The Evils of Capitalism

"Capitalism is organized crime, and we are all its victims"- Anonymous
Capitalism has been the status quo for far too long. The suppression of wealth and labor on part of the capitalist-aristocratic governments is disheartening humanity’s existence in the world. Comrades, the needs of the people are not being met. It’s time we realize the evils that we are living in and make the necessary changes for international progress. First off, I will define Capitalism and put it into the necessary context. Next, I will describe the spread of Capitalist globalization, the exploits of the system, and “free trade”. Finally I will offer a sufficient alternative to the corruption of Capitalist agenda.
In 1909, Century Dictionary defined Capitalism as the possession of capital or the concentration or massing of capital in the hands of a few, where they control the economic system or the distribution of wealth. A more modern source defines Capitalism as an economic system characterized by private or corporation ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision rather than by state control, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly in a free market. Notice the difference?
Currently in the world, most of the members of the United Nations are considered to have capitalist-democratic systems. But some of these nations are brutal dictatorships oppressing their people by saying they are doing it for the “common good”, while others do it by more noticeable and extreme measures. Though Adam Smith, one of the foremost Capitalist thinkers in , believed that while these human motives that drive these governments are often based on greed, the competition in the capitalist free market would tend to benefit society as a whole by keeping prices low, still building in an incentive for a wide variety of goods and services. History has shown this to be incorrect, because in the system this fundamental human nature dictates inherent corruption in the “free market” system, since it’s given to the power of a few instead of the collective populous. The trend is: In countries where there is capitalist economic system there is usually a maldistribution of wealth (and power), a tendency toward market monopoly, and economic exploitation. And the bourgeoisie (upper class rulers) still strive for more and more political and economic power, without realizing who’s is getting less and less.
In 2005, the richest 300 people in the world had the same amount of wealth as the bottom 3 billion. The question is: when all this power is put into the higher classes, Won’t the people in power take way propriety from lower classes? Yes. Capitalism was designed that way.
“Since its earliest days, capitalism has inflicted incalculable harm on the inhabitants of the earth. Primitive accumulation, world wars, slavery, various forms of labor servitude, ruthless wage exploitation, territorial annexation, colonial and interstate wars, racist, gender, and other forms of oppression – all this and more occupy prominent places in the historical mapping of U.S. and world capitalism.” Sam Webb, Communist Party USA Chairman
I know it may seem hard to believe, but we don’t control our lives in our current system of monopolistic-capitalism. We may think we do, but no, the Corporations do. Through control the ways and means of every single one of the commodities we possess, they hold the power. Capitalists base their private ownership of the means of production on the exploitation of us working class citizens. They have to buy our suppressed labor power to increase their profits, so they exploit the working class.
Capitalism encourages the powers that be use the profit motive, so they make sure they get as much money out of the product they provide. Although one could argue: Is this such a bad thing? Yes. The reality of the situation is: companies are getting more profit, but are still laying off workers. According to the Michigan IMC, “The Ford Motor Co. released an announcement of plans to lay off 25,000 to 30,000 auto workers and shut down 14 plants. It also intends to lay off 4,000 white-collar staff. Seven assembly and parts plants are to be closed by 2008 and the rest by 2012.” But in 2005, [Ford Motor Co.] was the largest exporter of cars out of the U.S. Slowly it’s becoming a similar pattern with every single multi-billion dollar business in the world. The private industries of the world are firing workers while their executives still have the highest paychecks. Capitalism is ruining our lives by just chipping at the iceberg, and one of these days unemployment is going to be a fact of life for 25% or 50% of the population just like during the Great Depression. Yet, unknown to the American populous, it’s already a fact of life in many of the developing nations. How can the corporations continuously lay off American workers and get away with it, you ask? Free Trade Laws passed in 1994 and earlier encouraged the off shoring jobs to these developing nations, increasing the profit margins. Sadly, it won’t stop anytime soon.
The developing world is being exploited in this process of “free trade”. Since NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was passed in 1994, under Democratic President Bill Clinton, there has been an increase of the suppression of labor in all its member nations. According to wikipedia.org, a bipartisan online encyclopedia, “Transnational corporations (lead by the Capitalists) have tended to support NAFTA in the belief that lower tariffs would increase their profits. Labor unions in Canada and the United States have opposed NAFTA for fear that jobs would move out of the country due to lower labor costs in Mexico which have been reduced by about 20 percent in some sectors. According to Greg Beiter of the Socialist Alternative written May 1st, 2006, “128 million people in Latin America live on less than $2 per day (USAID.org). More than 130 million have no access to safe drinking water, and only one in six persons enjoy adequate sanitation service (NACLA.org). [Capitalists and their respective countries] argue that in a globalized world we need “free trade” and capital should be free to pick up and move to any country with the best market conditions such as Latin America. Free Trade policies have allowed U.S. companies to lay off unionized workers in the U.S. so they can set up sweatshops across the Mexican border. U.S. workers have lost around 395,000 jobs since NAFTA was put into effect and now their new jobs pay on average 23% less. Simultaneously, poverty has exploded in Mexico, with two-thirds of the population now living on less than $3 per day.”
Free Trade is not free. It is nothing more than another attempt by the powers that be to use the profit motive in globalization so they manufacture the products we indulge in, while exploiting the poor so they can make as much profit as possible. It began in the (Capitalist) system.
I’m sure you’re thinking, is there an alternative to this madness? Sure. It was William Morris who said “[We seek] a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick workers, nor heartsick hand workers, in a world, in which all would be living in equality of condition and would manage their affairs unfaithfully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth.” A decent way to start is found an organization or international task force where we regulate trade, and the distribution of wealth, and implement a true socialist system, without the class antagonisms of the neo-capitalist parties (i.e. The Democratic Party of the United States), in which power and privilege is distributed “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." In essence, encourage pure fair trade on an international scale instead of “free trade”, through the international public institutions.
Whether it is traditional Ladakhi society, or the villages in eastern Ecuador, the profit motive of the Capitalists brought their company there. I must ask you, Can we, as American citizens be happy, or in the least bit content with economic system of “free-market” capitalism when we see images of the devastating effects when this same system is implemented in the developing world taking away its community basis and ultimately ruins its way of life? No. We as citizens of the powerful Capitalist nation in the world have an obligation to speak out against tyranny and corruption, and it needs to start now.
"We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both." - Louis Brandeis, United States Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939

