CHAPTER IX

THE CLASS LIE

In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The fisherman may need the cocoanut as badly as the cocoanut-gatherer needs the fish. But as soon as we come to the stage where tokens are accepted, there begins a shifting of the balance of advantage; for the reason that the seller comes to specialize in the selling of one thing, whereas the more complex the society, the more different things the buyer must buy, and so he remains an amateur as to each. Moreover, the sellers learn to combine; they form partnerships, firms, corporations, alliances, leagues, associations, parties, classes; the buyer, on the other hand, remains unorganized and helpless. He is the consumer, who takes what he can get; he is the proletarian, who has only his chains to lose; he is that plaything of the competitive process, that jest of the trader through the ages, the general public. “The public be damned,” said a great seller of railway transportation, and his phrase has become the corner-stone of capitalist civilization.

Nineteen hundred years ago a revolutionary economist remarked, “To him that hath shall be given; while from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” And this economic process is one which tends continually to accelerate, multiplying itself by geometrical progression. In present-day society, the sellers are nearly all organized, while labor is only ten per cent organized, and the ultimate consumer is not organized at all. We have thus the combination of a monopoly price with a competitive wage, and the surplus wealth of the world is drawn by automatic process into the hands of a small class. The world’s selling power is now vested in combinations of capital, called “trusts,” which present themselves in the aspect of enormous fortresses of lies.

Merely to give a catalogue of the various trade-lies embodied in the daily operations of such a “trust” would require a volume. There are so many kinds of lies that no one man can know them all. There are lies carried in the heads and embodied in the practice of petty chiefs of departments. There are lies so generally accepted and conventionalized that the very liars do not know them as such, and are amazed and wounded in the feelings when their attention is called to the truth. There are lies so complicated that highly trained lawyers have been paid millions of dollars to contrive them. There are lies so cleverly hidden that it would take the restoring of tons of burned account-books to prove them. There are lies so blazoned forth on billboards and in newspapers that they have become part of the daily thought of the people, and have given new words and phrases to the language.

So comes the next stage in the evolution of the trade-lie. The owners of trusts and combinations unite into parties, classes and governments for the defense of their gains. They combine and endow and perpetuate their trade-lies, making them into systems and institutions; and so we have the Lie Wholesale, the Lie Sublimated, the Lie Traditional, the Lie Classical; we have the Lie become Religion, Philosophy, History, Literature, and Art.

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