THE CLASS STRUGGLE
My dear John,
It is almost impossible to find a Socialist agitator who does not
lay great stress upon the “class struggle.” I cannot remember having
listened to a single one of these gentry who has not asserted that
his “clear view of the economic situation” dates from the hour when
he first became “class-conscious”; and I do not think that many
Socialists will deny the statement that fully four-fifths of the
militant propaganda is an attempt to arouse the workers to this sense
of “class-consciousness.”
Of course, the Socialists want you to believe that the revolution they
are preaching is really an evolutionary process by means of the ballot.
But, as you must have noticed, John, their promise of peaceful methods
is not borne out by the gospel of class-hatred which they preach under
the name of “the class struggle.” It is “class war” that they are
trying to incite; and in this, as one writer has said, “evolutionary
Socialists closely rival, even if they do not always equal, the members
of the revolutionary organizations.... _No graver mistake, therefore,
could be made in diagnosing Socialism than to regard evolutionary
Socialists_ (so-called) _as opposed to revolutionary methods_. The
whole gospel of the ‘class war’ as commonly preached by Socialists
... is a direct and malicious incitement to the ignorant to adopt
revolutionary methods” (“A Case Against Socialism,” p. 101).
There are lots of things in Socialism that a man doesn’t have to
believe in order to be a Socialist, but class-consciousness is not one
of them. Before he can sign up, before he can get his red card, he must
affix his signature to a document in which he admits that he recognizes
the existence of a class struggle.
Marx and Engels formulated this doctrine and preached it in their
“Communist Manifesto,” where they said:
“The history of all past society is the history of class antagonism,
which took different forms in different epochs. But whatever form they
may have taken, the exploitation of one section of society by another
is a fact common to all previous centuries.... The first step in the
working-class revolution is the raising of the proletariat [workers]
to the position of the ruling class.... The proletariat will use its
political power to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie
[employers] to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of
the State, _i. e._ of the proletariat organized as the ruling class....
If the proletariat, forced by its struggle against the bourgeoisie to
organize as a class, makes itself by a revolution the ruling class,
and, as the ruling class, destroys by force the old conditions of
production, it destroys along with these conditions of production the
conditions of existence of class antagonism, class in general, and
therewith its own domination as a class” (pp. 20, 21).
Here we have the doctrine of class-war in a nutshell. Believing
that the wealth of the world in every kind was destined to become
concentrated in the hands of the few, and that all the people
would of necessity be divided into two distinct classes, with
absolutely antagonistic interests, Marx assumed that a class-war must
result--the proletariat, or wage-earning class, waging war with the
property-owning class to compel the latter to give back the property it
had stolen and restore liberty to the “enslaved worker.”
As you can see, John, the doctrine of the class-war is necessarily one
of the foundation stones of the Socialist gospel. Ferri recognized its
importance as you may ascertain if you will turn to page 145 of his
“Socialism and Positive Science,” where he says:
“The other sociological theory by which Karl Marx has really dissipated
the clouds which obscured till now the heaven of Socialist aspirations,
and which has furnished to scientific Socialism the political compass
for steering itself with complete assurance in the contentions of the
life of every day, is the great historic law of the class struggle.”
The _Manifesto_ of the Socialist Party of Great Britain takes the same
stand when it says that “the Socialists say that the present form of
property-holding divides society into two great classes”; while the
Social Democratic party of England repeats Marx’s assertion that “the
history of human society is a history of class struggles arising from
the antagonism of class interests,” and appeals to the workers to make
themselves “masters of their own country and of all the resources,
political and material” (Quelch, “The Social Democratic Party”).
“There are in reality but two classes,” says the _Socialist Standard_
(December, 1907), “those who live by labor and those who live upon
those who labor--the two classes of exploiter and exploited.”
Here, then, is the crux of the whole question. The workers are told
that they are being robbed and exploited by the capitalists, and that
there can be nothing in common between the two classes. “The task
before us is not to appeal to the capitalist class to do something,
but to organize the workers for the overthrow of that class, so they
(the workers) may do something for themselves. The battle cry of the
workers’ party is not ‘the right to work,’ but ‘the right to the
product of our labor,’ and the right waits only upon their might”
(_Socialist Standard_, November 1, 1908).
“The Capitalist class, in its mad race for profits,” says the American
Socialist party platform (1908), “is bound to exploit the workers to
the very limit of their endurance, and to sacrifice their physical,
moral and mental welfare to its own insatiable greed.”
If we turn to France, we find Jaurès (“Studies in Socialism”) preaching
the same doctrine. “Society,” he says, “is to-day divided into classes
with opposing interests, one class owning the means of life and the
other nothing but their power to work. Never in the history of Society
was the working class so free from all traces of property as to-day.”
