The Money Power

How finance capitalists enslave the world
-- by: Frank Anstey, 1921, source: Australian Nationalist Archive
MHP hypertext version for non-profit educational use only

6.  The Bondholders and the Slaves

The laboring class as bond servants of the financier elite

Misery and Distress

Speaking in the House of Commons on May 12, 1915, Lloyd George said: "Distress, misery and wretchedness always follow a great war."

He knew that history repeats itself. He knew the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, of the Crimean War, of the Indian Mutiny. He knew that in Trafalgar Square, on the monument of Havelock, there be inscribed the words: "Soldiers, your grateful country will never forget your sufferings, your privations and your valour." He knew that the rulers of Empire had permitted the veterans of a hundred battles to perish of hunger on the streets of the Empire they had defended. He knew they would do it again, and so he said: "Distress, misery and wretchedness always follow a great war."

But the unseen rulers do not permit their political administrators to speak the truth too often, so the tune was changed to "Never again the old miseries. After this war fond love and the New Jerusalem." And the great crowd swallowed the dope.

Then in 1916 came my Lord Inchcape...chief of great banking corporations, London director of Burns Philp and Co. Speaking in cold, blunt, brutal language to associate sharks, he told them that after the war "the purchasing power of the workers must be reduced and their standard of life lowered." It was the [Lord] talking of the future of his herds and hordes. He was reminded that his language was unwise. Thereafter my Lord Inchcape joined in the song, "Paradise after the War."

In "The Kingdom of Shylock", I pinned attention to the dictum of Inchcape, and I said:

"The arms of Britain, France and Russia may be as triumphant as those of Rome in the days of its greatest glory -- yet the workmen of the combatant nations will emerge from this war such abject slaves of Mammon that they will wish they were dead.

"Out of this war will emerge two classes: bondholders and slaves to the bondholders.

"All who come alive out of the war must be bled dry that interest-mongering vampires within the nation may extract from the products of toil hundreds of millions per annum."

"That is what they mean when they say 'the standard of life must be reduced.'

"Working men! You shall eat less, have poorer food, shabbier clothes, scantier furniture, fewer pleasures, and know more hardships than ever you knew in all your days and generation.

"Is it not plain? If every year Shylock is to draw hundreds of millions more in interest from investments in wasted lives and bloody slaughter, you who remain alive must slave for it and pay for it. All your days shall be made bitter with hard bondage.

That is your future; that is what they mean, when they say 'the standard of life must be reduced.'"

This comment on Lord Inchcape was designated "disloyal", "unpatriotic", and "retarding recruiting." It must be suppressed. It was.

The Liars Revealed

Now comes the veil torn aside from all the delusions, illusions and doperies of war. Now, Christmas Day, 1920, can the "Age", of Melbourne, write:

"From every side come sickening accounts of Europe's plight. The Nemesis of an outraged civilisation is upon her. In every country, once hostile or friendly, men, women and children are dispirited and dying...Europe has the ghastly scenes of battle, the sight of ruined homes, fields and factories, the hopelessness of recovery.

There is only one thing in which Europe is rich, and that is fear -- fear of starvation...Desolation is now being placed on innocent children, whose starved condition is making them easy victims of tuberculosis. Hunger is causing abnormal, precocious crime."

These be your guides, O people. They know how to fatten you for slaughter but they know not how to feed you in times of peace.

"The conditions in England are becoming sinister. Unemployment is great and increasing. Life is hard and becoming harder. It is all part of the war price. The instalments are relentlessly falling due -- no nation can escape the consequences of the great catastrophe."

Thus when their purposes are served do the liars reveal themselves. Thus do they admit their promised freedom from militarism, oligarchy and slavery; their promises of "better times", "New Jerusalem", "Paradise", a "new world" and "perpetual peace" were so much bird-lime for the trapping of human gun fodder. Now do we read in our daily press "day by day the European situation grows more tragic. Day by day the contrast between the starving poor and the feasting rich grows more intolerable."

Of the conditions in France, Vaillant Couturier wrote: "Men feel a hand settle on their necks which shoves them down to the mud where they have left their weapons. Terrible times are in store for us."

Of conditions in England the London "Star" said: "Myriads of our people are living on the verge of destitution. We are going forward to national bankruptcy."

This drift to bankruptcy, starvation and chaos is admitted in the memorial of the directors of the Bank of England, signed also by the chairmen of four of the great Joint Stock Banks of England. The memorial describes general conditions, and then adds: "The effect of European bankruptcy would be felt all over the world."