A New Era of Freedom

An oratory on communism and its potential upbringing in postmodern society (revised edition, Trotskyist)
“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.”- Karl Marx
My fellow Americans, we are at a crisis: Over the past several decades we were ill advised, misrepresented, misinformed, and now victims of our own wealth and power. We’ve seen the corporate agenda play out in its most brutal form in our own country and across the world and we have done nothing, when it’s plaguing our human existence at its very core. While the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it’s time that we look to the most viable alternative to monopolist post-modern capitalism that’s out there in modern society, communism. First, I will explain communism and how it can be effective in the economic stratus. Next, I will explain its social agenda and differences of opinion in relation to its Marxian doctrine. Finally, I will denounce capitalism and explain in the eyes of many how a post-modern communism should be implemented in our society.
A communist society, by definition, is a classless society in which capitalism is overthrown by a working-class revolution that gives ownership and control of wealth and property to the people, in Marx’s view being the final piece of a revolutionary process of transformation, which goes somewhat like this:
• First, the realization of persecution against the proletariat (the working class) by those of the bourgeoisie (the class of modern capitalists-“the rich folk”) in an autocratic society.
• Next, the revolution of the working classes, leading to the overthrow of the Government at large.
• Then, the redistribution of the wealth by the communists, through, simply, a change in the means of production.
• Finally, The working class, or proletarian, democracy carries out the final “withering away” of the bourgeois State, founding communism in all aspects of society.
“[Communism or scientific socialism]… by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will insure the material well-being of each member of the community.” Oscar Wilde’s reflection in The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891 tells us of the condition for working class autonomy, by laying out the primary goal of true communism. Though the notion of postmodern co-op is profoundly utopian, it is a society where the ruling class does not rule; and through that system we can create public integrity and collective economic trust. The present capitalist aristocracy is designed to work for its own private property through greed, corruption, and monopoly of free market. The conditions for the revolution to replace the aristocracy are what Marx described as “dialectal materialism”: the process and history behind it, in which society creates a shared class propriety, therefore ending class struggle. To justify this, he and Engels wrote in the German Edition of the Communist Manifesto, “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society… all social wealth: the land, factories, and works are taken out of the hands of the exploiters and… into common property of the people.” Yet history has shown that a pure communist society hasn’t ever existed and I’ll show you why.
Many argued and still do to this very day that communism will never be possible because of what has dictated "human nature” and how the system has been implemented throughout the modern age. The essence of this argument is the belief that the only type of communist society is one where there’s an un-egalitarian central government that would suppress the middle classes, and would therefore undermine the overall initiative of people. This argument is based on two false assumptions: One, it assumes that a communist society will never change from the way it was implemented in the former Soviet Union, China, and most especially North Korea. When the reality is, that the Communist parties in those countries, were and are strictly authoritarian-based aristocracies since the hierarchy of the Government in those nations separated itself from the commune, which led to the suppression of the working class. It also assumes that “human nature” is limited to the definition where people only work in order to own larger commodity or gain. When in fact, in State and Revolution V.I. Lenin believed that the communist revolution would be driven by a proletariat vanguard, but managers and bookkeepers, that would only make workingman’s wages, would do the specific commanding methods of the Party. However in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule there was intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and corruption. Stalin believed that bureaucracy was inevitable with Statist Marxism, just as in America the conservatives believe capitalism was inevitable with democracy.
