Review of and Comment on Events Here and Abroad, Critical and Otherwise
Oneal, James
Editor's Corner Review of and Comment on Events Here and Abroad, Critical and Otherwise By James OnealThe Sharts' Program /\UR readers will find on this page a party program by Joseph W....
...The real estate interests aad the taxpayers' associations didn't want municipal housing, and, as between the Socialists, and the landlords' demands, there was alas...
...Land and Capitalism I AND holding "is the core of all social classes...
...j Th.e program reverts back to the land reformers like Spcnce, Paine and George who assumed that free access to the soil would solve all economic problems, and it favors "Americanism, nationalism and patriotism" as agitation slogans, enlisting "national pride and love of country" as substitutes for the claims of the working class for the abolition of the capitalist system of production and distribution...
...The first bill for municipal housing was drafted and introduced by William M. Feigenbaum...
...Year undertoei brother ti commerd votes...
...Assume that we do not nominate for executive and municipal officesi until constitutional and legislative restrictions are removed...
...But even under Us blessings to a very small minority of the population, high tariffs proved unsatisfactory in every land where cut-throat competition ruined the protected prices...
...There are hazards we risk in acquiring municipal powers when many cities are sinking into the red, but it is at least debatable whether we should, without a struggle, permit our enemies to possess the executive powers...
...A housing commission was to be established to survey and condemn property and to buy property at the value the owners placed on it for tax purposes...
...Perhaps Mayor LaGuardia and his supporters will be able to put it over...
...We have known Joe for some thirty years...
...then a Socialist Assemblyman, in 1918...
...Adam Smith once said, when he came to defend the labor movement, that it is easier for a few manufacturers to agree to cut wages than many thousand workers to organize and prevent waje-cutting...
...High tariffs and cartels very favorably influenced capital concentration and made countries safe for highly developed monopolies...
...we do assert that it is what we would get if the Socialist movement were to adopt the course that he recommends...
...In the cooperative housing projects I've seen—notably the Amalgamated houses—there's no coal in the bath-tubs and the homes are clean...
...2. State requisition of idle lands, factories, mills, mines, and machinery...
...However, a fight is being put up against the municipal housing plans...
...Socialists Alone Started the Move For Municipal Housing By Gertrude Well Klein "J CAN'T understand why it was not done fifteen or more years ago," said Mayor LaGuardia speaking of the establishment of a comprehensive housing program at a municipal housing ally in New York City this week...
...I don't know how you feel about it, but I find that pretty cold comfort...
...now P'e1 action on masses...
...The So. rial ist movement emerged out of this view 76 years ago and it is proposed that we go back to it...
...We do not assert that this is what Joe wants...
...We shall do so...
...It requires ore miners, smelting furnaces, steel milts, blast furnaces, railways and other vast equipment organized into giant corporations and now owned by the capitalist class...
...We got the push and incentive for this sort of legislation from the Socialist Party," he said...
...C. To provide a new constitution, state and national, which shall express the collective needs of the machine age, and embody functional as resenUtiol First...
...We must return to fundamentals...
...Joe does not propose to return to them...
...Can Cartel Solve ll ly Leopold SomIo "pHE present paralysis has shown that the Very foundation upon which pre- and postwar capitalism is built is a more or less interde|)endent economic system...
...How the Mayor is going to get around this, I don't know...
...Or shall we engage in general strikes to compel action...
...But M dustry t| keep „u capacity possible i of the cat unfavora The kt a nd met creased i never in« of our that, cai first of material: Producin needed i every ol cartels, high pri duetion so they goods at And bec« in compt kets, Nc branches goods ar of artifk tion, wit...
...But this is the stuff- of which the surface opposition to municipal housing is composed...
...The Sharts' program unwittingly leads to Fascism, not to Socialism...
...Carrying coal up six or Ave or even three flights of stairs daily—assuming there is a place in the cellar to keep it, which there usually isn't—is not exactly a light chore for a busy, tired person...
...Shall we strive to win the executive power and use it to protect strikers or permit it to be used against our class...
...We propose: 1. To abolish all taxes and tariffs...
...very little doubt as to whom the majority of assemblymen and the aldermen would listen...
...They are one unified system and it must be treated as a whole...
...Any American Hitler could recruit our followers of "national pride and love of country" and use them as shock troops for a nationalist dictatorship...
...The whole agricultural class today bears witness to the fact that possession of land provides no more advantage to the farmer than the, possession of labor power by the worker does...
...5. To abolish the wage and profit system as rapidly as possible and substitate planned collective production for use...
...Hardly that because Joe has no confidence in the organized working class...
...This was largely true before the days,of machinery...
...The extractive industries cannot be considered separate from the others...
...3. Free land,* tools, and machinery, to enable workers to produce collectively for use...
...Editor's Corner Review of and Comment on Events Here and Abroad, Critical and Otherwise By James OnealThe Sharts' Program /\UR readers will find on this page a party program by Joseph W. Sharts of Ohio who asks the editor to express his opinion of it...
...Well, "fifteen or more years ago," Major LaGuardia was dropping 1) o m i) s on A u s trian village*, so we can't blame him...
...Well, if they had no other place to store coal, I suppose they would, and I don't know what else they could do...
...Several developed into a highly efficient machinery of national and» international production and trade...
...To abolish rents...
...inevitablj actions...
...Wherever industry reached its developed, concentrated forms of mass production, the system of high tariff, "the protection of agriculture and industry" went hand in hand with the system of cartels and price monopolization: The latter tendency has been the most desired fruit of "defensive" tariff systems...
...4. To limit individual holdings of lands and houses and to condition such holdings upon actual use...
