Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/15

 has taken away the burden of man from the land, and have left the land workers more prosperous than before.

You are afraid or unwilling to follow this natural and sensible course, which is of course very inconvenient to a few rich manufacturers, merchants and zamindars who grow rich by starving millions of people. You are freely receiving gifts from these selfish rich in order to carry on work in the opposite direction of increasing the economic value of workers in industries or on land. The poverty of the population on the land can easily be remedied, instead of being played about with, by bravely fighting the causes which directly produce such poverty, such as the unnatural and unjustifiable rights of the zamindars over God-created land and low wages of agricultural labourers.

Thus I say that if you had not put forward political claims you would never have acquired the power and opportunities which you have, and if you had purely economic aims you are standing against the economic interests of the masses and in favour of the interest of the wealthy classes by deliberately "non-co-operating" with and indirectly obstructing the work of those who would bring about an economic re generation of the people along lines that have proved successful in all parts of the world.

You have raised the objection against western methods of organising labour on your mistaken notion that such a process would introduce class war and that acute oppression of capitalists over Labour does not exist in India. In both these theories you are entirely wrong. Those who organised Labour had not created class war. Modern systems of production, commerce and finance produce class war, the parties in which are the capitalists and the workers. Those who organise labour are doing nothing but the great moral work of helping and strengthening the weaker of the two parties in that class war. Those who organise Labour always do so deliberately with a view to abolish ing class distinctions by making capital the common property of all, and by making manual or mental labour the common duty of all. This alone will stop class war, and you who would not assist in organising labour, help in the Rh