As I alluded to earlier, I know may seem hard to believe, but we don’t control our lives in our current system. We may think we do, but no, the corporations do. Capitalism, a noun; an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a competitive market and motivation by profit. Through control of the ways and means of every single one of the commodities we possess or take in, they hold the power. Since the beginning of modern society capitalism has imposed immense harm on humanity. For example: world wars, labor slavery, and endless wage manipulation, and class injustice, just to name a few. Capitalists, (those who wear top hats anyway), base their private ownership of the means of production on the exploitation of us working class citizens, through the buying and selling of our suppressed labor power in order to increase their profits. On the contrary, in communism we actually have control over the means of production in society as a whole, and our way of life.
The question is: how do should we implement Communism in a Capitalist society such as the United States of America? In 1934, Trotsky wrote in If America Should Go Communist “[The Americans] are prepared to [implement communism] as is no other country. Nowhere else has the study of the internal market reached such intensity as in the United States. [American] banks, trusts, individual businessmen, merchants, traveling salesmen and farmers have done it as part of their stock-in-trade. Your [Communist] government will transform [privatization] into a scientific system of economic planning.” In summary, the means of production, for example, agriculture, private works, and other such industry, would become national property and would be placed under the control of society.
In conclusion, I hope you think that communism is no longer the vile demon as Joe McCarthy and other Cold War antagonists portrayed it. Humanity has been alienated throughout history based our social classes for too long, through the noticeable corruption in capitalism and private ownership. Greed and corruption on the part of the bourgeoisie in today’s society is plaguing humanity’s potential for true freedom and liberty. It’s time that America lives up to the communist ideals it printed in the Declaration of Independence, called life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So with that in mind, I leave you with these final words, "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution… Working men of all countries, unite!"


Comments? Questions? Concerns?

The Need for American Communism

Leon Trotsky's

If America Should Go Communist
Transcribed for the Trotsky Internet Archive by sryan@marxists.org
From Liberty, March 23, 1935

August 17, 1934

Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance.

At present most Americans regard communism solely in the light of the experience of the Soviet Union. They fear lest Sovietism in America would produce the same material result as it has brought for the culturally backward peoples of the Soviet Union.

They fear lest communism should try to fit them to a bed of Procrustes, and they point to the bulwark of Anglo-Saxon conservatism as an insuperable obstacle even to possibly desirable reforms. They argue that Great Britain and Japan would undertake military intervention against the American soviets. They shudder lest Americans be regimented in their habits of dress and diet, be compelled to subsist on famine rations, be forced to read stereotyped official propaganda in the newspapers, be coerced to serve as rubber stamps for decisions arrived at without their active participation or be required to keep their thoughts to themselves and loudly praise their soviet leaders in public, through fear of imprisonment and exile.

They fear monetary inflation, bureaucratic tyranny and intolerable red tape in obtaining the necessities of life. They fear soulless standardization in the arts and sciences, as well as in the daily necessities of life. They fear that all political spontaneity and the presumed freedom of the press will be destroyed by the dictatorship of a monstrous bureaucracy. And they shudder at the thought of being forced into an uncomprehended glibness in Marxist dialectic and disciplined social philosophies. They fear, in a word, that Soviet America will become the counterpart of what they have been told Soviet Russia looks like.

