|
is forced by competition and the superior facilities which large capital employs to quite the field of business, and are driven into the ranks of the wage-workers. The small capitalist cannot cope with the millionaire, and the individual millionaire must succumb to the syndicate. Thus the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat is recruited from all classes of the production. Thus the social revolution is gathering strength for the new birth, when all men will indeed be free and equal. The movements of the past were the conflicts of minorities in the interests of minorities. Not so with the world-wide international labor movement of to-day, which is a movement of the vast majority on behalf of the immense majority.
The existing social order, as everyone now admits, is the work of the bourgeoisie. Their peculiar mode of production, which we call "capitalistic production," was incompatible with the local and class privileges and the mutual personal relations of the feudal order. The bourgeoisie destroyed the feudal order, and established in its stead the present civil society, with its constitution of free competition, equal rights, and other glorious things, among those who were in possession of the products and means of production. Under these conditions the development of production was given full sway. Soon the smaller manufacturer disappeared. Steam and machinery took the place of human labor and production on a large scale grew with unprecedented rapidity. And as in former times the developed small trade came in conflict with the fetters of feudalism, so now modern industry is revolting against the barriers into which the capitalistic system of production has forced it. In other words, the present forms of production have outgrown the forms of bourgeoisie utilization. This revolt and this struggle is going on outside of us and entirely independent of our will. Socialism is, therefore nothign else but the reflex of this conflict and struggle in our sphere of thought and comprehension, and this reflex is most potent in the minds of those who under the present system are suffering most—i. e., in the minds of the working people.
The speaker proceeded at further length to show the operations of capitalism in different countries. He quoted the Untied States census for 1880, which in manufacturing industries gives 2,738,000
|
