Always this for the worker: “Your turn will come next”—that is, in the next world.
Following this vanishing lure, hundreds of millions of toilers have, as it were, walked barefoot on broken glass and lain down in their beds of misery mentally paralyzed on the subject of justice. Hundreds of millions of toilers have not only accepted these teachings; but, saddest of all, have been tricked into teaching these same things to their children.
Thus it was that almost the entire working class were tamed and trained for many centuries into spineless meekness, into the docility of humility—helpless—policed by prejudice and fear founded on shrewdly perpetuated ignorance.
“Slaves, obey your masters,” has been taught in a thousand ways for ten thousand years by the stuffed prophets for the profit-stuffed rulers of the robbed and ruined workers of the world.
This perhaps will make it somewhat easier to understand the present intellectual condition of the working class. It thus becomes easier to understand why the workers were taught (and are taught now) to be “satisfied with their lot,” taught the “identity and harmony of interests of capital and labor.” This explains the meekness of the multitude, the docility of the majority, and their political modesty.
Sheepish meekness, self-contempt and prideless obedience long ago took the place of defiant and splendid rebellious self-respect—in the character and the thinking of the working class.
In every possible way the shackles have been riveted to the wrists and brains of the working class—what for?—in order to perpetuate the class-labor system. Under slavery, under serfdom and under capitalism, laws, constitutions, customs, religious teachings, secular teachings, and all the social institutions have been shrewdly conformed or adjusted to THE PREVAILING METHOD OF PRODUCTION for the PROTECTION of that method of production in order thus to SUPPORT THE CLASS who, in the struggle for existence, have had GROSSLY UNFAIR ADVANTAGE BY MEANS OF THAT METHOD OF PRODUCTION.[[336]]
Ferocious wrongs were studiously developed into vast institutions. For example, man-stealing and slave-breeding became the chief business of the mightiest of the ancient pagan societies, the Roman Empire, and was also a flourishing enterprise under the most highly developed modern Christian societies, the British Empire and the American Republic. Christian Queen Anne, of England, unrebuked by her “spiritual adviser,” was a pious stockholder in a slave-hunting corporation composed of prominent and pious Christian ladies and gentlemen.[[337]] The Christian churches, colleges, newspapers, of the United States not long ago, North and South, were almost unanimous in their eloquent and pious defense of human slavery.[[338]] The business was eminently respectable, the business of legally (and piously) sucking the industrial blood out of one’s fellowmen—living like a parasite,—the business of producing nothing and living upon the results of the worker’s labor-power.
Thus keep in mind:[[339]]
(1) The origin of the working class,