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WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN PROGRESSION, THE DESPOILED CLASS OF WEALTH producers becomes fully conscious of its rights and determined to take them, a decent respect to the judgment of posterity requires that it should declare the causes which impel it to change the social order.

More truly can we say of our plutocracy than our forefathers did of the British crown that "its history is one of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states." Let the facts speak.

The foundation of the Union was coeval with the birth of the modern system of production by machinery. No sooner was the federal Constitution adopted than the spirit of capitalism began to manifest its absorbing tendency and corrupting influence. Every new invention was looked upon, not as a means of promoting the welfare of all, but as an instrument of private profit. Every tract of fertile land belonging to the states was appropriated by individuals, regardless of the rights of future generations. Every public franchise of any value was given away to "enterprising" persons and companies.

Thus was already formed in those early days, a privileged class, whose wealth was derived from the labor of others; this growing monopoly of the means of production and exchange, by placing a steadily, increasing number of disinherited workers in its dependence for employment, strengthened its hold upon the public powers, which it used more and more unscrupulously for its own aggrandizement.

Even such a public calamity as war was turned by that selfish and unpatriotic class to its own enrichment. By their labor alone the working people not only provided their own sustenance but supplied the means of supporting armies, recruited from their own ranks. Yet, from the fact that the instruments of production were the private property of individuals, the product itself was also the property of those individuals, who stood between the people and their government. For that part of the product which was required to carry on the war, the nation, therefore, became indebted to capitalists, who availed themselves of the public needs to exact exorbitant prices, further increased by the depreciation of the currency or of the interest-bearing bonds in which the war supplies were paid for, and which would some day have to be redeemed at par. In other words, during and after a war the capitalist class cost to the country several times as much as the enemy.

So did the promises and purposes of the Revolution immediately prove abortive. While the fundamental law declared that the Union was formed "to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty," free scope was given to an economic system replete with injustice, pregnant with the seeds of domestic strife, destructive, of every true element of happiness, and fatally tending to class tyranny.

Under that system men, proclaimed free and equal, were soon made to realize that they were only labor power in human form, to be sold in the market for what it could fetch, and to be consumed in the production of wealth for the exclusive benefit of those who already had wealth. Under that system the value of a man, and, therefore, his remuneration, were not to be measured by the extent to which his industry and intelligence benefited his fellows. They were to be gauged by the necessities of his competitors on the "labor market"; so that, as the competition increased, the tendencyof his wages was constantly downward, until it reached the minimum required to keep alive his flesh-and-bone machine while it was hired to an employer, who thus became the absolute owner of the net product, or, "surplus value," created by that human machine.

Under that system the toiling masses, hungry and despised, turned the wilderness into a garden, the stones, the clay, the trees into resplendent cities, the ore and the coal into new organs of motion, through which human strength, speed and skill were multiplied a thousandfold, the lightning itself into an obedient messenger; they built factories, ships, docks and warehouses; constructed railroads, bridged rivers and pierced mountains; then descended into their nameless graves, leaving all in the hands of their despoilers, to further oppress and degrade the inheritors of their misery.

Under this system society, so called, became a worse pandemonium than it had ever been. Each looked upon his neighbor as a legitimate prey or a dangerous antagonist. The laborer viewed with dismay, the appearance of another laborer, while the employer of both plotted the ruin of a rival employer. And this horrible struggle for life among the weak, for dominion among the powerful, ever more intense as the means of life became greater and as the dominion of man over nature grew more extensive, was glorified by sophists as the providential law of human progress!

From this state of anarchy emerged at last the plutocracy of our day. How and at what cost we shall now see.

For a century or more anarchy reigned supreme in all the branches of production. At times, without definite or approximate knowledge of actual conditions, but stimulated by a reckless desire for gain, every "captain of industry" went on "rushing business" to the utmost capacity of his means and credit until the market was "overstocked"; that is, until he found by the event what he might have learned before by a timely use of common sense, namely:

1. That since, under the wage system the people can only buy back a portion of their product, the profit-making class must depend on itself alone for the consumption of the remainder.

2. That insofar, then, as the overproduction, so called, consists of such necessaries as the wage-earning masses require, it must either be sold at a great sacrifice or remain in store until the workers engaged in the production of things exclusively used by the said profit-making class can gradually absorb it.

3. That in the meantime the production of necessaries must stop and the adventurous "captains" who have incurred obligations beyond their means are necessarily bankrupted.

