3. Free exchange of equivalent products through the productive organization without jobbing and profit-making.
4. Organization of the educational system upon a non-religious and scientific and equal basis for both sexes.
5. Equal rights for all, without distinction of sex or race.
6. The regulation of public affairs through agreements between the independent communes and confederacies.
The above was published in the Alarm of November 1, 1884, with the following comment:
Proletarians of all countries, unite. Fellow workmen, all we need for the achievement of this great end is organization and unity.
There exists now no great obstacle to that unity. The work of peaceful education and revolutionary conspiracy will, can and ought to run in parallel lines.
The day has come for solidarity. Join our ranks! Let the drum beat defiantly the roll of battle; workingmen of all lands, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win. Tremble, oppressors of the world! Not far beyond your purblind sight there dawn the scarlet and sable lights of the judgment day!
Such, in brief, are the aims of Socialism as expounded by its most extreme representatives. The state of society they seek to establish may be highly beneficial to a class which, under any conditions, lacks sobriety, frugality, thrift and self-reliance; but just where the general mass of humanity is to be bettered or elevated, socially, morally or politically, is a point not satisfactorily explained. Their theory may look well on paper, and their glittering generalities may draw adherents from the ranks of the illiterate and the vicious, but a condition of society in which there are no masters and no authority can only lead to chaos. In a society “in which all human beings do right for the simple reason that it is right,” there can be neither stability nor permanence, unless human nature is recast, reconstructed and regenerated. Human nature must be treated as it is found in the general make-up of man; and therefore a society in which all special desires, all ambition and all self-elevation have been eliminated, precludes development and progress. It reduces everything to utter shiftlessness and stagnation. In such a society there can be no incentive to great achievements in art, literature, mechanics or invention. If all are to be placed on an equal footing, the ignorant with the educated, the dullard with the genius, the profligate with the provident, and the drunken wretch with the industrious, what encouragement for special effort? If you “render accessible to each and every member of the human family the achievements and benefits of civilization,” holding “property in common,” why should a man rack his brain or strain his muscles in producing something which he expects to prove remunerative to himself in some way, but which under the Socialistic state would go to the financial benefit of all? Take away all incentive to improvement, and you make life scarcely worth the living. Where the state, or the “independent commune,” is to be entrusted with the care and equal distribution of wealth and the employment of men, the individual will give little concern for the morrow or for anything beyond his immediate wants. What need he accomplish more than his neighbor, since everything that is produced is shared jointly?
In the Socialistic society, every man might “work honestly for his own living,” as Spies declares, but what would be the inevitable result of a system in which the state or commune undertakes to see that all have employment?