberator wants to know, “Can the workers run the world?” This question tickles our risibilities and causes us to submit to an attack of the merry ha ha! It unconsciously re-echoes the capitalists’ claim that they run the world and that they are the only ones that can run the world. For a radical socialist magazine to re-echo capitalist misstatements is bad Marxian-ism-the sin of sins against the holy of holies. And then the question is preposterous in the light of contemporaneous events. What we behold, if our eye sight is not falling us, is not a world run by capitalists, but a world that is running the capitalists—running them out of existence, p. d. q. (By the way, we suggest that Art Young draw a cartoon for his new satirical weekly, “Good morning,” showing the capitalists “running” the world according to modern history.)
Then look at the way the capitalists run the world when the world is not running them. H. L. Gantt, one of New York’s foremost production engineers, says the present system is only 15 per cent efficient. There’s some running for you-running to waste-85 per cent. Will the Liberator please repeat its question again? We enjoy anything that suggests a collosal joke, such as the capitalists’ assumption that they are the efficient world runners par excellence. Ask Gantt; he knows.
Now, for a change, let us take seriously this question of running the world. Let us state frankly that if the workers ever run the world the way the capitalists are running it, we’ll start a bloodly counter-revolution against them! And we’ll inflict an antiproltetarian mismanagement dictatorship on them; by God, so we will. We want the world to be run, not ruined or wasted.
The capitalists do anything but run the world. They either bring it to a dead stop or they develop conditions that throw the world into a state somewhat akin to a volcanic eruption. They have, in this heavenly society of theirs, stagnations, crisis, struggles for commercial supremacy and world domination, all climaxed by great wars. Its more like the catniption fits than running, in the sense of orderly, efficient management. We are tired of it. And if ever the workers try the same game on us, we’ll raise old Harry, damned if we wont!
Can the workers run the world?
Aw, shucks! Ask us something serious and sensible.
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[Emphasis added. Drawings added are by Art Young from The Liberator of April 1919.]
Details from Art Young’s “He Should Worry!”
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones Raising Hell, NYT p1, Oct 6, 1916
Speech to wives of street car strikers; NYT blames her for “RIOT”
https://www.nytimes.com/1916/10/06/archives/car-riot-started-by-mother-jones-women-relatives-of-strikers-heed.html
The Rebel Worker
“Organ of Revolutionary Unionism”
“Take the s Out of Resolution and Add v for Victory”
(New York, New York)
-Apr 15, 1919
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=fuMtAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA653
From:
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice by Louis F. Post and Others, Volumes 1-2
-Hearings before Committee on Rules, House of Representatives
-June 1920, Sixty-Sixth Congress
United States. Congress. House. Committee on Rules
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920
https://books.google.com/books?id=fuMtAAAAMAAJ
Exhibit No. 32: The Rebel Worker of Apr 15, 1919
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=fuMtAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA653
IMAGES
Art Young, Capitalism All right so far, Liberator p19, Apr 1919
Art Young, US Capitalism v Socialist Europe, Liberator p23, Apr 1919
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1919/04/v2n04-apr-1919-liberator.pdf
See also:
The Liberator Internet Archive
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/
The Liberator
(New York, New York)
-Apr 1919
Page 37: “Can the Workers Run the World” by James Peter Warbasse
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1919/04/v2n04-apr-1919-liberator.pdf
Tag: New York Rebel Worker
https://weneverforget.org/tag/new-york-rebel-worker/
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 23, 1919
New York, New York – Chinese Fellow Workers Arrested and Deported
Chinese IWW Hall Raided in New York City; FWs Organized by Gurley Flynn and Carlo Tresca
Cartooning Capitalism, web site
-Cover of first issue of Good Morning of May 8, 1919
-with links to Art Young cartoons, and biography. This is a great web site!
http://www.cartooningcapitalism.com/good-morning
Cartooning Capitalism
Radical cartooning and the making of American popular radicalism in the early twentieth century.
-a study by Michael Cohen
https://libcom.org/history/cartooning-capitalism-radical-cartooning-making-american-popular-radicalism-early-twenti
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I Hate the Capitalist System – Barbara Dane
Lyrics by Sarah Ogan Gunning
Dreadful Memories – Sarah Ogan Gunning