MIA > Archive > Fraina/Corey Archive > Decline of Am. Cap.
UNDERLYING the class-ideological crisis created by the decline of capitalism is a crisis of faith in the old order. More concretely, it is a crisis of the constituent ideals which animate the faith. The ideals of the American dream – the trinity of liberty, opportunity, and progress – were becoming, long before the crisis of the capitalist system, increasingly restricted in scope and unrealizable in practice. They lingered on primarily as a cultural lag: for ideals may persist and affect social action after the material conditions of their origin are no more. Now the breakdown of the ideals is startlingly revealed by the decline of capitalism. The faith of the million-masses begins to crumble.
The stubborn cultural lag identified with the ideals of the American dream is proof of their former vigor and measurable reality. They were, it is true, ideals forged in the fires of the bourgeois revolution in Europe, but they acquired greater scope and realization in the American scene because of the frontier and the absence of feudal hangovers, resulting in more favorable social-economic relations for the practice of liberty, opportunity, and progress. The American dream assumed definite shape and flourished most vigorously in the 1820’s-50’s. An enormous mass of settlers was absorbed by the frontier, creating an agrarian democracy whose independence and rebellious spirit strongly colored American life. Industry developed rapidly, and it was in the small-scale stage which made it “open to all the talents.” Restrictions on the right of labor to organize were overthrown. Remnants of semi-feudal tenure in the colonial land system were destroyed. The older aristocracy was breaking down, the new not yet entrenched in power. Free public education was enacted into law, and it measurably included higher learning. The ideals of the American revolution and of Jeffersonian democracy seemed wholly realizable. One bourgeois historian thus describes the situation:
“Neither an extreme of individualism nor uniformity. Class distinction became less obvious than in earlier days, but it did not quite disappear. There was absent the later bitterness of class feeling ... American aristocracy was not a closed caste, and it was everywhere firmly linked with the mass ... There was so close an approximation to economic equality to match the political that effort and ability could raise anyone to the top ... A fundamental element of a living was liberty, and all Americans were expected to look forward to becoming their own masters ... The agency of the national government was reduced to a minimum ... To deny that the American system of government would be immediately beneficial if adopted in China was to commit democratic treason; heredity availed not opportunity plus effort would produce anything at once ... Free men could be trusted to want what was right and to get it ... The dominant and simple belief in equality, the vast demand for labor, and the individualistic conception of government, all reinforced the sentiment that the United States was a refuge for the oppressed as well as an example to the world.” [1]
The dream had many tawdry elements. Underneath it all, moreover, were many serious abuses. There was the extermination of Indians and the slavery of the Negro. In the South the American dream was excluded, for slavery prevented its appearance even among “poor whites.” The factory system was consolidating itself, with its typical evils. Vile slums disfigured the larger towns. Political corruption flourished, and was generally considered an element of “opportunity.” Already there was prejudice and enmity against immigrants, whose labor sustained much of the liberty, opportunity, and progress of the older Americans. But the faith was that these abuses would be destroyed, as others had been: agrarian radicals and Abolitionists testified to the faith. The hope was, in this new world, that a new social order was being created, moving irresistibly onward to higher things. Of the measurably plebeian democracy impatient, rebellious, against the old and for the new the plebeian Whitman sang:
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The democratic masses, turbulent, wilfull, as I love them. Resist much, obey little. |
But where Walt Whitman believed he was singing the future democracy (some “radicals” still do), he was really celebrating an age already passing away in his own lifetime. For the social-economic relations which sustained the ideals of the American dream arose out of the prevalence of small independent property and the comparative ease of its acquisition. The middle class was ascendant; it was not restricted by survivals of feudal aristocracy, ideology, and political power. The workers were few and largely composed of skilled artisans; if they owned no property, they were convinced it was within their reach. The farmers were the largest class, independent, impatient of restraint, animated by a definite, if parochial, spirit of revolt. It was essentially the petty-bourgeois democracy of early capitalism, invigorated by the absence of feudal hangovers and the constant rebirth of the frontier (the small independent farmer is himself a petty bourgeois). But the development of capitalism is conditioned by the annihilation of independent property: an objective socialization of industry which assumes the capitalist form of concentration of ownership in a small predatory class. Whitman saw this development without appreciating its significance; in fact he greeted “the almost maniacal appetite for wealth, the immense capital and capitalists” as “parts of amelioration and progress, needed to prepare the very results I demand.” The makers of the American dream, by and large, crudely admired material progress, possessions, wealth. Yet these forces destroyed the conditions of petty-bourgeois democracy, limited or altered the ideals of the American dream, and strengthened its more tawdry elements.
The onward sweep of industrial capitalism, which consolidated its power during the Civil War and after, transformed social-economic relations. Out of the middle class arose the great industrial capitalists; the class was thrust downward, becoming a “class” of small businessmen struggling for survival, functional groups dependent upon large-scale corporate industry, and parasitic elements nourished by the purely speculative and predatory aspects of capitalism. The workers became industrial serfs; instead of independent property, the great objective now was jobs, higher wages, and lower hours. Agriculture was mastered by industry; the farmers were steadily deprived of their class-economic independence, ground down by capitalist exploitation, land speculation, and an increasing tenancy which gradually lost its character of climbing up the agricultural ladder. The frontier began slowly but inexorably to close: measurably by 1880, completely by 1900. Before this, a fundamental change in the frontier altered its significance. There were really two frontiers. The older frontier, before the 1850’s, built up an essentially self-sufficing agricultural economy; it was a driving democratic force, destructive of class stratification, creating an ideology and representing a way of life. [1*] The newer frontier, after the 1850’s, was increasingly dependent upon the economy of market and price; it was essentially a force in the extensive expansion of capitalist agriculture, mining, and industry, resulting in conditions destructive of the old ideology and way of life and consolidating a new class stratification. For agriculture sustained the development of capitalism in the Western regions, which made farming a business, destroyed its independence, and converted the new regions into provinces, if not direct domains, of industrial and finance capital. [2*]
Developments after the Civil War constantly restricted the reality of the American dream: its ideals disintegrated, were limited in practice, or assumed a different character. Most of the libertarian spirit evaporated. Independence was increasingly replaced by insecurity. Class lines began to harden and government to usurp more repressive powers. Individualism was submerged, except for the freedom granted to capitalist buccaneers, as a constantly greater proportion of the population became direct employees or general dependents of large-scale corporate industry dominated by the financial oligarchy. Opportunity for the mass was more and more limited to survival or slightly improving one’s lot within the new institutional set-up. The dream became primarily a faith in mere material progress; its old cultural promise was destroyed. But the dream was still vigorous and profoundly affected American life, mainly because of cultural lag, partly because there was still progress in many directions and capitalism, by and large, still “delivered the goods.”
