Thus it becomes clear what the future has for the working class—while capitalism lasts:
In spite of all the sincere and insincere hopes and prayers for peace there will always be, under capitalism, legalized wholesale plundering of the workers by the capitalist employers—a form of aggressive social parasitism by the employers and vigorous resistance by the workers in proportion to their realization of the robbery;—and consequently there will be wage struggles, wage reductions, compulsory under-consumption, “over-production,” unemployment, bread lines, soup kitchens, rent riots, evictions, “demand-work” marches, strikes, picketing, “scabbing,” boycotting, lockouts, injunctions, “bull-pens,” blacklisting, interstate kidnapping; and also anti-picket thugs,—policemen, Pinkertons, deputy sheriffs, constabulary, cossacks, militiamen and the “regulars” shooting down underpaid, underfed workers; everywhere the belittled lives and the spilt blood of the working class.[[313]]
And there will be increasing opposition to free assemblage, opposition to free speech, opposition to free press—in order to silence discussion and stop the spread of knowledge of what is fundamentally wrong.
Also there will continue to be, from time to time, naturally, under capitalism, wars of conquest to widen the field of exploitation—to enlarge the opportunity for aggressive social parasitism,—wars to open up foreign markets, wars to protect foreign markets for products which the producers’ wages will not permit them to consume and the employers are not able to consume;—and everywhere the world will be stormy with the stirring trumpet call, “To arms! To arms!”—stormy with the crafty and confusing cry, “To the front! To the front! The flag!”—stormy with the shrilling fife, the roll of drums, the rattle of musketry, the flash of swords, the booming roar of cannon, burning cities, sinking warships and the thundering tread of galloping cavalry horses,—the class struggle in a thousand visible bitter forms,—and everywhere windrows and ditchfuls of dead men, dead working men, everywhere the torn flesh, the slit veins, the streaming blood and tears of the working class: hell everywhere except in the homes of our “very best people” who in times of trouble as in times of peace are always calmly feeding (like leeches ever feeding) on the surplus legally filched from the working class.
Thus capitalist society is everywhere cursed with a festering social sore, an unhealable sore, poisoning, withering the best things in society, blasting the finer forms and feelings of brotherhood and peace. Everywhere the lives of the toilers are vulgarized and brutalized and wasted. And all these things will always be natural and unescapable facts and parts of any class-labor form of society, an unsocially organized society, with injustice organized, legalized and easy, down deep in the industrial foundations of society,—ever an endless civil war in industry between the two, the only two, industrial classes.
Now what shall we do about it?
It is as plain as “a, b, c.”
War and all the forms of the class struggle are excessive social inflammation.[[314]]
(a) Injustice violently inflames society.