Allan L. Benson

“ The reason you have never gotten what you want is because you have never known how to get it. You want the right to work without being robbed. You do not seem to realize that it is the existence of the capitalist system that causes you to be robbed. In an indefinite sort of way you seem to believe that it is possible for a small class of bondholders and share-holders to live in luxury without working and, at the same time, take nothing from the product of your labor. If dividends grew upon one tree and wages upon another, your belief would be justified. ”

“ Capitalists are now able to get honest men who are competent to administer the government in the interest of the capitalist class. Why, then, should you doubt that Socialists will be able to get honest men who will be able to administer the government in the interest of the working class? In either case, it is simply a matter of executing the orders of the employer. Capitalism’s employees obey its orders. Socialism’s employees will, for the same reason, obey its orders. You tell your employees to maintain the advantage that the few have over the many, and they obey you. ”

“ Between the ages of 20 and 30, every third death is from consumption, and, at all ages, the mortality from the same disease is one in nine.
We now censure ancient kings for having slaughtered men in war for private profit. But what ancient king ever made such a record in war as our dividend-takers make in peace? What ancient king, in his whole lifetime, ever slew 8,000,000 men? What modern war marked the end of so many men as tuberculosis kills in a year? During the four years of the Civil War, only a little more than 200,000 men were killed in battle. ”

“ It would no more be at the service of an individual, exclusive of any other or all other individuals, than the postal department is now at the service of an individual to the exclusion of any other individual. Nor would any man or small set of men ever have a greater opportunity to regain possession of the nation’s industrial wealth than any man or small set of men now have to acquire private ownership of the Capitol at Washington. Any man may walk into the Capitol with all the freedom that he might feel if it were his own. ”

“ Lincoln’s greatest opportunity to serve his country lay in doing precisely what he did, and it is to his eternal glory that he had both the understanding and the courage to do it.
The times again call loudly for such a man. Chattel slavery is dead, but a greater slavery has grown up in its place. Wage slavery is as much greater than chattel slavery as the white people in this country are more numerous than the black people. Poverty is widespread and the fear of poverty is all but universal. No one knows how much longer he will have employment. ”

“ Every Socialist has his individual conception of how mankind would advance if poverty were eliminated, but all Socialists agree that the heart and soul of their philosophy lies in the public ownership, under democratic government, of the means of life. And, as compared with this belief, all other beliefs of Socialism are minor and inconsequential. Public ownership is the rock upon which it is determined to stand or fall. ”

“ Without the control of government, the small, rich class would not be rich. Government, in the hands of the rich, is a sort of two-handed claw with which golden chestnuts are pulled out of the fire. One claw is the governmental power to make and enforce laws. The other claw is the power to grab by force that which cannot be grabbed by laws.
One nation cannot make laws for another nation. But the capitalists of one nation may possess property that is wanted by the capitalists of another nation. ”

“ But in a season of national mourning over the high cost of living, is it not unseemly for these gentlemen to provoke us to laughter by telling us that, if we were to lose them, we ourselves should be lost? We who work can never save ourselves. We can be saved only by those who work us.
Let us get down to brass tacks. If the Socialists were to gain control of this government to-morrow, probably the first thing they would do toward carrying out their program would be to call a national convention to draft a twentieth century constitution to replace our present eighteenth century one. ”

“ Wall Street gentlemen may put such a crimp in the financial situation that industry cannot go on. Business may slow down because more is being produced than the markets can absorb. A greedy employer may precipitate a strike by trying to reduce the wages of his employees. Any one of many causes may without notice step in between the worker and the machinery without which he cannot work.
But worse than the uncertainty of employment is the absolute certainty that millions of men must always be out of work. Times are never so good that there is work for everybody. ”

“ Capitalist concentration is mercilessly crushing the class of small business men and driving its members into the ranks of propertyless wage workers. The overwhelming majority of the people of America are being forced under a yoke of bondage by this soulless industrial despotism.
It is this capitalist system that is responsible for the increasing burden of armaments, the poverty, slums, child-labor, most of the insanity, crime and prostitution, and much of the disease that afflicts mankind. ”

“ Whatsoever of beauty—whatsoever of poetry there is in the passion that unites the sexes, withers up and dies in the cold atmosphere of authority. Native as they are to such widely-separated regions of our nature, Love and Coercion cannot possibly flourish together. Love is sympathetic; Coercion is callous. Love is gentle; Coercion is harsh. Love is self-sacrificing; Coercion is selfish. How then can they co-exist? It is the property of the first to attract, while it is that of the last to repel; and, conflicting as they do, it is the constant tendency of each to destroy the other. ”

“ The worker cannot haggle too long because he must labor or starve. Therefore, he comes to terms. He walks into the clutches of those who want to rob him of part of what he produces. He consents to work for a wage that represents only a part of what he has produced.
That is robbery. You may call it business, but it is robbery. If robbery is anything, it is the taking of the property of another against his will. The worker knows his wage is not all he earns. He resents the fact that he must toil long and hard for a poor living, while his employer lives in luxury without doing any useful labor. ”

