The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-07-02
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
FOR -IHE- UNEMPLOYED

announces, "for the first five months of 1880
was 14.5 per cent below production in the cor
responding part of 1929" Nor is this all.
Steel plants are now down to 81 per cent of
capacity. They will soon reach the level of
40 per cent, or even below, of the dark days
of January February. There is no backbone
whatever to steel production with automobile
production down, with building construction
shot, and with the agrarian crisis cutting the
jugular vein of farm implement demand.
top of all this comes the ever-deepening
slough of despond of commodity prices. Then
at the bottom is the laundering anchor of
dropping exports, due to the shrinking mar
kets and the sharpening world crisis. The
drop of prices in the United States, as well
as in other countries, will further intensity
the crisis in this country and still further
shrink the possible markets
The outlook for recovery is greyer than
at any time since the crisis began. Early in
the year, in chorus the bosses shouted about a
recovery in the spring There was a short
upward jog which gave momentum to the
sharper downward swing that followed. Now
they all admit the late summer and fall will
see further crisis and unemployment. About
the winter they are grimly silent. They try
to overlook this element of time completely
and gaze beyond into the spring of 1881 when
they "hope"-"hope" is the word nine-tenths
of them use-for-oh, no, not recovery but
a stop in the downward swing of production
and prices.
The stall and extremely conservative Journal
of the American Bankers Association declares:
st may be that over the next five or ten
years business will be a replacement basis
instead of being carried forward by unusual
expansion in or two particular lines"
Stipt of its mystic varbiage, this means
they expect for the next five or ten years no
upward swing in production that will carry
them above the 1929 level-in fact, they thus
expect sterilization" if at all, on a chronic
crisis level.
For the workers this portends an increase
in unemployment that will make last winter
mild in comparison. The breadines will be
longer and GUNNER. The savings of the great
majority of the jobless will be spent. Starva-
ton will stalk through the ranks of the Amer
lean workers as never before.
With this will be coupled an attack of I'M
usual ferocity against the standard of living
of the employed workers. This has already
been announced by the National City Bank of
New York, the Journal of Commerce, and
dozens Of other capitalist financial sheets.
To this will be added an intensified agrarian
crisis unequaIled in American history. AS low
as farm product prices are now, they have
been artifcially kept up in the interest of the
spectators and bankers, by the Federal Farm
Board. Farm exports have been very low.
The warehouses already overlooking and
harvest is just beginning. Many farmers are
holding their wheaton higher prices-when
prices constantly go lower and lower. This
spells ruin and bankruptcy for thousands of
them. A good harvest is looked for in Italy,
Argentina Canada, the United States and the
Soviet Union. To the capitalist nations this
is a catastrophe. 1t means starvation for the
masses. Ruin for the poor farmers. In the
Soviet Union it means more food for the
masses and an impetus to the building of So
cialism.
The horn Of plenty under capitalism is brim-
full of misery for the workers.
Only the sharpest struggles of the great
mass of unemployed, whose number now what
with so-called vacations and inventories) is
not far from the 100000 mark, for "Work
or Wages" together with the employed work.
ers in a fight against speed-up and wage-cuts,
stave off the growing attempts of the
bosses to unload the burdens of the growing
crisis on the back of the working class.