The owners of property are ever on the look-out for means of augmenting their possessions. They employ their capital in industrial operations simply for the purpose of deriving from its use profit or interest. So long as they get their profits increased they care little for the conditions under which the work in their factory, in their mine, or on their railway is carried on. They never seek to know whether those working for them are living happy and contented lives. For them the worker is an abstraction—the materialisation of some portion of their capital in exactly the same way as another portion of their capital shows itself as raw material, as auxiliary material, as factory building, or as a finished product. He sees the worker figuring on his periodical balance-sheet as “Wages,” and cares nothing that “Wages” means so many sentient human beings capable of thinking, loving, functioning even as he does.
Why then should he hesitate, when the markets are glutted, when his “wages” have been transformed into more goods than the market can consume, when goods cannot be sold because hungry men and women have not the wherewithal to buy food, when ill-clad children cannot have clothing provided for them because there is too much in the shops, to turn adrift those he no longer wishes to employ because they are no longer profitable?
And the result is invariably that, during periods when the markets are teeming with food and clothing, the workers are sent adrift and cannot purchase the things of which they are so sorely in need.
The only solution to this state of affairs is to abolish capitalism. The whole trend of events is in the direction of collectivist production and the inquirer into things political and economic can see that the capitalist, having ceased to be useful, is using the whole governmental machinery to safeguard the interests of his class.
The worker must learn that he has to look to himself and his fellows to work out the emancipation of the working-class. Only by combining to capture the political machinery and to use the power thus acquired for the overthrow of capitalism can he hope to obtain, once and for all, a full and complete solution to the unemployed problem.
The capitalist-class are fighting to increase or maintain their powers and privileges; and as these can only be maintained or increased at the expense of the working-class, their greatest concern is to keep the latter in subjection; to prevent them improving their position, except in-so-far as that improvement is necessary to capitalists. On the other hand, the working-class are fighting for the best conditions they can get; to improve those conditions if possible, and to prevent them being adversely affected in any event. And as they cannot improve their position, or for that matter maintain it, except in opposition to and at the expense of, the class above them, they are in necessary conflict with that class. Obviously then, the antagonism of interest existing between these two classes must prevent any intermingling except in conflict.
The victory of the socialist working-class is the only possible ending of this great struggle. This, however, does not mean the subjection of the capitalist class by the workers: it means the abolition of capitalism and the end of classes, for the great many unprivileged cannot secure equality of opportunity without abolishing class privilege, and privilege is based on private property. The triumph of the great working majority thus involves the emancipation of all from class oppression, for the interests of the toiling majority are fundamentally the interests of humankind. The interests of the humanity are bound up with the aspirations of the oppressed working-class in its struggle with capitalist domination.
Socialism is the ownership of the means of production by society as a whole.
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