...Along with subsequent bills, introduced while there were Socialists in the Assembly or the Board of Aldermen, it died aborning—in committee...
...The representative of the Greater New York Tax Payers' Association ridiculed the idea, while he suggested that the "reformers" would do better to force tenants to keep their homes clean...
...Vincent Astor and another large property holder whose name I've forgotten, are willing to let the city take their holdings at their.assessed valuation...
...i We are facing an integrated capitalism of exploiters owning ore, coal, oil and other natural resources in alliance with owners of vast manufacturing enterprises...
...It was "home" to, them, they quavered in pitiful cracked voices, meanwhile lovingly patting the walls, which reminded me or the time I was doing some, research on housing for the Socialist Aldermanic Research Bureau...
...Assume that we were to agitate in accord with this chauvinism...
...Comrade Vladeck.who is on the Housing Commission, feels quite hopeful...
...For this reasqn we had several international cartels long before the World War, and many more in the post-war period of capitalistic reconstruction...
...Instead of trying to obtain control of these powers we stand outside of them and ask the enemy to make the changes we want...
...Public revenues to be derived from government operation of water power, gas and oil fields, coal fields, liquor, transportation, and similar resources and functions...
...The Socialist housing measures were based on the theory that housing be considered a public utility...
...Substitute the word "Germanism" for "Americanism" in the above quotation awd we have the slogans of the Hitler movement that brought a counter-revolutionary dictatorship in Germany...
...It would substitute state capitalism for the corporate capitalism we have today...
...A Crusade for Nationalism ¦OE would have us refrain from nominating candidates *^ for executive and municipal offices till certain constitutional and legislative restrictions are removed...
...He has rendered marked service to the movement, but we believe that this program represents not only a retreat but a surrender of some basic principles of the Socialist movement...
...There-) fore, long before the World War, beginning with the "heroic" era of the Carnegies, manufacturers made price and production agreements among themselves through pools and cartels...
...He might even enforce government operation of water power, gas and oil fields, etc., under this dictatorship and not destroy the wage system...
...In a recent symposium, Tenement House Commissioner Langdon W. Post gave all credit to the Socialist Party for founding the principle upon which his housing bill was drafted...
...True, several went under, caused ihiefly by the barriers of a politico-nationalistic economic war...
...B land froi 19th cent War peri ing the d dust rial 1 and toe i both belu school, o tective" I infant ( heavy im competith serious at used aft* developed pacifies I ist ic tend Enough that the ( and the | of cartels trial court a mercik* n ationi war-prow Points of Po P"OR consideration by Socialist * locals and the national conventions...
...This war, like a regular war, calls for an economic self-sustaining policy, otherwise known as autarchy, especially vigorously applied by fascist states...
...The free land farmer has been pursued across the American continent and has been conquered by the capitalism that has crept at his heels...
...As for a toilet for every family, that was just nonsense, according ti this gerttleman...
...1 cialist cani for executi until the i and lejis...
...Perhaps we have come to the stage where property is so unprofitable, particularly in the slum areas, that landlords will be quite happy to let the city have it...
...While in Cleveland a few weeks ago, the writer went to a strike meeting of textile workers who met police clubs and tear gas just before he arrived...
...Cartels are the organizations of exploiters with large capital...
...I suspect there are thousands of landlords who would consider themselves in luck if they could find buyers for their property at half its assessed value...
...To be sure, capitalism obtained a strong foothold by land enclosures in England, by restriction of free access to lands in new countries l|ke Australia and the United States, but to assume that land-ownership is the core of the problem is to ignore the industrial evolution which has made possession of land in general of relative unimportance today...
...Not that the need for housing reform wasn't great...
...If he could not create economic independence for himself when capitalism was weak, he canrtotfreate it when capitalism has become the monstrous giant it is today...
...What is left to us to effect legislative and constitutional changes are prayer meetings and petitions...
...And it was something less than that for the 48 people who were burned to death in fire-traps since the first of the year and for the thousands of others, who for the crime of being poor, are condemned to life sentences in airless, unsanitary fire-traps...
...But there was a small u n popular group of men sitting in the Ass embly of the state and the Board of A 1 d ermen of the city at that time who put a great deal of serious study into the drafting of a municipal housing program...
...I was assured by some worthy persons that "if these people had bathtubs they would only use them to store coal in...
...There < several ii certain t helped tt forces of France, 1890...
...It is a phase of that disintegration of Socialist ideas that is obvious in some sections of the country and a hodge-podge of views that would blur the class lines that are becoming sharper every day with the disillusionment regarding the blessings of the NRA...
...he would abandon them for a crusade in behalf of "Americanism, nationalism and patriotism...
...And not that the plans drawn by the Socialists were not adequate and practicable...
...The primitive agriculturist could make a rude plow and other simple tools out of the resources of his land but today he requires modern machinery which he cannot manufacture...
...The early land reformers used to argue that free access to land would enable the worker to make his own tools and become economically independent...
...Second, futility ol long as w elementsl in "Amei and "P»trl need of « trailing tude andi list natifl country.^ In revol ning pl*n Observe I lei...
...During the past decades there has been always a close relationship between the systems of "defensive" (high) tariffs and cartels...
...For tho horizontal, vertical and circular trusts...
...Underneath, of course, is the more sinister determination to squeeze out and hold on to whatever profits possible, come what may...
...Nor do I know any of the details of the present housing plan...
...Some of the newspapers carried touching stories of tenants so "attached to their squalor" that they refused to let 'the tenement house inspectors come in...
Vol. 27 • April 1934 • No. 15
