I wrote a comment the other day in BNR where I post several each morning, and ChroneWit suggested that I post the comment here on C99% as an article.
It is very satisfying to point out the inequities in life, to rail against the obnoxious ones among us, yet in doing so we become the obnoxious ones. We become the person cutting into line at the grocery, or cutting off another driver trying to get out of the parking lot, just to secure our 'proper' place in line, but in reality just sowing more inequity behind us. Such counter-productive behavior is almost human nature; I myself can be obnoxious and casually, even unconsciously and inadvertently, spew inequities and insults toward others who will then cut me off as I try to exit the grocery parking lot later on today.
As usual I'll wander around a bit, trying to make some sort of point.
You really have to suspect that something is wrong when someone as clearly possessed of the criminal mentality as Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner in the 2016 Presidential race. You can see this in the electoral fraud that has accompanied a great number of primaries, from Iowa to Illinois to Arizona to New York and much, much more.
The desire for revolution lives at the beating heart of anti-capitalism. There may be differing visions of how that revolution will be conducted and on exactly whose terms the new-born society will be ruled, but in the end our mission is to overturn the power of Capital and remake the world for the benefit of the masses.
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Saturday December 18, 1916
From The Masses: "Do You Believe in Patriotism?" Part II
In the March issue of The Masses, various Socialist writers responded to the question, "Do you believe in Patriotism?" Yesterday Hellraisers featured the answers to that question from two prominent Socialists women, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Sara Bard Field. Today's edition features the responses of John Sloan and Charles Erskine Scott Wood:
From John Sloan
If I had to love a country I could love no country but this, nor could I find a fitter one to hate.
I put Patriotism with the other isms,-Militarism, Anarchism, Capitalism, Individualism, Socialism, Dogmatism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Rheumatism (I had almost written Catechism), but I am answering your question. I hope that social progress will eliminate all isms-though in the case of Futurism we have a hard one to catch.
Patriotism licks the boot of capitalism and until the earth-worms get the latter's carcass, he will need patriots. As the wage system will never enable the people of any country to consume all their products with a profit to the owning class, foreign markets are a necessity to be fought for. Patriotism is a potent means of providing the fighters. Conscription is another powerful persuader and Our Country has both (see Dick military law passed by congress in 1903 and 1908).
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Monday March 6, 1916
From the International Socialist Review: Comrade Debs on the Fantines of Our Day
From this month's edition of the Review, Comrade Debs urges class solidarity and human compassion for the "girls, women who have walked the path of thorns and briers with bare and bleeding feet; who know the ways of agony and tears, and who move in melancholy procession as capitalist society's sacrificial offering to nameless and dishonored graves."
FANTINE IN OUR DAY
By EUGENE V. DEBS
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THE reader of "Les Miserables" can never forget the ill-starred Fantine, the mournful heroine of Hugo's immortal classic. The very name of Fantine, the gay, guileless, trusting girl, the innocent, betrayed, self-immolating young mother, the despoiled, bedraggled, hunted and holy martyr to motherhood, to the infinite love of her child, touches to tears and haunts the memory like a melancholy dream.
Jean Valjean, noblest of heroes, was possible only because of Fantine, sublimest of martyrs.
Fantine—child of poverty and starvation—the ruined girl, the abandoned mother, the hounded prostitute, remained to the very hour of her tragic death chaste as a virgin, spotless as a saint in the holy sanctuary of her own pure and undefiled soul. It was of such as Fantine that Heine wrote: "I have seen women on whose cheeks red vice was painted and in whose hearts dwelt heavenly purity."
I was provoked into writing this piece by a diary which discussed Supreme Court review of some sort of proposed regulation of carbon emissions from coal plants.
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Sunday February 11, 1906
Greensboro, North Carolina - Mother Jones Speaks on Child Labor
From the Greensboro Daily Industrial News of February 9th:
"MOTHER JONES" ON CHILD LABOR
-----Socialist Declares That Factories Are Responsible
for Mental Degenerates
-----
LABOR AND CAPITAL ARE DULY COMPARED
-----
Laboring Man's Champion Speaks to a Small Audience
in Labor Union Hall But Holds Her
Hearers' Interest to the End.
-----Mother Jones talked in Labor Union Hall last night to an audience made unfortunately small by the inclemency of the weather. But the few people who were there were profoundly interested and were besides very greatly taken with the "spunky" little woman who tried to stir up in them the revolutionary spirit and to implant in them a firm purpose to benefit their brothers and help them forward to a higher civilization.
Mother Jones related first the history of the tool, told how it had become a machine, and how its change, and its ownership by the few had brought about the present economic conditions. She told about how young men used to go West to escape the servitude of labor, but now, she said, the conditions were the same everywhere.
Cuba appealed for relief from Spain, said she, and could have had it without war, but in the interests of capital war was brought about. Then capital went on to the Philippines, to work up that country. In the Far East, before the gates of Pekin, Militarism and Capitalism for the first time in history, joined their interests and worked together. The whole thing means that we are face to face with a competition as the world has never known it before.
Calls Child Labor Murder.
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Sunday February 4, 1906
From the Montana News: Mary Beals on Child Suicide and Heartless Churches
Readers of Hellraisers might remember a story from the Montana News, written by May Beals, about the suicide of a young cotton mill worker who was too worn out from her labors to go on living. The child sought the sure rest of the grave where her slumbers could not be interrupted by the factory whistle blowing at an early hour. That was a fictional story, but, in a letter to the News, Miss Beals claims that suicides among children who labor in the mines and mills are increasing, especially obvious in France where statistics on child suicide are available.
Writes Miss Beals:
Notice that it is "poor children"—the disinherited—who have no share in the earth, who take themselves out of it. Some good people say that the rapid increase in France is due to the spread of free thought—the decay of religion.
If the function of religion is to hold children in a life of torment, that nothing else can force them to endure, the sooner it decays the better. Truly religion is worth more to the masters than either the constable or the hangman if he can keep the children alive while they are being despoiled. Even capitalism cannot grind profits out of a dead child.
