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Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 8 THE TOILER SATURDAY, ,JAN. 22, 1920. THE TOILER USE YEAR $2.00 six MONTHS $1.00 FOEEIGN 1 year, $2.50 Address all mail and make all checks payable to THE TOILER 3207 Clark Ave., Cleveland, Ohio. Entered as Second Class Matter, February 31, 1917, at the Fost Office at Cleveland, O., Uidcr the Act of March 3, 1879. t Bundle Order Prices Bundle orders in any quantity , 39c. ft copy Bills upon bundlo orders of 100 or more rendered monthly. Bills must be paid upon presentation. Order a bundle of Toilers weekly and sell them to I "ur shopmates. Published weekly by the Toiler Publishing Association Telephone: Lincoln 3639. "Surplus" Surplus, surplus everwhere. Wherever the eye may turn it is greeted with a sight of surplus com modities. The shops a stores are stocked to over flowing with surplus food, clothes, hardware, fur niture, machinery. On the farms there is surplus grain and cattle and hogs and other products. Pric es arc falling because the surplus is so great Pro ductive machinery has stopped and still the surplus is not depleted. Prices are marked down and down in those lines least organized) and still the bottom is not yet plumbed. But if the surplus of manufactured commodities is great just as much so is the surplus of human beings. Here too is a great and ever growing sur plus. But let us first note that the surplus here is a surplus of one class only the workers. Nowhere have we Read or seen or heard of a surplus of shirkers. It is only the workers who pile up in menacing quantities in such times as these. In spite of a war that took its ton millions of dead there yet remains a vast quantity of surplus humanity that is, people without "visable means of support" cash or jobs. There is a direct relation Ix'tween the surplus stocks and the surplus workers. Each is in a way, a cause and an effect. The worker, by working hard and long, produced the quantities of goods. Because he piled them up, they turned him into a surplus. If the worker received a return for his labor equal to the value of his product, no surplus would exist. Then instead of creating a "surplus" and freezing and starving because of it, he would take a vacation well clothed, housed, fed in comfort and security. The surplus we see all about is really not a sur plus at all. All of it is wanted, needed by the hung: v and illclad millions. Every bit of it is demanded by the necessities of decent living. Yet it lays in the warehouses locked up out of reach of the very workers whose labor and sweat produced it. Was there ever such an anomaly in history? Can such a contradiction be conceived? It is almost unbelievable that human beings in the twentieth century would tolerate such a palpable misery creating economic error. Starvation with food in reach. Freezing with only a pane of glass to keep us from the warm woolens. Miseiy, with all the comforts which science can invent, all around US. Verily, we workers are fools. But by suffering we learn. Misery spurs us on to learn. Hunger drives us to action. These are potent causes which teach us the way to remedy these evils and to eradicate them. No longer must we produce for profit. USE only must be the motto and the slogan of intelligent workers applied to in dustry. Production for profit is starving millions all over the world. It must stop. The workers must take and operate industry for the uses of the millions, not for the profits of millionaires. o Workers which do you prefer A dictatorship of the capitalists or a dictatorship by the workers? If some one must be held down, should it bj the millionaires or millions of workers? Do you stand with the workers in their fight for more of the world's goods more of life? If not, what claim have you to manhood? They cmpelled us to work during the war, now they won't let us wo;' The people who are hand ling affairs seem to l)e such a crazy lot anyway or is it ourselves the workers who are foolish.