However, on the farm, in the care of plants and animals no matter how small or helpless or innocent or beautiful parasites may be which interfere with the wheat crop or the flock of sheep, the parasites must be dislodged—rigorously and promptly. And, in society, no matter how handsome, polite, pious, learned, philanthropic, or ancestrally distinguished and blue-blooded a human parasite may be who lives on the labor of the workers, that parasite, old or young, male or female, must dismount promptly, must be forced from the shoulders of the working class. Those who, at the time of social reconstruction, endeavor to defend themselves by polishing their family coat-of-arms and climbing their ancestral trees in search of credentials, will simply be making monkeys of themselves. They will be even more ridiculous than the Royalists in the American Revolution. Those of “gentle breeding” will have to learn the gentle art of getting a living by producing a living; that awful saying, “If he will not work, neither shall he eat,” will mean more and more.
The working class must, then, legally, do whatever is necessary to protect themselves from the strangling clutches of the capitalist class.
And here is what is necessary:
The working class must themselves become organized political authority, must seize the powers of government—and thus secure legal control of sovereign political power which carries with it the legal right[[322]] to control, or revise, or abolish, or reorganize industrial institutions; must thus secure the legal right (and power) to construct and inaugurate that industrial form of society which will destroy capitalism with its organized, legalized opportunity for class robbery, and which will, at the same time, substitute organized, legalized opportunity for every member of society to make a living without being robbed, opportunity to live without wasting and vulgarizing his life in a struggle against his fellow men. And this destruction of unsocial capitalism and the construction, at the same time, in place of capitalism, the necessary social substitute, can be accomplished by the industrial reorganization of society on the following plan—
The Plan of Rational Mutualism:
(1) The SOCIAL ownership of the means of production.
(2) The SOCIAL control of the means of production.
(3) Equality of OPPORTUNITY TO USE the means of production, under regulations made by the workers themselves.
(4) The production of goods primarily for SOCIAL SERVICE OF ALL,—instead of primarily for PROFITS FOR A PART OF SOCIETY.
(5) The SELF-EMPLOYMENT of all who are willing to do useful work,—by virtue of the fact of their joint ownership and joint control of the things the workers must collectively use in production, the reward of each to be undiminished by rent, interest or profits.