The American dream lingers on, for the lag is stubborn. But it now experiences a crisis more serious than any in the past. For former crises did not shatter the dream; they merely destroyed some of its ideals, increasingly limited the realization of others, and gave still others new, if vulgar and unsatisfactory, forms of expression. Material progress and reform helped to sustain the dream’s cultural lag; but these very forces (the one ending in monopoly capitalism and imperialism, the other making them acceptable to the mass of the people) prepared the conditions of the decline of capitalism, which turns the American dream into a nightmare.
For now capitalism is not merely limiting or vulgarizing the ideals of the American dream. It is in direct revolt against them. They must be destroyed if capitalism is to endure in the epoch of decline. [3*] This appears clearly from an analysis of the dream’s constituent ideals.
1. Liberty: The right of the individual to live his own life in his own way (of which an earlier expression was freedom of conscience); tolerance as a way of life.
Always limited, and necessarily in a class society, this ideal was identified with the possession of property. It was in its cruder aspects an expression of competition and too often merely the liberty and individual right of the worker to starve (and is now increasingly becoming that). But the ideal, even in its limited realization, marks a great achievement of civilization. Although it arose out of bourgeois necessity, out of the struggle against feudal restrictions and the need for free labor, and was accompanied by barbarous exploitation of workers and expropriation of peasants, the ideal of liberty acquired its own loftier meaning: the right to doubt and act, to revolt, to create new forms of living in preference to the old. In this sense it was an upthrust of the human spirit. One aspect of liberty and individualism, particularly in the new world of the American scene, was the right to move freely in an economic and social sense. The petty bourgeois fairly easily went into business or the professions. The worker as easily changed his job, with some chance of becoming a master. The dissatisfied and adventurous migrated to the frontier, creating a pervasive agrarian democracy. These conditions invigorated independence and the “right to revolt” glorified by Jefferson and Whitman.
A great change was wrought, however, by industrial capitalism, whose institutional set-up destroyed, without developing an alternative, the earlier relations of liberty and individualism based upon the possession of independent property or the ease of acquiring it. [4*] The factory and the farm know little of them. They have been whittled down to a minimum by large-scale industry, although they offer the material means for an infinitely greater and finer realization of liberty and individualism. Monopoly suppresses them. They have been limited and degraded by all sorts of institutional pressures in the interest of profit and the ruling class, whose “rugged individualism” is merely a screen for predatory practices and disregard of the masses’ needs. (The widening gap between the ideal and the conditions of its realization is the major cause of that reactionary, poisonous ingrown individualism of the esthetes, with its contempt of the masses and life itself.) Now the decline of capitalism makes things worse. The disemployed – where is their liberty and individualism, or that of the employed worker, more fearful than ever of being fired? Liberty and the right to revolt, freedom of conscience and its right to doubt and act against the old order, become dangerous revolutionary ideals in the midst of a class-economic crisis. The old order no longer “delivers the goods.” Discontent must be suppressed, the masses isolated from the influence of subversive ideas, the individual (and the class) yoked to a new slavery. State capitalism limits with innumerable fetters the scope of liberty and individualism; fascism murderously tramples them underfoot, while elevating the liberty and individual right of the masters to plunder and destroy.
Tolerance as a way of life? It was never very real, limited by the strain of competitive living and class and institutional pressures. Now tolerance breaks down as class-economic antagonisms flare up in social war. Fascism makes intolerance its ideal, a system and a way of life.
2. Democracy: The right of the people to decide their own destiny in their own interests and in their own way; faith in the creative initiative and action of free men and women.
Bourgeois democracy, an incomplete form of democracy because identified with class domination, was itself always incomplete, particularly where it compromised with feudalism. Its American form was the most fully developed, primarily because of an agrarian democracy unknown in Europe. But the class-economic basis of bourgeois democracy is small independent property and petty-bourgeois rule: both are annihilated by monopoly capitalism. Hence the decay of the democratic spirit while the forms and ideal persist. Now the mere ideal is dangerous to capitalism, and it is the object of a growing offensive. “Democracy,” according to an influential American educator, “minimizes distinctions of worth, idealizes the mass, flatters the man in the street. With the degradation of power, as the center of gravity moves to the lower strata of the population, there is a corresponding degradation in the values of civilization.” [2] His contempt of the masses is justified by ascribing evils to “the psychology of the crowd itself,” as if “the crowd” is an independent historical category. That is the ideology of fascism. Even in its incomplete bourgeois form, democracy has enriched the values of civilization, particularly the possibility of enriching them still more. Capitalism in decline, not democracy, now revolts against civilization and degrades its values, for it is a revolt against the ideal of a creative democracy of free men and women.
The early American democracy encouraged revolutionary democratic struggles in other countries. It approved the French Revolution and the democratic revolts in Latin America, demanding “hands off” from monarchical Europe. Now the form of expression of that demand, the Monroe Doctrine, is used to impose our imperialist domination upon Latin America. Imperialism pursues a wholly reactionary foreign policy. It works with the most barbarous feudal-bourgeois elements in economically backward lands. Finance capital, with loans and other means, supports fascist reaction in Italy and Germany. Monopoly capitalism and imperialism replace democracy with domination and tyranny. Nor is this limited to alien lands: for at home democracy becomes increasingly the democracy of repression, disemployment, and misery.
Bourgeois democracy at the beginning practically excluded the workers, who had to fight hard and long to secure democratic rights. Their concrete form is the right of the workers to organize and strike, to act politically as an independent class, to struggle for a new social order. These rights were available to the workers, although always limited by the economic, political, and ideological terrorism of the ruling class and on condition that they were not used for revolutionary purposes. They did not endanger the existing order, as the capitalist upswing induced the workers to use their rights in peaceful struggle for reform and piecemeal social change. Now the decline of capitalism makes the concrete democratic rights of the workers dangerous. For the old order is breaking down; reforms and piecemeal social change are excluded. Strikes now tend to become more aggressive and threatening, class action more conscious of final objectives and means, the struggle for a new social order a more pressing necessity and an immediate revolutionary issue. Bourgeois democracy, in the “rights” it “grants” the workers, now undermines capitalist rule where once it was sustenance and support. State capitalism increasingly restricts the democratic rights of the workers: it “regulates” unions and “arbitrates” strikes, moving toward their abolition, and invigorates the persecution of revolutionary parties where it does not drive them underground. These measures tend toward the suppression of all independent organization and action by the working class and the abolition of all democratic rights by fascism, whose ideal is no democracy.
3. Equality: The right of all to an equal share in the fruits of progress regardless of origins; differences of racial or biological inheritance do not justify social inequality and class oppression or exclude any people from the highest forms of civilization.
