The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i. e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence, as his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
The version of the Marxian gospel which we have in the Manifesto is among the first of its versions. It was published about the middle of the last century. Within the short period which has intervened, it has changed nearly all of the ideas of a large and rapidly growing part of every nation about almost everything social; and before the middle of the present century, it will revolutionize all nations as it has Russia.
Ludendorff, the greatest among the military authorities in Germany, saw and terribly feared this, and called Europe to arms to prevent it. In his almost frantic appeal he said:
Bolshevism is advancing now and in a gradual progress from east to west and is crushing everything between the midland sea and the Atlantic ocean. It was easy to foresee that the Bolshevist armies would attack toward the middle of May and defeat the Poles, as they have now done. The world at large must, therefore, figure with a Bolshevist advance in Poland toward Berlin and Prague.
Poland's fall will entail the fall of Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. Their neighbors to the north and south will follow. Fate steps along with elementary force. Let no one believe it will come to a stand without enveloping Italy, France and England. Not even the Seven Seas can stop it.
Under the capitalist system most people are and must continue to be slaves. If you are a slave (all wage earners, as such, are slaves) the socialist literature, the greatest of all literatures, will thrill you with the hope of liberty. Read, note and inwardly digest it. No wage earner who does this will ever again vote either the Democratic or the Republican ticket. As a whole this literature is a brilliantly illuminating and almost resistlessly persuasive explanation of the most sane, the most salutary and withal the most promising movement towards the freeing of all toiling men, women and children (nine of every ten) from their body and soul destroying slavery.
Both Socrates and Jesus are recorded as teaching that the saviour of the world is truth. Among saving truths (there is no truth without some saving efficacy) the greatest is the one which was discovered and formulated concurrently by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and it is in substance this: all which makes for the good of mankind ultimately depends wholly upon the laborious constructors and operators of the machines for the cultivation, production and distribution of the necessities of life, not at all upon the owners of these machines, who at best are idlers and at worst schemers, and in any case parasites.