Wilhelm Liebknecht

“ The fury of war is unchained, thousands are plunged into death and hundreds of thousands into misery. Should this be so? The social democracy insists that no war be carried on except in vindication of the freedom and rights of the people. They wish, therefore, the POWER to declare war—for here we cannot speak of a right—to belong to the people and their deputies.
The strongest part of the nation, the men in the bloom of life, are torn away from their occupation for years, withdrawn from useful productive labor, placed in the standing army and drilled to blind obedience. ”

“ Disorder rules; socialism demands order.
War and class struggle prevail; socialism insists on peace and harmony of interests, doing away with class struggle through the abolition of classes.
Property is to-day a lie for the majority of men, a robbery for the minority. Socialism would make property the possession of every one. It would convert it into a truth, secure to the worker within society the full proceeds of his labor and destroy the capitalistic system of plunder from its foundation. ”

“ As the present production, exploitation and robbery must be abolished, so likewise must the present traffic, which is only fraud.
In the order of equality the worker will perform all the labor necessary for the whole body of citizens. In place of the employer and his humble subservient or rebellious wage slaves there will be free comrades. Labor will be the torture of no one, but the duty of all. An existence worthy of a human being will be provided for every one who performs his duty to society. Hunger will become henceforth not the curse of labor but the punishment of the idle. ”

“ The present society separates the family—socialism, since it removes demoralizing class rule, will give value to the rights of the family.
State and society compete with each other to nip in the bud the culture of men, to stunt spiritually and physically the enormous majority of the people and to corrupt the ruling minority—socialism insists on equal and the best possible training for every individual; the practical development of their faculties for all men; the systematic advance of art and science, and will make art and science the common possession of the people. ”

“ All wealth is the fruit of labor, teaches political economy—labor shall reap the fruit of labor, demands justice, demands socialism. The present inequality springs from this: That labor does not work for itself; that it must sell itself to the idle for wages and by them be exploited. In a word, it springs out of the system of wage labor. The present injustice is only to be abolished in this way, that labor cease to work for the idle and that instead it work for itself.
Individual labor is unproductive. Work, as we have seen, must according to its nature be communistic. ”

“ The great majority of the population receive only a shamefully perverted and insufficient education and are systematically hindered in the development of their talents, since an educated people, a truly well-bred, cultured people, would not bear patiently the present tyrannous political and social condition. For education, true education—not the systematic perversion and doggish breaking-in that to-day is pleased to boast the name of education—is the mother of freedom, justice and equality, and therefore not consistent with the existence of the present class state. ”

“ Since the rise of modern industrial society with the opposition of classes and class struggle, the banner of democracy has been made use of many times to veil the eyes of the people to the chasm that yawns between the divided classes of society. Yes, we have lived to see the enemy of the working people fight them under the flag of democracy. Even in the mouth of those democrats who honestly wish the rule of the people the word democracy has an essentially narrowed sense, covering only the political and governmental sphere. ”

“ On the basis of the wage system towers the giant structure of present social and political institutions for the subjugation and exploitation of the laboring people—the Castle of Uri of the proletariat, the gloomy bastile of the class state, which has taken prisoner the bulk of the people, killed thought, broken and destroyed character and directed its cannon threateningly upon every one who did not bow himself in the dust before the ruling injustice. ”

“ What sort of picture does present society offer?
War and right of force rule between the people, between classes and between individual men. Through capitalistic production there is war between bourgeoisie and worker; through competition bourgeoise is in strife with bourgeoise, the laborer with the laborer. Socialism would set permanently a limit to this war of all against all. ”

“ Socialism provides that the standing army, this means of subjugation and conquest, be disbanded, and that it he replaced, so long as the possibility of war exists, by an army of the people. Each citizen, from his youth, shall be exercised in the use of arms and become qualified for military action. If every citizen is a soldier then every soldier is a citizen, and no tyrant will ever he in a position to offer violence to the people.
At present education is the privilege of a few, and for this few it is not a training for humanity but a preparation to exercise class rule. ”

“ With the universal obligation to labor, according to equal justice, each should have in proportion to his reasonable needs.
In the present society the means of labor are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the servitude of the laboring class, which is the outgrowth of this, is the cause of misery and of slavery in all forms.
The liberation of labor demands the transformation of the means of production into the common property of society and the associative regulation of the collective labor with general employment and just distribution of the proceeds of labor. ”

“ The ancient slave worked for his master, the mediæval vassal for the lord of the manor, and the modern wage slave works for the capitalist. Here is the inconsistency, here the injustice to remedy which is the object of the social democracy. The social communistic character of labor must be extended to the product of labor, the product of labor shall be the property of labor, labor no longer be the companion of misery but of enjoyment. ”

“ A scanty minority whom birth and wealth have made a privileged class. The great majority of the people are absolutely helpless, and, because helpless, also without rights, for a right to which the power of enforcement is not attached is only a picture, a play, a misleading fantasy. What meaning, for example, has the right to choose a legislative representative who can only speak but cannot exercise the slightest influence on the government of the land? The governing minority rules for itself, not for the subject majority. ”