4. That a large number of the very people who purchase those necessaries from retailers are consequently thrown out of employment, and that the current stock of those traders is thereby converted into an overstock, with the inevitable result of widespread failure, reaching at last the industries affected to the production of capitalist commodities.

And then must the strange spectacle be afforded, of a whole people—with the exception of a few drones for whom the sun of prosperity never sets—reduced to the utmost destitution in the midst of the plenty of their own creation; men, women and children starving, apparently, because there is too much wheat and meat; ragged and shoeless, apparently because there is too much clothing and footwear; idle, and therefore miserable, actually because there stands between them and the idle machine, as also between them and busy nature, a paper wall of private ownership, stamped "sacred" by the hand of imposture.

At such times those social functions only which have escaped individual covetousness—those public services like the post office, education, and other departments of national, state and municipal administration which have remained socialized—are entirely free from the general paralysis, insofar at least as their working force is involved. And although tainted with the corruption that capitalism imparts to government, they shine in the night of economic chaos as vivid illustrations of individual security and public benefit in social cooperation. By the contrast of their normal activity with the intermittent palsyof all the capitalized organs of the social body, they plainly show that individual suffering is the natural punishment inflicted upon men for their disregard of the fundamental law of social existence—the law of interdependence—or solidarity.

Every such crisis reduced the number of capitalistic combatants and left the survivors stronger than formerly. It also left the wage-workers weaker in proportion.

The time at last came when the powerful had more to gain by combination among themselves than by internecine war. They became class-conscious, and, therefore, interdependent, as against the individualistic and, therefore, turbulent class from which they had now emerged. The era of capitalistic competition was fast passing away, to be succeeded by the era of plutocratic concentration.

In all the chief branches of production the TRUST made its appearance, spreading its devilfish tentacles in the corresponding channels of distribution.

The effects of this new movement were multiple and ominous. They may, in part, be enumerated as follows:

First—Simplification of administrative methods and consequent reduction of the clerical force.

Second—Application of labor-saving machinery and processes on an unprecedented scale of magnitude and efficiency.

Third—Consequent increase of productive power without a proportionate increase, and in many instances with an actual decrease, in the number of employees.

Fourth—Reduction, at first, of the wholesale price of the product to the point where the smaller competitors still in the field must abandon it, and subsequent enforcement of a monopoly price by the victorious combination or"trust."

Fifth—Hence destruction of the middle class at an accelerating rate (which, since 1889, has reached an annual average of 11,000 failures), and consequent displacement, partly temporary, chiefly permanent, of the labor previously employed by the bankrupted firms.

Sixth—Therefore, decreased competition among capitalists, increased competition among workers.

Seventh—Steady fall of the wage rate; that is, curtailment of the purchasing power of the masses, resulting in a lesser increase in the production of necessaries than in the number of the population.

Eighth—Enlargement of the purchasing power of the capitalist class, resulting in a prodigious development of the industries affected to the production of luxuries and to the creation of new capital, yet insufficient to absorb the labor displaced by mechanical, administrative and other improvements in all the industries.

Ninth—Introduction of the contract or "sweating" system wherever practicable; so that, by abandoning an insignificant portion of his fleecings to a contractor, or "sweater," the capitalist may relieve himself of all the care and odium incident to the superintendence of wage labor, while securing at the same time from every wage slave in his direct or indirect employment the highest degree of efficiency and the most merciless intensity of toil.

Tenth—Consequent widening of the distance between capitalist and laborer, until both have become actually invisible and personally unknown to each other, although mutually felt across the dividing chasm, not as interdependent human beings, but as brute forces in constant opposition, the weaker of which (namely, labor) must yield more and more to the stronger (namely, capital).

To all those effects, already, well developed, may be added a still more portentous one, now in course of development, as follows:

Growing insufficiency of the domestic markets to meet the enlarging capacities, and practically unlimited possibilities, of domestic production. Therefore, international competition; that is, huge masses of national labor hurled against each other in the international conflict between mighty capitalists for supremacy in the world’s market. Logically, in the end, the trusts are to become international and capital will lose entirely its national character, while any sentiment of patriotism remaining in the workers will have been used to stimulate competition among them, prevent their international organization, and thus reduce them, all over the world, to the same level of misery and degradation.

