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Title: The Jobless Author: Alexander Berkman Language: en Topics: unemployment Source: Online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1249, retrieved on November 18, 2020.
Generally speaking, there is neither any sincere and intelligent plan
among the reformers, of whatever hue, to solve this great problem, nor
any possibility of a thorough and final solution of unemployment within
the legal and industrial boundaries of present-day capitalist society.
Unemployment is no sporadic phenomenon of modern life. It is inherent in
the character and mode of functioning of our industrial system. The
jobless man is always with us, and industrial crises or stagnation,
eliminating hundreds of thousands of workers, for a longer or shorter
period, from the field of labor, are events of regular and inevitable
recurrence.
The causes of unemployment are ridiculously simple, and therefore so
little understood. Sociologists, political economists, and reformists
have succeeded in so confusing the issue that the real facts of the
problem have been all but buried beneath a mass of fictitious issues
concerning the tariff, money problems, stringency of the market, and
similar aberrations. Yet the fundamental causes underlying all these
so-called problems and, above all, the paramount problem of constant
unemployment on a comparatively small scale and periodic unemployment
for great masses of workers, are only too evident. They are these: the
producer, deprived of the full equivalent of his product, cannot buy the
latter back. As a result, products accumulate in the hands of the
non-producers, till a point is reached when a halt is called to
production. Hence closed mills and factories, and men out of work.
In other words: when much food, clothing and shelter has been produced,
the producer is thrown out of work and is thus doomed to do without the
very things of which we have the greatest abundance. That is to say, the
more wealth the worker creates, the poorer he is; the more food on hand,
the greater the starvation; the more products are being accumulated, the
greater the army of the unemployed.
Surely ‘tis no more simple a problem that its existence is a travesty
upon all sanity or humanity.
The solution — the only possible one — consists in the producer
receiving the full value of his product, or its equivalent. This
involves the termination of capitalist production for profit, and the
organization of cooperative social production for use.
Such a change in the very fundamentals of capitalist society is
inevitable, both for reasons of social necessity as well as because of
the growing class consciousness and solidarity of labor. Bout though
inevitable, its accomplishment will require considerable time.
Meanwhile the unemployed by the hundred thousands are tramping the
streets of our industrial centers, many of them homeless and hungry.
What is being done in this matter by the lords of life, or by the
municipal, State and national governments? Why, practically nothing.
Even the labor unions, nay, even the Socialist party organs know no
better solution to offer than the need of new legislation. And while new
laws are being discussed, proposed, voted on and passed, then vetoed or
declared unconstitutional, only to be discussed again, amended and
passed, and finally found inapplicable or impossible of execution; then
labor departments created and commissioners appointed to “investigate
thoroughly” the whole situation and catalog the unemployed by trade,
number, nationality, sex, age, and color, — while months, aye, years,
pass in this graft game of high-paid politicians and reformers, what are
the unemployed, hungry and homeless, to do? How are they to exist?
Surely, every hungry man has a right to bread; has a right to demand it,
for he is entitled to it by laws more sacred than any man-made statutes
— the laws of human need, of self-preservation. And whoever dare refuse
a starving man bread, let him take heed. It was Marie Antoinette, if we
remember right, who scorned the demand of the Paris mob, when it cried
for bread. She probably regretted her hauteur when the same “mob” took
her head in exchange.