Johann Jacoby

“ Does the manufacturer, the merchant, the landlord, owe his wealth of accumulated labor to his own activity and the industry of his ancestors? Is the want of capital, the poverty of the toiling proletarians solely due to their own and their fathers' fault? But if the present inequality of fortune is not solely due to the economically correct action of the property-holding class and the shiftlessness of the non-possessing class, to what other cause can it be attributed? ”

“ Legislation itself, far from distributing air and sunshine equitably in the economic race, has contributed its large share by conferring privileges on the one hand and interfering with liberty on the other, to widen and deepen the chasm between the property-holding and the non-possessing classes.
How then can any one blame the men of toil, if, having awakened to the consciousness of their rights and their power, they demand from the State a very special consideration of their so long neglected interests? ”

“ Accordingly, bribes proving unavailing among the masses of workers now awakening to a consciousness of their class interests, we behold the spectacle of these worthy "democrats" and "patriots" buying among the tenement-house populations of our great cities that popular majority which they so greatly respect. For the purchase of a majority no sacrifice of money is too great, and every fair-minded person must admit that this is the heaviest sacrifice which a party can make that represents only the interests of that class whose domination in State and society rests solely upon its possessions. ”

“ In the depths, still but ceaseless is the forward movement of our knowledge of nature and of mind, and with this knowledge the consciousness of the sovereignty of man, that thought which moves the world, the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity of all. ”

“ But if he finds no purchaser for the only commodity at his command, for his force of labor, he and his fall into the utmost misery. Yet, despite this wretched insecurity of his position, it will hardly occur to any workman to wish the old conditions back. It is a life worthy of man that he strives for, and he knows that this can be attained only in a state of freedom.
As the French Revolution proclaimed the workers personally free, so did it liberate inanimate property from the last shackles of the Middle Ages. ”

“ It was the spirit of co-operation which in the the Middle Ages raised the working middle class to so high a level of culture and prosperity, of power and consequence. The re-awakening of the spirit of co-operation in our day will bear similar and still more precious fruit, not for one class alone but for the whole human society. ”

“ What has the State done to bring about a more just distribution of the product of labor? Has it made any attempt by legislation or otherwise to protect the workingman against the superior power of capital or to set a limit to the social inequality that is growing from day to day? ”

“ Whereas formerly, productive labor was chiefly performed by slaves, serfs or bondsmen, all rights of ownership in human beings ceased at the French Revolution. Rightfully, legally, every worker is free and his own master. But as a matter of fact he is anything else rather than free. Cut off from the means and conditions of employment, with no other possession than his labor power, he is forced to work for wages in the employ of others, and for wages which suffice at the utmost for the bare necessities of life. ”

“ Sharing the life of his companions in toil, men placed like himself and equally oppressed, in constant contact and interchange of thought with them, working together for reciprocal support and the common defense against common danger, there arises a class consciousness which sustains and elevates the individvual and inspires the masses to battle for their social rights. It is a strange fate which decrees that Capitalist production itself shall assemble and drill the powers destined to make an end of capitalist and class rule. ”

“ So much for the preliminary conditions of labor reform. The workingmen have been advised, perhaps honestly enough, to keep out of politics and busy themselves solely with their economic interests, as if political and economic interests could be separated as kindlings are split, with a hatchet. Whoever has followed our line of reasoning thus far cannot, I think, be in doubt that precisely the working class must first of all and most of all resolve to transform political conditions in the direction of freedom. ”

“ To-day a similar fate is the lot of everyone who ventures to lay hands upon the "chain of economic phenomena." Do but venture to attack the privilege of the possessing class, the abuse of power by Capital, the prevailing credit and loan system, or even to broach a more equal distribution of material goods, and you are in certain circles branded forthwith as the enemy of all social order, a social heretic, a Communist. But this shall not deter me from recognizing freely and publicly that all individual property, material not less than intellectual, is the common good of society. ”

“ Hence the moral obligation of every owner of property so to use his fortune that it may be of use not to himself alone but to the community as well, especially to those of his fellow men who are less favorably placed than himself.
The grand Labor Movement of the last forty years has had a wholesome effect in this respect. As it has awakened in the workman the consciousness of his social rights, so has it sharpened in the possessing class the sense of social duty. ”

“ Whether we examine the state of the Church, the State or Society everywhere—we cannot ignore it—we meet with the class rule of the Middle Ages, the mediæval system of guardianship. In one point only does the Present differ from the Past, namely that, thanks to the German Reformation and the French Revolution, the conviction gains ground from day to day in ever-widening circles down to the lowest strata, that it cannot go on so forever, that men are not created to be ruled and governed, held in leading strings and oppressed by their fellow-men. ”

“ The ruling industrial system, by making indispensable the assemblage of masses of workers at one point, gives the first impulse to the removal of the evil itself has created. As man first sees his own features in the mirror, so the laborer first awakens to a full appreciation of his own pitiable situation when, in the misery of masses of his comrades in suffering the image of his own lot stares him in the face. ”

