4. The Challenge
This is the challenge of the workers of Europe to the capitalist system. The workers are not satisfied; they are questioning. They mean to have the best that life has to give, and they are convinced that the capitalist system has denied it to them.
The world has had more than a century of capitalism. The workers have had ample opportunity to see the system at work. The people of all the great capitalist countries—the common people—have borne the burdens and felt the crushing weight of capitalism—in its enslavement of little children; in its underpaying of women; in long hours of unremitting, monotonous toil; in the dreadful housing; in the starvation wages; in unemployment; in misery. The capitalist system has had a trial and it is upon the workers that the system has been tried out.
During this experiment, the workers of the world have been compelled to accept poverty, unemployment and war.
These terrible scourges have afflicted the capitalist world, and it is the workers and their families that have borne them in their own persons. In those countries where the capitalist system is the oldest, the workers have suffered the longest. The essence of capitalism is the exploitation of one man by another man, and the longer this exploitation is practiced the more skillful and effective does the master class become in its manipulation.
The workers look before them along the path of capitalist imperialism that is now being followed by the nations that are in the lead of the capitalist world. There they see no promise save the same exploitation, the same poverty, the same inequality and the same wars over the commercial rivalries of the imperial nations.
The workers of Europe have come to the conclusion that the world should belong to those who build it; that the good things of life should be the property of those who produce them. They see only one course open before them—to declare that those who will not work, shall not eat.
The right of self-determination is the international expression of this challenge. The ownership of the job is its industrial equivalent. Together, the two ideas comprise the program of the more advanced workers in all of the great imperial countries of the world. These ideas did not originate in Russia, and they are not confined to Russia any more than capitalism is confined to Great Britain. They are the doctrines of the new order that is coming rapidly into its own.
Capitalism has been summed up, heretofore, in the one word "profit." The capitalist cannot abandon that standard. The world has lived beyond it, however, and without it, capitalism, as a system, is meaningless. If the capitalists abandon profit, they abandon capitalism.
Without profit the capitalist system falls to pieces, because it is the profit incentive that has always been considered as the binder that holds the capitalist world together. Hence the abandonment of the profit incentive is the surrender of the citadel of capitalism. While profit remains, exploitation persists, and while there is exploitation of one man by another, no human being can call himself free.