The capitalists, with their policies of mass poverty, exploitation and war, are a menace to the human race. Ending the gigantic robbery which is the very base of the capitalist system will at once release vast resources for useful social ends. A socialist system will greatly increase the productive forces and production itself. By liquidating the contradiction between the modes of production and exchange, it does away with economic crises, with all their waste and loss. Socialism will conserve the natural resources of the planet which are now being ruthlessly wasted in the mad capitalist race for profits. Unemployment, with its terrible misery and suffering, will become a thing of the past. The many millions who now walk the streets unemployed will have fruitful work to do, to the benefit of all society. The socialist system of planned production, based upon social ownership of industry and the land, is incomparably more efficient than the anarchic capitalist system founded upon private property, competition and the exploitation of the workers. The abolition of the monumental robbery of the workers by the capitalists in all its myriad forms; the liquidation of the capitalist economic crisis, with its mass unemployment and general crippling of the productive forces; the development of an industrial efficiency and a volume of production now hardly dreamed of; the careful conservation of natural resources; the abolition of war;—these revolutionary measures will provide the material bases for a well-being of the toiling masses of field and factory now quite unknown in the world.
Capitalism, by its very nature, is a prolific breeder of crime. It is a system of legalized robbery of the working class. The whole process of capitalist business is a swindle and an armed hold-up. In capitalist society what constitutes crime and what does not is a purely arbitrary distinction. The capitalists do not recognize any line of demarcation for themselves. They do whatever they can “get away with.” The record of every large fortune and big corporation in this country is smeared not only with brutal robbery of the workers but also statutory crime of every description, from the bribery of legislatures to plain murder. In a society where each grabs what he can at the expense of the rest, naturally the government offers a wide field of corruption. Such corruption is not a special condition, but of the very tissue of capitalism. It is not surprising that in a system of society where the aim is to get rich by any means, crime of every kind should flourish. Faced by low wages and other impossible economic conditions on the one hand and by the corrupt example of capitalism generally on the other, many naturally take to lives of open crime and try to seize at the point of a gun what the capitalist “big shots” steal through exploiting the workers, by a corner on the stock exchange, or by corrupting the government. The main difference between their operations is primarily one of dimension. Socialism, by putting an end to capitalist exploitation, deals a mortal blow at crime of every description. The economic base of crime is destroyed. The worker is enabled to live and work under the best possible conditions. There is no place for human sharks to prey upon their fellow men and women. Not only does the abolition of capitalism destroy the basis of the so-called crimes against property, but the revolutionized economic and social conditions, involving cultural values also greatly diminish the “crimes of passion.” Capitalism blames crime upon the individual, instead of upon the bad social conditions which produce it. Hence its treatment of crime is essentially one of punishment. But the failure of its prisons, with their terrible sex-starvation, graft, over-crowding, idleness, stupid discipline, ferociously long sentences and general brutality, is overwhelmingly demonstrated by the rapidly mounting numbers of prisoners and the long list of terrible prison riots. Capitalist prisons are actually schools of crime.
So long as capitalism lasts war must continue to curse the human race. It is the historical task of the proletariat to put an end to this hoary monster. This it will do by destroying the capitalist system and with it the economic causes that bring about war. It is characteristic of capitalism to justify all the robbery and misery and terrors of its system by seeking to create the impression that they are caused by basic traits in human nature, or even by “acts of god.” Thus we find current many metaphysical and mysterious explanations of the present crisis and unemployment. These preventable disasters are made to appear almost as natural phenomena over which mankind has no control, like tornadoes and earthquakes. The same general attitude is taken with regard to war. War is put forth as arising out of the very nature of humanity. Man is pictured as a war-like animal, and therefore capitalism escapes responsibility. War becomes more or less inevitable. This is all nonsense, of course. Man is by nature a gregarious and friendly animal. He does not make war because he dislikes others of his own species, differing from him in language, religion, geographical location, etc. His wars have always arisen out of struggles over the very material things of wealth and power. This is true, whether he has been living in a tribal, slave, feudal or capitalist economy, and whether he has obscured the true cause of his wars with an intense religious garb or with slogans about making the world safe for democracy. The cause of modern war is, as we have already seen, the imperialistic policies of the capitalist nations to rob the colonial peoples, to smash back the growing revolutionary movement, to crush each other in the world struggle for markets, raw materials and territory. In a society in which there is no private property in industry and land, in which no exploitation of the workers takes place and where plenty is produced for all, there can be no grounds for war. The interests of a socialist society are fundamentally opposed to the murderous and unnatural struggle of international war. Politically, the world will be organized. There will be no colonies, no “spheres of influence,” no hypocritical “open doors.” The toilers will then have fully realized Marx’s famous slogan, “Workingmen of the World, Unite!” The interests of the toiling masses in the various regions of the world will not be in conflict, but in harmony with each other. There will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism that serves so well the capitalist warmakers. Armies and navies, rendered obsolete, will be disbanded.
