The working class themselves must save the working class.
Read Chapter Ten: “Now, What Shall We Do About It?”
Note: It is of the greatest importance that the working class reader should learn what his employer does not wish to have him learn concerning value, surplus value, rate of surplus value, profit, rate of profit, profit to capitalist class, profit to individual capitalist employer, division of the spoils of exploitation among capitalists, etc., etc. Mr. Joseph E. Cohen’s small book, Socialism for Students, is a model of clearness for the reader who is too busy to read big books and yet wishes to inform himself accurately on the secrets of this legalized robbery. This book (published by Charles H. Kerr and Company, Chicago) is just what a busy worker needs in making a beginning in those economic and sociological studies which will give him a large outlook upon the world and a deep inlook into the mainsprings of human society.
Soldiers, cossacks and militiamen are to the capitalist class what beaks are to eagles and tusks are to tigers.
CHAPTER FOUR.
The Cost of War—In Blood and In Cash.
SECTION I: THE COST IN BLOOD.
“Ez fer war—I call it murder.”—James Russell Lowell.[[25]]
“The hero is a species of assassin.”—Victor Hugo.[[26]]
Human blood, human life, under the present industrial form of society, is so cheap that even a sweet child’s life, as a wage-earner, in the factory, can be bought for a few cents a day—almost a drug on the market, the “labor market.” So cheap indeed is the life of the wage-working class that the blood cost of war is regarded as comparatively unimportant—considered unimportant by all except those who are sneeringly referred to as “sentimental people.” These “sentimental people” presume to assert that the superiority of a nation’s civilization is more convincingly indicated by its sacred regard for the purity and dignity of human blood than by its cheap and swaggering boasts about big battleships, “blooded” cattle, “blooded” horses, and “young men not only willing but anxious to fight,”[[27]] or by the nation’s strutting announcement of our “readiness” to spill the toilers’ blood at the factory door and on the battlefield.