The Commonwealth. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1911-1914, 1914-02-19
THAT SCHOOL ELECTION ON
MARCH 7TH.

The student of the materialist con-
ception of history is forcibly struck by
this apparently contradictory situa-
/ tion: The way in which men get their
living and their relation to the system
of production and exchange deter
mines their general mental attitudes
and their ideas. In other words men
are moved primarily by their economic
these interests. And yet the working
class more than a billion strong in all
the lands of the earth do not act in
their own interest, but permit an ex-
plotting class to live luxuriously off
their labors.
Why this contradiction? The vari-
Gus sections of the master class al
most without exception comply with
their own interests In fact all history
is but a series of class struggles in
which consciously or unconsciously
class strove against class for control
of the food getting process. But now
in this climax of all the class struggles
in which the workers are definitely
concerned and in which the very lives
of their children are at stake we find
millions actually helping their own op-
pressors. By what magic is this
miracle performed?
Power of False Ideas.
Strange as it may seem this miracle
has a physical basis like all miracles.
1t so happens that the development of
technic and the application of science
to industry proceeds at much greater
pace than the average intellectual ad-
vancement of the race. We have thus
through rapid series of inventions
developed an industrial system vastly
different from what it was a century
ago or even forty years ago. But the
mental progress of the working class
and even of large sections of the rul-
ing class drags along behind. Insti-
tutions and ideas that sprang from
at every turn. They have wandered
far from their historic homes and have
projected themselves into an industrial
era where they are as foreign as a
grain of sand in the eye. Many of
these ideas are the ideas of peasants.
Others are the mental offspring our
nj 10
passed away as completely as have
the wooden p1ows and the other tools
of antiquity. A feudal church pro-
iects itself into a bourgeois world and
dying slowly in a foreign atmosphere
grasps frantically at the nourishment
offered it by the reactionary ruling
it now serves. Feudal laws, and even
Roman laws are also projected far
through the centuries. Primitive sup
erstitions crystalized into creeds per-
petuate themselves in the face of
scientific discoveries that knock their
every premise into cooked hat.
How the masters huIe.
1t is the business of all ruling
classes to perpetuate all the ideas and
institutions that do not interfere with
their interests. The more ancient
these ideas, as a rule, the safer they
are for the ruling eXploiters. Napol-
con saw this need for perpetuating a
creed in which he had no faith him
self Bismarck, Gladstone, and a
whole host of the prophets of capital
ism saw and have felt this need of be-
lieving one thing and teaching anoth-
er thing
No institution serves the masters
more faithfully in this work of perpet-
uating ideas born in a foreign indus
trial time than the schools The pow
er of ideas to project themselves
through time when once given the ini-
tiaI economic impulse is very marked;
but when assisted by artificial means
they may live and flourish for many
centuries. Standing i'm the pathway of
the hlldl lucas pL the llhlu6 pl G3Chb
these ideas serve nightly in deluding
the workers who are thus unable to
see their real economic interests be-
cause they live in a former intellectual
world that has passed with the econ
omic environment that created it,
To think the thoughts Of a pioneer
and work in a factory is so absurd
that one might laugh at it were it not
for the fact that the capitalist owner
of the factory gains by this mental
stanauon. In the first place perman-
en-; organization was impossible among
pioneers and when the workers are
affHsled with tdiz mental ativism they
make natural scaus and furnish
armies OF srikebreakers and thugs.
Farmer and CITY Worker
Farm conditions have changed so
tremendously duriHs the past twenty
.. rE-4 rE. -..fH. aa.4la ggarEfrs