“ It is an error which arises from the confusing of society with the privileged minority, that is with the ruling classes, that we are charged with the intention of overthrowing all existing things and proceeding tabula rasa to erect a fantastic structure upon the ruins. We only wish to remove whatever hinders the sound, intelligent development of society and to bring about a condition in which the interests of the great majority shall no longer be sacrificed to those of the minority. ”

“ The interest of the negro does not come in question for the plantation owner; his own interest is determinative for him and he handles the negro as his interest demands. Just so in the present state. The interest of the people does not come in question, but exclusively the interest of the ruling minority.
To make the interests of the ruled subservient to the interests of the rulers is the foundation and purpose of rule—is the meaning of ruling. So long as there are rulers and ruled it must be so, for rule is by its very nature exploitation. ”

“ Wholly aside from the unjust distribution of the products of labor, capitalist production is incapable of providing all members of society with the things requisite to an existence worthy of mankind and must be displaced by a higher form of production which fulfills these conditions. And this is possible only through communistic, social production, and the socialist organization of labor which turns the concentrated capital of the community to the advantage of society. ”

“ Whoever in the middle ages, however, or even the first half of the present century, had said that the system of small industries was too costly, too unproductive, and must be wiped from the earth through an industrial revolution that should bring another system of production to the ruling position, would have been considered as—well, much as the fanatics of the present' social order, or, more properly, disorder, consider us. ”

“ The economic inequality is not, however, the worst thing. Labor creates all wealth, and were those who do not work poor this inequality would have a certain justification; in reality the situation is turned about. As the bourgeois political economist, John Stuart Mill, who is honored as an authority by our opponents, has explained with keen insight, in our present society goods are proportioned in inverse ratio to the heaviness of the labor performed. ”

“ And instead of privileged individuals, instead of political social monopolies, we would establish the rights and interests of all and justice as the highest law of state and society. Whatever has outlived itself and no longer satisfies the growing cultured needs of society shall cease to withhold air and sun from the struggling new life. We will make possible the organic evolution of our culture that is prevented by the present class rule. ”

“ We call ourselves the labor party because the vital interest and the strength of numbers of the working class alone have the power to establish the order aimed at by socialism. And mark well, under working people we do not understand merely the hand workers, but every one who does not live on the labor of another. ”

“ It remains where it belongs, with labor. There is no capital but through labor. There shall be no capital except for labor. It has been asserted by charlatans that capital creates value as well as labor—the test can be easily made. The worshiper of capital may sweep together in a heap his capital, he may gather all the capital of the earth, and after the space of a year there would not have grown a penny more of value from it, but indeed the worth of the idle mass would be considerably decreased. Capital is not merely the child of labor ”

“ The "people" is composed of all the members of the state, and the whole cannot rule, since there is no one outside them to be ruled. A ruler necessarily presupposes a subject. Where there is no one to be ruled, because all have a part in the governing, there is, as a matter of course, no domination.
It is by all means a reasonable demand that all subjects of the state, minors naturally excluded, should have an equal part in the rule of the state, and, further, it cannot be denied that the carrying out of such a system would bring about the destruction of social misery. ”

“ Who will deny that the majority of mankind live in the greatest wretchedness and that only a minority have the means of attaining an existence worthy of human beings? We would refer the doubter to the statistics, whose figures admit of no reply and can be ignored only by the ignorant or the evil disposed. ”

“ Social democracy means the rule of the people in the province of the social relations of men as well as in that of politics, the just, vase, dignifying arrangement of state and society. Socialism is the science of society, the science of the irrational regulation of it at present and of the reasonable order to be brought about through us ”

“ The people beg in vain for freedom. The wishes and the happiness of a million on one side of the balance, the will and caprice of one on the other, and light as a feather the scale rises with the wishes, happiness and well-being of a million. ”

“ The ruling minority tax, according to their desire, the subject majority, burden them with the principal weight of taxation, turn the proceeds to their own profit and throw down at most only the crumbs to "the wretched tax-paying plebs." From the sweat of labor they erect advanced academies for the children of the wealthy, from which the children of the poor are shut out. ”

“ The social democracy demands, therefore, as for the state so for the municipality, universal, equal, free and direct suffrage, complete privilege and equalization, as for the citizen of the state so for the inhabitant of the city—a free community in a free state. ”

“ I. Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture, and since universal productive labor is possible only through society, therefore to society, that is to all its members, belongs the collective product of labor. ”

“ Have we not learned to our satisfaction, by experience at the Reichstag’s elections, that the oppression which the capitalist exercises on his wage-slave is stronger than that exercised by the most reactionary state? ”

“ Although we have the nearest direct sphere of our activity in the state of which we are citizens, nevertheless we do not forget the citizens of the world and the universal brotherhood of man. And we know wherever there is a struggle for the cause of labor and the oppressed people there our cause is at stake. ”

“ It insists on her complete political and social equality and equal position with man. It will destroy prostitution, whether it walk ashamed under the mantle of marriage for wealth or convenience, or whether it run shameless painted and naked upon the street. ”