The revolutionary bourgeoisie waged a vigorous struggle against inequality as one condition of its coming to power; the imperialist bourgeoisie wages a still more vigorous struggle against equality as one condition of retaining power. Equality was always limited, of course, by the class-economic relations of capitalist society. It had much of brutal hypocrisy: the poor man and the rich man, the small thief and the big thief were all “equal” before the law. But within the limitations, there were substantial achievements, particularly those secured by the struggles of the labor movement. The ideal of equality was a real force in the America of the 1820’s-50’s, and still more a real faith: invigorated by the new non-feudal world, its great agrarian democracy, and the prevalence of small independent property. As, however, the institutional set-up of capitalism hardened, inequality became more marked. Now the decline of capitalism sets in motion forces opposed to even the limited realization of equality.
Decline and repression threaten the gains of the labor movement, the workers are to become a lower caste, and their limited right to organize and act is limited still more, if not destroyed. The Negro, who has struggled agonizingly to secure a place in American life, is to be deprived of his small gains: the increase in jim-crowism and lynching is ominous of the future. Women’s rights are under constantly greater pressure, from more discrimination on jobs and wages to consigning them again to a medieval condition. Hatred of foreign-born workers is inflamed; they are repressed, discriminated against, deported if engaged in strikes or revolutionary activity, denied the “equal” rights of the American. (The great “melting pot” is now described, in the gracious words of two reactionary American educators, as “a very convenient garbage pail for Europe.” [3]) Capitalism moves toward a system of caste privileges for the “elite” and an equality of misery for the masses. For under the limited economic conditions of decline the workers (and constantly larger groups of the farmers and lower bourgeoisie) must be thrust downward in an absolute, not merely relative, sense in order that the “elite” may flourish.
Underlying these developments is an ideological drive in favor of inequality, whose “scientific” justifications acquire an increasing currency. Inequality, according to its apologists, is conditioned by the germ-plasm, both in races and individuals. ‘”Innate superiority,” according to two American educators, “is the secret of the greater productivity of the business and professional classes [who have] a higher ratio of biologically superior individuals ... The degree of achievement has [not] been conditioned to any considerable extent by the environmental factors.” [4] Not the decline of capitalism, which has outlived its historical utility and now survives only by repressing progress, but degeneration of the germ-plasm may “cause society to collapse and usher in a return of barbarism,” as in the case (this is mere apologetics) of Rome and other ancient civilizations. [5] The masses are the masses because they are unfit, the “elite” are the “elite” because they are fit. The “elite” are to breed only with one another, the fit with the fit. [5*] Inequality is erected into a biological-caste system in the interests of the existing order and its ruling class.
Concepts of inherent racial inequality, buttressed by the most brazen distortions of biology, anthropology, and history, are used to justify imperialism. The whites are the superior race. So they can plunder colored peoples, butcher them, commit the most hideous crimes, impose reaction upon them and prevent their progress to a higher civilization. The brutes must pay for being born of the wrong germ-plasm! But precisely as imperialism has its class aspects promote capitalist profit, prevent the objective forms of a new social order developing into socialism so the “racial” justification of imperialism has its definite class aspects. Both, in final analysis, are directed against the working class. While white peoples are considered the superior race, they are in turn divided into superior Nordics and inferior Mediterraneans, with the Alpines in between. Now observe the ingenious class application of a wholly unscientific and unhistorical theory: Within each white nation there is a mingling of races. The upper class are the superior Nordics, the middle class are the in-between Alpines, while the masses of workers and poorer farmers are the inferior Mediterraneans. “The cramped factory and the crowded city,” according to one American exponent of the theory, favor the “little brunet Mediterranean” and not the “big blond Nordic.” [6] So the workers are condemned to biological-racial-class inferiority and subjection.
These ideas are fantastic, unscientific, brutal. That does not, however, lessen the menace, for they meet the reactionary needs of capitalism in decline. State capitalism increasingly accepts them; fascism erects them, and other reactionary ideas, into a monstrous system of oppression. Both within the nation and in lands under imperialist domination the mere idea of equality becomes dangerous: it has revolutionary implications and must be destroyed.
The masses of workers and farmers are to become helots with a small middle class as slave-drivers, while a still smaller upper class reigns and enjoys.
Other races? Objects of war and plunder; if within the nation, objects of subjection approaching extermination to prevent racial “defilement” (Jews in Germany, the American Negro).
Women? They are to breed men for the wars, as cattle are bred for the slaughter pens.
4. Mass well-being: The right of all to the good things of life, particularly the right of the mass of the people to share, and share increasingly, in the conquests of industry and civilization; the abolition of poverty.
Mass well-being has become the most important ideal of the American dream for the workers, because of their occupational inflexibility resulting from constantly more rigid class stratification. The ideal was not, however, of bourgeois origin; it was created primarily by the upthrust of the masses and the ideology of the labor movement arising out of the conditions of capitalist development. Bourgeois revolutions called the masses to action but suppressed them after the conquest of power, disregarding their well-being. The industrial revolution was accompanied by increasing mass misery; improvement of the workers’ lot in the epoch of capitalist upswing was offset by increasing misery in newly developing industrial nations and in colonial lands. Yet capitalism, by and large, raised considerably the level of mass well-being as a by-product of economic expansion and necessity and in response to the struggles of labor. Not as much, of course, as among other classes; not as much as was possible in view of the immensely augmented productive forces of society. There were recurrent depressions when mass well-being was submerged, and periods of prosperity when the workers did not share in the gains of material progress or saw their relative share decreased. Nor was poverty abolished, although its abolition has been possible these many, many years. But the tendency was upward, if slowly, interruptedly, agonizingly, and there was always the hope of better things to come. Now the hope is killed by the decline of capitalism and its crisis of the system, by mass disemployment, lower wages, and lower standards of living.
The shattering of the ideal of continuously greater mass well-being is of the utmost significance, as the great mass of workers have increasingly interpreted the American dream in terms of improvement on the job. Now jobs become scarce and working conditions worse. Mass well-being is replaced with mass misery, the ideal of the abolition of poverty with a new and wholly unnecessary poverty. Capitalism returns to the epoch of increasing misery. State capitalism gives lip-service to mass well-being with mass relief and promises, for it clings to the old ideology in words. Fascism brutally and cynically discards the ideal of mass well-being. Mussolini categorically declares the “good old times” will not return, that the nation (workers, peasants, and lower bourgeoisie) must accustom itself to lower standards of living. [7]
Recompense? The glory of fascism and war, of the prison and concentration camp!
5. Opportunity: The right to an equal share in economic and political opportunity, whose perpetual rebirth was assumed, unrestricted by origins; in its more subtle forms, an aspiration after higher things.
