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cent, and wages only one hundred and thirty percent. In France the rise of prices amounts to three hundred per cent and the rise in wages two hundred per cent. In Japan prices have gone up one hundred and thirty percent, and the wage increase has been sixty per cent. I here set the figures given by comrade Brown in his work above referred to against the figures of the „Supreme Economic Council“ taken from the „Times“ of March 10th 1920.
It is clear that under such conditions the indignation of the workers, the growth of revolutionary tendencies and ideas, and the growth of spontaneous mass strikes are inevitable. For the living conditions of the working people have become unendurable. They have convinced themselves that the capitalists have made excessive profits on the war and shift the expenses and the debts on the shoulders of the working people. Recently we have received a telegraph report that America is about to deport to us into Russia five hundred or more Communists to rid herself of „dangerous agitators“.
Should America send us not only five hundred but five hundred thousand Russian, American, Japanese, and French „agitators“ matters would not change, for the disproportion between prices and wages will still remain and nothing can be done for them. They cannot help that disproportion because private property with them is being carefully guarded. They consider it as sacred. It must not be forgotten that only Russia has done away with the private property of the exploiters. The capitalists can do nothing to change this discrepancy between prices and wages, and the workers cannot live under the old wage scheme. None of the old methods can alleviate this misery. No single strike, no parliamentary struggle, no voting can do anything with it, for „private property is sacred“ and the capitalists have accumulated such amounts of it that the whole world is dominated by a handful of men. At the same iime, the living conditions of the workers are becoming harder and harder to bear. There is no way out except by abolishing „private property“ of the exploiters.
Comrade Lalinsky in his brochure „England and the World Revolution“, from which our „Vestnik of the People's Commissarat for Foreign Affairs“ of February 1920 publishes valuable extracts, points out that export prices on coal in England have proved two hundred per cent greater than those anticipated by official industrial experts.
In Lancashire matters have come to such a state that the value of shares has been quoted four hundred percent and
