The Class Struggle.

 Among the Socialist slogans "class struggle" is the one which most gets on the nerves of the bourgeoisie, even upon politicians possessed of horse sense. Socialisation of the means of production is a theme which is debatable, declare some of them, but class struggle, that is civil war, "blood and war," and to their imagination it is like barricades and other like defences of 1848. By this time, though, they should have learned enough from our literature, press, and history to know that we, in saying "class struggle," have as little in mind the shotgun and paving stones as when using the word "revolution." Classes are economic groups with antagonistic interests and possessing social power. The struggle for these interests can be carried on in many ways, and in fact has often been carried on with out a drop of blood having been shed, since private property and individual mode of earning a living has brought about the division into classes. If two competitors fight with each other to get each other's customers, this is not a class struggle, but a struggle between private individuals; for the rest this is also a struggle for economic power and interest, but it is not of the same importance as the struggle between classes. Since Olim's time conflicting interests and powers between classes have been settled through struggle, through a class struggle. And the whole development of civilisation moves, since the dissolution of primitive communism, through class struggles as stated in the "Communist Manifesto." How absurd it is then to say as Ethical Culture some time ago stated: "Class struggle is a cur that one must tie outside because, otherwise it would soil the room."
Max Nordau, the Paris physician and renowned author, not a Socialist but judging Socialist matters more intelligently than the great lights of the Progressists, wrote an essay some years ago about the historic and the present day class struggle, in which he said: "Those who attribute improved conditions of labor to the magnanimity of the ruling class, or to the initiative of a monarch, suffer— granted their sincerity— from intellectual deception." Nothing that was ever done for labor has been done voluntarily. Not one measure which improved labor's condition was a voluntary concession of the ruling class. Everything was wrung from it either by force or threat; every thing was granted after it recognised the futility of further resistance : everything is the result of struggles, without which the proletariat would not have gained a thing. All history makes for the axiom : Never did a ruling class, out of sympathy for the oppressed give up one particle of its advantages, nor anything, were it ever so little, was conceded, unless it itself derived some benefit thereby. Sympathy,justice, neighborly love play no role in the mutual relation of classes. These are virtues of individuals but not of classes. These are dominated by relentless laws of "interests." That is the reason each class had to fight a life and death struggle for concessions gained from the other class. The author describes the judicial rights of the Roman slaves, which were not improved in the least during a full ten centuries, and he also describes conditions during Feudalism. The land-owners who united in the class of nobility had no more feeling for their serfs than the war-hardened Romans had for their slaves. The general laws, the regulations in various feudal domains make one shudder. The serf found in the secret possession of a weapon had his hand chopped off. The same happened to one who failed to salute his master, where he was not hanged, as in Normandy. Refusal to work, flight, and poaching were punishable with death. The master recognised no duties towards his vassals; in years of famine he let them starve to death. The church only protected them as far as its interests demanded. These fearful conditions only improved when the outlawed farmers began to feel as a class and risk a class struggle with the propertied class. In England conditions were a little better, but only to the benefit of the barons. Still in the year 1515, Thomas Bacon complained : "Where formerly human beings could live comfortably, there are now only sheep and rabbits. Animals created by God to feed men now eat them up. . . . And the cause of this misery ? The greed of the nobility, who became raisers and cattle dealers and thought only of increasing their own wealth. (See Kautsky's "Thomas Moore:") True, on the renowned night of August 1, 1789, the French nobility gave up "voluntarily" its class privileges. Voluntarily? Yes—when everywhere throughout the land the baronial castles were in flames or demolished, and dozens of murders had enlightened the court aristocracy of what was in store for them; if they resisted longer the demands of the farmers. This is clearly proven by Comrade Cunow by publications of that period. It is not true that there was even one case of voluntary grant in this long development. Each right that the enslaved class conquered was mostly at the price of a bloody encounter in the class struggle. From the class struggle proceeding the founding and development of cities, the farmers' revolts, the Puritanic movement, the settling of North America, the Commonwealth— the English republic (with Cromwell as Protector), and of course the French Revolution, the Thirty Years' War, the war in the Cevennes, the taking of the Bastille, etc. The history of the industrial proletariat is line after line the history of slavery and serfdom, says Nordau. In the beginning of industry on a large scale the wage workers were the enslaved class under the domination of a reckless master and employing class. So long as the new "industrial aristocracy" felt fully its immense superiority, it did not hesitate to enslave the defenceless proletariat. The "code Napoleon" contained at its promulgation, 1804, the article 1781, according to which the simple statement of an employer was positive proof in court against a wage-earner. The penal law made every combination of workers illegal. The wage-worker had to have a "work book" if he did not desire to be jailed as a vagabond. He had no right of migration, no right to strike, no right of free speech and assemblage, no franchise and even in the press he was muzzled, because Guizott still ordered that a political paper had to give a bond of 200,000 francs. This was the situation in the land of the taking of the Bastille and the convent. In England things were not any better. As long as the proletarians relied upon the reasonableness of the employer, they worked from 14-16 hours daily in factories which were horrible prisons, and for starvation wages. Only the class struggle of the workers carried on with determination, and threatening the position of the dominant class, brought them some relief. "Have," asks Nordau, "those, who see in Socialism a danger to culture, ever asked themselves how civilisation would look if the proletarian had not, for the last hundred years, carried on a class struggle against the ruling class?"—The metropolis would consist of a small quarter of marble palaces and scattered suburbs of horrible hovels (London slums.) The workers would work daily 18 hours and earn just enough to live on potatoes and tea, to die at the age of thirty with tuberculosis and bring into the world a progeny of rickety dwarfs. Art, poetry and science would be exclusively in the service of blase, neurotic, hysteric, or totally crazy patricians. Europe would have become like China, but without the patriarchal concern for the coolie. Or does one believe that the white man's nature is of a better make-up? Remember then that in America chattel slavery still existed in 1861, and that the class interest of the Republicans caused its abolition, like in Russia Czaristic "state reasons" caused the ending of serfdom in 1863. The age of machinery would have brought a new Roman decline, a new medieval dark new over the world if the proletarian class struggle had not prevented this misfortune for mankind. And the numerous social and political remnants of by-gone ages, some of which still disgrace the world, as in Prussia and Russia — what else can conquer them but the proletarian class struggle ? — Hamburg Echo.


International Socialist (Sydney, NSW : 1910 - 1920), Saturday 6 August 1910, page 2