Actually American soviets will be as different from the Russian soviets as the United States of President Roosevelt differs from the Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II. Yet communism can come in America only through revolution, just as independence and democracy came in America. The American temperament is energetic and violent, and it will insist on breaking a good many dishes and upsetting a good many apple carts before communism is firmly established. Americans are enthusiasts and sportsmen before they are specialists and statesmen, and it would be contrary to the American tradition to make a major change without choosing sides and cracking heads.

However, the American communist revolution will be insignificant compared to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in terms of your national wealth and population, no matter how great its comparative cost. That is because civil war of a revolutionary nature isn't fought by the handful of men at the top—the 5 or 10 percent who own nine-tenths of American wealth; this handful could recruit its counterrevolutionary armies only from among the lower middle classes. Even so, the revolution could easily attract them to its banner by showing that support of the soviets alone offers them the prospect of salvation.

Everybody below this group is already economically prepared for communism. The depression has ravaged your working class and has dealt a crushing blow to the farmers, who had already been injured by the long agricultural decline of the postwar decade. There is no reason why these groups should counterpose determined resistance to the revolution; they have nothing to lose, providing, of course, that the revolutionary leaders adopt a farsightcd and moderate policy toward them.

Who else will fight against communism? Your corporal's guard of billionaires and multimillionaires? Your Mellons, Morgans, Fords and Rockefellers? They will cease struggling as soon as they fail to find other people to fight for them.

The American soviet government will take firm possession of the commanding heights of your business system: the banks, the key industries and the transportation and communication systems. It will then give the farmers, the small tradespeople and businessmen a good long time to think things over and see how well the nationalized section of industry is working.

Here is where the American soviets can produce real miracles. "Technocracy" can come true only under communism, when the dead hands of private property rights and private profits are lifted from your industrial system. The most daring proposals of the Hoover commission on standardization and rationalization will seem childish compared to the new possibilities let loose by American communism.

National industry will be organized along the line of the conveyor belt in your modern continuous-production automotive factories. Scientific planning can be lifted out of the individual factory and applied to your entire economic system. The results will be stupendous.

Costs of production will be cut to 20 percent, or less, of their present figure. This, in turn, would rapidly increase your farmers' purchasing power.

To be sure, the American soviets would establish their own gigantic farm enterprises, as schools of voluntary collectivization. Your farmers could easily calculate whether it was to their individual advantage to remain as isolated links or to join the public chain.

The same method would be used to draw small businesses and industries into the national organization of industry. By soviet control of raw materials, credits and quotas of orders, these secondary industries could be kept solvent until they were gradually and without compulsion sucked into the socialized business system.

Without compulsion! The American soviets would not need to resort to the drastic measures that circumstances have often imposed upon the Russians. In the United States, through the science of publicity and advertising, you have means for winning the support of your middle class that were beyond the reach of the soviets of backward Russia with its vast majority of pauperized and illiterate peasants. This, in addition to your technical equipment and your wealth, is the greatest asset of your coming communist revolution. Your revolution will be smoother in character than ours; you will not waste your energies and resources in costly social conflicts after the main issues have been decided; and you will move ahead so much more rapidly in consequence.

Even the intensity and devotion of religious sentiment in America will not prove an obstacle to the revolution. If one assumes the perspective of soviets in America, none of the psychological brakes will prove firm enough to retard the pressure of the social crisis. This has been demonstrated more than once in history. Besides, it should not be forgotten that the Gospels themselves contain some pretty explosive aphorisms.

As to the comparatively few opponents of the soviet revolution, one can trust to American inventive genius. It may well be that you will take your unconvinced millionaires and send them to some picturesque island, rent-free for life, where they can do as they please.

You can do this safely, for you will not need to fear foreign interventions. Japan, Great Britain and the other capitalistic countries that intervened in Russia couldn't do anything but take American communism lying down. As a matter of fact, the victory of communism in America—the stronghold of capitalism—will cause communism to spread to other countries. Japan will probably have joined the communistic ranks even before the establishment of the American soviets. The same is true of Great Britain.

In any case, it would be a crazy idea to send His Britannic Majesty's fleet against Soviet America, even as a raid against the southern and more conservative half of your continent. It would be hopeless and would never get any farther than a second-rate military escapade.

Within a few weeks or months of the establishment of the American soviets, Pan-Americanism would be a political reality.

The governments of Central and South America would be pulled into your federation like iron filings to a magnet. So would Canada. The popular movements in these countries would be so strong that they would force this great unifying process within a short period and at insignificant costs. I am ready to bet that the first anniversary of the American soviets would find the Western Hemisphere transformed into the Soviet United States of North, Central and South America, with its capital at Panama. Thus for the first time the Monroe Doctrine would have a complete and positive meaning in world affairs, although not the one foreseen by its author.

In spite of the complaints of some of your arch-conservatives, Roosevelt is not preparing for a soviet transformation of the United States.

The NRA aims not to destroy but to strengthen the foundations of American capitalism by overcoming your business difficulties. Not the Blue Eagle but the difficulties that the Blue Eagle is powerless to overcome will bring about communism in America. The "radical" professors of your Brain Trust are not revolutionists: they are only frightened conservatives. Your president abhors "systems" and "generalities." But a soviet government is the greatest of all possible systems, a gigantic generality in action.

The average man doesn't like systems or generalities either. It is the task of your communist statesmen to make the system deliver the concrete goods that the average man desires: his food, cigars, amusements, his freedom to choose his own neckties, his own house and his own automobile. It will be easy to give him these comforts in Soviet America.

Most Americans have been misled by the fact that in the USSR we had to build whole new basic industries from the ground up. Such a thing could not happen in America, where you are already compelled to cut down on your farm area and to reduce your industrial production. As a matter of fact, your tremendous technological equipment has been paralyzed by the crisis and already clamors to be put to use. You will be able to make a rapid step-up of consumption by your people the starting point of your economic revival.

You are prepared to do this as is no other country. Nowhere else has the study of the internal market reached such intensity as in the United States. It has been done by your banks, trusts, individual businessmen, merchants, traveling salesmen and farmers as part of their stock-in-trade. Your soviet government will simply abolish all trade secrets, will combine all the findings of these researches for individual profit and will transform them into a scientific system of economic planning. In this your government will be helped by the existence of a large class of cultured and critical consumers. By combining the nationalized key industries, your private businesses and democratic consumer cooperation, you will quickly develop a highly flexible system for serving the needs of your population.

This system will be made to work not by bureaucracy and not by policemen but by cold, hard cash.

Your almighty dollar will play a principal part in making your new soviet system work. It is a great mistake to try to mix a "planned economy" with a "managed currency." Your money must act as regulator with which to measure the success or failure of your planning.

Your "radical" professors are dead wrong in their devotion to "managed money." It is an academic idea that could easily wreck your entire system of distribution and production. That is the great lesson to be derived from the Soviet Union, where bitter necessity has been converted into official virtue in the monetary realm.

There the lack of a stable gold ruble is one of the main causes of our many economic troubles and catastrophes. It is impossible to regulate wages, prices and quality of goods without a firm monetary system. An unstable ruble in a Soviet system is like having variable molds in a conveyor-belt factory. It won't work.

Only when socialism succeeds in substituting administrative control for money will it be possible to abandon a stable gold currency. Then money will become ordinary paper slips, like trolley or theater tickets. As socialism advances, these slips will also disappear, and control over individual consumption—whether by money or administration—will no longer be necessary when there is more than enough of everything for everybody!

Such a time has not yet come, though America will certainly reach it before any other country. Until then, the only way to reach such a state of development is to retain an effective regulator and measure for the working of your system. As a matter of fact, during the first few years a planned economy needs sound money even more than did old-fashioned capitalism. The professor who regulates the monetary unit with the aim of regulating the whole business system is like the man who tried to lift both his feet off the ground at the same time.

Soviet America will possess supplies of gold big enough to stabilize the dollar—a priceless asset. In Russia we have been expanding our industrial plant by 20 and 30 percent a year; but—owing to a weak ruble—we have not been able to distribute this increase effectively. This is partly because we have allowed our bureaucracy to subject our monetary system to administrative one-sidedness. You will be spared this evil. As a result you will greatly surpass us in both increased production and distribution, leading to a rapid advance in the comfort and welfare of your population.

In all this, you will not need to imitate our standardized production for our pitiable mass consumers. We have taken over from czarist Russia a pauper's heritage, a culturally undeveloped peasantry with a low standard of living. We had to build our factories and dams at the expense of our consumers. We have had continual monetary inflation and a monstrous bureaucracy.

