Viewed today from any intelligent standpoint the outlook of the Socialist movement is full of promise to the workers of coming freedom.
It is the break of dawn upon the horizon of human destiny and it has no limitations but the walls of the universe.
What party strife or factional turmoil may yet ensue we neither know nor care. We only know that the principles of Socialism are necessary to the emancipation of the working class and to the true happiness of all classes and that its historic mission is that of a conquering movement. We know that day by day, nourished by the misery and vitalized by the aspirations of the working class, the area of its activity widens, it grows in strength and increases its mental and moral grasp, and when the final hour of capitalism and wage slavery strikes, the Socialist movement, the greatest in all history—great enough to embrace the human race—will crown the class struggles of the centuries with victory and proclaim Freedom to all Mankind.
Unionism and Socialism
The labor question, as it is called, has come to be recognized as the foremost of our time. In some form it thrusts itself into every human relation, and directly or indirectly has a part in every controversy.
A thousand “solutions” of the labor question find their way into print, but the question not only remains unsolved, but steadily assumes greater and graver proportions. The nostrums have no effect other than to prove their own inefficacy.
There has always been a labor question since man first exploited man in the struggle for existence, but not until its true meaning was revealed in the development of modern industry did it command serious thought or intelligent consideration, and only then came any adequate conception of its importance to the race.
Man has always sought the mastery of his fellow-man. To enslave his fellow in some form and to live out of his labor has been the mainspring of human action.
To escape submission, not in freedom, but in mastery over others, has been the controlling desire, and this has filled the world with slavery and crime.
In all the ages of the past, human society has been organized and maintained upon the basis of the exploitation and degradation of those who toil. And so it is today.