The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1929-12-05

EIlSllSIl anu AllSIlCdH WHINING Sldoo'
Frederick Engels, in one of the great Marx
ian classics, wrote of "The Condition of the
English Working Class in 1874" of the hor-
rors of the early English factory system. In
the twentieth century, and in the United
States, the most powerful imperialist country,
whose prosperity" is heralded throughout the
world, and whose production methods aped
by the ruling classes of the European capt.
talist countries in carrying out their postwar
program of naturalization, are duplicated in
the southern textile industry, which, with
hydro-electric power and chemicals, form the
base of the new southern capitalism, as in the
seventeenth century the textile industry was
the base of rising English capitalism, the mass
misery on which the English factory system
was built.
The Reformation swept over England and
destroyed the political superstructure of Eng
lish feudalism. Cromwell and his Ironsides
were the mdwives of British capitalism. On
the ruins of the old order, to the sound of the
slogans of Calvinisnl, were built the factories
into which the English, Scotch and Irish peas
ants were herded. King Charles lost his head,
the peasantry lost the few rights they had
wrung from the feudal barons, and the "inde-
pendent" traditions of the English yeomanry
passed into history. Swept from the country
side to make room for the sheep whose wool
was the principal commodity traded in by the
great maritime towns of the Hanseatic League,
the British peasants marched from serfdom to
wage-savery. The prisons filled with
debtors and the sturdy rogues" of the Eliza
bethian statutes To be landless and master
less was to be criminal. The new factories
did not furnish work for all the peasantry
driven from the countryside. Neither did the
home industry, producing some of the worst
IF he tal-o of
driven to desperation by the closing of Com
mons and the abolition of all communal privi-
leges.
Yet to be jobless meant to be whipped at the
tail of cart until the blood ran down to the
heels" for the first offense. to have ones ears
cut off for the second, and to be hung, drawn
and CHARTERED for the third.
The Cromwellian code was as barbarous as
the feudal code which preceded it. But by it,
in the fierce heat of thousand fires where
its opponents burned and christened by the
blood of prosecuted lardless peasantry, Bri-
fish capitalism was born. Ireland and Scot
land were brought to heel. The north of Ire
land was made safe for the rising British
capitalist class.
Thousands of the working class were de-
ported or driven from England, Scotland and
Ireland, to the American colonies. The ances-
tors of the new working class in the Piedmont
section of the new South came from the class
upon whose backs was built the whole edi-
flee of British capitalism, Scotch, English and
Irish landless peasants. They fled from Great
Britain to escape the horrors of the factory
system. They brought with them all the Evan
gelica superstitions of Purtansm. Debtors,
fugitive indentured servants, the "landless and
lawless" settled in the Piedmont region of
eastern Tennessee, North and South Carolina,
Virginia and Georgia. They fled to escape the
unspeakabe misery which rising capitalism
brought to the masses of Great Britain and
from which they found relief to some extent
at least, in the colonies of the New World.
Three hundred years later, their offspring,
still burdened with the religious and cultural
traditions of the Cromwelian period, are
trapped by the new marvellous machines of
modern American capitalism. These noun
taineers, who for three centuries retained the
illusion of independence given by the owner
ship of even poor patch of land, now are tied
to the most highly machinized industry in the
highest developed industrial country in the
world. They are the modern serfs.
For three hundred years CAPITALISM waited
for these new victims. Oceans and continents
were no barriers In the new South has been
repeated the process which turned the ances-
tors of this new contingent of the American
work - class INTO English proletarlans, but
the process has been intensified by the dire
needs of capitalism in the imperialist epoch
"the period of wars and revolutions" when econ
onlic struggles bring workers rapidly into d-
rect conflict with imperiast government.
The author has described this process. No
MARKHAM will underestimate the significance of
this book. The author has performed sur
gical operation upon portion of the body of
American Imperialism, an operation which dis
closes in detail the misery of the masses, the
real basis for all the inflated claims which
form the subject of the lyricisms of the propa
gandists for American efficiency and "pros-
perity"-a prosperity shaken to its foun-
dations.
This is no "study" by social welfare work.
err. Sympathy and understanding are here,
but primarily it is an incison, sharp and merci-
less, by a scalpel with a feminist edge. 1t is
charge Communists both with an ignorance of
and blinking of facts. Here is complete
reply. Here. are the facts upon which the
Communist Party of the United States has
based its campaign in the South Here are
the facts which prove that the leadership of
the American Federation of Labor, and more
especially its loyal opposition, the so-called
Music wing, denying the existence Of the class
struggle and, therefore, the necessity for revo-
utionary working class strategy, tactics and
detectives, is both unwilling and unable to give
leadership to this new contingent of the Amer
lean proletarat in conflicts which inevitably