This crystal clear call for the self-emancipate of our class and to expropriate our expropriators, was surely informed and under-girded by Brown’s preacher’s indignation and solemn religious conviction for a better, more just world. Brown, (1861–1938) had an intriguing political life; a traitor to his class who went from Yale-educated Congregationalist and later (a fallen) Unitarian minister, to become a founder of the Socialist Party, albeit with strong anarchist leanings. Markedly different than many of the clergy who hitched their wagon to the Socialist horse, Brown was a genuine leftist, a partisan of revolutionary action, advocating for industrial unionism and allied with the I.W.W., to which he would become increasingly close. After his unfortunate political retreat during the First World War, he reclaimed his leftism and was in the orbit of the Communist Party, assisting with political prisoners, during the 1920s. However, Brown’s most important and lasting role, was as a leading proponent of the Modern Schools, helping to start many, including the famous one in Stelton, New Jersey which he ran for years, while helping to theorize its teaching method. One of those many, nay millions, of uniquely interesting activists who kept the freedom struggle going.
‘Wanted: The Necessities of Life’ by William Thurston Brown from International Socialist Review. Vol. 12 No. 4. August, 1911.
IF THE evolution of society should sometime cease to be, as now, a blind process and come under the control of a rational idea, what would that idea be? Would it not be this: That the only thing which can make it worthwhile for human beings to be born or to grow up lies in the freedom and expression of individuality, the sense of a personal creative function for every human being? Not the Rooseveltian ideal of a vast multiplication of human animals to become mere beasts of burden for a few to ride; not the subordination of the individual to the mass or to the coercive powers of any kind of government, but the frank subordination of all other things to the free and full expression of the individual life–this alone can justify any form of human association, or even make the world worthwhile.
There can be no difference of opinion as to the fact that the worth or even the significance of any nation or group of human beings, of any age or period in history, is to be measured not by its machinery, its inventions, its conveniences, its books or buildings or cities or any such thing, but solely by the freedom and power and personality of its people.
If a beginning is to be made of abandoning the process of blind and unthinking evolution, such a beginning will take place in the sphere of ideas, of thought, reflection, will, where alone it can take place.
We are slowly making the discovery that there can be no such thing as education unless, as a result, human beings discover their place and function in this evolving world–unless, in other words, they are able to express their own personality. The so-called education afforded in the public schools is woefully defective in this supreme function. At its best, it merely fits boys and girls to become unthinking parts of an industrial system in which they have no voice or control. It teaches nothing of the problems of the day–nothing of economics, nothing of life. It develops no self-consciousness, no individuality.
Three things, above all others, are essential not only to education, but to life: first, a knowledge of the fact of revolution; second, the sense of personal freedom; and third, action. These three are the indispensable conditions of life. If we have not these, we do not and cannot live. Without these, we are nothing but wooden figures, mere pieces of furniture in a mechanical and life-destroying system. And all these are in a measure possible to at least some of us. Some of us can know this fact of revolution. Some of us can exercise a measure of freedom. Many of us can at least act.
The Fact of Revolution,
The key to any clear knowledge of what the world means is the knowledge of REVOLUTION as the central and crucial fact of history–indeed, of the very days in which we are living. The great word of modern times–the word that is on all our lips, is “evolution.” But it is only in Revolution that the significance or even the fact of evolution can be seen. We cannot see causes–hardly processes; we can only see effects and infer their causes.
No man or woman is acquainted with the alphabet of real knowledge until the fact of Revolution is grasped. In particular, three revolutions disclose and illumine the meaning of the world we live in and show us our place and function in it: the revolution which resulted from the evolution of the tool of production; the revolution in man’s whole conception of the world and of life produced by Darwin’s great induction concerning the origin of species and the descent of man; and the proletarian revolution with which the whole civilized world today is insurgent because of the slave status of the working class.
The evolution of the tool of production from hand manufacture to machine manufacture, from simple tools to complex tools, from the little shop to the big factory, wrought a complete and far-reaching revolution in the status of the laborer. It changed him from a condition of independence to one of dependence, from a free man to a slave. That was THE REVOLUTION. That revolution alone explains the meaning of our industrial and social system today. No man can understand our industrial and social system unless he knows about that revolution. That revolution is the key to effective knowledge for anyone. Lacking that knowledge, the world’s workers are hopeless slaves. Possessed of that knowledge, they are on their way to freedom.
The study and observation of Charles Darwin, supplemented by those of other scientists, completely destroyed the foundations and superstructure of humanity’s whole intellectual cosmos, and compel a new and revolutionary change in our whole thought of morals, of religion, of history, of life.
