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| | [http://library.brown.edu/jpegs/1362683052976639.jpg '''Why the United States Must Adopt Socialism'''] by R.A. Dague | | [http://library.brown.edu/jpegs/1362683052976639.jpg '''Why the United States Must Adopt Socialism'''] by R.A. Dague |
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| − | ''"The annual report of the Steel Trust for December 31, 1911, shows that last year it made net profits of $142,000,000 or a profit of $700 on each employee."'' | + | ''"'Crushing of the weak by the strong, he [Chancellor Andrews] says, is an eternal principle. Time will come, says the chancellor, when wrecks of humanity will be put out the world mercifully by skilled physicians just as Mr. Rockefeller terminated the existence of the weaker oil companies.'"'' |
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| − | For Karl Marx, exploitation is unpaid wages. By this definition, any member of the working-class whose company realizes a profit is exploited. Dague finds this appalling, and uses the factoid to suggest why socialism is necessary for the United States. He continues, ''"The U.S. Senate Labor and Education Committee recently in its official report denounced the United States Steel Corporation as a "brutal system of industrial slavery.""'' Strong rhetoric of slavery via exploitation is reminiscent of the slavery of fifty years prior... It took over a century to free slaves from Africa. Will Dague tolerate taking that long to solve exploitation in the industrial era?
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| − | ''"Socialism is a systematic, well-thought-out system of Industrialism, which will meet the requirements of the new era coming. It will stop stock-watering and "industrial peonage," and the crushing of the weak by the strong. It will furnish employment to all the unemployed. It will abolish strikes and blacklisting and dynamiting and war. It will take children out of the mills and shops and put them in school; it will make comfortable the aged, not by chloroforming them, but pensioning them.''"
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| − | While these all sound like great things, and appeal to the masses, how will socialism result in such change? Dague provides empty claims that preach to the choir that is ''The Masses''. In fact, Dague seems to gather his persuasion from the ethos that comes from shaming both the system of capitalism, and the capitalists themselves. Dague's logos, in this piece at least, is lacking.
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| | ===Vol. 7 No. 1=== | | ===Vol. 7 No. 1=== |