Socialism, by freeing the masses from economic and political slavery will, for the first time in history, give the masses an opportunity to fully develop and express their personalities. With socialism no one will have the right to exploit another; no longer will a profit-hungry employer be able to shut his factory gates and sentence thousands to starvation; no more will it be possible for a little clique of capitalists and their political henchmen to plunge the world into a blood-bath of war. The boast of capitalist apologists about the equal opportunity which their society affords, that it is a case of the survival of the fittest, is a tissue of lies. Not socialism, but capitalism, with its exploitation, terrorism, war, superstition, and cultivated illiteracy, creates a dead level in its poverty and ignorance for the uncounted millions of toilers of field and factory. Changed social conditions develop different “human natures.”
Wide fear is expressed that we are going into a regime of such standardisation and mechanisation that life is becoming merely a machine-like process and the people so many robots. Under Socialism the machine will be used on the broadest scale possible to produce the necessities of life in the great industries, transport systems and communication services. It would be the sheerest nonsense and quite impossible not to take advantage of every labor and time-saving device. But Socialist society will also know how to develop the variegated and artistic. Where the creative impulses of the masses are not checked by poverty and slavery, where the arts and sciences are not hamstrung by the profit-making motive, where the masses are not poisoned by anti-social codes of morals and ethics, and where every assistance of the free community is given to the maximum cultivation of the intellectual and artistic powers of the masses—there we need have no fear that society will be robotized by the machine.
Life under a Communist society will be varied and interesting. Individual will vie with individual, as never before, to create the useful and the beautiful. Locality will compete with locality in the beauty of their architecture. The impress of individuality and originality will be upon everything. The world will become a place well worth living in, and what is the most important, its joys will not be the niggardly monopoly of a privileged ruling class but the heritage of the great producing masses.
The socialist revolution is the most profound of all revolutions in history. It initiates changes more rapid and far-reaching than any in the whole experience of mankind. The hundreds of millions of workers , striking off their age-old chains of slavery, will construct a society of liberty and prosperity and intelligence.Socialism will inaugurate a new era for the human race, the building of a new world. The overthrow of capitalism and the development of Communism will bring about the immediate or eventual solution of many great social problems. Some of these originate in capitalism, and others have plagued the human race for scores of centuries. Among them are war, religious superstition, prostitution, famine, pestilence, crime, poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, illiteracy, race and national chauvinism, the suppression of woman, and every form of slavery and exploitation of one class by another. The objective conditions, in the shape of scientific knowledge and the means of creating material wealth, are already at hand in sufficient measure to do away with these menaces to humanity. But the trouble lies with the subjective factor, the capitalist order of society. Capitalism, based upon human exploitation, stands as the great barrier to social progress. Socialism, by abolishing the capitalist system, liquidates this subjective difficulty. It releases thereby productive forces strong enough to provide plenty for all and it destroys the whole accompanying capitalist baggage of ignorance, strife and misery. Socialism frees humanity from the stultifying effects of the present essentially animal struggle for existence and opens up before it new horizons of joys and tasks. The day is not so far distant when our children, immersed in this new life, will look back with horror upon capitalism and marvel how we tolerated it so long. Socialism will be the organization of the economics of the world upon a rational and planned basis, the systematic conservation and increase of the world’s natural resources, the development of a vast concentration upon all the great problems now confronting science, the beautification of the world by a new and richer artistry, the liquidation of congested cities and the combination of the joys and conveniences of country and urban life, and the solution of many other great problems and tasks now hardly even imagined.
Socialist society, however, will not confine itself simply to thus developing the objective conditions for a better life. Especially will it turn its attention to the subjective factor, to the fundamental improvement of man himself. Capitalism, with its wars, wage slavery, slums, quack doctors, etc., undermines the health of the race and destroys its physique. Socialism, with its healthy dwellings and working conditions, its nutritious food, physical culture, etc., will make well-being, like education, the property of all.
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