Why Communism?

New York: Daily Worker, 1934. One of several printings of Olgin’s strident “Third Period” polemic, first published in 1933. This version presumably issued to coincide with the 1934 midterm elections. Olgin, editor of the Yiddish communist daily Freiheit, characterizes the New Deal as thinly-disguised fascism and calls for the immediate overthrow of Capitalism by any means necessary.

You have much at stake in this establishment—your life. It is yours, more than the owner’s. It is part of your very self.

As to bankers and brokers, real estate operators and promoters—they do not produce anything essential to human life although they have the lion’s share of control over production. As a matter of fact, they produce nothing. They transfer “paper” from hand to hand. That paper—call it checks or deeds or drafts or shares—is a claim to the fruits of somebody else’s labor.