Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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So it would be, if the workingman were content to take his doctrines from the other side—from the retainers of those “to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom has entrusted the care of the property interests of the country.” But, meantime, the workingman has been thinking for himself—and evolving a quite new doctrine, all his own, concerning the property interests of the country. This doctrine is, in a word, that the means of production of wealth belong of right to no individual, but to the whole people; and that in the hour of the collapse of the profit-making system, the thing for the people to do is to take possession of the machinery, and use it to produce goods, no longer for those who own, but for those who work.

And that brings me to the second of my tasks. I have shown the “great underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue”; there remains to show the consequent “movement of protest.”

I have before me, as I write, a little pamphlet published by the “Standard Publishing Company,” of Terre Haute, Indiana, and entitled, “The American Movement,” by Eugene V. Debs. It opens with the statement that “The twentieth century, according to the prophecy of Victor Hugo, is to be the century of humanity,” and will witness “the crash of despotism and the rise of world-wide democracy, freedom and brotherhood.” The reader, continuing, soon discovers that the “American movement,” with which this pamphlet deals, is the American Socialist movement. The writer tells of its early “Utopian” forms, the Owenites and the Brook-farmers, and names the exiles who came from abroad in 1848, bringing the Marxian doctrine, and influencing such men as Horace Greeley and Parke Godwin. “The first large society to adopt and propagate Socialism in America,” he writes, “was composed of the German Gymnastic Unions. Through the sixties and seventies the agitation steadily increased, local organisations were formed in various parts of the country. Following the Paris Commune of 1871, and its tragic ending, many French radicals came to our shores and gave new spirit to the movement. In 1876 the Workingman’s Party was organised, and in 1877, at the convention held in Newark, it became the Socialist Labour Party. The Socialists were intent upon building up a working-class party for independent political action.” This party, “composed of thoughtful, intelligent men, aggressive and progressive, of rugged honesty and thrilled with the revolutionary spirit and aspiration for freedom, became from its inception a decided factor in the labour movement. The busy, ignorant world about the revolutionary nucleus knew little or nothing about it; had no conception of its significance, and looked upon its adherents as foolish fanatics whose antics were harmless and whose designs would dissolve like bubbles on the surface of a stream. In March, 1885, was inaugurated the strike of the Knights of Labour. On May 1st of the same year, the general strikes for the eight-hour work-day broke out in various parts of the country. In 1884, Laurence Gronlund published his “Coöperative Commonwealth.” In 1888 Edward Bellamy published his “Looking Backward,” and it had a wonderful effect upon the people. The editions ran into hundreds of thousands.”