Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Ruined By Riches. (1926)

From the September 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard
The extraordinary wrongness of our present industrial system is shown once more by the outcry at the bumper crop of American raw cotton. One would think that a record crop of this kind would be greeted with delight by the user as well as by the ultimate consumer as a guarantee of abundant raw material, low prices and correspondingly brisk expanding trade. But it appears that in the world constituted as it now is, abundance of raw cotton is a positive calamity. Stated coldly like that, the only possible inference from the assertion is that the world is quite mad. The facts are, we believe, that in value the export of British cotton to India, for instance, is now greater than in 1913, but the volume is from various causes very greatly less the volume exported in 1913. This state of things is al very well for the banker and the financier; it is ruin to the unfortunate operative who is on permanent short time; because to him, the volume manufactured is everything. But there must be something wrong with a system in which a trade can flourish financially while the people who are engaged in it are in desperate straits, and in which the prospect of ample raw material takes on the air of a positive calamity. — (Daily News, 11/8/26.)
We have said this often. Now they say it perhaps it will carry more weight.
Gilmac.

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