TOWARD INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

...Public Corporations Say this for the '44 platform of the Socialist Party —it doesn't spend all its time bawling out the two old parties—the right and left wings of one bird of prey, as my old friend Allen McCurdy used to put it...

...On the other hand, I've seen with these bloodshot eyes of mine democracy at work in the valleys around the great dams and I know how truthfully one of our top servants, David Lilienthal, Chairman of TVA, speaks, when he says: "I share with many of my neighbors in the Tennessee Valley a deep conviction that it can be done, the modern job of building our resources and making the machine work for all men...

...Let's Do Something!' In the old days it was enough for a Socialist speaker to get up on a box and holler: "To hell with Capitalism...

...it comes down, after all, to how we are going to get the two together for the common good...

...It is now taken for granted by almost everyone old enough to vote that neither party has the ability to contrive a democratic and enduring peace, full employment, a man-sized measure of security, or any sort of adequate planning for a war-weary, disillusioned, hungry world...

...The part of the platform I most commend is that which deals with things we can do something about...

...Speaking of platforms, have you boys and girls seen the one the Socialists batted out at Reading, Pa., at their unintentionally secret convention held on the days when the invasion news was hottest...

...The earliest possible time...

...our natural resources...

...our public utilities and all monopolies, semi-monopolies, and other exploitive industries must be socially controlled...

...To be effective that requires social ownership but not autocratic administration by agents of a bureaucratic stale...

...There are portions of that which I would recommend to those who ask me for a common sense plan of revamping this weird system of the production of goods which we old-timers called in our quaint manner Capitalism...

...He raid (the translation is mine) : "We have described this lousy system, now let's do something about it...

...That's as obvious as Dewey's mustache or F.D.R.'s whimsical cigarette holder...

...The Republicans have only this to say, after announcing that they too are going" "to take Government out of competition with private industry": "We give assurance now to restore peacetime industry at the earliest possible time...

...Two forms of administration of socialized enterprise will go far to protect us against this danger (1) public corporations operated for the people's benefit through directors representing consumers and the various categories of workers with hand and brain and (2) growth of consumers' cooperatives on the Rjchdale plan...

...It was brief, to the point, and it immensely pleased audiences of workers and farmers who then and now loathed and loathe the whole economic set-up with a loathing which is going to surprise the Fat Boys of the NAM and other richraff when some day it finds adequate expression...

...It is a shy and sinister word showing up the ideology of profit-hungry men who regard the production for the use of the people of necessary goods as a subversive and "communistic" undertaking...

...All I have to say is that anyone on the left side of the street who doesn't vote for Norman Thomas and Darlington Hoopes on Nov...

...The commanding heights of our economic order," roads the platform, "our system of money, banking and credit...

...for the small business man...

...This calls for large-scale socialization with vigorous democratic controls...

...7 ought to go have his head examined...

...I have long championed consumers' co-ops in varied fields from that of groceries and meat in the Martha's Vineyard Co-op of which I'm a member, to electricity in the Rural Electrification groups on the Pacific Coast...

...But it is perfectly evident that they are not organized to take over an important segment of the aluminum industry, for example...

...I know that in the old-days Socialists made thorough-going, intelligent analyses of the distresses caused by our cock-eyed Capitalist Way of Life and that they had—and have—an equally thorough-going, intelligent method for ending many of those distresses...

...Hurry, hurry...

...Old Parties' Reply The Democrats, through President Roosevelt's swift and sickening endorsement of the Baruch Plan, are obligated to surrender—and unconditionally — this salient of "the commanding heights" to U. S. Steel, Alcoa, the Dow Chemical Co., and the privateers of the rubber industry...

...Apply these administrative techniques to the realities of the present situation where at least one-fifth (perhaps more) of the productive capacity of the nation is now publicly-owned...

...And then the party of trusts, monopolies, and cartels has tears to shed (who let all those crocodiles into the sessions of the Republican platform committee...

...Men and resources, resources and men...

...There are, as a matter of fact, a great variety of such plans conceived by intelligent, courageous, decent-minded men and women who attack the fundamental problem of man-made misery from diverse angles...

...cries Barney Baruch...

...It's just that we did spend an awful lot of time stressing the obvious, the obvious being that man had got himself into a helluva mess...

...by disposal of surplus Government plants, equipments, and supplies with due consideration of small buyers and with care to prevent monopoly and injury to existing agriculture and industry...

...We do not need to exchange government of the workers by the bosses, for the profits of absentee owners, for government of the workers by the bureaucrats for the glory and power of the military state...

...By the way, whatever became of the old Capitalist System...

...A publicly-owned plant which is turning out aluminum, for example, is a "surplus" plant to be bought up at from 14 to 20 cents on the dollar by Alcoa and then closed down as quickly as possible...

...Long live the Socialist Commonwealth of America...

...Huge plants, financed by the people's money through the RFC, powered largely by cheap and abundant electricity from the great publicly-owned and operated dams from the Tennessee Valley to the Columbia River Basin, will soon be ready for the production of sorely-needed civilian goods —• steel, rubber, aluminum, magnesium, chemicals of all sorts, the fundamentals of that coming age of light metals and synthetics that the advertisements are telling you about...

...Federal corporations on the TVA model, with an eye to regional interests and rank and file demands, would give meaningful, useful jobs to hundreds of thousands of boys coming back from the wars, would provide us with the material things for more spacious living, and would, in addition, lay the foundations for an industrial democracy without which purely political democracy is so vitally handicapped...

...Besides, hollering this was about all we had time for because in a great many parts of the country it was an inevitable exit line, a cue for the entrance onto the scene of the irate constabulary...

...Of course, the above is not to be taken literally and I hope no indignant veterans write me telling me to go climb a tree...

...say the Fat Boys of the "Republican party, the historical champion of free labor," as they so modestly call themselves in the platform...

...Far be it from me to interject any partisan pleading into this strictly objective, non-partisan, unbiased column...

...Toward Industrial Democracy By McALISTER COLEMAN EVERY now and then I'm flattered by getting a letter from a reader of The Progressive asking me, as did J. L. Childers of El Reno, Okla., recently, to recommend some sensible plan for the revamping of our economic system so that the plain people of America and the world, for that matter, would get a greater share of our potential abundance...

...I know that the speeches were good because I made some of them myself...

...Could this strange thing they call "Free Enterprise" be its reincarnation...

...You will notice that in all this I've concentrated on domestic matters, not necessarily because I'm a homebody but because all I know about foreign affairs is what I read in the papers and the bulk of that seems to be boloney written by heavy-handed "intellec-tools" whose chief qualification is the fact that they can distinguish Minsk from Pinsk...

...The italicizing of the word "surplus" in this part of the GOP platform is mine...

...You will all understand that The Progressive, the Army, the Navy, and the National City Bank are in no way responsible for the opinions of the author of this piece and that any allusions to living people, platforms, or ideas contained herein are purely coincidental...

...My money (all the $2.50 of it) is, as you might have guessed, on the approach taken by the Socialists in their 1944 platform...

...Men And Resources Personally, I am not so hot about the part that cooperatives can play in this situation nor the importance assigned to them in the Socialist platform...

...Karl Marx once made a notable remark, notable not because of its profundity—most of his remarks were profound—but because anyone can understand it...