This is the most bourgeois ideal of the American dream. It was rooted in the demand for bourgeois opportunity to exploit the workers, in preference to feudal exploitation. It meant essentially the opportunity to acquire property (and to plunder others of their property). In the earlier years of the American republic, property was comparatively easy to acquire: if in no other way, then by staking out a farm on the frontier. Opportunity was measurably an element in a way of life. Its most important causes were the enormous need for material development in a new world, the great increase in population, primarily because of immigration, the perpetual rebirth and expansion of the frontier, and the swift tempo of capitalist development. The resulting unusual social-economic growth, both in time and place, and the fluidity it created, multiplied opportunity and the chances offered to the more enterprising among the mass of the people.
The onward sweep of industrial capitalism provided new forms of opportunity while limiting the acquisition of independent property to an increasingly smaller class. But for propertiless workers, opportunity now meant getting a job and improved working conditions; for a constantly greater number of farmers it meant getting a mortgage or becoming tenants. Opportunity in general, however, was sustained by its new forms resulting from the upswing of capitalism, mainly technical, managerial, and professional. It became more and more a matter of “rising” within the institutional set-up of industrial and monopoly capitalism. Immigration was again a factor, for older Americans “rose” because of the influx of aliens into the poorer-paid occupations. But the great majority of workers were practically excluded. Of 18,400 individuals born around 1870 and represented in Who’s Who for 1922-23, only 1,259 or 6.8% were the children of workers. [8] The son of a skilled worker had one chance of rising out of 1,250, the son of an unskilled worker one chance out of 37,500. This has more the appearance of a lottery than of opportunity. Conditions in 1870, moreover, were comparatively favorable to “rising” among sons of the mass of the people; thus some groups of the farmers, who furnished 23.4% of the persons in Who’s Who, prospered because of the continuous expansion of agriculture, the growth of cities in the newer regions in which their farms were, and the chance of making money by the discovery of minerals in their lands. As expansion in general slowed down, opportunity became more and more a monopoly of the intermediate and upper bourgeoisie. This is confirmed by a bourgeois study of the origins of American business leaders:
“Contrary to an American tradition of long standing, the typical figure among present-day business leaders in the United States is neither the son of a farmer nor the son of a wage-worker ... The proportion of farmers’ sons among successful businessmen is tending to decrease and that of businessmen’s sons (specifically, the sons of major executives) is tending to increase. The slack created by the decreasing proportion of farmers’ sons is being taken up not at all by the sons of manual workers ... The representation of sons of major executives is on the increase. If this tendency continues for many decades, the well-to-do classes [intermediate and upper bourgeoisie] will be contributing the major share of business leaders, and the middle classes [lower bourgeoisie, including farmers, clerks, and salesmen] but a minor share.” [9]
First opportunity was limited for the working class. Then it was increasingly limited for the farmers and lower bourgeoisie. Now the further limitation of opportunity, an inescapable result of capitalist decline, means that the existing possessors of money and power will augment their control of diminishing opportunity. For the workers, it means a tremendous restriction of their only opportunity: to get a job and improved working conditions. Fascism tries to “freeze” this situation for all time, and with the most brutal sort of repression.
Aspiration? It can only be the other-world aspiration of medieval Christian submission – or the revolutionary aspiration for a new social order, for socialism.
6. Education: The right to an education and faith in education as the means for personal improvement and progressive solution of social problems; the creator of new and finer ways of life.
This is one of the most cherished ideals of the American dream. And in truth, after the technical-economic, capitalism has scored its greatest achievements in education. (Particularly in terms of their contribution to the possibility of developing a new social order.)
A revival of learning arose out of stirrings created after the tenth century by the accumulation of technical-economic and social-economic changes. The revival was conditioned by the emergence and development of the bourgeoisie. But it was a revolutionary class. The ideals and the martyrs of the new learning and of science, moreover, went measurably beyond mere bourgeois class necessity. They stormed the heavens. They stressed learning or education as Enlightenment: the light of reason, the human and the rational, the freedom to break down mental and social barriers and create new ways of life and thought opposed to the medieval. The university, even where it was enmeshed in the Church, was a center of resistance to feudal tyranny. Science, with its technical and experimental approach and the new vistas it opened up, invigorated the ideal of learning as change and mastery of the world and of life. Underlying the ideal of education was a sense of the perfectibility of man. (The cynic and the reactionary sneer. But is not perfectibility a creative ideal? Its horizons recede, but they beckon: is it not inspiring to march toward them?) The revolutionary pioneers of bourgeois education envisaged it as the means of solving social problems, of creating and realizing new ideals and ways of life.
By the 1800’s, the revolutionary vigor was no more. But the earlier ideals of learning appeared in the philosophy of mass education. Its pioneers insisted that this was the means of transforming man and society. This ideal was a passionate faith in the America of the 1820’s-50’s. It was embodied in the onward sweep of free public school education, including many institutions of higher learning. Emerson and others expressed their conviction that education meant the perfectibility of man, which was identified with the perfecting of democracy. But this democracy turned against itself. The perfectibility of man degenerated into practical “self-improvement” and the crotchety perfection of the crank and sectarian reform. Bourgeois education was stultified by its class nature and crass utilitarianism. A great educational plant was built up, but its scope was limited. The public schools provided competent workers and clerks. The institutions of higher learning provided competent technicians and professionals and ideological defenders of the existing order; on a smaller scale, they provided the cultural gilt indispensable to a ruling class. Nor was higher learning freely open to the mass of the people. In 1927, only 24% of American college students were the children of wage and clerical workers [10] (who constituted nearly 70% of the gainfully occupied).
Yet, in spite of limitations, the educational achievements were great. Now they are threatened by the decline of capitalism.
There was a serious breakdown in educational facilities during the depression. In the winter of 1933-34, at least 250,000 certified teachers were unemployed, while in many states the teachers earned less than $400 yearly. The rural school system approached collapse, with over 5,000 schools closing in 1933. Over 3,000,000 children of school age were not in school. Because youngsters could not get jobs, they swelled the enrollment in high schools, but this was a mere makeshift of no permanent consequence. Universities, with lower appropriations, cut staffs and salaries and limited the number of students. Public libraries were almost crippled by a tremendous shrinkage in staffs and books. The public school situation was most serious. “Our claim,” according to one observer, “that the sons of the farm hand and the factory owner through our public schools have the same chance to make good fades daily further into the realm of theory.” [11]
Higher education is afflicted by a crisis of overproduction, as in industry itself: by educational excess capacity. Already before 1929 the number of trained people – technicians, professionals, intellectuals – was greater than the market could absorb; and this was true also in the case of collegians whom education prepared for the noble job of selling bonds and other merchandise. The curve of output was upward, that of demand downward. Educational mass production created the conditions of its doom. Higher education increasingly sloughed off its cultural values; it merely prepared the student for a “better” job, for “rising” in the world. Most of them were disappointed. Now the situation is much worse: overproduction mounts as demand still falls. College students are prepared largely for disemployment, for the surplus population. [6*] Yet there is tremendous need for professional services. There are great physical, mental, and social wants to be satisfied. Capitalism answers with a growing reaction against higher education, with restriction of educational opportunity.
