In spite of all the sincere and insincere hopes and prayers for peace
there will always be, under capitalism, legalized wholesale plundering
of the workers by the capitalist employers—a form of aggressive social
parasitism by the employers and _vigorous resistance by the workers in
proportion to their realization of the robbery_;—and consequently there
will be wage struggles, wage reductions, compulsory under-consumption,
“over-production,” unemployment, bread lines, soup kitchens, rent riots,
evictions, “demand-work” marches, strikes, picketing, “scabbing,”
boycotting, lockouts, injunctions, “bull-pens,” blacklisting, interstate
kidnapping; and also anti-picket thugs,—policemen, Pinkertons, deputy
sheriffs, constabulary, cossacks, militiamen and the “regulars” shooting
down underpaid, underfed workers; everywhere the belittled lives and the
spilt blood of the working class.[313]
And there will be increasing opposition to free assemblage, opposition
to free speech, opposition to free press—in order to silence discussion
and stop the spread of knowledge of what is fundamentally wrong.
Also there will continue to be, from time to time, naturally, under
capitalism, wars of conquest to widen the field of exploitation—to
enlarge the opportunity for aggressive social parasitism,—wars to open
up foreign markets, wars to protect foreign markets for products which
the producers’ wages will not permit them to consume and the employers
are not able to consume;—and everywhere the world will be stormy with
the stirring trumpet call, “To arms! To arms!”—stormy with the crafty
and confusing cry, “To the front! To the front! The flag!”—stormy with
the shrilling fife, the roll of drums, the rattle of musketry, the flash
of swords, the booming roar of cannon, burning cities, sinking warships
and the thundering tread of galloping cavalry horses,—the class struggle
in a thousand visible bitter forms,—and everywhere windrows and
ditchfuls of dead men, dead working men, everywhere the torn flesh, the
slit veins, the streaming blood and tears of the working class: hell
everywhere except in the homes of our “very _best_ people” who in times
of trouble as in times of peace are always calmly feeding (like leeches
ever feeding) on the surplus legally filched from the working class.
Thus capitalist society is everywhere cursed with a festering social
sore, an unhealable sore, poisoning, withering the best things in
society, blasting the finer forms and feelings of brotherhood and peace.
Everywhere the lives of the toilers are vulgarized and brutalized and
wasted. And all these things will always be natural and unescapable
facts and parts of any class-labor form of society, an unsocially
organized society, with injustice organized, legalized and easy, down
deep in the industrial foundations of society,—ever an endless civil war
in industry between the two, the only two, industrial classes.
Now what shall we do about it?
It is as plain as “a, b, c.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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