Mary E. Marcy offered a contest to the readers of her Marxist Study Course of May, 1911, “We are going to publish in the June number of the Review the best six or seven hundred word article from any one of the Study Clubs showing WHY Low Prices Do Not Help the Working Class. We shall also be glad to publish the names of classes or comrades who send in particularly good articles on this subject. We will also pay $5 cash or send $10 worth of books published by Chas. H. Kerr & Co. for this article…Typewrite your articles, if possible, and send them in early if you want to see them in the June Review.” The winner, a comrade from the small town of Peru, Indiana, was Clinton L. Snyder with the essay below.

‘Why Low Prices Will Not Benefit the Working Class’ by Clinton L. Snyder from International Socialist Review. Vol. 11 No. 12. June,1911.

Winner of First Prize Offered Study Classes.

“GIVE us lower prices, cheaper I food, cheaper clothing, the grocer and clothier, the butcher and coal dealer are robbing us,” is the cry that is heard on every hand. “Down with the trusts and high prices so that a working man can live.”

You’ve heard it. Certainly. Perhaps you have been complaining along that line yourself. If so, I want to ask you a question: In the “good old days” before the trusts came, you bought a certain article, say for $10.00. You say it was worth it, and you were not robbed. True. But tell me why you gave $10.00 for it. Why could you not buy it for $8.00? Why was the article and $10.00 in money equal in value? Now, remember, if you cannot explain this intelligently, you cannot explain intelligently whether you pay more for things than they are worth today.

As a matter, of fact, the wage-workers are the only ones that are robbed, and they are robbed in one place only, and that place is the slave pen where they work, be it factory, railroad, department store, postoffice or farm. The hand that pays you for your work is the hand that robs you. Remember that.

It is also true that lower prices will not benefit you (the worker) in the least, under industrial conditions as existing today.

In the first place, let’s take just a glimpse at the industrial world and see what conditions we have to contend with. (1) In the factories and workshops, farms and railroads, everywhere, we see men, women and children toiling long hours over machines that have increased their productive powers many fold. (2) As a result of this labor-saving machinery, together with the necessity of those who operate that machinery, to work as many hours a day as ever, we see on the streets thousands of men out of work —looking for jobs. (3) We see labor divided into little ineffective craft companies, some flying their white flags of truce and merely looking on while others go to defeat after defeat single handed and unaided. (4) We see the capitalists united on the economic field regardless of craft, industry, race, color, age, sex, politics and religion—everything.

Their economic interests are identical and they know it.

That is enough. Now in the face of these conditions, do you workers who have been working and agitating spending time and money advocating measures that would merely “decrease the cost of living” do you think for a minute, that under these conditions you would be benefited by them? Not one iota.

An Illustration.

Let us say that horses require on the average about 15 lbs. of hay and 6 qts. of grain daily to keep them in average working condition. Now if you own and work a horse you must provide it with that amount daily no matter whether the prices of hay and grain be low or high. Or you must give your man “John” daily, money enough to buy hay and grain enough to keep your horse in condition. Now if the prices of hay and grain fell, you and not the horse would be the winner, as the horse would only require the same amount of feed as before.

The same with the working class. They require the same amount of necessaries yearly, be prices low or high. When prices fall, the unemployed eager to work for even the bare necessities of life; will work for a wage that will buy those necessities and take the jobs away from those working.

So “low prices” will not benefit you any more than they would the horse as long as you by doing the work of two men help to perpetuate the army of unemployed which acts as an automatic regulator and reducer of wages.

When you are agitating for “lower prices on the necessities of life,” you are also agitating for lower prices on the commodity you sell labor power. When the prices of the necessities of life fall, wages will follow, just as sure as the mercury in a thermometer shrinks in cold weather.

Under existing conditions, high prices for labor power and low prices for the necessities of life, would be as great a phenomenon as a river flowing up the mountain, or rocks floating on the surface of the ocean.

History.

It is argued sometimes that Socialism has never been tried and we do not know whether it would work or not. Well “low cost of living” ism has been tried, on a large scale, too, in England, after the repeal of the corn law.

How did it work? Excellent, i.e. for the employers. Wages once started downward did not stop where the cost of living did, but went still lower. Result—a lower standard of living for the workers. Who wants to see this repeated in America? Not the workers, surely.

In conclusion, I will say that it is of the utmost importance that the working class understand such things as this: “Will it benefit the whole working- class?” That’s the question to apply to every proposition that comes up and the way to find out whether it will or not is to apply the test of Marxian Economics. Education is the greatest need of the hour: without it, there is little hope. As education grows, organization will grow and hope will grow. An educated working-class will waste no time chasing will-o-the-wisps, but press on and on to Industrial Freedom.

Local, Peru, Ind

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v11n12-jun-1911-ISR-gog-Corn-OCR.pdf