Page:Meet the Communists (Flynn).djvu/11

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their jobs. Inventions or improvements in working processes are deliberately suppressed for reasons of profit.

Plenty can be produced for all in America, an abundance of food, clothing, shelter and means of education, amusement, travel, recreation, for all the people. "Heaven on earth" is not an idle dream. The material basis is the utilization of labor, machinery and materials to full capacity in planned socialist production and in socialized distribution. Produce for use and not for profit!

Today, no matter how muck is produced, none of it belongs to the people. If the products of farm and factory cannot be sold for a substantial profit they are stacked in warehouses and granaries and allowed to rot. We have "shortages" of stockings, men's shirts, and baby's diapers, while plenty are stored away. If our scientists finally contact the moon and one of its inhabitants should drop down to visit us, it would be hard to explain such a crazy system to him!

A small tight-fisted, granite-faced, flint-hearted group of owners condemn millions of workers to a mere existence wage and throw millions of free Americans out to starve. We can work, to live and support our families, only when they say so. When they nod their heads factories and mines close or open up. This is free enterprise; this is the profit system; this is private ownership; this is capitalism. It has produced war and more war, hunger and want, unemployment and misery, in the midst of untold wealth. It has produced that "shame of the twentieth century"—fascism.

It solves no problems for the welfare of the people. For example, how does capitalism preserve the "great American home?" There are over 17 million homes in the U.S.A. today which lack running water, private toilets, or bathtubs. In the world's leading metropolis, the wonder city of gleaming skylines, New York, there are 85,000 homes without bathrooms, 19,000 without inside toilets. There are a thousand homes with no water supply within fifty feet, and another thousand with only hand pumps for water. That's capitalist sanctity of the home for you.

That a worker who is able, willing and anxious to work can be jobless, that the stench of the slums can arise in all our

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