I might go on indefinitely citing the words of prominent Socialists who
have preached Marx’s doctrine of class hatred; but, as the whole story
is summed up by our own “Rev.” George D. Herron, I shall (as a final
example) permit him to tell us what the class-struggle means to the
Socialists. He says:
“There are no words that can make this fact hideous and ghastly enough,
or vivid and revolutionary enough--the fact that society and its
institutions are organized for the purpose of enabling some people to
live off of other people, the few to live off the many. There is no
language realistic enough, or possessed of sufficient integrity, to lay
bare the chasm between the class that works and the class that reaps
the fruit of that work; between the class that is grist for the great
world-mill of economic might and the class that harvests that grist.
And until the working class becomes conscious of itself as the only
class that has a right to be, until the worker understands that he is
exploited and bound by the power which his own unpaid labor places in
the hands that exploit and bind him ... our dreams and schemes of a
common good or better society are but philistine utopias, our social
and industrial reforms but self-deceit, and our weapons but the shadows
of stupidity and hypocrisy” (“From Revolution to Revolution,” p. 3).
Now, John, as a matter of fact, have you in your experience as a
working man ever run across the class struggle as Socialists define it?
I have put this question to scores of workers and the answer has always
been the same. Not one of them, unless he happened to be a red-card
Socialist who took the “class struggle” on faith, has ever found the
class-consciousness out of which the revolution is to generate.
I do not deny that there is such a factor as class-interest in the
industrial world. We see this interest exhibited in the industrial
struggles that are almost daily taking place. The labor organizations
are evidence of the existence of a class interest, but, beyond this,
there is no class consciousness other than that which is incited by the
Socialist agitators in the hope that they may tempt the worker to deeds
of violence.
Think of it, John! The Socialist agitator must know, if he has even
ordinary common sense, that the worker is not entitled to the whole
product of labor--that it is not labor that finally fixes the value of
a commodity. Yet, basing his arguments upon this self-evident fallacy,
he calls upon the workers to unite and overthrow the present industrial
system that they may take back from their employers the capital “of
which they have been robbed.”
Nor will any real Socialist deny that this is the purpose of their
propaganda. Even Hyndman, who is anything but a rank revolutionist,
said in his celebrated debate, “Will Socialism Benefit the English
People?”: “We are accused of preaching discontent and stirring up
actual conflict. _We do preach discontent, and we mean, if we can, to
stir up actual conflict._”
After this frank admission you will probably not be surprised to read
Jack London’s declaration of war:
“We intend nothing less than to destroy existing society and to take
the whole world. If the law of the land permits, we fight for this end
peaceably, at the ballot box. If the law of the land does not permit
the peaceful destruction of society, and if we have force meted out to
us, we resort to force ourselves. In Russia the Revolutionists kill the
officers of the Government. I am a Revolutionist.”
And Harry Quelch, in _Justice_ (October 21, 1893), voiced just as crude
an expression of the Marxian “gospel of hate”:
“We are prepared to use any means, any weapon--from the ballot-box to
the bomb; from organized voting to organized revolt; from parliamentary
contests to political assassination--which opportunity offers and which
will help in the end we have in view. Let this be understood, we have
absolutely no scruples as to the means to be employed.”
Frankly: Do you hate your employer? Would you harm a hair of his head
even if you had the chance? Do you curse him whenever you think of
him, crying with Archibald Crawford: “_Damn the Boss! Damn the Boss’s
son! Damn his family carriage! And damn his family, too!_”? Do you
think that Herron knows what he is talking about when he says that “our
whole system of life and labor, with all that we call civilization is
based on nothing else than war ... a war so terrible, so full of death,
that its blood is upon every human hand, upon every loaf of bread, and
upon every human institution”? Do you agree with the conclusion that
it is “only folly, or worse, falsehood, that prates of peace in such a
society”? (Quoted by _The Revolt_, April 25, 1912.)
Yet this is but a sample of the “truth” as it is taught from the
soap-box. Wherever there is a militant propagandist, you will hear this
kind of an appeal. “In fact, the repetition of the bitter denunciation
of society is so constant,” says Peter W. Collins (_The Common Cause_,
January, 1912), “that on the mind of him who becomes an attendant at
the soap-box, this doctrine of class-hatred, of enmity among men,
gradually sinks into the mind and heart and the poison does its work,
as the dripping of water wears away a stone.”
This is what the Socialist wants. His prime object is to create a
force among the toilers that may be welded into a great revolutionary
movement. In this appeal slumber the darkest and the most cruel
instincts of man’s nature.
There is no room in this country for class-hatred. It does not exist
outside of the ranks of the Socialists. There is, in fact, more
class-hatred shown by the rival factions in the Socialist movement in
their squabbles with one another, than there is between employer and
employe. Yet, by means of cunning misrepresentation and perversion of
facts, all who come under the influence of Socialism--even the children
in the Socialist Sunday schools--are made to take this wrong outlook
upon life; their mental balance is upset; they are incited to develop
a feeling of bitter hatred against those from whom they have suffered
no harm. In this way, by sowing the poisonous seed of prejudice
and class-hatred, it is hoped later on to reap the harvest of THE
REVOLUTION.