Socialists are opposed to class war. Socialists believe there should be no classes. There would be no classes if everybody worked at useful labor and took no more than belonged to him. But if some men will not work at useful labor, choosing, instead, to make war upon those who are working, who is to blame? Certainly not the workers. They are trying to get nothing that belongs to anyone else. They have never yet been able to keep what belonged to them.
Socialists recognize these facts. They say a class struggle is in progress. Anybody who denies their statement must necessarily know nothing of the existence of trusts, labor unions, courts, lobbyists, crooked legislators, millionaires, paupers, overworked workers, or men who are underworked because they can get no work. Anyone who recognizes the existence of these things cannot well deny either the existence of classes or the existence of a struggle. The dead of this warfare are upon every industrial battlefield, where the fierce desire for profits sends workers to their doom for lack of the safeguards that would have saved their lives. The wounded are in every poverty-stricken home.
Either these statements are true or they are not. If they are true, is it wiser to recognize their truth, or, ostrich-like, to stick our heads in the sand and deny both the existence of classes and the class struggle? Socialists believe it is wiser to recognize the existence of the facts. They deplore the existence of the class struggle, but they can see only harm in closing our eyes to it. If their contention is correct a small body of capitalists are robbing the great working class. If the working class has not found out who is robbing it it cannot find out too quickly. Nor can the working class find out too quickly the methods by which it is being robbed.
It is the advocacy of these ideas that has caused the Socialists to be censured by the rich for trying to “array class against class.” If one class is being robbed by another ought not the class that is being robbed to be politically arrayed against the class that is robbing it? Do we not array those whose houses are broken into by burglars against the burglars? Is not the existence of police forces sufficient proof that we do? If capitalists, working through laws they have made, are robbing the workers of thousands, where burglars take cents, why should not the workers be politically arrayed against the capitalists even more solidly than they are arrayed against burglars?
The workers, either singly or collectively, as in their unions, are already arrayed against the capitalists, so far as fighting for more wages is concerned. Without any help from Socialists, we thus have here class arrayed against class. Socialists seek only to extend this conflict to the ballot-box. They ask the worker to remember when he votes as well as when he strikes that he belongs to the working class. They point out to him that he is robbed under the forms of law and that the robbery cannot be stopped until the operations of capitalist laws are stopped. The operations of capitalist laws cannot be stopped until working men stop them. Working men can stop them only by uniting at the ballot-box and wresting from the capitalist class the control of the government.
In this way only do Socialists try to “array class against class.” They do not try to array men against men. They do not try to engender hatred of Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller, or any other great capitalist. Socialists have nothing against any rich man individually. They regard all great capitalists as the natural and inevitable products of the capitalist system. If the great capitalists are sometimes bad, it is because the capitalist system makes them bad. If the particular capitalists who are bad had never been born, the capitalist system would have made others do the same bad acts. Therefore Socialists are opposed to the system that makes man bad rather than to the men who have been made bad by the system. If every capitalist in the world had gone down with the Titanic, Socialists would have expected absolutely no improvement in conditions, because the capitalist system would still have remained. Other men would simply have taken their places, and the wrongs would have gone on. Therefore, Socialists leave it to Democratic and Republican politicians to point out “bad men” and say if this man or that man were in jail we should have no more robbery. The slightest reflection should reveal the fallacious character of such comment. Where are all of the “bad men” of the last two generations? Where are William H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, E. H. Harriman and the others? They are not simply in jail—they are dead. But who noticed the slightest abatement of robbery when they died? Who will note the slightest improvement of conditions when the “bad men” of the present day are dead? Then how ridiculous it is to say that if Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller and some others were in jail we should have no more robbery. So long as we have a system that makes men bad we shall have bad men.
Let us now inquire what it is about the capitalist system that makes men bad. We shall not have far to look. It is the private ownership and control, for the sake of private profits, of the means of life. Think how gigantic is this power! All of our food, clothing and shelter is made with machinery. A few own the machinery. The others cannot use it without permission. And, if permission be given, it can be used only upon such terms as the owners offer. Those terms are always the lowest wages for which anybody can be found to work.
Is it any wonder that the few who control this machinery go mad with the desire to accumulate wealth? Is it any wonder that they press their advantage to the limit? Are you sure you would have done less if you had been placed in the same circumstances? I am not sure I should have done less. In fact, I am quite sure I should have done as much, or more, if I could. I say this because I take into account the tremendous power of habit and environment.
An environment of money makes those whom it surrounds forget men. The Titanic was not raced through icebergs to her doom because her owners were indifferent to the loss of human life. The Titanic was raced to her doom because her owners forgot human life. They thought only of the money that would come from the advertisement of a quick trip across the Atlantic. If they had not been made mad by this thought they would at least have remembered their ship, with its cost of $8,000,000. But in their money-madness they forgot not only their passengers, but their own ship. Yet, if the manager of the company had been sailing the ship for the government, without thought of profit, he would have thought of the passengers, the crew, the ship and the icebergs. And if the trusts were owned by the government, the men in charge of them would think of the workers when they fixed wages and of the consumers when they fixed the prices of finished products.
So easy is it to dispose of the argument that Socialism is impracticable because it could not be made to work “without changing human nature.” Some men believe we must forever go on grabbing, grabbing, grabbing, while others go on starving, starving, starving. Human nature will “change” just so rapidly as conditions are changed. If one sits on a red-hot stove, it is “human nature” to arise. But if the stove be permitted to cool, one who sits on it will not arise until other reasons than heat have made him wish to do so. Yet, the human nature of the man in each case is the same. It has in no wise changed. It is only the stove that has changed.