Your brains are as keen as the brains of your masters.
In swiftness and strength ye surpass them by far,
Ye've brave hearts that teach ye to laugh at disasters,
Ye vastly outnumber your tyrants in war.
Why, then, like cowards stand.
Using not brain or hand,
Thankful, like dogs, when they throw ye a bone?
What right have they to take
Things that ye toil to make?
Know ye not, boobies, that all is your own?[325]
Arise, unite each scattered band,
To sweep all masters from our land,
Then shall each mine and loom and field
Its produce to the workers yield.[326]
Others, again, urge the workers to seize all property and to make the rich man work for them.
They're never done extolling
The nobility of work;
But the knaves! they always take good care
Their share of toil to shirk.
Do they send their sons and daughters,
To the workshop or the mill?
Oh! we'll turn things upside down, my lads;
It will change their tune, it will![327]
We'll drive the robbers from our lands, our meadows and our hills;
We'll drive them from our warehouses, our workshops and our mills;
We'll make them fare upon their bonds, their bankbooks and their bills,
As we go marching to liberty.[328]
Some Socialists believe that they will come to power suddenly and by violence, and abolish private capital at a stroke. Others are inclined to think that they will only gradually abolish it. Karl Marx was of the latter opinion. Therefore he wrote in his "Manifesto": "The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State—i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production: by means of measures therefore which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will of course be different in different countries. Nevertheless in the most advanced countries the following will be pretty generally applicable:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income-tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.