Twentieth Century Socialism Part 35

FOOTNOTES:

[223] In a previous attempt to define justice, I have found it necessary to devote to this subject an entire volume, and I do not believe that the subject can be sufficiently discussed in less than such a volume. The definition with which I concluded that book has been adopted by Mr. Lester F. Ward in his book on Applied Sociology. I believe that all other definitions of justice are defective mainly because other definitions such as those of Herbert Spencer in his book ent.i.tled "Justice" confound justice with liberty. In other words, his definition of justice is a definition of liberty, whereas justice is more than liberty. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that liberty is one of the elements of justice.

[224] See "Government or Human Evolution," Vol. II, p. 181.

[225] See "Principles of Sociology," pp. 414-415.

[226] See "Justice," p. 127, by the author.

[227] The Unnecessary Curse of Sickness, _World's Work_, July, 1909.

[228] See Book III, Chapter II.

APPENDIX

I

SOCIALIST PARTY NATIONAL PLATFORM

ADOPTED AT THE NATIONAL CONVENTION a.s.sEMBLED AT CHICAGO, MAY, 1908

Human life depends upon food, clothing, and shelter. Only with these a.s.sured are freedom, culture and higher human development possible. To produce food, clothing and shelter, land and machinery are needed.

Land alone does not satisfy human needs. Human labor creates machinery and applies it to the land for the production of raw materials and food. Whoever has the control of land and machinery controls human labor, and with it human life and liberty.

To-day the machinery and land used for industrial purposes are owned by a rapidly decreasing minority. So long as machinery is simple and easily handled by one man, its owner cannot dominate the sources of life of others. But when machinery becomes more complex and expensive, and requires for its effective operation the organized effort of many workers, its influence reaches over wide circles of life. The owners of such machinery become the dominant cla.s.s.

POWER GOES WITH CONCENTRATION

In proportion as the number of such machine owners, compared to all other cla.s.ses, decreases, their power in the nation and in the world increases. They bring ever larger ma.s.ses of working people under their control, reducing them to the point where muscle and brain are their only productive property. Millions of formerly self-employing workers thus become the helpless wage slaves of the industrial masters.

As the economic power of the ruling cla.s.s grows, it becomes less useful in the life of the nation. All the useful work of the nation falls upon the shoulders of the cla.s.s whose only property is its manual and mental labor power--the wage workers--or of the cla.s.s who have but little land and little effective machinery outside of their labor power--the small traders and small farmers. The ruling minority is steadily becoming useless and parasitic.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN CLa.s.sES

A bitter struggle over the division of the products of labor is waged between the exploiting propertied cla.s.ses on the one hand, and the exploited propertyless cla.s.s on the other. In this struggle the wage-working cla.s.s cannot expect adequate relief from any reform of the present order at the hands of the dominant cla.s.s.

The wage workers are, therefore, the most determined and irreconcilable antagonists of the ruling cla.s.s. They suffer most from the curse of cla.s.s rule. The fact that a few capitalists are permitted to control all the country's industrial resources and social tools for their individual profit, and to make the production of the necessaries of life the object of compet.i.tive private enterprise and speculation, is at the bottom of all the social evils of our time.

ANARCHY OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION

In spite of the organization of trusts, pools and combinations, the capitalists are powerless to regulate production for social ends.

Industries are largely conducted in a planless manner. Through periods of feverish activity the strength and health of the workers are mercilessly used up, and during periods of enforced idleness the workers are frequently reduced to starvation.

The climaxes of this system of production are the regularly recurring industrial depressions and crises which paralyze the nation every fifteen or twenty years.

The capitalist cla.s.s, in its mad race for profits, 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. Capitalism keeps the ma.s.ses of workingmen in poverty, dest.i.tution, physical exhaustion and ignorance. It drags their wives from their homes to the mill and factory. It s.n.a.t.c.hes their children from the playgrounds and schools and grinds their slender bodies and unformed minds into cold dollars. It disfigures, maims, and kills hundreds of thousands of workingmen annually in mines, on railroads and in factories. It drives millions of workers into the ranks of the unemployed and forces large numbers of them into beggary, vagrancy and all forms of crime and vice.

