Evening star., 1927-09-04
Capital VS.. Labor Fallacy z=s:~==

minds and devastates our public affairs today
It is a conflict embodying certain easy miscon.
ceptions of social and particularly of economic
life. 1t is an incidental squabble exaggerated
to the dimensions of a fundamental process.
But it rules huge proportion of current pot.
ical activity. 1t is another of the great halluci
nations which make history in our time and
prepare infinite perplexity for the historians of
the days to come.
This capitalist system" has never been de.
fined it has merely been indicted Try to define
it. Labor" is equally underlined. According to
a Communist informant, Labor" is the prole-
tariat-that is to say. the people who produce
offspring for whose education and upbringing
they have made no provision. 1t is the prop
ertyless class which works for wages and breeds
so that it keeps those wages down to the sub
sstence level.
There certainly is such a class in most
countries where there towns and cities.
but it is a residual class 1t Is much more
in evidence in medieval city like Hankow
than in a modern city like New York. In
China the brigand armies now prevalent are
drawn largely from that class. It SUPPLIES the
gang labor which under recent conditions took
the place of gang slavery The pressure of it's
hunger exercises a degrading influence upon
life in general. So far it justifies the 'prole.
tartan" legend. But it Is absurd to project
its characteristics and limitations the
great multitude of workers in a modern COM
HunlIy. 1T is pT6pOSLeFOuS 10 present economic
life substantially the exploitation of this
class by hard-minded minority.
In the United States the actual proletariat,
have defined it. must be very small
proportion of the population There is less Of
such exploitation of degraded, propertyless
people than there was a hundred years
ago and it Is diminishing factor in economic
life.
If we abandon this romantic, this Victor
Hugoesque conception of labor" living in
rags and sums and begin to incorporate semi
skilled and skilled workers, with savings in.
surances and other property and a certain
minimum of education and peasants with
leases or owning land, we shall cease to have
any definite boundary to stop us, and before
we know where are we shall find ourselves
In perplexity, whether in this or that case we
are dealing with capitalist or a worker,
"exploiter' or exploited"
We may draw social boundaries we
shall find anywhere. II we draw them suff.
c1ently high we may arrive at last at the
proposition that every activity in the State
is labor" and that nothing lies outside that
term except few usurers. gamblers, criminals
official parasites and the heirs Of rich men,
The economic processes of the modern COM
munity and the psychology of these processes
are, as matter of fact extraordinarily com.
pick and still largely unmassed, and they yield
to no such elementary antagonism as the CAPT.
tai and labor picture assumes. Human beings
carry on by use and won't They are initiative
habitual, mechanical lazy, greedy and afraid
There is no such simple shark-like consumption
OF the honest toiling community by highly
intelligent property owners as the legend sug.
gests.
Property in excess does not make most peo
PIE either active or aggressive; generally it
tvI1
wasteful. Property in small quantities brings
out much inherent meanness and causes much