There are those who sneeringly class Socialism among the “ism” that
appear and disappear as passing fads, and pretend to dismiss it with an
impatient wave of the hand. There is just enough in this great world
movement to them to excite their ridicule and provoke their contempt. At
least they would have us think so and if we take them at their word
their ignorance does not rise to the level of our contempt, but entitles
them to our pity.
To the workingman in particular it is important to know what Socialism
is and what it means.
Let us endeavor to make it so clear to him that he will readily grasp it
and the moment he does he becomes a Socialist.
It is our conviction that no workingman can clearly understand what
Socialism means without becoming and remaining a Socialist. It is simply
impossible for him to be anything else and the only reason that all
workingmen are not Socialists is that they do not know what it means.
They have heard of Socialism—and they have heard of anarchy and of other
things all mixed together—and without going to any trouble about it they
conclude that it is all the same thing and a good thing to let alone.
Why? Because the capitalist editor has said so; the politician has sworn
to it and the preacher has said amen to it, and surely that ought to
settle it.
But it doesn’t. It settles but one thing and that is that the capitalist
is opposed to Socialism and that the editor and politician and preacher
are but the voices of the capitalist. There are some exceptions, but not
enough to affect the rule.
Socialism is first of all a political movement of the working class,
clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the overthrow of the
prevailing capitalist system by securing control of the national
government and by the exercise of the public powers, supplanting the
existing capitalist class government with Socialist administration—that
is to say, changing a republic in name into a republic in fact.
Socialism also means a coming phase of civilization, next in order to
the present one, in which the collective people will own and operate the
sources and means of wealth production, in which all will have equal
right to work and all will cooperate together in producing wealth and
all will enjoy all the fruit of their collective labor.
In the present system of society, called the capitalist system, since it
is controlled by and supported in the interest of the capitalist class,
we have two general classes of people; first, capitalists, and second,
workers. The capitalists are few, the workers are many; the capitalists
are called capitalists because they own the productive capital of the
country, the lands, mines, quarries, oil and gas wells, mills,
factories, shops, stores, warehouses, refineries, tanneries, elevators,
docks, wharves, railroads, street cars, steamships, smelters, blast
furnaces, brick and stone yards, stock pens, packing houses, telegraph
wires and poles, pipe lines, and all other sources, means and tools of
production, distribution and exchange. The capitalist class who own and
control these things also own and control, of course, the millions of
jobs that are attached to and inseparable from them.
It goes without saying that the owner of the job is the master of the
fellow who depends upon the job.
Now why does the workingman depend upon the capitalist for a job? Simply
because the capitalist owns the tools with which work is done, and
without these the workingman is almost as helpless as if he had no arms.
Before the tool became a machine, the worker who used it also owned it;
if one was lost or destroyed he got another. The tool was small; it was
for individual use and what the workingman produced with it was his own.
He did not have to beg some one else to allow him to use his tools—he
had his own.
But a century has passed since then, and in the order of progress that
simple tool has become a mammoth machine.
The old hand tool was used by a single worker—and owned by him who used
it.
The machine requires a thousand or ten thousand workers to operate it,
but they do not own it, and what they produce with it does not go to
them, but to the capitalist who does own it.
The workers who use the machine are the slaves of the capitalist who
owns it.
They can only work by his permission.
The capitalist is a capitalist solely for profit—without profit he would
not be in business an instant. That is his first and only consideration.
In the capitalist system profit is prior to and more important than the
life or liberty of the workingman.
The capitalist’s profit first, last and always. He owns the tools and
only allows the worker to use them on condition that he can extract a
satisfactory profit from his labor. If he cannot do this the tools are
not allowed to be used—he locks them up and waits.
The capitalist does no work himself; that is, no useful or necessary
work. He spends his time watching other parasites in the capitalist game
of “dog eat dog,” or in idleness or dissipation. The workers who use his
tools give him all the wealth they produce and he allows them a
sufficient wage to keep them in working order.
The wage is to the worker what oil is to the machine.
The machine cannot run without lubricant and the worker cannot work and
reproduce himself without being fed, clothed and housed; this is his
lubricant and the amount he requires to keep him in running order
regulates his wage.