Underlying these developments is a crisis of education as Enlightenment, a faith in reason, a revolutionary force transforming old and creating and realizing new ways of life. These magnificent aspirations were not fulfilled. They could not be fulfilled because of the class nature of bourgeois education: the bourgeoisie turned against its earlier revolutionary ideals and became reactionary. The university moved toward the more crassly utilitarian and domination by the millionaires who endowed it. Now and then the issue of “academic freedom” was thrust across the march to safe and sane learning: the unavailing protest, ruthlessly suppressed, of a scholar with some sense of the rebel tradition of the university. It was a liberal protest. Now it takes another form and becomes revolutionary. Communist and other rebel elements among students and faculty increasingly demand the “academic freedom” to think, organize, and act independently on the vital issues of the day. They are the carriers of the early revolutionary ideal of education as Enlightenment, as the solver of social problems, as the creation and realization of new ways of life. But the rebels are told to shut their mouths. The police are used against them. They are thrown out of college. Forcible means of suppression, hitherto reserved for the workers, are now used against college rebels. (This objective identification of students with the working class must become subjective and active, for the proletarian revolution liberates education of its bourgeois class fetters.) The crisis of education as Enlightenment appeared in the inability to solve social problems in terms of reason, repressed by ruling class interests and necessity. Now this aspect of the crisis appears on an overwhelming scale in the conditions created by the decline of capitalism. Of what avail is education in this social-economic breakdown? Of what avail against the furies of class interest, which condemn millions to disemployment and misery? Of what avail against imperialism and war? Of what avail against fascism, which conjures up the most malevolent passions of reaction to trample upon education, upon civilization itself? Liberals still cling to education, to enlightenment and reason in general. But the faith becomes more hopeless, assumes the degrading forms of ballyhoo, turns into a prop of reaction because it is now a flight from reality and struggle. [7*]
In this, as in other things, capitalist decline moves toward fascism, which completes the state capitalist tendency toward the “planned limitation” and final degradation of education. It is a starveling and a hireling in Fascist Italy. After fascism came to power in Germany, the number of yearly admissions to the universities was cut from 40,000 to 16,000; education is now “based on brawn, instinct, tribal customs, and morals, the aim to produce loyal, strong, and obedient members of the herd called the Nazi state.” [12] Education is limited. It becomes more and more narrowly national, negating the earlier international character of bourgeois learning. What is left is deprived of all spirit and initiative, of all progressive aspects: it is thrust down to the level of black magic, to make the world safe for reaction. For the fascist war against the masses is a war against enlightenment.
Enlightenment for the solving of social problems? That is dangerous, a negation of the reaction upon which capitalism now depends; it means struggle against capitalism and fascism, for socialism and communism.
Storm the heavens? Education now becomes training for storming the strongholds of civilization and destroying them.
7. No class stratification: The right to move freely from one class to another, including a disregard of class distinctions which colored American life and made it impatient of traditional restraint.
There never was, of course, a classless society. Yet American society appeared measurably near it in the 1820’s-50’s, when classes were fluid, distinctions not great or fixed, movement from one class to another freer than before or since. There was no feudal class, the older aristocracy was breaking down, and the agrarian democracy was almost universal. But the “classless” ideal of petty-bourgeois democracy is dependent upon the possession of property, which germinates the seeds of self-destruction. Universal ownership of capitalist property is impossible, as it arises out of a class mode of production and the expropriation of producers. Classes were fluid, but they were there, interlocked with the class-economic relations of capitalism. The very factors of class fluidity – the extensive expansion of agriculture and the speed of industrial development – moved toward class stratification: for out of them arose large-scale industry with its propertiless proletariat and “new” middle class, and capitalist farming with its propertiless laborers and tenants. Class fluidity diminished after the Civil War, although still sustained by the capitalist upswing. But fluidity was limited to “rising” within the limits of increasingly rigid class lines. The propertiless workers, becoming the largest class, were definitely consigned to the lower depths. Most of the fluidity was within the “new” middle class and on top, where the new moneybags intruded upon the resentful older possessors of wealth. Farmers were still able to rise, but decreasingly so. Class stratification appeared more definitely and rigidly after the 1900’s, with the slowing down of industrial and agricultural expansion and the consolidation of monopoly capitalism. Some measure of fluidity reappeared in the 1920’s, but it was almost wholly within the middle class, and class stratification was not in the least altered. Capitalist decline has its own class fluidity, in reverse: large groups of farmers and the middle class are objectively proletarianized, and millions of workers are thrust downward into the “new” class of disemployed.
Impatient of restraint? The restraints of class stratification are multiplied by state capitalism: it cannot tolerate impatience with things as they are under the conditions of capitalist decline. Fascism converts class stratification into a system of caste, for that is the meaning of the “principle” of hierarchy. Impatience becomes treason and restraint an ideal.
8. Limited government: The right to minimum interference by the state and faith in the creative action of the people: opposition to bureaucracy as a heritage of monarchy.
This was the bourgeois ideal of “that government is best which governs least,” created in the struggle against the absolute monarchy, itself a product of bourgeois development. It was never a very vigorous ideal, for as an organ of class suppression the state must have unlimited power. It was most cherished in the America of the pre-1850’s, primarily because of an independent agrarian democracy and of a society in rapid motion over large, thinly settled areas. But as the motion slowed down and more complex social-economic relations arose, government acquired greater powers. For while the bourgeoisie might object to monarchical state interference against its interests, it demanded state aid in its favor. Strikes and labor revolts had to be crushed. Legislation was necessary to eliminate abuses which threatened capitalism itself. Monopoly capitalism and imperialism enormously enlarged the scope of state power and action. One revealing aspect of these developments was the increasing limitation of “state rights” in favor of the Federal government.
Already before 1929 the ideal of “limited government” was a farce. Now it becomes tragedy, as the decline of capitalism makes necessary an increase in the bureaucratic and repressive forces of the state. State capitalism must prop up the capitalist economy, repress discontent and labor action, prepare for intensified imperialist competition and new wars. Fascism completes this development with the “totalitarian” state: a metaphysical conception of all within the state and for the state, which masks the most brutal reality of the state as an organ of class suppression. Bourgeois society starts with an ideal of “limited government” and ends with the practice of the state as all. Apologists of capitalism branded socialism as “the coming slavery.” Behold it in fascism!
