To paraphrase James Connolly: “ruling by fooling is a great ruling-class art with great working-class fools to practice on.” Every one of the points made in this 100-year-old article is applicable to today’s anti-immigrant ‘jobs’ arguments. The U.S. ruling class has a playbook, and a population ignorant enough–both willful and enforced–to buy the snake oil they are selling; year after year, generation after generation. The United States is a nation of suckers.

‘Unemployment and the Immigrant’ by William F. Kruse from The Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 160. September 25, 1924.

THE passage of the two per cent quota law further restricting immigration was hailed by certain old-line labor leaders as a great boon to the American working class. Here at last they saw a cure for unemployment. “There is just so much work to be done,” they argued according to their ‘labor pool theory,’ “and now that we control this reservoir of common labor we can assure a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work to every honest man who wants a job. America for the Americans. Hooray!”

They have their immigration law. Only a very thin stream trickles in thru Ellis Island and this contains but few “common labor” types. Yet the United States is today in one of the worst unemployment crises in its history. Among factory workers alone 1,300,000 more are out of work this year than a year ago, according to department of labor figures, while in 48 out of 62 industries the workers had to take wage cuts. Thousands of farmers have deserted their land in desperation. At least 200,000 workers are idle in the soft-coal field alone. And this time it cannot be blamed on the “furriner.”

That immigration law was not passed or amended in response to the demands of labor. Laws are not made that way in the United States—just yet. With the exception of the steel and textile barons almost our whole employing class wanted that law, so of course they got it. And organized labor wanted it too? Strange! Whenever labor and capital want the same thing from the same government somebody has hornswoggled labor.

Plenty of Native Slaves.

Our capitalists realize that even if not a single laborer came from abroad the development of our economic system is such that our native army of unemployed “common labor” must constantly increase. Every new invention or new application of mechanical power in industry or agriculture increases the productivity of labor and throws additional workers into the “slave markets” of the unemployed. For the owner of the industry every labor-displacing device means additional profit, for the workers additional competition on the already glutted labor market. Assured of plentiful supply of “common labor” in most of our important industries why should our bosses risk swelling our unemployed army by the importation of large “explosive” contingents, fresh from the battlefields of Europe, and possibly already tainted, despite the surveillance of our consuls, with all manner of “red ideas”?

Machines Displace Workers.

The real substitute for the stream of labor power that heretofore poured thru Ellis Island is the application of modern power machinery. Since 1880 the amount of steam horsepower used in factories has increased four times faster than the number of human hands employed, and engineers figure roughly that each horsepower dis- places the muscular effort of two men. Electricity has made even faster progress and the newest arrival, compressed air, has already nine million horsepower at work and an estimated increase of two million per year.

A single example of the effect of power application on the unemployment problem will suffice for present purposes. Twenty-five years ago the air drill was applied to the metal mining industry; it displaced four to five men. At that time its effect was expressed in terms of increased production and not solely in the decrease of the working force. But today? With the entire industry shut down months at a time due to the dislocated world market?

Yet at this very time, with the industry at lowest ebb, a new drill is introduced that takes the place of live or six old drills—twenty to thirty men according to the old standards. There is no demand for increased production. The men are thrown into the street. The jobless army is that much bigger.

Electro-Chemistry Does Its Bit.

There is not a single branch of a single industry that is free from this development. Bricklayers once proudly boasted, “You can never get machines to lay brick.” There are such machines, although they are said to be uneconomical. Yet the development of concrete building has crimped the bricklayers’ field, and only the power of building trades union organization has for the time resisted some of the efforts to introduce power machinery and method.

An even better example of the accessibility of craft skill to the ruthless sweep of invention is the case of the gold-leaf beaters. A single grain of gold can be beaten out to cover seventy-five square inches, a thinness that would require nearly 400,000 sheets to make a book an inch thick. Since gold is known to mankind there has been just one way to make gold leaf, and that was to beat it out by hand between layers of fine skin. Attempts to introduce mechanical power by means of rollers were laughed at by the beaters, the heat created by the rollers’ friction always spoiled the job. Along comes an electro-plating expert, borrows principles from half a dozen other Industries, and displaces hundreds of highly skilled artisans with one semi-skilled attendant, plus electricity and chemistry. So the skilled gold-beaters and metal-miners of yesterday become the unemployed “common labor” of today.

“Superfluous” Coal Miners.

The plute apologists will not have it thus. An official of the “National Industrial Conference,” in discussing the coal miners who are held In enforced idleness a large part of the year under the wondrously efficient capitalist system, puts into most beautifully preposterous language the claim that workers displaced by this “labor-aiding” machinery get better paid work elsewhere.

“When the shoe pinches enough to compel the relocation of labor markets,” says this authority, “the superfluous. coal miners will be drawn into other occupations, like building, and instead of working six months in the year and loafing another six months, increasing the price of coal to the consumer, they will be continuously employed at better wages and live under better conditions.”

