War of the Classes | Page 4

end of time. These were functions divine in origin and held by divine
right. The newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so,
and what they say, of course, is so--to the bourgeois mind.
Then came the presidential election of 1904. Like a bolt out of a clear
sky was the socialist vote of 435,000,--an increase of nearly 400 per
cent in four years, the largest third-party vote, with one exception, since
the Civil War. Socialism had shown that it was a very live and growing
revolutionary force, and all its old menace revived. I am afraid that
neither it nor I are any longer respectable. The capitalist press of the
country confirms me in my opinion, and herewith I give a few
post-election utterances of the capitalist press:-
"The Democratic party of the constitution is dead. The Social-
Democratic party of continental Europe, preaching discontent and class
hatred, assailing law, property, and personal rights, and insinuating
confiscation and plunder, is here."--Chicago Chronicle.
"That over forty thousand votes should have been cast in this city to
make such a person as Eugene V. Debs the President of the United
States is about the worst kind of advertising that Chicago could
receive."--Chicago Inter-Ocean.
"We cannot blink the fact that socialism is making rapid growth in this
country, where, of all others, there would seem to be less inspiration for
it."--Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
"Upon the hands of the Republican party an awful responsibility was
placed last Tuesday. . . It knows that reforms--great, far-sweeping
reforms--are necessary, and it has the power to make them. God help
our civilization if it does not! . . . It must repress the trusts or stand
before the world responsible for our system of government being

changed into a social republic. The arbitrary cutting down of wages
must cease, or socialism will seize another lever to lift itself into
power."--The Chicago New World.
"Scarcely any phase of the election is more sinisterly interesting than
the increase in the socialist vote. Before election we said that we could
not afford to give aid and comfort to the socialists in any manner. . . It
(socialism) must be fought in all its phases, in its every
manifestation."--San Francisco Argonaut.
And far be it from me to deny that socialism is a menace. It is its
purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of
present-day society. It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and
depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever
occurred in the history of the world. It presents a new spectacle to the
astonished world,--that of an ORGANIZED, INTERNATIONAL,
REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT. In the bourgeois mind a class
struggle is a terrible and hateful thing, and yet that is precisely what
socialism is,--a world-wide class struggle between the propertyless
workers and the propertied masters of workers. It is the prime
preachment of socialism that the struggle is a class struggle. The
working class, in the process of social evolution, (in the very nature of
things), is bound to revolt from the sway of the capitalist class and to
overthrow the capitalist class. This is the menace of socialism, and in
affirming it and in tallying myself an adherent of it, I accept my own
consequent unrespectability.
As yet, to the average bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace,
vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class, when
he discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his own
mouth. He does not know the literature of socialism, its philosophy, nor
its politics. He wags his head sagely and rattles the dry bones of dead
and buried ideas. His lips mumble mouldy phrases, such as, "Men are
not born equal and never can be;" "It is Utopian and impossible;"
"Abstinence should be rewarded;" "Man will first have to be born
again;" "Cooperative colonies have always failed;" and "What if we do
divide up? in ten years there would be rich and poor men such as there
are today."
It surely is time that the capitalists knew something about this socialism
that they feel menaces them. And it is the hope of the writer that the

socialistic studies in this volume may in some slight degree enlighten a
few capitalistic minds. The capitalist must learn, first and for always,
that socialism is based, not upon the equality, but upon the inequality,
of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is
necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that
socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the
material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the
warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and
contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with
flashes and