Creative action by the people? Always limited, it is limited still more by state capitalism and annihilated by fascism. For creative action by the people now means transforming the objective forms of a new social order into socialism.
9. Peace: The right to peace and the peaceful settlement of disputes; monarchical tyranny means war, while democracy moves toward universal peace.
This is the most hypocritical of the bourgeois ideals. Not merely is peace excluded in a class society, but capitalism has enormously augmented the destructiveness of war. The ideal of peace was most real in the America of the 1820’s-50’s (although it did not prevent aggression against the Indians and war with Mexico, or the Civil War, the greatest slaughter since the Napoleonic era). It arose out of a conviction that war was the result of monarchical tyranny, and should not scourge the Americas. But it did. The ideal of peace acquired great strength also in Europe, in spite of the Franco-Prussian War, during the capitalist upswing after the 1860’s. This was particularly true in Britain, “peaceful” because it sat on top of the world. It was, however, the epoch of imperialism, antagonisms sharpened, and both peace and war became instruments of policy. The older imperialist nations wanted peace, the newer considered peace an aggression. Small attention was paid to the “little wars” against colonial peoples, for they yielded profits and were not particularly disturbing. But the conditions underlying these “little wars” prepared the great catastrophe of 1914-1918. The more feverish the war preparations and the nearer catastrophe loomed, the more passionate became the belief in universal peace. The United States was drawn in by the war, in spite of its isolation in the “democratic” new world. The “war to end war” was followed by more wars, and by the greatest war preparations in the history of mankind. Imperialist antagonisms are sharpening, because of capitalist decline, and are driving toward another and more destructive world war. Production is prostrate, but the munitions industry is active; technological progress in general lags, but new and more murderous weapons of war are perfected. In its struggle to prevent the objective forms of a new social order emerging into socialism, capitalism threatens the destruction of all civilization.
One of the objectives of state capitalism, clearly revealed in the NRA, is to augment war preparations, to “unify” the nation economically and politically for imperialist aggression and war. State capitalism still pays lip-service to peace, still considers war essentially as an instrument of policy. But fascism, the final desperate resort of capitalism in decline, not only augments war preparations, it makes an ideal of war.
War, according to Hitler, is to replace the vile ideals of democracy and progress; it must become the great mission of life:
“Once more we want weapons! ... For the reawakening of the slumbering life-will of the nation. Then everything, from children’s primers to the latest paper, every theatre, every cinema, every bulletin board and every empty fence wall, will be placed in the service of this single great mission, until the fear-prayers of our present pseudopatriots, ‘Lord, make us free!’ will be changed, even in the brain of the smallest boy, to the glowing appeal: ‘Almighty God, bless our weapons for the future; be just as you have always been just; judge now whether we are worthy of freedom. Lord, bless our struggle!’” [13]
War, according to Mussolini, is a biological function and the supreme creative force:
“War is to man what maternity is to woman. From the philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint I do not believe in perpetual peace. Only a sanguinary effort can reveal the great qualities of peoples and the qualities of the human soul.” [14]
These reactionary and barbaric ideas are not new. But until now they were primarily the psychopathic ravings of small groups, useful on occasion as ideological trimming for war as an instrument of policy. States paid at least lip-service to peace. For the fascist, however, war is not merely an instrument of policy, it is an ideal, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Unlimited powers of coercion are used to impose the ideal upon society. Fascism means war upon the masses, war upon other peoples and cultures, war as a way of life.
To what end? That dying capitalism may writhe a bit longer in its death agony. To prevent the birth of a new social order.
10. Progress: The right and possibility of unlimited progress, the synthesis of all the preceding ideals; a steady, inevitable upward movement to new and finer fulfillments.
The bourgeoisie wrought the idea of progress, a concept of the utmost creative significance. It arose out of the struggle waged by the new bourgeois class against feudalism on all fronts: economic, political, cultural. Social relations had to become different, to change, to move. But not mere motion: it was a concept of development, of continuous upward movement to new objectives. As the bourgeois revolution thrust its ideals beyond immediate class objectives, so the idea of progress soared beyond its class-economic origins. It released the forces of the human will, created a new approach to the world, made man feel himself capable of mastering his fate.
Faith in progress was particularly vital in the American dream. It was invigorated by a new world taking shape in the wilderness, by an almost complete shattering of the fetters of the past, by an extraordinary economic development and its progressive accompaniments. The ideal arising out of these conditions is thus expressed by Dr. Charles A. Beard:
“Underlying all is a belief that the lot of mankind can be continuously improved by research, invention, and taking thought. This is the philosophy of progress ... All legislation, all community action, all individual effort are founded on the assumption that evils can be corrected, problems solved, the ills of life minimized and its blessings multiplied by rational methods, intelligently applied. Essentially by this faith is American civilization justified.” [15]
This ideal was always limited and distorted in practice. It is now, in its bourgeois form, a mere pitiable echo of what has been and a tragic ignoring of what might be. For Dr. Beard speaks (in 1932!) as if the ideal was now in action: but what a mockery of progress, of the rational and intelligent, is the social-economic breakdown created by the crisis of the capitalist system! Dr. Beard speaks as if capitalism is identified with progress everlasting: but capitalism, limiting progress even in the epoch of upswing, now in its decline openly revolts against progress and all its works, because they undermine the existing order.
The revolt against progress originates in the movement of economic forces. Capitalist progress emphasizes the material. While crudely interpreted as mere money-making by the bourgeois, material progress transformed the old world and set in motion forces of ideological change which reacted on the general movement of social progress. But this was conditioned by class-economic factors. It was a response to the needs of the bourgeois economic order, whose upthrust and development destroyed old relations and created new ones. The underlying driving force was the self-expansion of capitalist production: the production and realization of surplus value, the development of larger markets, the industrialization of new regions. The moment comes, however, when economic progress is limited by the movement of capitalist production itself. Production and realization of surplus value move downward because of the increasingly higher composition of capital and mass disemployment. The productivity of labor creates an abundance which presses upon contracting markets and endangers profit. Industrialization of new regions is either completed or prevented by the contradictions of monopoly capitalism. Capitalism is undermined by the very productive forces it called into being. The formerly relative self-destructive character of capitalist production now becomes absolute. It resorts to limitation of output on a mass scale: repression of the productive forces of society. Out of decline and decay arises the capitalist revolt against economic progress.
