Page:Alexander Jonas - Reporter and Socialist (1885).djvu/58

 old people will be able to do a great many things when all are sufficiently nourished, and when none are continually worrying and craving for food and shelter. That this is possible you can observe when looking over the list of names of our old merchants and manufacturers, who in spite of having worked all their lives, are as ruddy and crafty as if they were young men; and this is only because they have been living a life of material welfare and free from need in any form whatever.

And this organization of society at large into trades unions, as it might be called, is the final object communism is striving for?

It is the first and not the last aim the Socialists desire to accomplish. To organize social production upon the broadest and most accomplished scale imaginable, and regulated according to the wants and desires of mankind at the time being, to make society the owner of the land and the means of communication and of the means as well as the products of labor, as far as the latter are not private property already, is the first object we are striving for, and it ts the economic basis upon which the new society bases tts organization and continues to develop into higher and nobler proportions. I want you to tell that to all who may ask you what the communists want to do, and whenever you find anyone who says that they want anything else, tell him that he is either a knownothing or a slanderer. Moreover, "Beware of spurious imitations!" Always bear in mind that production uniformly organized and conducted upon a rational, scientific plan, is the only proposition which if carried out, will guarantee the welfare of mankind. If any political humbug or quack proposes any other system which excludes production upon such a scale, and leaves out the communistic ownership of the soil and the tools and means of labor,—may they call it anarchism or anything else—tell them that such is not socialism nor communism, it is not what we want!

You have been speaking so far, only about producing all sorts of things, and also about their distribution among those who produced them according to the part each worker took in the process of producing, but you did not men-