Эптон Синклер - Oil!

One thing Bunny had felt certain about—the workers ought to determine their tactics without bitterness and internal strife. But now he was beginning to doubt if even that were possible. The quarrel between the two factions was implicit in the nature of the problem. If you believed in a peaceable transition, your course of action would be one thing, and if you didn’t so believe, it would be another thing. If you thought you could persuade the masses of the voters, you would be cautious and politic, and would avoid the extremists, whose violent ways would repel the voters. So you would try to keep the Communists out of your organization, and of course that would make them hate you, and denounce you as a compromiser and a “class collaborator,” and insist that you were in the pay of the bosses, who hired you to keep the workers under their yoke.

And then the Socialists would counter with the same charge of bribery. Chaim Menzies never failed to declare that some of the Communists were secret agents, paid by the bosses to split the movement, and expose it to raids by the police. Bunny knew, from talk he heard among his father’s associates, that these big business men had elaborate secret agencies for the disrupting of the labor movement. And these agencies would work either way; they would hire old line leaders to sell out the workers, calling off strikes, or calling premature strikes that couldn’t win; or they would send in spies to pose as reds, and split the organizations and tempt the leaders into crime. Incredible as it might seem, the government secret service, under that great patriot, Barney Brockway, was up to the neck in such work. At the trial of one group of Communists the federal judge presiding remarked that apparently the whole direction of the Communist party was in the hands of the United States government!

Bunny was always having the beautiful dream that his friends were going to be friends with one another. Now he took Rachel to call on Paul and Ruth; he liked them so, and they must share his feelings. But alas, they didn’t seem to! Both sides were reserved, and avoided talking politics as carefully as if they had been visiting at the Monastery! But Bunny wanted them to talk politics, because he was trying to settle his own inner debate, and he felt that they were qualified, they were members of the working class, while he was only an outsider. Perhaps one might convert the other; but which one he wanted to be the converter, and which the converted, it would have been hard for him to say!

Bunny questioned Paul, and learned that he had given up his carpentry job—the Workers’ party was paying him a small salary to give all his time to organizing. Paul had met Joe and Ikey Menzies, the young “left wingers”; and Bunny told about how he and Rachel had helped to put Ben Skutt out of business at the trial. How he wished the Socialists and the Communists might work together like that, instead of making things easier for the enemy!

Thus led on, Rachel said that she would be interested to understand the ideas of Comrade Watkins. (Whenever a Socialist wanted to be very polite to a Bolshevik, she called him by that old term, which had applied before the family row broke out!) How could a mass uprising succeed in America, with the employing class in possession of all the arms and means of communication? They had poison gas now, and would wipe out thousands of the rebel workers at a time. The one possible outcome would be reaction—as in Italy, where the workers had seized the factories, and then had had to give them up because they couldn’t run them.

Comrade Watkins replied that Italy had no coal, but was dependent on Britain and America, which thus had the power to strangle the Italian workers. As a matter of fact the Fascist reaction in Italy had been made by American bankers—Mussolini and his ruffians had not dared to move a finger till they had made certain of American credits. We had played the same role there as in Hungary and Bavaria; all over the world, American gold was buttressing reaction. Paul had seen it with his own eyes in Siberia, and he said, with his quiet decisiveness, that nobody could understand what it meant unless he had been there. Paul didn’t blame Comrade Menzies for feeling as she did, that was natural for one who had been brought up under peace conditions; but Paul had been to war, he had seen the class struggle in action.

“Yes, Comrade Watkins,” said Rachel, “but if you try and fail, things will be so much worse!”

“If we never try,” said Paul, “we can never succeed; and even if we fail, the class consciousness of the workers will be sharpened, and the end will be nearer than if we do nothing. We have to keep the revolutionary goal before the masses, and not let them be lured into compromise. That is my criticism of the Socialist movement, it fails to realize the intellectual and moral forces locked up in the working class, that can be called out by the right appeal.”

“Ah,” said Rachel, “but that is the question—what is the right appeal? I want to appeal to peace rather than to violence. That seems to me more moral.”

Paul answered, that to make peace appeals to a tiger might seem moral to some, but to him it seemed futile. The determining fact in the world was what the capitalist class had done during the past nine years. They had destroyed thirty million human lives, and three hundred billions of wealth, everything a whole generation of labor had created. So Paul did not enter into discussions of morality with them; they were a set of murderous maniacs, and the job was to sweep them out of power. Any means that would succeed were moral means, because nothing could be so immoral as capitalism.

When Bunny went out with Rachel, she said that Paul was an extraordinary man, and certainly a dangerous one to the capitalist class. He was a case of shell-shock from the war, and those who had made the war would have to deal with him. Then Bunny asked about Ruth, and Rachel said she was a nice girl, but a little colorless, didn’t Comrade Ross think? Bunny tried to explain that Ruth was deep, her feelings were intense, but she seldom expressed them. Rachel said Ruth ought to think for herself, because she would have a lot of suffering if she followed Paul through his Bolshevik career. Bunny suggested that Rachel might help to educate her, but Rachel smiled and said that Comrade Ross was too naive; surely Paul would not like to have a Socialist come in and steal his sister’s sympathy from him. In spite of all Bunny could do, his women friends would not be friends!

Then later on Bunny saw Paul, and got Paul’s reaction to Rachel. A nice girl, well-meaning and intelligent, but she wouldn’t keep her proletarian attitude very long. The social revolution in America was not going to be made by young lady college graduates doing charity work for the capitalist class! What she was doing among the “Ypsels” was mostly wasted effort, according to Paul, because these Socialist organizations spent their efforts fighting Communism. The capitalists ought to be glad to hire her to do such work!

But somehow it wasn’t that way, Bunny found; the capitalists were narrow-minded, and lacking in vision! A few days later Bunny learned that Rachel was facing a serious dilemma. She had taken her four years course at the university with the idea of making a career as a social worker; but now a woman friend, upon whose advice she was acting, had warned her that she was throwing away her chances by her activity with these “Ypsels.” It was hard enough for a Jewish girl, and one from the working-classes, to have a professional career, without taking on the added handicap of Socialism. Rachel should at least wait till she had got a position, and got herself established.

So there were more troubles! What was Rachel going to do? The answer was that she was not going to desert her beloved young Socialists. It was all very well to say wait, but that was the way all compromising began; once you started, you never knew where to stop. No, Rachel would take her chances of the “Ypsels” being raided by the police, or placarded in the newspapers as a conspiracy to undermine the morals of youth! If it turned out that her friend was right, and the bourgeoisie wouldn’t have her as a dispenser of their charities, she would find some sort of job in the labor movement. And Bunny went off to keep an engagement to a dinner party with Vee Tracy; he went with a sober face and a troubled conscience, neither of which he was clever enough to hide!