Karl Marx, in his “Wage, Labor and Capital,” makes these points clear in
his own terse and masterly style. We quote as follows:
“The free laborer sells himself, and that by fractions. From day to day
he sells by auction, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life to
the highest bidder—to the owner of the raw material, the instruments of
work and the means of life; that is, to the employer. The laborer
himself belongs neither to an owner nor to the soil; but eight, ten,
twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong to the man who buys them.
The laborer leaves the employer to whom he has hired himself whenever he
pleases; and the employer discharges him whenever he thinks fit; either
as soon as he ceases to make a profit out of him or fails to get as high
a profit as he requires. But the laborer whose only source of earning is
the sale of his labor power cannot leave _the whole class of its
purchasers_, that is the capitalist class, without renouncing his own
existence. He does not belong to this or that particular employer, but
he does belong to the _capitalist class_; and more than that: it is his
business to find an employer; that is, among this capitalist class it is
his business to discover _his own particular purchaser_.”
Coming to the matter of wages and how they are determined, Marx
continues:
“Wages are the price of a certain commodity, labor-power. Wages are thus
determined by the same law which regulates the price of any other
commodity.
“Thereupon the question arises, how is the price of a commodity
determined?
“By means of competition between buyers and sellers and the relations
between supply and demand—offer and desire.
“* * * Now the same general laws which universally regulate the price of
commodities, regulate, of course, _wages, the price of labor_.
“Wages will rise and fall in accordance with the proportion between
demand and supply; that is, in accordance with the conditions of the
competition between capitalists as buyers and laborers as sellers of
labor. The fluctuations of wages correspond in general with the
fluctuation in the price of commodities. _Within these fluctuations the
price of labor is regulated by its cost of production; that is, by the
duration of labor which is required in order to produce this commodity,
labor power._
_“Now what is the cost of production of labor power?_
_“It is the cost required for the production of a laborer and for his
maintenance as a laborer._
_“* * * The price of his labor is therefore determined by the price of
the bare necessaries of his existence._”
This is the capitalist system in its effect upon the working class. They
have no tools, but must work to live. They throng the labor market,
especially when times are hard and work is scarce, and eagerly,
anxiously look for some one willing to use their labor power and bid
them in at the market price.
To speak of liberty in such a system is a mockery; to surrender is a
crime.
The workers of the nation and the world must be aroused.
In the capitalist system “night has drawn her sable curtain down and
pinned it with a star,” and the great majority grope in darkness. The
pin must be removed from the curtain, even though it be a star.
But the darkness, after all, is but imaginary. The sun is marching to
meridian glory and the world is flooded with light.
Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the inspired evangel of the coming
civilization, says:
“We close our eyes and call it night,
And grope and fall in seas of light,
Would we but understand!”
Not for a moment do we despair of the future. The greatest educational
propaganda ever known is spreading over the earth.
The working class will both see and understand. They have the inherent
power of self-development. They are but just beginning to come into
consciousness of their power, and with the first glimmerings of this
consciousness the capitalist system is doomed. It may hold on for a
time, for even a long time, but its doom is sealed.
Even now the coming consciousness of this world-wide working class power
is shaking the foundations of all governments and all civilizations.
The capitalist system has had its day and, like other systems that have
gone before, it must pass away when it has fulfilled its mission and
made room for another system more in harmony with the forces of progress
and with the onward march of civilization.
The centralization of capital, the concentration of industry and the
co-operation of workingmen mark the beginning of the end. Competition is
no longer “the life of trade.” Only they are clamoring for “competition”
who have been worsted in the struggle and would like to have another
deal.
The small class who won out in the game of competition and own the
trusts want no more of it. They know what it is, and have had enough.
Mr. John D. Rockefeller needs no competition to give life to his trade,
and his pious son does not expatiate upon the beauties of competition in
his class at Sunday school.
No successful capitalist wants competition—for himself—he only wants it
for the working class, so that he can buy his labor power at the lowest
competitive price in the labor market.
The simple truth is, that competition in industrial life belongs to the
past, and is practically outgrown. The time is approaching when it will
be no longer possible.
The improvement and enlargement of machinery, and the ever-increasing
scale of production compel the concentration of capital and this makes
inevitable the concentration and co-operation of the workers.
The capitalists—the successful ones, of course,—co-operate on the one
side; the workers—who are lucky enough to get the jobs—on the other
side.
