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).