In America the unemployed multiply and wages fall 25, 30 and, 40 per cent. The director of the American Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Trade sums up the position thus:

"Europe is short of food. America is the main source of supply. Europe cannot pay. America cannot go on supplying for nothing in return.

"Since Europe cannot pay and America cannot continue further credit, European starvation is accentuated and American production slows down. Thus America is drawn into the European vortex and the fallacy of the belief in isolated prosperity is exposed."

The economic situation now commences to effect Australia. The prices of products, by which we pay our obligations to overseas bondholders, are falling. The metal market collapses. Mines close down, purchasing power diminishes, unemployment increases; all the phenomena of Europe begins to reflect itself locally. Thus Australia, in its turn, like America, is drawn into the European vortex and the fallacy of isolated prosperity is again exposed.

Thus, in spasms of truth, the public can read in the capitalist newspapers that "we in Australia have now to face an appalling reckoning", that "there is no preparation for the lean days in front of us" -- that "the Budget is the latest expression of spurious patriotism" -- that "the Government drains the life from industry and confiscates the means by which industry expands", and finally, that "a dead weight of debt is weighing down the country into a slough of depression." Such are the prospects which in 1921 confront Australia, in common with the rest of the so-called civilised world. And such are the conditions to which capitalist Governments have reduced, or are in process of reducing, the workers of all lands.

Beware the Fall

To-day we see that to push Labor back into the pit -- to diminish its purchasing power, to reduce its standard of existence, to maintain the Bondholding Oligarchy upon the degraded status of Labor -- is everywhere the unspoken programme of the great capitalists. On both sides of the Atlantic -- in Europe and America -- millions are unemployed, millions starve in patience, millions more, broken in spirit, toil for a steadily diminishing return. The "Masters of Industry", the "Brains of the World", the men who could organise so ably for Death and Destruction, have no other conception of "Reconstruction" than that which is based upon the destitution and degradation of the mass.

And the most astounding fact is that everywhere in Western Europe and the United Stages there is a limpness, a tame submission, that arouses the astonishment even of those who flourish on this resurrected slavery; millions of men who fought on battlefields are tolerating in silence and inaction the starvation of their families. John A. Hobson once wrote that "the most important lesson of modern warfare is the fact that a knot of financiers and profiteers, per medium of their politicians and their pressmen, can capture the mind of a nation, and in the name of patriotism impose a policy of slavery." This fact we see to-day exhibited in England, Germany, Austria, France, America; and the question is, "Where next?"

But no matter how submissive the multitude, the Master Class policy defeats itself. It overloads the camel. It cannot reduce the standard of existence without reducing purchasing power, reducing the consumption of goods, choking production, reducing producers, destroying values, and rendering its slaves more and more incapable of earning the tax payable to the Bondholding Oligarchy. Thus a writer in the "English Review", reviewing the situation, can say, "Europe is on its deathbed. European civilisation as we know it is passing away." Thus no less a man than Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain, speaking on September 15, 1920, was driven to say:

"No effort can shore this system up much longer. If there be any who feel inclined to maintain it, let them beware lest it fall upon them and overwhelm them."

Unhappily this warning is not merely for the Master Class. It is for others. It is for the great mob of reactionary workers who have no ideals, no spiritual outlook, no conception of a higher life, no sense of social duty; who are satisfied to be "Bosses' Men" so long as they are well fed -- and often, when they are not. These are the sustainers of the existing system, until, to repeat the words of George, "it falls upon them and overwhelms them." They are the ripe fruit of the ceaseless daily press propaganda. They will not stand for any change. Thus there can be no orderly "passing away", no intelligent demolition, no plan of peaceful reconstruction. It must "fall upon them."

And the warning is for the "Great Press." It speaks of "appalling reckonings." It says, "No nation can escape the catastrophe." It bemoans the fact that there is "no preparation for the days in front of us." Yet it furnishes no guidance.

One would imagine that such a press, claiming so much loftiness of public purpose, would at least have some national ideal, some method of reaching it, some preparedness with which to meet the coming gale. But it is blank, it is barren, and it will struggle to submerge any section proposing anything touching the sacred citadel of the existing system. It speaks of "the hopelessness of recovery." But rather than give its aid to any method, policy, or principle of reconstruction, it prefers to see the existing system collapse in disorder and chaos. It exemplifies the fact that "dying orders rather than pass peacefully away are impelled towards catastrophies into which they drag as many men as possible."