Capitalists -------------------------------------------------------------------- Sections (TOC) : ---------------------------------- * 1 25 Words; 184 Characters * 2 29 Words; 201 Characters * 3 98 Words; 576 Characters * 4 92 Words; 488 Characters * 5 110 Words; 625 Characters * 6 49 Words; 289 Characters * 7 153 Words; 766 Characters * 8 74 Words; 381 Characters * 9 22 Words; 161 Characters * 10 73 Words; 396 Characters * 11 52 Words; 318 Characters * 12 66 Words; 409 Characters * 13 74 Words; 425 Characters * 14 27 Words; 163 Characters * 15 15 Words; 113 Characters * 16 82 Words; 456 Characters * 17 119 Words; 677 Characters * 18 147 Words; 894 Characters * 19 72 Words; 414 Characters * 20 7 Words; 53 Characters * 21 17 Words; 113 Characters * 22 61 Words; 350 Characters * 23 22 Words; 132 Characters * 24 12 Words; 95 Characters * 25 26 Words; 202 Characters * 26 14 Words; 100 Characters * 27 15 Words; 95 Characters * 28 52 Words; 321 Characters * 29 85 Words; 517 Characters * 30 39 Words; 228 Characters * 31 9 Words; 69 Characters * 32 63 Words; 363 Characters * 33 26 Words; 173 Characters * 34 45 Words; 245 Characters * 35 35 Words; 208 Characters * 36 14 Words; 83 Characters * 37 50 Words; 386 Characters * 38 19 Words; 115 Characters Sections (Content) : ---------------------------------- * 1 ...the engineer, devoted largely to improving practices of production, and the finance capitalist or manager, who restricts production in order to maintain process and profit. * 2 This mission of capitalism is one that all previous ruling classes have also had to fulfill towards the class below. With capitalism, however, the mission assumed infinitely graver importance. * 3 These two classes, consisting of relatively few capitalists who own tools in the form of great machines that they did not make and that they cannot use, and of a vast army of wage workers who did make these machines and who do use them, but who do not own them—these two classes’ tool-owners and tool-users; that is to say, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited; to put it into perfectly plain terms, robbers and robbed-these two economic forces whose interests ceaselessly clash, are pitted against each other in a mighty struggle for the mastery. * 4 You, Mr. Workingman, don’t need a capitalist; and if you think you do, it is because of your ignorance. It is because you don’t understand your own interest. You don’t need him. You imagine that he gives you a job; but he does nothing of the kind. You give him a job. You employ him to take from you what you produce; and he faithfully sticks to his job. Why, the capitalist could not exist a second without you. Can you imagine a capitalist without workingmen? * 5 I was bent on thorough and complete organization of the railroad men and ultimately the whole working class, and all my time and energy were given to that end. My supreme conviction was that if they were only organized in every branch of the service and all acted together in concert they could redress their wrongs and regulate the conditions of their employment. The stockholders of the corporation acted as one, why not the men? It was such a plain proposition—simply to follow the example set before their eyes by their masters—surely they could not fail to see it, act as one, and solve the problem. * 6 It is no part of the mission of this revolutionary working class union to conciliate the capitalist class. We are organized to fight that class, and we want that class to distinctly understand it. And they do understand it, and in time the working class will also understand it... * 7 Most of your hands are calloused and you are taught by the capitalist politician, who is the political mercenary of the capitalist who fleeces you, you are taught by him to be proud of your horny hands. If that is true he ought to be ashamed of his. He doesn't have any horns on his hands. He has them on his brain. He is as busy with his brain as you are with your hands, and because he is busy with his brain and you neglect yours, he gets a goodly share of what you produce with your hands. He is the gentleman who calls you the horny handed sons of toil. That fetches you every time. I tell you that the time has come for you to use your brains in your own interest, and until you do that you will have to use your hands in the interest of your masters. * 8 The very moment the capitalist press credits me with being a wise labor leader, I will invite you to investigate me upon the charge of treason. I am discredited by the capitalist simply because I am true to his victim. I don't want his favors. I do not court his approbation. I would not have it. I can't afford it. If I had his respect it would be at the price of my own. * 9 ...the emancipation of the working class requires the complete destruction of capitalism and we can't stop our revolutionary efforts until that happens. * 10 What have any of us to lose if we band together in ONE BIG UNION to the end and by it as a medium transform the present system of industrial despotism and economic inequality into one of Industrial Freedom and Equality? We would lose our chains, our miseries, but gain the world for all the workers, a world fit for men and women to live their lives in freedom of love and labor. * 11 ...if the lot of a slave among the ancients was really more wretched than that of the indigent laborer and the mechanic among the moderns, it may be doubted, whether the superior orders, who are in possession of consideration and honors, do not proportionally fail in the dignity which befits their condition. * 12 In any type of society the industrial worker, for the most part, works harder than he likes at tasks which are frequently arduous, usually monotonous, and sometimes dangerous. On the job he is nearly always subject to the direction of higher authority. His income seldom sufficient to cover what he thinks his needs demand. The natural state of the industrial worker, therefore, is one of discontent. * 13 Capitalists cannot live without wage-workers. Where one class exists there the other will be found. Furthermore, there is sure to be trouble between the two. The master is always scheming to get more profits out of the worker. The worker fights for more wages from his boss. The less one gets the more there is for the other. Hence we have, between the capitalist and his worker, what is known as the Class Struggle. * 14 The nobility of the Old World hold the honest workingman in contempt, and yet are so contemptible