One side gets the profit, grow rich, live in palaces, ride in yachts,
gamble at Monte Carlo, drink champagne, choose judges, buy editors, hire
preachers, corrupt politics, build universities, endow libraries,
patronize churches, get the gout, preach morals and bequeath the earth
to their lineal descendants.
The other side do the work, early and late, in heat and cold; they sweat
and groan and bleed and die—the steel billets they make are their
corpses. They build the mills and all the machinery; they man the plant
and the thing of stone and steel begins to throb. They live far away in
the outskirts, in cottages, just this side of the hovels, where gaunt
famine walks with despair and “Les Miserables” leer and mock at
civilization. When the mills shut down, they are out of work and out of
food and out of home; and when old age begins to steal away their vigor
and the step is no longer agile, nor the sinew strong, nor the hand
cunning; when the frame begins to bend and quiver and the eye to grow
dim, and they are no longer fit as labor power to make profit for their
masters, they are pushed aside into the human drift that empties into
the gulf of despair and death.
The system, once adapted to human needs, has outlived its usefulness and
is now an unmitigated curse. It stands in the way of progress and checks
the advance of civilization.
If by its fruit we know the tree, so by the same token do we know our
social system. Its corrupt fruit betrays its foul and unclean nature and
condemns it to death.
The swarms of vagrants, tramps, outcasts, paupers, thieves, gamblers,
pickpockets, suicides, confidence men, fallen women, consumptives,
idiots, dwarfed children; the disease, poverty, insanity and crime
rampant in every land under the sway of capitalism rise up and cry out
against it, and hush to silence all the pleas of its _mercenaries_ and
strike the knell of its doom.
The ancient and middle-age civilizations had their rise, they ruled and
fell, and that of our own day must follow them.
Evolution is the order of nature, and society, like the units that
compose it, is subject to its inexorable law.
The day of individual effort, of small tools, free competition, hand
labor, long hours and meagre results is gone never to return. The
civilization reared upon this old foundation is crumbling.
The economic basis of society is being transformed.
The working class are being knit together in the bonds of co-operation,
they are becoming conscious of their interests as a class, and
marshalling the workers for the class struggle and collective ownership.
With the triumph of the workers the mode of production and distribution
will be completely revolutionized.
Private ownership and production for profit will be supplanted by social
ownership and production for use.
The economic interests of the workers will be mutual. They will work
together in harmony instead of being arrayed against each other in
competitive warfare.
The collective workers will own the machinery of production, and there
will be work for all and all will receive their socially due share of
the product of their co-operative labor.
It is for this great work that the workers and their sympathizers must
organize and educate and agitate.
The Socialist movement is of the working class itself; it is from the
injustice perpetrated upon, and the misery suffered by this class that
the movement sprang, and it is to this class it makes its appeal. It is
the voice of awakened labor arousing itself to action.
As we look abroad and see things as they are, the capitalists intrenched
and fortified and the workers impoverished, ignorant and in bondage, we
are apt to be overawed by the magnitude of the task that lies before the
Socialist movement, but as we become grounded in the Socialist
philosophy, as we understand the process of economic determinism and
grasp the principles of industrial and social evolution the magnitude of
the undertaking, far from daunting the Socialist spirit, appeals to each
comrade to enlist in the struggle because of the very greatness of the
conflict and the immeasurable good that lies beyond it, and as he girds
himself and touches elbows with his comrades his own latent resources
are developed and his blood thrills with new life as he feels himself
rising to the majesty of a man.
Now he has found his true place, and though he be reviled against and
ostracized, traduced and denounced, though he be reduced to rags, and
tormented with hunger pangs, he will bear it all and more, for he is
battling for a principle, he has been consecrated to a cause and he
cannot turn back.
To reach the workers that are still in darkness and to open their eyes,
that is the task, and to this we must give ourselves with all the
strength we have, with patience that never fails and an abiding faith in
the ultimate victory.
The moment a worker sees himself in his true light he severs his
relations with the capitalist parties, for he realizes at once that he
no more belongs there than Rockefeller belongs in the Socialist party.
What is the actual status of the workingman in the capitalist society of
today?
Is he in any true sense a citizen?
Has he any basis for the claim that he is a free man?
First of all, he cannot work unless some capitalist finds it to his
interest to employ him.