Of course, all the social and political evils already developed by the capitalistic system in its primary stage of competition were further intensified by the first effects of plutocratic concentration. With the steady growth of enforced idleness and destitution, ever more productive of disorganization, ignorance and immorality, came naturally a greater servility of the politicians to a class now possessed of overwhelming economic power, thoroughly united and determined to compel obedience. "The perversion of democracy to the ends of plutocracy" went on unchecked by any consideration of statesmanship or by any crude manifestation of public discontent. The powers of government so long used legislatively to confer privileges upon the capitalist class were at last used arbitrarily, and even murderously, to establish the absolute dominion of the plutocracy. And, blind to the true cause of its sufferings, lacking in the knowledge and spirit of interdependence, hopelessly divided against itself, the multitude stupidly sanctioned at the polls the economic despotism and political corruption which its own venal misleaders affected to denounce in bombastic phrases at public assemblies.

Of those misleaders, the most effectively treacherous were prominent in the organizations of labor, which it was their disgusting function to keep from uniting politically against the political machines of the plutocratic class. It was, indeed, plain enough that thus united, and only thus, could organized labor rally to its standard the masses of the people, and by one strike at the ballot box, costless and bloodless, achieve the emancipation of the working class. Therefore, "No politics in trade unions," was the cry of those traitors; and it was reechoed by every thoughtless man, who, proudly holding in his left hand a full-paid union card, with his right voted himself and his fellows into slavery on election day.

But throughout the civilized world the wage workers are asserting their interdependence—the natural dependence of every man upon his fellows, of every nation upon all other nations; and under the banner of international socialism millions of them are now marching to the conquest of the public powers.

They recognize that the social body is an organism, and, as such, is subject in its life, health and development to the general law which governs organic nature; that the more highly it is developed, the more interdependent are all its members; that the very extent of this mutual dependence of parts determines the amount of freedom and the degree of perfection with which they respectively perform their natural functions, ever so diverse, yet all tending usefullyand harmoniously to the common end.

They realize also that the capitalist is no more a legitimate member of the social organism than a parasite in the human body is a necessary part of the organ upon which it feeds, and upon the proper working of which all the other stimulate competition among them, prevent their international organization,and thus reduce them, all over the world, to the same level of misery and degradation.

Of course, all the social and political evils already developed by the capitalistic system in its primary stage of competition were further intensified by the first effects of plutocratic concentration. With the steady growth of enforced idleness and destitution, ever more productive of disorganization, ignorance and immorality, came naturally a greater servility of the politicians to a class now possessed of overwhelming economic power, thoroughly united and determined to compel obedience. "The perversion of democracy to the ends of plutocracy" went on unchecked by any consideration of statesmanship or by any crude manifestation of public discontent. The powers of government so long used legislatively to confer privileges upon the capitalist class were at last used arbitrarily, and even murderously, to establish the absolute dominion of the plutocracy. And, blind to the true cause of its sufferings, lacking in the knowledge and spirit of interdependence, hopelessly divided against itself, the multitude stupidly sanctioned at the polls the economic despotism and political corruption which its own venal misleaders affected to denounce in bombastic phrases at public assemblies.

Of those misleaders, the most effectively treacherous were prominent in the organizations of labor, which it was their disgusting function to keep from uniting politically against the political machines of the plutocratic class. It was, indeed, plain enough that thus united, and only thus, could organized labor rally to its standard the masses of the people, and by one strike at the ballot box, costless and bloodless, achieve the emancipation of the working class.Therefore, "No politics in trade unions," was the cry of those traitors; and it was re-echoed by every thoughtless man, who, proudly holding in his left hand a full-paid union card, with his right voted himself and his fellows into slavery on election day.

But throughout the civilized world the wage workers are asserting their interdependence—the natural dependence of every man upon his fellows, of every nation upon all other nations; and under the banner of international socialism millions of them are now marching to the conquest of the public powers.

They recognize that the social body is an organism, and, as such, is subject in its life, health and development to the general law which governs organic nature; that the more highly it is developed, the more interdependent are all its members; that the very extent of this mutual dependence of parts determines the amount of freedom and the degree of perfection with which they respectively perform their natural functions, ever so diverse, yet all tending usefully and harmoniously to the common end.

They realize also that the capitalist is no more a legitimate member of the social organism than a parasite in the human body is a necessary part of the organ upon which it feeds, and upon the proper working of which all the other organs depend for support and vigor. And they are determined to expel him.

The class struggle has reached its climax. With the triumph of the united toilers over their combined despoilers will end class privilege and class rule.

Americans, fall into line! Onward to the Cooperative Commonwealth!

To the industrious the tools of industry; to the laborer the fruits of his labor; to mankind the earth!