HOW THE RULING CLa.s.s CONTROLS

To maintain their rule over their fellow men, the capitalists must keep in their pay all organs of the public powers, public mind and public conscience. They control the dominant parties and, through them, the elected public officials. They select the executives, bribe the legislatures, and corrupt the courts of justice. They own and censor the press. They dominate the educational inst.i.tutions. They own the nation politically and intellectually just as they own it industrially.

SOCIALISM WILL FREE ALL CLa.s.sES

The struggle between wage workers and capitalists grows ever fiercer, and has now become the only vital issue before the American people.

The wage-working cla.s.s, therefore, has the most direct interest in abolishing the capitalist system. But in abolishing the present system the workingmen will free not only their own cla.s.s, but also all other cla.s.ses of modern society: the small farmer who is to-day exploited by large capital more indirectly but not less effectively than is the wage laborer; the small manufacturer and trader, who is engaged in a desperate and losing struggle for economic independence in the face of the all-conquering power of concentrated capital; and even the capitalist himself, who is the slave of his wealth rather than its master. The struggle of the working cla.s.s against the capitalist cla.s.s, while it is a cla.s.s struggle, is thus at the same time a struggle for the abolition of all cla.s.ses and cla.s.s privileges.

PRIVATE OWNERSHIP THE BASIS OF CLa.s.s RULE

The private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation is the rock upon which cla.s.s rule is built; political government is its indispensable instrument. The wage workers cannot be freed from exploitation without conquering the political power and subst.i.tuting collective for private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation.

The basis for such transformation is rapidly developing within present capitalist society. The factory system, with its complex machinery and minute division of labor, is rapidly destroying all vestiges of individual production in manufacture. Modern production is already very largely a collective and social process. The great trusts and monopolies which have sprung up in recent years have organized the work and management of the princ.i.p.al industries on a national scale, and have fitted them for collective use and operation.

The Socialist Party is primarily an economic and political movement.

It is not concerned with matters of religious belief.

FREEDOM THROUGH SOLIDARITY

In the struggle for freedom the interests of all modern workers are identical. The struggle is not only national, but international. It embraces the world and will be carried to ultimate victory by the united workers of the world.

To unite the workers of the nation and their allies and sympathizers of all other cla.s.ses to this end, is the mission of the Socialist Party. In this battle for freedom the Socialist Party does not strive to subst.i.tute working-cla.s.s rule for capitalist-cla.s.s rule, but by working-cla.s.s victory to free all humanity from cla.s.s rule and to realize the international brotherhood of man.

THE SOCIALIST PLATFORM

The Socialist Party, in national convention a.s.sembled, again declares itself as the party of the working cla.s.s, and appeals for the support of all workers of the United States and of all citizens who sympathize with the great and just cause of labor.

We are at this moment in the midst of one of those industrial breakdowns that periodically paralyze the life of the nation. The much-boasted era of our national prosperity has been followed by one of general misery. Factories, mills and mines are closed. Millions of men, ready, willing and able to provide the nation with all the necessaries and comforts of life are forced into idleness and starvation. Within recent times the trusts and monopolies have attained an enormous and menacing development. They have acquired the power to dictate the terms upon which we shall be allowed to live. The trusts fix the prices of our bread, meat and sugar, of our coal, oil and clothing, of our raw material and machinery, of all the necessities of life.

CAPITALISM TAKES THE OFFENSIVE

The present desperate condition of the workers has been made the opportunity for a renewed onslaught on organized labor. The highest courts of the country have within the last year rendered decision after decision depriving the workers of rights which they had won by generations of struggle.

The attempt to destroy the Western Federation of Miners, although defeated by the solidarity of organized labor and the Socialist movement, revealed the existence of a far-reaching and unscrupulous conspiracy by the ruling cla.s.s against the organizations of labor.

In their efforts to take the lives of the leaders of the miners the conspirators violated State laws and the federal const.i.tution in a manner seldom equalled even in a country so completely dominated by the profit-seeking cla.s.s as is the United States.