Arise ye slaves!

Slavery is not yet abolished. So long as the worker is deprived of property in the instruments of production, so long as his labour-power is a commodity which he is obliged to sell to another, he is not a free being, be he white or black. He is simply a slave to a master and from morning until night is as much a bondsman as any plantation slave ever was. Slaves are cheaper now and do more
work than at any time in the world’s history. The same principle of subjection that ruled in the chattel system rules in the wage system. slavery consist?

It consists in the compulsory using of men for the benefit of the user. One who is forced to yield to another a part of the product of his toil is a slave, no matter where he resides or what may be the colour of his skin. This was the condition of the African-Americans before the Civil War, and it is his or her condition today, but also the condition of all propertyless workers. That the worker
can today change masters does not alter the fact. Today he or she may leave one master but must look for another or starve. Workers may change their master, but they are still at the mercy of the master class. The choice of the chattel slave was between work and the lash, the choice of a
wage slave is between work and starvation. The whip of hunger is all sufficient to drive the wage slave to toil. The worker today, then, is a slave, bound by the pressure of economic wants to compulsory servitude to capitalist masters under the greatest tyranny of all — the tyranny of want. The person who is  compelled to submit to wages dictated by a corporation, and who is at the beck and call of a boss has not much personal liberty to boast of over the chattel slave.

Under chattel-slavery the slave was bought and sold and became the property of the buyer. Under the system of wage-slavery, to which workers of all lands are subjected at present, the labour or more accurately the labour-power of the individual worker is bought, a wage is paid to the worker by the employer, and the employer only takes an interest in the welfare of his workers in so far as it helps him to make profits out of them.

The most barbarous fact is the labour market. The mere term sufficiently expresses its commerce of the buying and selling of people as beasts. It is the inhuman traffic of people and it is brutally simple, a handful of capitalists and financiers control of the factories, the farms the mines and the natural resources and they decide who will work and who shall not.  The lives of the workers are made up of worry, anxiety, insecurity, and hardships, the constant pinching to make ends meet, and the continual necessity of learning to do without things. As long as the wages system continues, part of the wealth which the workers create will be kept back from them. The share which is withheld from the workers is the larger share, and, as machinery increases and improves, the share will grow larger. The things necessary for the production of wealth must be made the common property of the people and must be controlled by them. The workers who would be free must organise and must educate themselves. They must get out of their heads all idea that the era of wage-slavery cannot be ended and work towards  the era of the co-operative commonwealth. The working class must affirm the unity of the workers of the whole world in common struggle for the realisation of this common goal.

The workers cannot restrict themselves to addressing only the symptoms of their oppression. They must prepare for removing the source of the disease, the capitalist system of wage slavery, that is the source of all the problems facing the working class and establish socialism. The apologists for the capitalists and the reformists dismiss this as “unrealistic”. They pretend it is so laughable as not to deserve serious discussion. The capitalists and their retainers do everything to try to ensure that the idea of the transformation of the social system is not even debated precisely because that is the real danger to themselves.

Socialist revolution is not only a possibility, it is a necessity in order to avert the grave dangers facing people, to prevent the further immiseration and destitution to avert the dangers of war and to reverse the environmental destruction of our planet. The class struggle must be strengthened and deepened.