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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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