Socialism and Democracy in Europe

by Samuel Peter Orth

By the enlargement of the world's markets, by the growing facility of transport, by the division of labor, by the increasing application of machinery, by the concentration of capitals, immense concentrated production is gradually ruining or subordinating the small or middling producers.

Even where the number of small craftsmen, small traders, small peasant proprietors, does not diminish, their relative importance in the totality of production grows less unceasingly. They fall under the sway of the great capitalists.

Even the peasant proprietors, who seem to have retained a little independence, are more and more exposed to the crushing forces of the universal market, which capitalism directs without their concurrence and against their interests.

For the sale of their wheat, wine, beetroot, and milk, they are more and more at the mercy of great middlemen or great industries of milling, distilling, and sugar-refining, which dominate and despoil peasant labor.

The industrial proletarians, having lost nearly all chance of individually rising to be employers, and being thus doomed to eternal dependence, are further subject to incessant crises of unemployment and misery, let loose by the unregulated competition of the great capitalist forces.

The immense progress of production and wealth, largely usurped by parasitic classes, has not led to an equivalent progress in well-being and security for the workers, the proletarians. Whole categories of wage-earners are abruptly thrown into extreme misery by the constant introduction of new mechanisms and by the abrupt movements and transformations of industry.

Capitalism itself admits the disorder of the present régime of production, since it tries to regulate it for its gain by capitalistic syndicates, by trusts.

Even if it succeeded in actually disciplining all the forces of production, it would only do so while consummating the domination and the monopoly of capital.

There is only one way of assuring the continued order and progress of production, the freedom of every individual, and the growing well-being of the workers; it is to transfer to the collectivity, to the social community, the ownership of the capitalistic means of production.

The proletariat, daily more numerous, ever better prepared for combined action by the great industry itself, understands that in collectiveness or communism lie the necessary means of salvation for it.