Revolution and Other Essays | Page 4

Whim does not conduce to
unanimity. There must be a deep-seated cause to make 7,000,000 men
of the one mind, to make them cast off allegiance to the bourgeois gods
and lose faith in so fine a thing as patriotism. There are many counts of
the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist class,
but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to which
capital has never replied and can never reply.
The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed.
And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed
deplorably, ignobly, horribly. The capitalist class had an opportunity
such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the
world. It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and
made modern society. It mastered matter, organized the machinery of
life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no
creature should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein
for every child there would be opportunity for education, for
intellectual and spiritual uplift. Matter being mastered, and the
machinery of life organized, all this was possible. Here was the chance,
God-given, and the capitalist class failed. It was blind and greedy. It
prattled sweet ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor
ceased one whit in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as
tremendous only as was the opportunity it had ignored.

But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind. As it was
blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand. Well,
then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp and
unmistakable. In the first place, consider the caveman. He was a very
simple creature. His head slanted back like an orang- outang's, and he
had but little more intelligence. He lived in a hostile environment, the
prey of all manner of fierce life. He had no inventions nor artifices. His
natural efficiency for food-getting was, say, 1. He did not even till the
soil. With his natural efficiency of 1, he fought off his carnivorous
enemies and got himself food and shelter. He must have done all this,
else he would not have multiplied and spread over the earth and sent
his progeny down, generation by generation, to become even you and
me.
The caveman, with his natural efficiency of 1, got enough to eat most
of the time, and no caveman went hungry all the time. Also, he lived a
healthy, open-air life, loafed and rested himself, and found plenty of
time in which to exercise his imagination and invent gods. That is to
say, he did not have to work all his waking moments in order to get
enough to eat. The child of the caveman (and this is true of the children
of all savage peoples) had a childhood, and by that is meant a happy
childhood of play and development.
And now, how fares modern man? Consider the United States, the most
prosperous and most enlightened country of the world. In the United
States there are 10,000,000 people living in poverty. By poverty is
meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate
shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained.
In the United States there are 10,000,000 people who have not enough
to eat. In the United States, because they have not enough to eat, there
are 10,000,000 people who cannot keep the ordinary 1 measure of
strength in their bodies. This means that these 10,000,000 people are
perishing, are dying, body and soul, slowly, because they have not
enough to eat. All over this broad, prosperous, enlightened land, are
men, women, and children who are living miserably. In all the great
cities, where they are segregated in slum ghettos by hundreds of
thousands and by millions, their misery becomes beastliness. No

caveman ever starved as chronically as they starve, ever slept as vilely
as they sleep, ever festered with rottenness and disease as they fester,
nor ever toiled as hard and for as long hours as they toil.
In Chicago there is a woman who toiled sixty hours per week. She was
a garment worker. She sewed buttons on clothes. Among the Italian
garment workers of Chicago, the average weekly wage of the
dressmakers is 90 cents, but they work every week in the year. The
average weekly wage of the pants finishers is $1.31, and the average
number of weeks employed in the year is 27.85. The average yearly
earnings of the dressmakers is $37; of the pants finishers, $42.4l. Such
wages means no childhood for the children, beastliness of living, and
starvation for all.
Unlike the caveman, modern