themselves that they are willing to live upon his labor. * 15 [Sam Jones, Riverbrooker, shoe worker] Working men are trustworthy and just; upper-class people are not. * 16 You will see that everywhere, in England as well as in France, in Germany as well as in Italy, in Russia as welt as in the United States, everywhere where there is a privileged and an oppressed class, there is a tremendous work going on in the midst of the working class, whose object is to break down forever the slavery enforced by the capitalist feudality and to lay the foundation of a society established on the basis of justice and equality. * 17 Is it possible when the profit of capital is due to what we have seen, when capital is the octopus which sucks up the entire surplus of the toil and sweat of the worker, leaving him only what are the bare necessaries of existence—is it possible that any one can still have the courage to speak in the presence of the workers of the profit on capital as the reward of abstinence of capitalists who mortify themselves? Yes, there are those who still have the hardihood to flout the workers, to insult these luckless proletarians, with these jeers, with these monstrous sarcasms. Has conscience, then, died out from among us? Has shame taken refuge with the brutes? * 18 Today the working class must educate itself, marshal its forces, and direct itself in the course of the revolutionary struggle and thus the revolution is directed as much against capitalist exploitation as against the ancien regime; so much so that the mass strike appears as the natural means to recruit, organize and prepare the widest proletarian layers for revolutionary struggle, as the means to undermine and overthrow the old state power, as well as to contain the capitalist exploitation. The urban industrial proletariat is now the soul of the revolution in Russia. But in order to carry through a direct political struggle as a mass, the proletariat must first be assembled as a mass, and for this purpose they must come out of the factory and workshop, mine and foundry, must overcome the atomization and decay to which they are condemned under the daily yoke of capitalism. * 19 ...the workman, forced for centuries to depend upon the good will of his employer for work, that is, for bread, and accustomed to see his own life at the disposal of those who possess the land and capital, has ended in believing that it is his master who gives him food, and asks ingenuously how it would be possible to live, if there were no master over him? ["Anarchy," by Errico Malatesta.] * 20 ....those who acquire anything, do not work. * 21 The tyranny of capitalism has prepared the terrain; socialism has only to sow the seeds of emancipation. * 22 There is a great number of noblemen among you, that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labor, on the labor of their tenants, whom, to raise their revenues, they pare to the quick. This indeed is the only instance of their frugality, for in all other things they are prodigal, even to the beggaring of themselves... * 23 ...in order to keep the rich in idleness and luxury, all the workers must lead a life of perpetual misery and exploitation. * 24 ...the nature of the occupational structure derives directly from the economic system. * 25 [The unemployed, starving workers...]... with some undestroyed powers of reasoning, perceive, in part, the glaring errors and injustice of society towards themselves and their fellow sufferers. * 26 ...strike movements spread over whole countries and hit at the roots of capitalist power... * 27 The landlords have no reclaim against those whose only fortune is in their daily work. * 28 For the workers, the general strike is the logical outcome of the modern industrial system, whose victims they are to-day, and at the same time it offers them their strongest weapon in the struggle for their social liberation, provided they recognize their own strength and learn how to use this weapon properly. * 29 Subjects extoll public tranquility, citizens individual liberty; the one class prefers security of possessions, the other that of person; the one regards as the best government that which is most severe, the other maintains that the mildest is the best; the one wants crimes punished, the other wants them prevented; the one wants the State to be feared by its neighbors, the other prefers that it should be ignored; the one is content if money circulates, the other demands that the people shall have bread. * 30 If society cannot do without masters and wage slaves, so much the worse for society. For we are prepared to sacrifice our machines, our wheels and tunnels and wires and systems and slave lives for one hour of happiness. * 31 I'm just an ordinary capitalist, I expect, highly obnoxious. * 32 ...the lives of poor artisans... gives to the state a superabundant population. Already brought into the world, that population finds no longer any room to exist there; it is always ready to be satisfied with the lowest terms on which it may be permitted to live. There is no condition so hard that men are not found ready to engage in it voluntarily.... * 33 Far from attending to their business with affection, they [slaves] felt a secret joy every time they saw their oppressors' wealth diminished, or his hopes deceived. * 34 ...having come to understand that the ownership of land is a crime, you must not take part in it, either as soldiers, who take the land away from the workers, or as laborers on the lands of the proprietors, or as tenants on these lands. * 35 If all working men fully comprehended that working for the proprietors and renting their lands are bad, there would be fewer and fewer people ready to work on the proprietors' lands and to rent them. * 36 He whose desires are few gets them; he whose desires are many goes astray. * 37 Demonstrating that participation will not destroy profitability may affect attitudes somewhat, but fundamental beliefs in individualism, competition, and just deserts drive the modern corporation. Reconciling these beliefs with the communal, cooperative goals of organizational democracy is the challenge to be faced if serious attempts at industrial democracy are to flourish. * 38 ...the peasant well understood that the will of the powerful was more important than the will of the poor. Events : ---------------------------------- Capitalists -- Added : April 11, 2020 About This Textfile : ---------------------------------- Text file generated from : http://RevoltSource.com/