The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1924-07-09
Breakup of Political Lines

DTSuR-up OF TOLlIICQL Lines
One fact stands out as the characteristic of the
political period thru which we are now passing
the breakup of the old political alignments The
republican party is spkt in twain in spite of the
apparent harmony of its conventional was
harmony purchased by making the split in the
ranks more irretrievable The democratic party is
deadlocked, and even tho unity may be restored
on the surface, the hidden economic forces that
produced the te-up in Madison Square Garden
will continue their process Of disintegration. The
socialist party has merged itself into the formless
middle-class, Hearst-LaFollette movement Even
Gompers finds himself in strange and forbidding
lands, without guide or compass His own pet
policy is being stolen from him by the Conference
for Progressive Political Action and turned into an
alliance with the semiregulars of the old parties
instead of with the regulars
This chaos IN the political life of the United
States is reflection of the economic chaos of the
entire world and its resultant sharpening of So
cial conflicts Capitalism, as Marx points out, per-
shes by its own contradictions, which, of course,
do not operate automatically but as causitive fac
tors in forcing proletarian revolution.
The great division within the capitalist class
has arisen from the fact that greater and greater
power has accumulated in the hands of finance
capital now the dominant factor in the imperial
list stage of capitalism. The old times when bank
ers loaned money to manufacturers without thot
of interfering in industrial processes, is gone,
never to return. The great industrial corpora
lions, which by advantage in credit as well in
improved machinery it gave, drove the smaller
manufacturers to thel wall, have become only the
industrial end of the more powerful banking cor
porations. We have the directors of great
machinery trusts, willing to do business with So
Wet Russia, stopped by the orders of Wall Street
banks. This is but one small example of the eco
nomic antagonism existing within the capitalist
class.
Industrial capitalists bewail, also, the tendency
for finance capital to export credit for a higher
return than they can give, typical habit of i'm
peralism. The money SYSTEM ready tool of the
great banks has alternately cheered business"
both great and small by infation only to snare
them into a trap where defation ruins many to
enrich few. But this same money system endan-
gers even it's makers, and we see the finance sys-
TENS of half of Europe collapsing about the ears
of distracted bankers And below all these jug
glers with fortunes and figures, these quarreling
classes within the bourgeosie lies the proetariat,
only beginning to be conscious of its chains
| Political movements are expressions of econom-
ic differences The split we see in the republican
party and in the democratic party also (they have
been and are undiferentatedly capitalistic), is a
split between finance capital and industrial CAPT
tai threatened with widespread ruin.
But the same process which has subjected manu-
featuring capital to the international bankers also
has reduced the small business man, the employ
ing farmer, the professional man, the progeny of
the near-rich the intelligentsia-all the tribe of
capitalists without capital to the servie status OF
lnot-too-independent lackeydom to corporations.
they CRY out against these ''soulless' entities,
against srapacious monopolies. They seek politi-
cal expression but, being capitalistic they reject
class war and class parties class political express
sion. They want ''justice'-they want LaFollette
Such is the plant and the program of the petty
bourgeoisie And Gompers, poor man, he is so
accustomed to selling his soul to big business that
he cannot at once adjust his spiritual nature to
the radical" program of small business No won
der he fell i'll when he looked upon the democratic
convention.