Why not? Because he has no tools and man cannot work without them.
Why has he no tools? Because tools in these days are, as a rule, great
machines and very costly, and in the capitalist system are the private
property of the capitalists.
This being true, the workingman, before he can do a tap of work, before
he can earn a dime to feed himself, his wife or his child, must first
consult the tool-owning capitalist; or, rather, his labor-buying
superintendent. Very meekly, therefore, and not without fear in his
heart and trembling in his knees, he enters the office and offers his
labor power in exchange for a wage that represents but a part, usually a
small part, of what his labor produces.
His offer may be accepted or rejected.
Not infrequently the “boss” has been annoyed by so many job-hunters that
he has become irritable, and gruffly turns the applicant away.
But admitting that he finds employment, during working hours he is
virtually the property of his master.
The bell or the whistle claims him on the stroke of the hour. He is
subject to the master’s shop regulations and these, of course, are
established solely to conserve his master’s interests. He works, first
of all, for his master, who extracts the surplus value from his labor,
but for which he would not be allowed to work at all. He has little or
no voice in determining any of the conditions of his employment.
Suddenly, without warning, the shop closes down, or he is discharged and
his wage, small at best, is cut off. He has to live, the rent must be
paid, the wife and children must have clothing and food, fuel must be
provided, and yet he has no job, no wages and no prospect of getting
any.
Is a worker in that position free?
Is he a citizen?
A man?
No! He is simply a wage-slave, a job-holder, while it lasts, here today
and gone tomorrow.
For the great body of wage-workers there is no escape; they cannot rise
above the level of their class. The few who do are the exceptions that
prove the rule.
And yet there are those who have the effrontery to warn these
wage-slaves that if they turn to Socialism they will lose all incentive
to work, and their individuality will fade away.
Incentive and individuality forsooth! Where are they now?
Translated into plain terms, this warning means that a slave who is
robbed of all he produces, except enough to keep him in producing
condition, as in the present system, has great incentive to work and is
highly individualized, but if he breaks his fetters and frees himself
and becomes his own master and gets all his labor produces, as he will
in Socialism, then all incentive to work vanishes, and his
individuality, so used to chains and dungeons, unable to stand the air
of freedom, withers away and is lost forever.
The capitalists and their emissaries who resort to such crude attempts
at deception and imposture betray the low estimate they place on the
intelligence of their wage-workers and also show that they fully
understand to what depths of ignorance and credulity these slaves have
sunk in the wage-system.
In the light of existing conditions there can be no reform that will be
of any great or permanent benefit to the working class.
The present system of private ownership must be abolished and the
workers themselves made the owners of the tools with which they work,
and to accomplish this they must organize their class for political
action and this work is already well under way in the Socialist party,
which is composed of the working class and stands for the working class
on a revolutionary platform, which declares in favor of the collective
ownership of the means of production and the democratic management of
industry in the interest of the whole people.
What intelligent workingman can hold out against the irresistible claim
the Socialist movement has upon him? What reason has he to give? What
excuse can he offer?
None! Not one!
The only worker who has an excuse to keep out of the socialist movement
is the unfortunate fellow who is ignorant and does not know better. He
does not know what Socialism is. That is his misfortune. But that is not
all, nor the worst of all. He thinks he knows what it is.
In his ignorance he has taken the word of another for it, whose interest
it is to keep him in darkness. So he continues to march with the
Republican party or shout with the Democratic party, and he no more
knows why he is a Republican or Democrat than he knows why he is not a
Socialist.
It is impossible for a workingman to contemplate the situation and the
outlook and have any intelligent conception of the trend and meaning of
things without becoming a Socialist.
Consider for a moment the beastly debasement to which womanhood is
subjected in capitalist society. She is simply the property of man to be
governed by him as may suit his convenience. She does not vote, she has
no voice and must bear silent witness to her legally ordained
inferiority.
She has to compete with man in the factories and workshops and stores,
and her inferiority is taken advantage of to make her work at still
lower wages than the male slave gets who works at her side.
As an economic dependent, she is compelled to sacrifice the innate
refinement, the inherent purity and nobility of her sex, and for a
pallet of straw she marries the man she does not love.
The debauching effect of the capitalist system upon womanhood is
accurately registered in the divorce court and the house of shame.
