The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-03-10


 We model our daily lives, we plant our ambitions, we train our hopes, we direct our future along the lines ordered by the employing classes. Our thoughts are mimicry and ou, ideas mechanical We have little or no class originality. Our literature is borrowed literature, and our philosophy is stolen or adopted from that of the employing classes.
 Here and there to be sure cases will be cited which are exceptional, but they are isolated and minority and exceptional cases, hardly of consequence in the social move ment.
 This being so, it may be argued that progress is therefore impossible. It might be so considered did we forget the solution that Marx very fortunately stumbled upon to the effect that the newer system is born within the shell of the old.
 Socialism is an effect of capital ism. The cause of socialist growth, socialist ideas and persistency is ca. pitalism, and it is as much as any thing else part of the discipline which the economic supremacy of the employing classes forces upon us.
 This may seem paradox. But it is the truth.
 The very mechanical condition that machine industry forces upon man is responsible for the growth of socialism.
 l In the first place the rigid discIp- line of the machine insists upon CO., ordination and collective action for the best results. The very first inn pression left upon the human nina by modern industry is the need for cooperative effort. Disorganizec disunited individual effort is wholly inefficient in modern industry, and every "plant" ia in itself a little In- dustrial community ordered along cooperative lines, and production where 1t attains any degree of eff ciency at all, a collective produc- tion. Capitalist machinery insist, technically, as It's sine qua non, upon collective action and this crushes down the individual impulse to un- restrained discipline which in a mo- dern factory would get nowhere
 Nor is this all The machine pre-. sents itself to the working man as a contrivance which is efficient in accordance with the elimination of all unnecessary movements, unnec- cessary parts unnecessary power. Every cog functions usefully only when it is essential, every wheel functions efficiently only when it does what is an absolute requisite. and wholly non-superfiuous work, every movement justifies itself only when that movement adds to the maximum of the machines produc- tive capacity.
 Men turn from the machine to society with the mechanical concept of the social organization imbedded unwittingly may be, or consciously, in their minds. They look towards the elimination of the unnecessary in the social organization. They devise ways and means of making it as productive of happiness and we'll being as possible. All unnecessary parts are to be eliminated under this machine discipline that is imbedded in the minds, and socialism unques- tionably has it's greatest Justification in the application of efficiency sy- stems to modern society, and to mo- dern social organization.
 Unconsciously it affects the class standpoint of the worker and the employer differently.
 The employer views the machine as profit making device. The worker regards the machine as pro- ductive contrivance which turns out tools or supplies or commodities ot one sort or another, so that he can make his days wages and live. The machine suggests itself therefore to one as means of producing profits to the other as something producing Ia useful article.
 The reflex of this viewpoint Is seen in the application of the me- chanicai discipline upon their minds.
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