Love's Pilgrimage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

In economic classes in college there had, of course, been some mention of Socialism; but this had been of the utopian variety, the dreams of Plato and St. Simon and Fourier. There had been some account of the innumerable communities which had sprung up in America—with careful explanation, however, that they had all proven failures. Also one heard vaguely of Marx and Lassalle, two violent men, whose ideas were still popular among the ignorant masses of Europe, but could be of no concern to the fortunate inhabitants of a free Republic.

And then, after this, to come upon some piece of writing—such as, for instance, the “Communist Manifesto”! To read this mile-stone in the progress of civilization, this marvellous exposition of the development of human societies, and of the forces which drive and control them; and to realize that two lonely students, who had cast in their lot with the exploited toilers, had been able to predict the whole course of political and industrial evolution for sixty years, and to foresee and expound with precision the ultimate outcome of the whole process—matters of which the orthodox economists were still as ignorant as babes unborn!

Or to discover the writings of such a man as Karl Kautsky, the intellectual leader of the modern movement in Germany; such books as “The Social Revolution”, and “The Road to Power”—in which one seemed to see a giant of the mind, standing in a death-duel with those forces of night and destruction that still made of the fair earth a hell! With what accuracy he was able to measure the strength of these powers of evil, to anticipate their every move, to plan the exact parry with which to meet them! To Thyrsis he seemed like some general commanding an army in battle, with the hopes of future ages hanging upon his skill. But this was a general who fought, not with sword and fire, but with ideas; a conqueror in the cause of “right reason and the will of God”. He wrote simply, as a scientist; and yet one could feel the passion behind the quiet words—the hourly shock of the incessant conflict, the grim persistence which pressed on in the face of obloquy and persecution, the courage which had been tested through generations of anguish and toil.

Thyrsis’ mind rushed through these things like prairie-fire; and all the time that he read, his wonder grew upon him. How could he have been kept ignorant of them? He was quick to pounce upon the essential fact, that this was no accident; it was something that must have been planned and brought about deliberately. He had thought that he was being educated, when in reality he was being held back and fenced off from truth. It was a world-wide conspiracy—it was that very class-war which the established order was waging upon these men and their ideas!

Section 10. It was not difficult for any one to understand the ideas, if he really wished to. They began with the fact of “surplus value”. One man employed another man for the sake of the wealth he could be made to produce, over what he was paid as wages. That seemed obvious enough; and yet, what consequences came from following it up! Throughout human history men had been setting other men to work; whether they were called slaves, or serfs, or laborers, or servants, the motive-power which had set them to work had been the desire for “surplus value”. And as the process went on, those who appropriated the profits combined for mutual protection; and so out of the study of “surplus value” came the discovery of the “class-struggle”. Human history was the tale of the arising of some dominating class, and of the struggle of some subject class for a larger share of what it produced. Human governments were devices by which the master-class preserved its power; and whatever may have been the original purposes of arts and religions, in the end they had always been seized by the master-class, and used as aids in the same struggle.

One came to the culmination of the process in modern capitalist society. Here was a class entrenched in power, owning the sources of wealth, the huge machines whereby it was produced, and the railroads whereby it was distributed, and above all, the financial resources upon which the other processes depended. One saw this class holding itself in power by means of the policeman’s club and the militiaman’s rifle, by machine-gun and battle-ship; one saw that, whether by bribery or by outright force, it had seized all the powers of government, of legislatures and executives and courts. One saw that in the same way it had seized upon the sources of ideas; it controlled the newspapers and the churches and the colleges, that it might shape the thoughts of men and keep them content. It set up in places of authority men whose views were agreeable to it—who believed in the beneficence of its rule and the permanence of its system; who would pour out ridicule and contempt upon those who suggested that any other system might be conceivable. And so the class-war was waged, not merely in the world of industry and politics, but also, in the intellectual world.

And step by step, as the processes of capitalism culminated, this war increased in bitterness and intensity. For, of course, as capital heaped up and its control became concentrated, the ratio of exploitation increased. The great mass of labor was unorganized and helpless; whereas the masters had combined and fixed their prices; and so day by day the cost of living increased, and misery and discontent increased with it. As capital expanded, and new machines of production were added, there were more and more goods to sell, and more and more difficulty in finding markets; and so came overproduction and unemployment, panics and crises; so came wars for foreign markets—with new opportunities of plunder for the exploiters and new hardships and new taxes for the producers. And so was fulfilled the prophecy of Marx and Engels; under the pressure of bitter necessity the proletariat was organizing and disciplining itself, training its own leaders and thinkers forming itself into a world-wide political party, whose destiny it was to conquer the powers of government in every land, and use them to turn out the exploiters, and to put an end to the rule of privilege.

This change was what the Socialists meant by the “revolution”—the transfer of the ownership of the means of production; and it was about that issue that the class-war was waged. Nothing else but that counted; without that all reform was futility, and all benevolence was mockery, and all knowledge was ignorance. So long as the means of producing necessities were owned by a few, and used for the advantage of a few, just so long must there be want in the midst of plenty, and darkness over all the earth. Whatever evil one went out into the world to combat, he came to realize that he could do nothing against it, because it was bound up with the capitalist system, was in fact itself that system. If little children were shut up in sweat-shops, if women were sold into brothels, it was not for any fault of theirs, it was not the work of any devil—it was simply because of the “surplus value”. they represented. If weaker nations were conquered and “civilized”, that, too, was for “surplus value”. And these epidemics of “graft” that broke out upon the body politic—they were not accidental or sporadic things, and they were not to be remedied by putting any number of men in jail; they were to be understood as the system whereby an industrial oligarchy had rendered impotent a political democracy, and had fenced it out from the fields of privilege.

And so also was it with the dullness and sterility that prevailed in the intellectual world. The master-class did not want ideas—it only wanted to be let alone; and so it put in the seats of authority men who were blind to the blazing beacon-fires of the future. It would be no exaggeration to say that the intellectual and cultural system of the civilized world was conducted, whether deliberately or instinctively, for the purpose of keeping the truth about exploitation from becoming clear to the people.

The master-class owned the newspapers and ran them. It had built and endowed the churches, and taught the clergy to feed out of its hand. In the same way it had founded the colleges, and named the trustees, who in turn named the presidents and professors. The ordinary mortal took it for granted that because venerable bishops and dignified editors and learned college-professors were all in agreement as to a certain truth, there must be some inherent probability in that truth; and never once perceived how the cards were stacked and the dice loaded—how those clergymen and editors and professors had all been selected because they believed that truth to be true, and believed the contrary falsehood to be false!