Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/47

 How would things stand with the integrally organized Industrial Union?

First, its cost is trifling, positively within reach;

Secondly, every scrap of information it gathers while organizing is of permanent value;

Thirdly, it will be able to offer resistance to capitalist encroachments, and thereby to act as a breastwork for its members, while getting ready;

Fourthly, and most significant and determining of all, the day of its triumph will be the beginning of the full exercise of its functions—the administration of the productive forces of the Nation.

The fourth consideration is significant and determining. It is the consideration that Social Evolution points the finger to, dictating the course that the proletariat must take;—dictating its goal;—dictating its means. The proletariat, whose economic badge is poverty; the proletariat, whose badge, the first of all revolutionary classes, is economic impotence;—for the benefit of that class, apparently treated so stepmotherly by Social Evolution, Social Evolution has wrought as it has wrought for none other. It has builded the smithy of capitalist industrial concentration; and, in keeping with the lofty mission of the Working Class to abolish class rule on earth, Social Evolution has gathered ready for the fashioning, not the implements of destruction, but the implements of future peace, withal the most potent weapon to clear the field of the capitalist despot—the industrially ranked toilers. The integrally organized