And now, as the inevitable product of these two tremendous revolutions culminating in the nineteenth century, we are in the rapids of another revolution; the world-wide uprising of the working class, forced as the price of its own existence to destroy the existing capitalist system and replace it with the republic of Labor, the regime of Socialism. If our thinking is sane and fruitful only as it corresponds with the data and conclusions of evolutionary science, our action and effort, either as individuals or en masse, can have meaning or value only as it fits into this pending revolutionary struggle.
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the truth that none of us can be economically free until all are free, and that the path to any kind of freedom is a path of pain and martyrdom until every man’s base of livelihood is secure. But it is just as important for us to know that no true freedom of the mind or soul ever can be the mere PRODUCT of some economic change. Not in a million years could men and women know real freedom or have it unless it is a fact of their own minds. The real freedom is not political or economic, but spiritual in the best sense of that much abused word. No conceivable political or industrial or social revolution in any future time will or can make free men and free women. The real freedom, without which there can be nothing worthy to be called life, never can be the product of any mechanical change. There is no magic in the whirling planets, in the changing seasons, in political enactments, or even in class struggles or victories, by which the minds of men and women take on new qualities or rise to a nobler stature. There isn’t on this earth today more abject slavery on the part of men and women than in what is regarded as the freest nation in the world. And while it is perfectly true that Capitalism does make wage-slaves of fully two-thirds of the whole race, it is also true that “four walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” We do not have to wait till the dawn of the co-operative commonwealth before we claim and gain for ourselves some of the noblest and most vital treasures of life. Justly do we feel, fairly may we claim, that life cannot fulfill itself in a system based on economic mastership and industrial slavery. But no man or woman in all the world can be said to live at all, so long as it is true that a lot of silly superstitions and exploded beliefs are expressing themselves through such men and women. You and I cannot be someone else and really live at all. You live exactly and only in the measure in which you think your own thoughts and live your own life. Otherwise you are nothing but a quotation. In the measure in which you let any other human being or institution or book or what not think for you, you abdicate the throne of your own being and are guilty of the deepest treason life can know. We men and women must assert our freedom at any cost. Freedom and life are one. Finally, the attainment of any possible good, whether socially or individually, hinges on ACTION. The need of clear knowledge must be evident to all of us. But knowledge becomes a mere dry rot, an empty sterile scholasticism, a dead body to which we tie ourselves-witness the mass of colleges and universities today and in all former days–unless to knowledge is always added action. The richest discovery of modern times in the sphere of education is the discovery that not the brain cells chiefly, not memory and imagination primarily, are the organs of education, but that the whole body, all its muscles, organs and activities, are the indispensable organs of education. The key to the new education is in that one word, “action.” We learn by doing, and in no other way. If that is true of the child, it is true of the man or woman, true of a class or race. You have as much virtue as you are putting into action, AND NO MORE. You have as much knowledge as you are using, and no more. Wage slaves have or ever will have as much freedom, as much power, as much control in society or anywhere as you actually USE, and no more. Beware how you delegate any power or any function which you can yourselves exert. Beware how you let other people do things for you, speak for you, act for you. That is precisely what Capitalism means. You are letting other people do things for you and to you–instead of doing them yourselves. You yourselves. If ever you are to be free, you will have to legislate for yourselves, and you will never do that in Washington. You will do that in the industries where you work and by which you live. Fellow-workers: this is a changing world. That is the kind of world you are in. Changing all the time. Don’t forget that. The whole method of production has changed–from hand production to machine production. You were masters of hand production. You are not yet masters of machine production. That’s why machine production is master of you. You must take into your own hands the control of the machines. You simply must. It is the price of your economic freedom. Unite as workers and you can
But one of the reasons why you don’t do it is that you are letting other people do your thinking for you. You consent to be intellectual slaves. You own the mastership of a book, of a church, of a priesthood, of a creed. That spells SLAVERY for you. You are not men and women, but wooden puppets that move at the will of the dead, so long as you accept any creed or faith or belief WHICH YOU HAVE NOT VERIFIED. Drop it. Cut it out. Leave it. Be free. Affirm the right of your own mind, of yourself.
And don’t believe the man who says you must wait till some sweet by and by before you can be free. You can be free the moment you put your freedom into deed. You can be free as individuals today, and no other time at all. How? By living your own life. By doing what YOU think is right, what expresses YOU. You workers of the world can come into your own the moment you say so. AS A CLASS YOU HAVE ALL THE POWER THERE IS. All else depends on you. If you will exert YOUR power, the whole world is yours. Do it. Unite. Act. Take things into your own hands. Pay yourselves the full product of your toil. Wipe out these little parasites of politics and trade, of press and pulpit and office, and be your own masters.
The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v12n04-oct-1911-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf
