As an insight into the minds of the people to whom it is necessary to direct propaganda, surely there has been nothing better for some time than a little incident just lately reported in the Daily News and which they describe as a cruel hoax upon 10,000 hungry ex-Service men.
In the issue of that paper dated January 9th the report is made of a rumour which was spread in regard to the proposed Ford factory at Dagenham and, according to which, a contingent of 400 miners were being brought to Romford with the object of work associated with this factory being given to them. The report continued that the unemployed ex-Service men in the district accepted the rumour as true and that in consequence 500 of them went to the neighbourhood of the proposed factory to offer resistance, by force if necessary, to what they regarded as an unfair measure and so as to obtain for themselves all such temporary jobs as there might be available.
The point to be noted is that one section of the working class was prepared, if necessary, to use violent methods in order to coerce a number of other workers suffering from the direst poverty—possibly in a sorrier plight than they themselves were in —to take no advantage from this possibility of a job. An intention by one section of workers, we may say, to fight another section in order to get a job—the only thing all workers now live for.
What a sad reflection it induces as to the state of their minds. Or, rather, what a reflection upon the means used to produce that state of mind.
Communists imagine that, by some method that they alone understand but which they are entirely incapable of explaining, that they are going to lead such a divided rabble against all the powerful, devastating and horror-producing means of destruction that the capitalists know so well how to use, in an attempt to overthrow the capitalist class.
Just imagine the case of these ex-Service men. Having been willing to make every possible sacrifice for "their” country and that glorious Empire upon which the sun never rises, they come home to this country of “theirs” and in which their permission to live is conceded by the luxurious provision of a dole or a pension, and are willing to fight men by whose side they fought in the War in an attempt to secure a job which it is certain would only be temporary from a firm owned by those “hated foreigners" who have brought the art of exploitation to the highest pitch of efficiency.
The Press and capitalist parties, the school histories, religion, etc., we know, are responsible, as we also know who foster the "education" supplied through these agencies.
There is only one conclusion: the nature of capitalism and the remorseless and ruthlessly brutal nature of the pirates who exploit them will have to be brought home in a very clear manner to a very large number of workers before a Socialist society becomes a nearer possibility.
Miners, ex-Service men and others: Wake up!
G. M. A.
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