This at least you admit; the class represented by the strikers is vastly larger than that represented by the owners; we are that much nearer to democracy. But you demand one hundred per cent pure democracy—dear reader of capitalist opinion!
Well, the workers offer you the way; they cheerfully permit all owners to become workers—either of hand or brain—and to receive their full share with all other workers of hand or brain; whereas, in the nature of the case, the owners do not welcome the workers as owners, and are doing all in their power to make sure that no one shall be owners but themselves. This is the fundamental and all-determining fact about the class struggle, and the reason why he who serves the interest of the workers is serving the interest of all society, and of the Co-operative Commonwealth which is to be. To the argument that the taking of power by the workers is the substitution of one kind of class tyranny by another kind of class tyranny, the answer, complete and final, is that there is no need of the capitalist class as a class and that the world will be a happier place for all men when the members of that class have become workers, either of hand or brain. When that has been done, there will be no classes, therefore no class tyranny, and no incentive to class lying. Thus, and thus only, shall we break the power of the capitalist press—by breaking the power of capitalism. And so it is that I, an advocate of pure democracy, am interested in this story from the Argentine Republic, and tempted to cry to the American dockers, the American typographers, the American newswriters: "Help! Help against the lying, kept press!"
And as I am reading the final proofs of this book, I hear the answer to my cry. I read the following in the "New York Times":
Boston, Oct. 28.—Pressmen employed by the Chapple Publishing
Company, Ltd., on discovering in a cartoon in "Life" which is being
printed here during the New York strike, what they considered a reflection
on organized labor, suspended work and refused to return
until the objectionable cartoon was taken out. The cartoon was eliminated,
and the men returned to work.
The drawing depicts a room apparently meant to typify conditions existing in a city tenement district. The artist portrays a man beating his wife over the head with the leg of a chair. The woman is shown lying on the floor; the man has one knee on her body and one hand clutching her throat. A child about two years old is shown in bed