The euphonious term, “relocation of the labor market,” will probably rile Brother Gompers, who insists that labor is not a commodity. A storekeeper who moves his shop from one corner to another “relocates” his sauerkraut market, and “Liberty cabbage,” by whatever name known, is undeniably a commodity.

Call In the Magicians.

The “superfluous” coal diggers are just to walk off and get steady work the year round as plasterers and steamfitters! And the “superfluous” plasterers, who would think the world a rosy place at the prospect of six months work in two years, what are they to do when the “superfluous” coal miners come up for their jobs? Go down and become “superfluous” miners?

We know that jobless miners cannot compete with jobless carpenters for building trades work. They do meet, however, in open competition in the field of “common labor” in the 35c per hour building of roads and other work formerly parceled out to the convict and to the newest immigrant. And even here the compressed- air machine displaces hundreds at each application. The pneumatic trench-diggers of the Italian army have been put to work ripping up American pavement—and in so doing they have displaced an army of Italians who used to do this work.

Slave Markets Glutted.

There is no need to look to Europe for “common labor.” The “superfluous” miners and carpenters and ditch-diggers and gold beaters and farmers—all clamor for it. The slave markets are glutted and each train that arrives from the West brings in bankrupt farmers who have had to abandon their all to the clutches of the loan sharks. In the course of a recent trip I saw hundreds of abandoned farm houses, in some cases the rag curtains were left on the windows and the kettle on the stove.

And from the South come thousands of Negroes and poor white workers. Georgia bankers estimate that 80,000 Negroes and 30,000 white workers left during eight months of last year. The old man-and-mule cotton farming system has been wiped out by the boll weevil and the scientific plantation so the good Americans of the South come North to seek “common labor.” These are just a few of the sources, to say nothing of the entire younger generation which faces life at an age when the old handicraft skill, once the artisan’s “capital,” has been made almost meaningless by power machine production. Common labor! Labor in America will be “common” enough until the day it shakes off Its shackles and makes all exploiters “superfluous”. Then “common labor” will be a badge of honor; labor will be common to all useful members of society and only the willful idler will be despised.

Communists Against Law.

The Communists opposed the present immigration law. We knew that its promises of economic benefits to the workers were false; this country is rich enough in industrial and economic resources to shelter the working population of the whole world. Our prediction of hard times with or without immigration has come true.

We opposed particularly those sections which the masters were most anxious to enact, providing governmental spy machinery for the weeding out of “undesirables” abroad and the hounding and possible deportation of such as manage to slip thru. We know that the very elements branded as “undesirable” by our capitalist enemy would be of greatest value to the labor movement. We know that there will be upheavals in Europe’s present unstable condition, we are realists enough to acknowledge, that the workers may be defeated in some of them. And we know our own government well enough to realize that when revolutionary fugitives cross the ocean with a white terror price upon their heads, there will be no quota law exceptions on their behalf.

The workers of no country can prosper permanently upon the exploitation and degradation of their fellow workers of other lands. It is the essence of capitalist economy that the worker must produce more than he consumes plus more than the master class can waste, so that this surplus can be marketed in other countries. But our principal European markets are today bankrupt, busted. The rich Russian market is diplomatically blockaded. While things stay that way our factories are idle, when European capitalism revives, on the other hand, it will produce a surplus of its own to compete with ours in the few remaining undeveloped markets. So Dawes plans offer no more solution for our unemployment problems than do immigration laws.

Immediate Remedy.

The only temporary remedy under capitalism is the shortening of the workday and the distribution of work among all available manpower. Things would be much worse today if the labor movement, through generations of organized struggle, had not clubbed down the work-day from fourteen to twelve hours, from twelve to ten, from ten to nine, and from nine to eight in many Industries. Some progress has been made. It is said that less than fifteen years ago only one man in twelve had the eight-hour day today more than half have it and more than a fourth have the 44-hour week. Maybe so. Obviously the six-hour day and five-day week are the next steps.

The Real Remedy.

But even this is a temporary makeshift. It involves a constant struggle between capitalist and worker for re- adjustment, the one fighting for profits and power, the other for his very life. Fundamentally the issue at stake is not the question of who snail work, or how long, or for how much—the real issue concerns that which gives to one man the power to decide the very conditions of life for thousands of others.

His “right” to decide this question is based upon his technical “ownership” of the machinery of production, machinery that is created and operated by labor power to decide the question depends on two factors: first, upon his control of the government which protects by force of arms his possessions. Second, upon the degree of organized power on the part of the workers and upon their consciousness of that power and their readiness to use it against both the capitalist and his state in the winning of their goal.

To end unemployment the workers must end the exploitation of wage labor. To do this they must take over ownership and control of industry. To do this they must achieve the physical power of the state which guarantees ownership.

Unemployment is here today and it will grow worse. Exploded is the lie that the immigrant is to blame. So the workers are that much closer to an understanding of the real fault. Ultimately unemployment must grow beyond all power of the present system to cope with when that time comes the American working class, notoriously virile and violent in action when once aroused, will see the correctness of the Communist analysis and will quickly apply the Communist remedy.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n160-sep-25-1924-DW-LOC.pdf