The Washington times., 1934-04-06
True To
Type
Workers in Power
as Power Checks
Their Work
By GILBERT SELDES


day about "the dictatorship Of
the proletariat" and the mere
repetition Of that phrase made
me look at 1t a little more
closely than usual. If you re-
peat any word long enough it
begins to sound queer and mean
ingless; and this tremendous
phrase, which has changed the
face Of a large part Of the civ.
ilized world, although it resisted
a long time, finally yielded up
a few doubts.
It occurred to me in the end
that the proletariat was arriv-
ing at power just at the wrong
time. The Communist revolu-
tion, which seems to most Of us
to have come too soon, actually
came too late. The proletarians
should have come into power
before the power age.
BY proletarians most Of us
mean, and are told to mean, the
people who have no property,
but who work; in other words,
their capacity to work is the
only thing for which society is
willing to pay them. But ca
pacity to work isn't like capital;
you have to use it today or you
will not be paid today; you can't
put it away and forget about it
and still earn 10 per cent on it.
A manufacturer can close his
plant for six months and live
on interest of past receipts;
then open again and resume
work. A laborer cannot. Ex-
cept for his hands and his
shoulders and his legs, he has
nothing; he is dispossessed in
a world full Of other peoples
possessions.
Less and Less
But when you get to the
basic argument, you strike a
snag. The proletariat, the
worker, ought to have power,
according to this argument,
because he is the fundamental
creator of wealth. without
him everything else is profit
less. He is not only the man
in the majority, but the man
on whom everything else de-
pendS.
There are fifty million, more
or less, workers in America.
Put the small farmer and the
factory workers together, and
you have the foundation of all
our wealth.
That argument, it strikes
me, holds good for the past.
But unless we reverse the whole
direction Of industry and agri-
culture, the number of people
doing manual labor is going to
become regularly less. It ought
to, and electric power makes it
inevitable that it should. If
not, what's machinery for?
New Facts-New Morals
I have before noted Walter
Polakov's statement that, given
the utmost in the machine and
the widest latitude, less than a
million men could produce as
much as was produced indus
trially in this country in 1926.
Agrobiologists assure us that
we can raise our eight funda-
mental crops on one-tenth of
the land we now use-probably
with one-tenth the number Of
farmers. Now, if the number Of
workers is going to dwindle,
and work will become a rare
privilege, where is the moral
reason for putting into the
hands Of the proletariat the
dictatorship over our lives
even as a temporary measure
toward a Communist Utopia?
When Marx wrote, steam
power was the major power.
Steam power had two very bad
features: it led to concentration
in big cities and it enslaved the
worker. In the past generation
we have begun to develop elec-
trio power which scatters in
stead of concentrating and frees
instead of enSlaving.
Isn't it possible that we need
a new moral-economics to go
with the new facts? And if we
have to iIave a dictatorship,
why not give it into the hands
of I electrical engineers? They
seem a Competent lot of men.
FR4HFnA