A Modern "Metropolis" (1927)

From the May 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Concerning a weird picture being shown at a West London cinema, we read, about robots, or semi-human automatons, who slave in the bowels of the earth, to sustain the guilded drones of their day in the sunlit atmosphere of the regions above; We are brought back to reality, however, for from a professor who has studied American life and prosperity (!) comes the information that the automaton business has actually arrived and is threatening contagion: Our prosperity, he says:-

Can only be obtained at a tragic price, not less than the transformation of millions of workers into automatons. "Fordism," which is the essence of American industry, results in the standardisation of the workman himself . . . France has the same instinctive fear of America as symbolised by Ford, as she of the German system on the eve of the war. (Review of a book by Professor Siegfried, Daily News, 13/4/27.)

Among the bogeys with which we have been confronted from time to time, we have often encountered the threatening one that Socialism would make life monotonous and stereotyped; as in other case, so in this we answer: To observe the consummation of that which is vile, loathsome and de-humanising. Look around.

W. E. MacHaffie