In Socialism, woman would stand forth the equal of man—all the avenues
would be open to her and she would naturally find her fitting place and
rise from the low plane of menial servility to the dignity of ideal
womanhood.
Breathing the air of economic freedom, amply able to provide for herself
in Socialist society, we may be certain that the cruel injustice that is
now perpetrated upon her sex and the degradation that results from it
will disappear forever.
Consider again the barren prospect of the average boy who faces the
world today. If he is the son of a workingman his father is able to do
but little in the way of giving him a start.
He does not get to college, nor even to the high school, but has to be
satisfied with what he can get in the lower grades, for as soon as he
has physical growth enough to work he must find something to do, so that
he may help support the family.
His father has no influence and can get no preferred employment for him
at the expense of some other boy, so he thankfully accepts any kind of
service that he may be allowed to perform.
How hard it is to find a place for that boy of yours!
What shall we do with Johnnie? and Nellie? is the question of the
anxious mother long before they are ripe for the labor market.
“The child is weak, you know,” continues the nervous, loving little
mother, “and can’t do hard work; and I feel dreadfully worried about
him.”
What a picture! Yet so common that the multitude do not see it. This
mother, numbered by thousands many times over, instinctively understands
the capitalist system, feels its cruelty and dreads its approaching
horrors which cast their shadows upon her tender, loving heart.
Nothing can be sadder than to see a mother take the boy she bore by the
hand and start to town with him to peddle him off as merchandise to some
one who has use for a child-slave.
To know just how that feels one must have had precisely that experience.
The mother looks down so fondly and caressingly upon her boy; and he
looks up into her eyes so timidly and appealingly as she explains his
good points to the business man or factory boss, who in turn inspects
the lad and interrogates him to verify his mother’s claims, and finally
informs them that they may call again the following week, but that he
does not think he can use the boy.
Well, what finally becomes of the boy? He is now grown, his mother’s
worry is long since ended, as the grass grows green where she sleeps—and
he, the boy? Why, he’s a factory hand—a _hand_, mind you, and he gets a
dollar and a quarter a day when the factory is running.
That is all he will ever get.
He is an industrial life prisoner—no pardoning power for him in the
capitalist system.
No sweet home, no beautiful wife, no happy children, no books, no
flowers, no pictures, no comrades, no love, no joy for him.
Just a hand! A human factory hand!
Think of a hand with a soul in it!
In the capitalist system the soul has no business. It cannot produce
profit by any process of capitalist calculation.
The working hand is what is needed for the capitalist’s tool and so the
human must be reduced to a hand.
No head, no heart, no soul—simply a hand.
A thousand hands to one brain—the hands of workingmen, the brain of a
capitalist.
A thousand dumb animals, in human form—a thousand slaves in the fetters
of ignorance, their heads having run to hands—all these owned and worked
and fleeced by one stock-dealing, profit-mongering capitalist.
This is capitalism!
And this system is supported alternately by the Republican party and the
Democratic party.
These two capitalist parties relieve each other in support of the
capitalist system, while the capitalist system relieves the working
class of what they produce.
A thousand hands to one head is the abnormal development of the
capitalist system.
A thousand workingmen turned into hands to develop and gorge and
decorate one capitalist paunch!
This brutal order of things must be overthrown. The human race was not
born to degeneracy.
A thousand heads have grown for every thousand pairs of hands; a
thousand hearts throb in testimony of the unity of heads and hands; and
a thousand souls, though crushed and mangled, burn in protest and are
pledged to redeem a thousand men.
Heads and hands, hearts and souls, are the heritage of all.
Full opportunity for full development is the unalienable right of all.
He who denies it is a tyrant; he who does not demand it is a coward; he
who is indifferent to it is a slave; he who does not desire it is dead.
The earth for all the people! That is the demand.
The machinery of production and distribution for all the people! That is
the demand.
The collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic
management in the interest of all the people! That is the demand.
The elimination of rent, interest and profit and the production of
wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people! That is the demand.
Co-operative industry in which all shall work together in harmony as the
basis of a new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic!
That is the demand.
The end of class struggles and class rule, of master and slave, of
ignorance and vice, of poverty and shame, of cruelty and crime—the birth
of freedom, the dawn of brotherhood, the beginning of MAN! That is the
demand.
This is Socialism!