“ How can there be peace when these same capitalists, through their control of government, teach even school children that the warrior’s trade is glorious and that the citizen’s duty is to “stand by the flag”? Our flag has often stood where it had no moral right to stand. It has stood for the wrongs of capitalism when it should have stood for the rights of the people. Our flag will always stand for the wrongs of capitalism, so long as capitalism controls the government. ”

“ We are supposed to be greedy for blood, but we are not. We do believe, however, the best way to end violence caused by robbery is to end the robbery. We believe it is contemptible for a government to be blind to robbery so long as it proceeds without an outcry from the victim. We believe it is criminal for the government to shoot the victim simply because, in his distress, he breaks a pane of glass in the factory or mill in which he was robbed. We can understand why such crimes are committed, because we know that the same capitalist interests that control industry also control government. ”

“ Here is another thing that Socialists hope the people will soon understand. The policy of permitting a few men to use the machinery with which all other men must work or starve compels all other men to become competitors for its use. If there were no more workers than the capitalists must have, there would not be such competition. But there must always be more workers than the capitalists can use. The fact that the capitalist demands a profit upon the worker’s labor renders the worker incapable of buying back the very thing he has made. ”

“ Socialists are trying to eradicate poverty now. They have no other immediate concern. If the eradication of poverty should send the world to hell, the Socialists, if they can, will send the world to hell. They do not believe anything that can be kept only with poverty is worth keeping. Their observation has taught them that poverty is always and everywhere a curse. They believe no other curse is nearly so great except the curse of excessive riches.
Let us now pass to objections to Socialism that are both pertinent and honest. ”

“ In the defeat or victory of the working class party in this new struggle for freedom lies the defeat or triumph of the common people of all economic groups, as well as the failure or the triumph of popular government. Thus the Socialist Party is the party of the present day revolution, which marks the transition from economic individualism to Socialism, from wage slavery to free co-operation, from capitalist oligarchy to industrial democracy. ”

“ If boys were not compelled to go to work so young, does it not seem likely that, with added years, they would be better able to choose an occupation that would be more nearly suited both to their tastes and their abilities? And if we should destroy the power of poverty to push boys into the occupation nearest to them, should we be justly subject to the charge that we had destroyed, or even impaired, the boys’ individual liberty?
Persons who derive their knowledge of Socialism from capitalist sources have strange, and sometimes awful, ideas of what Socialism is setting out to do. ”

“ But if there be those who are interested in owning homes, furniture, clothing, motorboats, automobiles, and so forth, let them be interested in Socialism. Socialism, by no means, guarantees that every laborer shall go to his work in a six-cylinder car, while his wife does the marketing in a limousine, but it does guarantee that Socialism would not prevent him from privately owning all such property that he could earn.
We realize, of course, that this is but a small bait to hold out to a man whom capitalism has given the “right” to own the earth. ”

“ More than nine-tenths of our many millions are wage-laborers or farmers. Naturally, they care nothing about profits. If everybody were continuously employed at good wages, and the balance-sheets, at the end of the year, should show not one dollar left for dividends, nobody except the capitalists would shed a tear. So little does the working class really care about profits. So convinced is the working class that the right to work, together with the right to be protected from robbery, should come ahead of everything else. Yet this very working class that cares nothing about profits ”

“ No life insurance company wants much to do with a coal miner except at the highest rates. No tuberculosis exhibit is complete without the blackened lungs of a coal miner in a jar of 150alcohol. There is nothing for a coal miner when he is alive but a cheerless existence of the greatest drudgery—and nothing for him when he is dead but an unmarked grave on the hillside. Yet 76,000 human beings thus spend their lives in the anthracite coal mines, and hundreds of other thousands in the bituminous mines. All of this great toll of human misery that the nation may burn coal. ”

“ In spite of the multiplication of labor-saving machines and improved methods in industry which cheapen the cost of production, the share of the producers grows ever less, and the prices of all the necessities of life steadily increase. The boasted prosperity of this nation is for the owning class alone. To the rest it means only greater hardship and misery. The high cost of living is felt in every home. Millions of wage-workers have seen the purchasing power of their wages decrease until life has become a desperate battle for mere existence. ”

“ Thus do we perceive a peculiar feature of the human mind. Individually, we know what we should like to do about the Coal Trust and the railroads. We know we should like to own and operate them. But collectively we know no such thing. We do not get together. We act as if that which each of us believes were believed by no other than himself. We are like butter that will not “gather” or bees that will not “hive.”
There is every reason why we who are paying outrageous prices for coal should get together on the matter of public ownership. The cost of mining coal is less than $2 a ton. ”

“ Should we be contented with the cotton-mill owners of the South, who, under the protection of Democratic state administrations, fill both their mills and the graveyards with little children? Should we be contented with a world in which a few own everything and the rest do everything—a world in which the worker is but a fleeing fugitive from inevitable fate, owning neither his job, nor the roof over his head? ”