“What authorizes the people to believe in the salvation from long ages of torture—nay, not only to believe in, but to see it, and actively strive for, is the fairy-like productive power, the prodigious fertility of human labor. In the secrets which have been wrung from nature; in the magic formulas by which we force her to do our wishes and to yield her bounties almost without any painful work on our part; in the constantly increasing improvement of the methods of production—in this I say consists the wealth which can accomplish what no redeemer ever could.”
And Dietzgen, like Ward, protests against this great legacy of history, this vast accumulation of the results of the combined social labor of a hundred generations, being the sole property of those “who never achieved anything!”
Dietzgen, like Ward, sees that the great problem which confronts the race is to break down those intolerable bars which prevent humanity from entering into its just inheritance.
To this great and culminating task man must bend all the powers of his mind. Now he has reached the point where the gates of liberty begin to yield and with one grand, united effort may be thrown wide open so that all the sons and daughters of men may finish the long centuries of misery and freely enter in.
To continue this senseless oppression longer would be the summit of stupidity.
“Consider the frugal needs of our people and at the same time the fertility of labor, and ask yourselves if mere instinct alone would not be sufficient to teach us how to supply adequately our needs with the help of the existing means of production?”
To make these “means of production the property of society” is then the problem of Ward’s applied sociology and Dietzgen’s social democracy alike. According to both, this emancipation of the mass of the people from the last form of slavery is the one consuming task of civilization.
And the psychic factor, the consciously reasoning brain of man is, according to both, to be more than ever the instrument of “achievement.”
To Dietzgen especially, the time is rotten-ripe for the great change.
“The salvation of humanity is involved in this question. It is so great and sublime that all other problems which time may bear in its folds must wait in silence. The whole of old Europe is waiting with bated breath the fulfilling of the things which are coming.