The revolt against economic progress becomes an ideological revolt. Progress means the continuous upward movement of society. But capitalism is not eternal; it is not immune to the law of social succession. Basing himself on the idea of progress and its manifestations in the dialectical movement of capitalist production, Marx saw the relations of a new social order developing within the shell of the old. Capitalism created collective or social forms of production, the objective basis of socialism. The capitalist bourgeoisie moved and had its being by creating the industrial proletariat, the objective carrier of socialism. As this dialectical movement appeared more clearly, threatening the old order, the bourgeois idea of progress began to change. Where formerly it included the revolutionary transformation of an old social order by the new, progress was now limited to mere change and pedestrian reform within the existing order. Among small but important intellectual groups a whole philosophy arose embodying a reaction against progress: limiting, scoffing, rejecting, mobilizing all the resources of the human mind to prove that progress was a delusion and a snare. Now the philosophy opposed to progress is seized upon by the capitalist class. For capitalism has outlived its historical utility. It is in the epoch of decline and decay. Progress is now realizable only in a form which endangers capitalist rule, by socialism releasing the creative social-economic forces of society, by the revolutionary struggle for power of the proletariat and its allies. Hence capitalism reacts against progress on all fronts: economic, political, cultural. Progress now again means the necessity of revolutionary change.
State capitalism clings to progress in words. But where is it in practice? The real job of state capitalism is to prop up the old order, to make it more resistant to progress, or socialism. State capitalism merely tries to “freeze” the breakdown and decay of capitalist decline. This eventually manifests itself in the fascist repudiation of the idea of progress. Fascism fuses into a system all the old reactionary ideas opposed to progress and deliberately moves backward to revival of a mixture of Caesarism and medievalism, which was emphatically rejected by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Reaction becomes a faith and retrogression its works.
New and finer fulfillments? They are doomed by capitalist decline and decay. New and finer fulfillments of progress are potential only in the revolutionary struggle for power, for socialism and communism.
Thus capitalism is driven to revolt against progress and all the other ideals of the American dream and of the bourgeois revolution. Now, in ideological form, the forces which sustained capitalism turn into their opposites and become its antagonists. For the ideals, seizing upon great masses, are an historical force. The masses believe in them and want them realized, having measurably identified them with their own mixed, groping, yet definitely plebeian aspirations. Cultural lag is identified with the bourgeois form of the ideals, with faith in the possibility of their realization in the existing order. As capitalist decline increasingly limits their already incomplete realization and moves toward their destruction, including destruction of the concrete democratic rights of the workers, the ideals become dangerous, for it is impressed upon the masses that they are realizable only in new forms and in a new social order.
This is the crisis of the American dream, underlying the class-ideological crisis created by the decline of capitalism. The crisis prepares the subjective conditions of fundamental social change. For the objective clash between the old and the new order must become a conscious class struggle, which transforms the quantity of accumulated socialeconomic changes into the quality of revolutionary action for the new social order. A class, in this case the proletariat, cannot become revolutionary and perform its historic task, cannot carry on the struggle for power, until it has broken the ideological fetters of the old order: it must replace the old faith with its own consciousness and ideals, and make the new world they express acceptable to the other exploited elements of society.
The ideals of the American dream, of the bourgeois revolution, become an ideological factor in the struggle for power. Ideology is itself a social force. The liberal middle class wants to “save” the ideals by “more generous” distribution of small independent property, clinging still to a petty-bourgeois world which monopoly capitalism and imperialism have destroyed. Moderate reformist socialism wants the peaceful, gradual development of the ideals toward a new order, and is, along with them, annihilated by fascism. The capitalist bourgeoisie wants to retain and “revive” the ideals as ideological trimming while increasingly limiting them in practice, or completely destroying them by resort to fascism and its “ideal” of negating progress. The communist proletariat wants to transform and realize them in the newer and finer fulfillments of socialism, precisely as it wants to transform and more fully realize the material promise of capitalist production. This is possible only after the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat and the overthrow of capitalist rule. The “self-movement” of the progressive forces of capitalism, particularly in the epoch of decline, does not lead, as petty-bourgeois radicalism and moderate socialism believe, toward a new social order: for state capitalism tramples upon the progressive forces and fascism suppresses them. This is inevitable as long as capitalism holds the repressive powers of the state: it will not yield up the powers peacefully but must be forcibly deprived of them. Only revolutionary action can do this, only the dictatorship of the proletariat can uproot capitalist relations, suppress any upsurge of reactionary elements, and set in motion an uninterrupted movement toward the new social order of socialism.
Unlike fascism, which makes dictatorship an ideal and eternal, communism considers the dictatorship of the proletariat as wholly temporary and functional, necessary only to consolidate the revolutionary power and create the relations of the new social order. Unlike fascism, which repudiates progress and all its ideals, communism accepts them as historical forces in transition (bourgeois society is the most transitional of all social systems) toward new forms and fulfillments, cleansing them of the elements and limitations identified with class exploitation and property ... Liberty and individualism are deprived of all meaning in terms of economic individualism and the liberty of one class to exploit another. No ingrown class forms of either which deny them to the mass! Economic collectivism liberates the human and cultural forces of liberty and individualism and makes them accessible to all ... Democracy is proletarian democracy, embracing the immense majority of the people; made complete and habitual by socialism, it becomes the freedom of communism ... The abolition of classes makes possible the abolition of social inequality: first the enormous inequality of capitalism, then the lesser inequality of the socialist transition period. Differences of individual endowment do not give the right or the power to exploit others, but are merely the source of variations in the human and cultural symphony of society ... Mass well-being: it is the primary objective, no longer limited by class rule and profit ... Opportunity ceases to be identified with rising over the masses or the acquisition of property: it is a mass opportunity to share in life fully and greatly ... Education, its class fetters broken, is creative mass preparation for a way of life, the union of labor and culture. Its scope grows immensely; with abundance and leisure mass participation in higher learning moves on until it is universal. Socialism is mastery of the world and life: hence the emphasis on education ... There is no class stratification, as classes are abolished ... Where capitalism starts with the “ideal” of limited government and ends with the all-devouring “totalitarian” state of fascism, socialism starts with the dictatorship of the proletariat and ends with the dissolution of the state into the community of integrally organized producers, manual and mental. For socialism needs a state only so long as there is capitalist reaction to suppress, national and international ... Peace ceases being merely an aspiration; it is fully realizable when class-economic antagonisms are wiped out on a world scale ... Progress, freed of its class limitations and .antagonisms, acquires a new spirit, becomes the object of deliberate aspiration, planning, and fulfillment. Culture, always limited and exclusive and now threatened by capitalist decline, experiences an immense quantitative and qualitative upsurge.
That is the promise of the proletarian revolution and communism. It is a promise whose elements already exist, alongside their reactionary opposites, within capitalist society, repressed by the old order but potential of the new: they need only to be released to move onward to the society of the free and equal.
1*. They still talk, to-day, of farming as a way of life, although it has long since been a business and is being ruined by the decline of capitalism.
