Saturday, August 8, 2015

Alcoholism and Crime in Capitalism: Some Views and Quotes



Maxim Gorky about Industrial Workers (from novel ‘Mother’):  “The day was swallowed up by the factory; the machine sucked out of men’s muscles as much vigor as it needed. The day was blotted out from life, not a trace of it left. Man same another imperceptible step towards his grace; But he saw close before his the delight of rest, the joys of the odorous tavern and he was satisfied… The accumulated exhaustion of years had robbed them of their appetites, and to be able to eat they drank, long and deep, goading on their feeble stomachs with the biting, burning lash of vodka… Returning home they quarreled with their wives, and often beat them, unsparing of their fists. The young people sat in the taverns of enjoyed evening parties at one another’s houses, played the accordion, sang vulgar songs devoid of beauty, danced, talked ribaldry and drank. Exhausted with toil, men drank swiftly, and in every heart there awoke and grew an incomprehensible sickly irritation, It demanded and outlet. Clutching disquieting sensation, they fell on one another for mare trifles, with the ferocity of beasts, breaking into bloody quarrels which sometimes ended in serious injury and on occasions even in murder.” (P.253)
A Journalist about Farmers in Villages: “For centuries heavy drinking seemed an indispensable and necessary part of life. The endless grey monotony of peasant life with its constant threat of famine and spice-breaking toil, the dirt and degradation of squalid city slums, stifling atmosphere of merchants’ homes – all this was an appropriate frame for ‘vodka,’ one of the few words.” (P.250)*
Conclusion in the words of Philosopher Friedrich Engels: “Worker drinks primarily to escape from the suffering of his daily existence under capitalism: “… he must have something to make work worth his trouble to make the prospect of the next day endurable… (He seeks) the certainty of forgetting for an hour or two the wretchedness and burden of life.” (P.252)*
*Books: How Capitalism Was Restored in the USSR

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