“ Let us assume the case that the special, individual side predominates in a man's character. It would find expression primarily in his estimate of himself, as self-consciousness, self-confidence. "Help yourself," "Hercules helps him who helps himself," becomes such a man's maxim, the rule of his thought and action. If he retains the consciousness of the other universal side of his nature, not losing sight of the connection between himself and his fellow men, he will admit that his own powers do not suffice to obtain him by his personal effort alone, a subsistence worthy of a human being ”

“ It is evident that all hope of help towards the peaceful solution of the labor question by the capitalist class and the State is illusory. The transition from the Wage-System to the Socialistic organization of society is going on around us and its peaceful consummation clearly rests with the Working Class. The clearer the insight of the workers the speedier and more peaceful the change. ”

“ Especially worthy of notice in this respect is the system of profit-sharing, according to which the workman receives besides his wages a regular share of the profit obtained by his labor. In England alone there are some ten thousand workmen who hold this relation to their employer, and both sides have reason to be content with their success. Yet, we must not overlook the fact that here everything depends more or less upon the good will of the employer, and that in the best case certain workingmen or groups of workingmen only are benefitted by it. ”

“ One of the greatest thinkers of antiquity, Aristotle, divides the whole human race into two classes, free men and slave natures. The Greeks he declares are appointed by reason of their free nature to rule over other peoples. The barbarous races on the contrary, are fitted for being ruled and performing the services of slaves. But slavery and slave-labor he explains as a social necessity, as the indispensable material foundation of State and Society ”

“ Employers of labor upon a small scale cannot as a rule share profits with their employes, their margin is too small. It is the middle class of employers who, hard-pressed to fight the large capitalists on the one hand and the labor organizations on the other, are thankful to buy peace with their own employes upon upon such favorable terms as profit-sharing offers.
Socialists therefore do not recommed profit-sharing. If enlightened workers accept it when offered they are not thereby blinded ”

“ Whence comes it that Capital concentrates more and more in the hands of the small minority while the mass of wage-laborers, despite their industry, can scarcely satisfy their barest needs? The reason for this can evidently be found nowhere else than in a distribution of the product of labor disproportionate to the labor performed, and therefore, unjust.
We shall not investigate the chain of historical conditions in consequence of which the workman was gradually separated from the means of production and the present disproportion between work and wages brought about. ”

“ But can we deny that our present social life, founded upon Capitalist rule and Wage-Labor, moves in a direction which, if it should continue unchanged, must bring us with every passing day nearer to the social conditions just depicted? ”

“ What has the workman, what has the capitalist employer, and what has the State to do to further the transition already begun to the co-operative method of production, and to bring this change to its consummation in the way most advantageous to the community? ”

“ When, in the article of the Zurich Constitution, State protection and State help is especially promised to the workers, there is involved in this no infringement upon the principle of equality. There is no question, as some anxious souls fear, of feeding the poor working man at the cost of the rich citizen; still less of forming a privileged class of workingmen, stipendiaries of the government. ”

“ Let us assume that in the remote future of the human race the soil of the whole earth had passed into the hands of individual owners, and man had attained by the progress of knowledge to the absolute control over Nature. Suppose the perfection of mechanical contrivance to have gone so far that machinery itself is produced and tended by machinery, and human labor is thus minimized if not superseded. What would be the result of such a state of things? ”

“ Thus the consciousness of self, praiseworthy enough in its place, deteriorates into selfishness, and self-consciousness into conceit. Selfishness, pretension and the desire to rule tempt him to make his fellow men serve his own will, all that he believes to be for his own advantage.
What is here said of the individual applies to the whole community. The same powers which are active in the mind of the individual make themselves felt in the life of peoples, in the history of the human race. ”

“ Like man himself, every form of the property of man possesses, besides its special character which makes it the private possession of an individual, a universal side which men gives the community a well-grounded claim to a right to it. That the State and the municipality appropriate a part of the property of every citizen as taxes we all consider a matter of course, or that the law limits the free control of the individual's property. ”

“ With us in Germany, as in most of the countries of Europe, nearly half of the nation's income is spent in preparation for war, while education and culture are put off with sums scarcely worth mentioning. Let us reverse the proportion and the people's wealth will multiply ten-fold without injury to our power of defense. A Minister of Education who understands his business is the best Minister of Finance and War. ”

“ Everywhere we see unions forming whose object is the improvement of the material condition of the laboring class; craftsmen's guilds and workingmen's clubs, educational and beneficial associations, co-operative, loan and credit societies, trades unions and co-operative manufacturing companies. Under the prevailing conditions of credit and production all these undertakings, originating in the working class and resting upon the principle of self-help must prove powerless to cure the misery of the masses. ”

“ The true significance of these associations, their value which cannot be overestimated lies in this that, wholly apart from the especial object at which they aim, they are a school for self-culture for their members; that they confer upon them skill in the independent management of their own affairs and in harmonious action with others for common ends; that by education, promotion of a comprehension of business and fraternal public spirit they prepare the worker for a gradual transition from the prevailing Wage-System to the co-operative method of production of the future. ”

“ Permit me to-day to make the Labor Movement, the so-called Social Question, the subject of my remarks. In view of the close connection between the political and the social conditions of a nation, every constituent has a well-founded right to demand of his representative a social confession of faith besides his political one. ”