For the whole of the working class, present society is doing life in the Bastille. Wilhelm Liebknecht on the prison-break that is Socialism.

‘The Bastille of Labor’ by Wilhelm Liebknecht from The People. Vol. 10 No. 21. August 18, 1900.

What sort of pictures does present society offer?

War and right of force rule between the people, between classes and between individual men. Through capitalist production there is war between capitalist and worker; through competition capitalists are in strife with capitalists, the laborer with the laborer. Socialism would set permanently a limit to this war of all against all. It insists on peace between men, peace between nations, peace between classes. No peace, however, is to be hoped for so long as the cause remains which gives rise to the conditions of war.

The cause is the present class rule, with its wage slavery, business frauds, its deceit in all lines of traffic, it adulteration of all physical and spiritual necessities of life, its strikes and lockouts, the murder of the laborers in a mass through hunger, infected dwellings and workrooms.

The Bastille of Labor.

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 bastille 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 everyone who did not bow himself in the dust before the ruling injustice.

The wage system must be done away with if peace, order, freedom and jus tice are to count for anything in the state and society. Thanks to this wage system and the monopolization of the instruments of labor (tools, machines, land, mines, railroads, etc.) by the minority, labor, which creates all value and wealth, is condemned to poverty and slavery. The employer enriches himself through the labor of his wage slaves, to whom he pays in the form of wages only a part of the proceeds of their work: the unpaid remainder he puts in his pocket as “profit”–robbery, which differs from the usual robbery only in this, that he is not punished by the present class laws. Or is there, forsooth, an essential difference between the employer who withholds from his laborers a part of the product of their labor and himself appropriates this part, and the “humane” highway robber who satisfies himself with relieving the traveler, through the logic of a drawn pistol, of only a part of his goods, but who before the law is not, therefore, less a highway robber?

How Capitalism Robs the Working Class.

The present manner of production, resting on the basis of the wage system, has as a result on the one on hand the accumulation of property in the hands of a few and the corruption of these few as a result of excessive possessions; on the other hand, there is impoverishment of the masses and pauperism. The worker, in the midst of the riches which he has created, cannot satisfy his smallest necessity: privation, unhealthful workshops and factories steal his life strength, as the employer steals from him the proceeds of his labor; lingering sickness and an early death await him. He has no family life, for, since his wages do not suffice for existence, wife and child must follow him into the factory. For the budding daughter he has the prospect of the short, glittering misery of prostitution, or the long, leaden, sunless misery of the life of a proletarian’s wife.

Socialist Republic the Only Solution.

The demands made by Socialists are very plain to everyone who is half-way educated and capable of thought. As with every party and class that ever opposed the ruling abuses and took for their object the removal of those abuses, so it is with the Socialist Party. It is slandered and abused by the selfish and deluded adherents of the maladjusted state and society: it brings disorder, class strife, destruction of property, ruin of the family and of culture, most sensual enjoyment, the deepest degradation of woman. The truth could not be more completely and shamefully perverted. The old society throws its crimes at us, for on their account we have condemned it to death.

Disorder rules; Socialism demands order.

War and class struggle prevail: Socialism insists on peace and harmony of interest, doing away with class struggle through the abolition of classes.

Property is today a lie for the majority of men, a robbery for the minority. Socialism would make property the possession of everyone. It would convert it into a truth, secure to the worker within society the full proceeds of his labor and destroy the capitalist system of plunder from its foundation.

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.

Condition of Woman Under Capitalism.

Thanks to the wrong conditions of society and the State, women is today without rights and in countless cases in chained to wed or unwedded prostitution. The intercourse of the sexes is unnatural and immoral–Socialism will bring the emancipation of woman as well as of man. 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.

Enough. Beginning with real conditions; not following Utopian will-o’-the-wisps, but building on the acquisition of culture, we strive for the abolition of the class State, class legislation and class rule.

Our end is: The free democracy, with equal economic and political rights; the free society with associative labor. The welfare of all is for us the one end of the State and society.

In order to accomplish our object we must organize ourselves. There can be no efficient propaganda or action without organization. Unified organization is the accumulation of strength, its gathering into a focus. Isolation makes each one powerless; divided strength is no strength. Union not only adds to strength but multiplies it many fold.

Capitalist Oppression Is Worldwide.

The economic and, accordingly also, the political conditions are essentially the same in all civilized lands. No State in the present day is shut off from the others by a Chinese wall. Notwithstanding the artificial boundaries, all civilized nations have a common evolution and a common history. Every land affects all others and is affected by them. All parties are, therefore, today, more or less international. And ours is so in a greater measure than all other parties, since it does not recognize national boundaries, and, standing on the position of pure humanity, adhering in all to strictly human measures, sees in the members of the divided nationalities only men and brothers.

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.

We seek justice and fight injustice. We seek free labor and attack wage-slavery.

We seek the prosperity of all and struggle against misery.

We seek the education of all and fight ignorance and barbarism.

We seek peace and order and combat the murder of people, the class war and the social anarchy.

We seek the Socialist State and attack the despotic class State.

Whoever desires these things, and will struggle for them, let him unite with us and work with all his strength for our cause–for the cause of Socialism–for the cause of humanity, whose victory will soon be gained.

New York Labor News Company was the publishing house of the Socialist Labor Party and their paper The People. The People was the official paper of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), established in New York City in 1891 as a weekly. The New York SLP, and The People, were dominated Daniel De Leon and his supporters, the dominant ideological leader of the SLP from the 1890s until the time of his death. The People became a daily in 1900. It’s first editor was the French socialist Lucien Sanial who was quickly replaced by De Leon who held the position until his death in 1914. Morris Hillquit and Henry Slobodin, future leaders of the Socialist Party of America were writers before their split from the SLP in 1899. For a while there were two SLPs and two Peoples, requiring a legal case to determine ownership. Eventual the anti-De Leonist produced what would become the New York Call and became the Social Democratic, later Socialist, Party. The De Leonist The People continued publishing until 2008.

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