Can Mexico Win Freedom Only By Slavery?, by William C. Owen (1912)
Article from ‘Regeneración’, English Section, April 27, 1912, Los Angeles, edited by William C. Owen
“I cannot believe that we can have any lasting advance toward Socialism without organization, and I do not think we can have organization without modern industries. It seems to me the reason why they have no Socialism in India and countries like that is because modern industry has not yet developed much there, but I may be wrong on this point, and we surely want to have our readers read something on Mexico. “
So writes the editor of one of the most widely-circulated Socialist papers in existence; a paper, moreover, that professed to know much about and be deeply interested in Mexico two years ago, at which time it continually advertised and lauded Turner’s “Barbarous Mexico.”
From the editor of “Wohlstand fur Alle,” published near Vienna, Austria, we receive a letter in which he says:
“The great Social-Democratic press, and its central organs in Germany and Austria, have had nothing to say on the Mexican Revolution except that the Berlin ‘Vorwaerts’ published an article of vituperation [condemnation] against the ideologists and bandits who believe that Mexico is ripe for the social revolution.”
To which he adds:
“What a pest off a stronghold of reaction Marxism is!”
Last week we criticized the editor of the “California Social-Democrat” for maintaining that effective organization was possible only among the city wage-workers, and last week we had a long conversation with a Socialist who is probably better known throughout the world than is any one connected with that paper. Having convinced him finally that the Mexican Revolution is a genuine agrarian struggle, he asked this naive question, “If the Mexican peons get back their land, what will they do with it? The will have no markets.” The man in question, is highly intelligent and it made one feel more strongly than ever — “What a pest of a stronghold of reaction Marxism is!”
Although every well-informed Socialist knows today that Karl Marx made a colossal mistake in his doctrine of the concentration of capital, the policy of the entire Socialist political movement, both in this country and in Europe, is still based on the supposition that what has been proved, and proved beyond dispute to have been an error is a truth. Marx believed that the middle class would disappear, and that there would be left to fight the battle out only small handful of employers on the one hand and the vast mass of humanity, organized as wage-workers, on the other. To Marx it was only a question of time. Give the capitalist system time and this result would work itself out, in his own words, “with the fatality that governs the metamorphoses of nature.”
Marx’s Fatalistic Dream
It was a fatalistic doctrine, and the fatalism was based on a guess that proved erroneous. The middle class instead of disappearing has increased by leaps and bounds; the number of both small and large capitalists has grown; the proletariat has not fallen naturally into the organization of the shop, inasmuch as an ever larger proportion of the proletariat has had no shops to work in. Instead of the capitalist system digging its own grave, it has been making its fortress stronger with every year.
The foregoing is today a well-established truth, which no one with a reputation as an economist would venture to deny. But the Socialists, as a political organization, still deny it, and still protest that such a nation as Mexico has only to pass through the capitalist evolution we have suffered in order to work out automatically its own salvation. It goes even farther, declaring that Mexico MUST pass through a long period of capitalist evolution, and it will not tolerate the idea that a people is capable of reading the lurid attacks its editors make on capitalism and saying — “We ourselves want none of that.” Was there ever a greater absurdity?
To say that the Mexicans would not know what to do with their land since they would have no markets is to slap common sense in the face, yet it is the position many Socialists assume. The answer is to offer them a piece of productive land and note the readiness with which they will accept. In arguing with such men one feels that they are either naturally idiots, that they have muddled their brains with metaphysics, or that party fanaticism, and the desire to shine as speakers and writers for the party, have made them blind to facts and deaf to reason.
There is no sense in abusing Socialists, just as there is no sense in abusing capitalists or anybody else. But, just as it is necessary to point out the human sacrifice demanded by maintenance of the decaying capitalist system, so is it necessary to point out the colossal errors by which Socialism has been led from the straight and fruitful path on which it originally started.
The Mexican Revolution has been and is a test question, as all great events are. It has shown, and will continue to show, “Who is Who” and why they are what they are. In some instances it has shown unmistakably that agitators were talking revolution for the sake of talk, which is, of course, contemptible. But I do not believe that is answerable for the blindness shown by the great mass of Socialists to the importance of the fact that a great neighboring nation is striking hard for economic freedom and that plutocracy is proposing to suppress the heroic effort at the cost of rivers of blood.
Experience has taught me that when people catch the lime-light craze, there is no truth they will not sacrifice for the sake of holding audiences, and for that reason I myself always look on orators with deep distrust. Still more is that the case with those who fancy their political fortunes are in the balance, or with those who have been seized with the fanatical delusion that the future depends on their party’s success. This last unquestionably, and most unfortunately, applies to many socialists, and it is by far the most serious obstacle with which, we have to deal. But as regards Socialists in the mass, I believe them to be the victims of an absurd and absolutely untenable fatalistic doctrine, which teaches that by some magic hocus-pocus, the road to economic freedom leads through the gate of factory slavery.
It would be to laugh if the matter were not so serious.
W. C. O.