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BOOKS 

383

—at their expense. The great American banks, and the journals of capitalism preached for years the dependence of our "prosperity" on a growing export trade. The present slump in American export trade is an evidence of the severity of the world economic crisis and of the integration of the export trade within the whole present structure of capitalist imperialism in the United States.

"America's answer to socialism and communism" includes lying to the farmer as to his present situation and as to the future. Of the one third, or 35,000,000 of our population living on our farms, 40 per cent live on rented farms. This is the tenant farmer. After "having paid his landlord rent (the farmer) is in undisputed possession of his farming facilities." (p. 18). His "undisputed possession" lasts as long as he can exist under the exploitation imposed by finance capital. Tenantry is the intermediary state between the privately owned farm and the expulsion of the farmer from the land, bankrupted, to join the industrial reserve army.

Mr. Robert S. Brookings knows this and offers the only solution capitalism has to offer—capitalist farming. "My opinion is that the best means of hastening the present slow and harrowing process of agricultural regeneration (throwing farmers off of the land!—E. B.) is by the formation of agricultural corporations which will accomplish in organization and management what big business has accomplished for industry." He tells the farmers that such corporations would give them bonds for their lands which would increase in value as farming became more efficiently organized. Such corporations are going to use land already owned by finance capital or will force the farmer to dispose of his lands for enough to get him to the cities. More efficient farming means capitalistically not shorter hours but fewer farmers, and longer hours and speed-up for those who become the agricultural wage slaves of farming corporations.

Quite appropriately the closing chapter of Economic Democracy is Industrial Defense. In this chapter Mr. Brookings mentions a few facts about the functioning of the war machine on the economic front in the World War. He looks to the next war and the feasibility of drafting labor for war work. After stating that the worker will work quite acquiescently without drafting rather than go to war, Mr. R. S. Brookings says, "In a general way, I would handle labor by agreement with the unions, just as I would handle prices by agreement with the manufacturers; rather than by any process of coercion." This representative of American capitalism knows how well the war machine was served by Sam Gompers, Hugh Frayne, etc., in deceiving the working masses and states that the labor lieutenants of capitalism in the A. F. of L. ought