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by John Richard Meader

Marx and Engels formulated this doctrine and preached it in their “Communist Manifesto,” where they said:

“The history of all past society is the history of class antagonism, which took different forms in different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, the exploitation of one section of society by another is a fact common to all previous centuries.... The first step in the working-class revolution is the raising of the proletariat [workers] to the position of the ruling class.... The proletariat will use its political power to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie [employers] to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.... If the proletariat, forced by its struggle against the bourgeoisie to organize as a class, makes itself by a revolution the ruling class, and, as the ruling class, destroys by force the old conditions of production, it destroys along with these conditions of production the conditions of existence of class antagonism, class in general, and therewith its own domination as a class” (pp. 20, 21).

Here we have the doctrine of class-war in a nutshell. Believing that the wealth of the world in every kind was destined to become concentrated in the hands of the few, and that all the people would of necessity be divided into two distinct classes, with absolutely antagonistic interests, Marx assumed that a class-war must result—the proletariat, or wage-earning class, waging war with the property-owning class to compel the latter to give back the property it had stolen and restore liberty to the “enslaved worker.”

As you can see, John, the doctrine of the class-war is necessarily one of the foundation stones of the Socialist gospel. Ferri recognized its importance as you may ascertain if you will turn to page 145 of his “Socialism and Positive Science,” where he says:

“The other sociological theory by which Karl Marx has really dissipated the clouds which obscured till now the heaven of Socialist aspirations, and which has furnished to scientific Socialism the political compass for steering itself with complete assurance in the contentions of the life of every day, is the great historic law of the class struggle.”

The Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain takes the same stand when it says that “the Socialists say that the present form of property-holding divides society into two great classes”; while the Social Democratic party of England repeats Marx’s assertion that “the history of human society is a history of class struggles arising from the antagonism of class interests,” and appeals to the workers to make themselves “masters of their own country and of all the resources, political and material” (Quelch, “The Social Democratic Party”).

“There are in reality but two classes,” says the Socialist Standard (December, 1907), “those who live by labor and those who live upon those who labor—the two classes of exploiter and exploited.”

Here, then, is the crux of the whole question. The workers are told that they are being robbed and exploited by the capitalists, and that there can be nothing in common between the two classes. “The task before us is not to appeal to the capitalist class to do something, but to organize the workers for the overthrow of that class, so they (the workers) may do something for themselves. The battle cry of the workers’ party is not ‘the right to work,’ but ‘the right to the product of our labor,’ and the right waits only upon their might” (Socialist Standard, November 1, 1908).

“The Capitalist class, in its mad race for profits,” says the American Socialist party platform (1908), “is bound to exploit the workers to the very limit of their endurance, and to sacrifice their physical, moral and mental welfare to its own insatiable greed.”

If we turn to France, we find Jaurès (“Studies in Socialism”) preaching the same doctrine. “Society,” he says, “is to-day divided into classes with opposing interests, one class owning the means of life and the other nothing but their power to work. Never in the history of Society was the working class so free from all traces of property as to-day.”