2*. Frederick J. Turner was the first historian to analyze the significance of the American frontier. But Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920), oversimplified the picture by neglecting the conditioning class-economic relations. This is also true of his analysis of sectional struggles, which at bottom were class struggles. The frontier and sections were important peculiarities of American development, but it is impossible to grasp their full significance without relating them to class relations and the onsweep of industrial and monopoly capitalism. The frontier contributed to the shaping of the American dream; it contributed still more to the development of capitalist agriculture and industry, which reacted against the dream. Turner and his successors were not satisfied to consider the influence of the frontier as temporary and past, but projected it into the future as a “spirit” still animating American life and creating a new national unity. But the frontier and the dream passed on; monopoly capitalism remains, with its class stratification, economic decline and crisis, and reaction against the ideals of the American dream.
3*. This is a world development. The ideals of the American dream are essentially the democratic ideals of the bourgeois revolution. In Europe they appear in the remnants of liberalism, and particularly in moderate reformist socialism. For this movement, in spite of its claims to Marxism, is really built on a faith that the bourgeois democratic ideals are capable of peaceful, gradual transformation and realization as socialism. This forgets the scientific prophecy of Marx that capitalism would break down and become a reaction against its own productive forces and ideals. In all the capitalist nations of Europe the attack upon democratic ideals grows. They are completely destroyed in Italy and Germany as wholly pernicious and unnecessary. The Spanish revolution embodied all the democratic ideals, which were given a substantial radical coloring by the strong labor and socialist movement; but now, as the workers did not completely overthrow the ruling classes, the reaction against democratic ideals grows – not merely, feudal-clerical but capitalist reaction, for the bourgeoisie is afraid of revolutionary action by the workers and peasants. In economically backward lands, imperialism hampers the development of bourgeois democratic ideals or distorts them. For while, in their struggle against imperialism, the local bourgeoisie accepts the democratic ideals, it does so gingerly because of a fear of their effect upon the masses of workers and peasants. Only the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants accepts the ideals and gives them, under communist inspiration, the significance of a struggle for socialism. As in Russia, the historically belated bourgeois revolutions merge into the proletarian revolution.
4*. Walter Lippmann, The Method of Freedom (1934), urges an extension of independent property to insure freedom and democracy, as “private property was the original source of freedom” and “it is still its main bulwark” – at a time when independent property is anachronistic, the ownership of essentially collective property is highly concentrated, and fascism annihilates freedom and democracy to preserve the “rights” of property; he urges making workers members of the middle class and strengthening that class in the interests of freedom and democracy – at a time when the middle class is disintegrating and is used to suppress freedom and democracy. Rip Van Winkle awoke after twenty years; Walter Lippmann sleeps on.
5*. Two “cultural” American exponents of this policy, Ellsworth Huntington and Leon F. Whitney, The Builders of America (1927), are really monomaniacal and obscene on the subject. They cast (p.120) longing eyes upon the feudal right of the first night, “which gave the lord of the manor the right to demand that every young girl on his estate spend the night with him before her marriage. A barbarous custom? Certainly, but biologically good. The children would possess a better average inheritance.” They say (p.115) of the feudal aristocracy’s whoring: “As a rule they took only the unusually attractive women. A letter from the King of France, or some similar man, thanks his noble host not only for the high quality of the food and drink, but for the attractiveness of the women. Thus the high inherent qualities of the leading men are joined with the best stocks among the lower classes.” They offer (p.113) an apology for polygamy: “When polygamy is highly developed a much better biological condition would seem to prevail. [The fit] acquire wealth and power above that of their neighbors. One of the first uses to which such wealth and power are put is almost always to acquire a number of wives, almost certainly above the average ... Put yourself in the place of a powerful chief. Would you be content with anything but the prettiest, most charming and most intelligent wives if you had free choice? The numerous children inherit fine qualities from both parents.” These sentiments are repeated by a German fascist professor, according to Ludwig Lore, Behind the Cables, New York Post, April 10, 1934: “Monogamy for life is unnatural and harmful to the species. There are in every community willing and industrious men and youths. One lusty fellow could become the mate of from ten to twenty young women.”
6*. The desperation of the college graduate’s plight is indicated by the suggestions of Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, college president and now head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who, according to the New York Times, June 17, 1934, urged the graduate to “open up new fields beyond the ranges of custom.” What? “There is room for a thousand young men to make themselves expert in preventing soil erosion ... Another career is that of irrigation. [With agriculture strangled by its own surplus.] ... A young woman might build up a good business by training herself in child care and relieving parents of the charge of their youngsters at certain hours of the day. [This was a favorite device of women during the depression: the field is overcrowded and pays almost nothing.] Or she might become an expert in entertaining young people and open up a kind of community centre with the cooperation of her town. Another opportunity for a man might be that of director of safety for a number of small towns.” This is what education and opportunity have come to!
7*. A similar crisis exists in science. Alongside the great theoretical advances of recent years in science has developed an increasing restriction of its social application. The reaction of capitalism in decline against technical-economic progress must profoundly affect science, if for no other reason because to-day it depends upon the use of large material means. As in the case of education, moreover, the faith in science as the means of solving great social problems has completely demonstrated its futility. Yet scientists still cling to the faith, but it now leads to the acceptance of religion and not its challenge. The bourgeois revolution created modern science; only the proletarian revolution can liberate it.
1. Carl Russell Fish, The Rise of the Common Man (1927), pp.8-12, 62, 110.
2. Everett Dean Martin, The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p.22.
3. Ellsworth Huntington and Leon F. Whitney, The Builders of America (1927), p.75.
4. F.W. Taussig and C.J. Joslyn, American Business Leaders (1932), pp.243, 251.
5. Huntington and Whitney, Builders of America, p.116.
6. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color (1921), pp.164-67.
7. New York Times, May 27, 1934.
8. Stephen S. Visher, A Study of the Type of the Place of Birth and Occupations of the Fathers of the Subjects of Sketches in Who’s Who in America, American Journal of Sociology, March 1925, p.553.
9. Taussig and Joslyn, American Business Leaders, pp.234-37.
10. O.R. Reynolds, The Social and Economic Status of College Students (1927), p.14.
11. H.G. Campbell, High School Has a Boom, New York Times, September 24, 1933; Eunice Fuller Barnard, Our Schools Face a Day of Reckoning, New York Times, April 15, 1934; R.L. Duffus, Our Starving Libraries (1934), pp.2-6.
12. New York Times, April 11, 1934; June 17, 1934.
13. Frederick L. Schuman, Germany Prepares Fear, New Republic, February 7, 1934, p.355.
14. New York Herald Tribune, May 27, 1934.
15. Charles A. Beard, A Charter for the Social Sciences (1932), p.71.
Last updated on 29.9.2007