Soviet America will not have to imitate our bureaucratic methods. Among us the lack of the bare necessities has caused an intense scramble for an extra loaf of bread, an extra yard of cloth by everyone. In this struggle our bureaucracy steps forward as a conciliator, as an all-powerful court of arbitration. You, on the other hand, are much wealthier and would have little difficulty in supplying all of your people with all of the necessities of life. Moreover, your needs, tastes and habits would never permit your bureaucracy to divide the national income. Instead, when you organize your society to produce for human needs rather than private profits, your entire population will group itself around new trends and groups, which will struggle with one another and prevent an overweening bureaucracy from imposing itself upon them.

You can thus avoid growth of bureaucratism by the practice of soviets, that is to say, democracy—the most flexible form of government yet developed. Soviet organization cannot achieve miracles but must simply reflect the will of the people. With us the soviets have been bureaucratized as a result of the political monopoly of a single party, which has itself become a bureaucracy. This situation resulted from the exceptional difficulties of socialist pioneering in a poor and backward country.

The American soviets will be full-blooded and vigorous, without need or opportunity for such measures as circumstances imposed upon Russia. Your unregenerate capitalists will, of course, find no place for themselves in the new setup. It is hard to imagine Henry Ford as the head of the Detroit Soviet.

Yet a wide struggle between interests, groups and ideas is not only conceivable—it is inevitable. One-year, five-year, ten-year plans of business development; schemes for national education; construction of new basic lines of transportation; the transformation of the farms; the program for improving the technological and cultural equipment of Latin America; a program for stratosphere communication; eugenics—all of these will arouse controversy, vigorous electoral struggle and passionate debate in the newspapers and at public meetings.

For Soviet America will not imitate the monopoly of the press by the heads of Soviet Russia's bureaucracy. While Soviet America would nationalize all printing plants, paper mills and means of distribution, this would be a purely negative measure. It would simply mean that private capital will no longer be allowed to decide what publications should be established, whether they should be progressive or reactionary, "wet" or "dry," puritanical or pornographic. Soviet America will have to find a new solution for the question of how the power of the press is to function in a socialist regime. It might be done on the basis of proportional representation for the votes in each soviet election.

Thus the right of each group of citizens to use the power of the press would depend on their numerical strength—the same principle being applied to the use of meeting halls, allotment of time on the air and so forth.

Thus the management and policy of publications would be decided not by individual checkbooks but by group ideas. This may take little account of numerically small but important groups, but it simply means that each new idea will be compelled, as throughout history, to prove its right to existence.

Rich Soviet America can set aside vast funds for research and invention, discoveries and experiments in every field. You won't neglect your bold architects and sculptors, your unconventional poets and audacious philosophers.

In fact, the Soviet Yankees of the future will give a lead to Europe in those very fields where Europe has hitherto been your master. Europeans have little conception of the power of technology to influence human destiny and have adopted an attitude of sneering superiority toward "Americanism," particularly since the crisis. Yet Americanism marks the true dividing line between the Middle Ages and the modern world.

Hitherto America's conquest of nature has been so violent and passionate that you have had no time to modernize your philosophies or to develop your own artistic forms. Hence you have been hostile to the doctrines of Hegel, Marx and Darwin. The burning of Darwin's works by the Baptists of Tennessee is only a clumsy reflection of the American dislike for the doctrines of evolution. This attitude is not confined to your pulpits. It is still part of your general mental makeup.

Your atheists as well as your Quakers are determined rationalists. And your rationalism itself is weakened by empiricism and moralism. It has none of the merciless vitality of the great European rationalists. So your philosophic method is even more antiquated than your economic system and your political institutions.

Today, quite unprepared, you are being forced to face those social contradictions that grow up unsuspected in every society. You have conquered nature by means of the tools that your inventive genius has created, only to find that your tools have all but destroyed you. Contrary to all your hopes and desires, your unheard-of wealth has produced unheard-of misfortunes. You have discovered that social development does not follow a simple formula. Hence you have been thrust into the school of the dialectic—to stay.

There is no turning back from it to the mode of thinking and acting prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

While the romantic numskulls of Nazi Germany are dreaming of restoring the old race of Europe's Dark Forest to its original purity, or rather its original filth, you Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics. Within a century, out of your melting pot of races there will come a new breed of men—the first worthy of the name of Man.

Comments? Questions? Concerns?