Page:Johann Jacoby - The Object of the Labor Movement - tr. Florence Kelley (1887).djvu/8

 Rh look to the capitalist corporations of America to promote the transition to the Socialist system. That would be asking them to commit suicide.

Moreover the State becomes year by year more completely the property, the willing tool, of these same corporations and less capable of action in the interest of the people. Such slender concessions as it makes in the direction of protecting and advancing the interests of the working class are made in answer to the demands of Labor organized so powerfully that its demand is a threat. And so far as it dares, the State of to-day renders illusory the trifles that it yields. If we pass in review the demands which Johann Jakoby makes of the State we find that, here in America, when the Government yielded to the demand for the eight-hour working day for its employees, the enforcement of the law remained practically nil. In the separate States the eight-hour law, wherever passed, is either a dead letter or vitiated in the first place by the private contract clause. The prohibition of the employment of children under fourteen years of age, though in some States enacted, is generally evaded for want of adequate inspection by men and women appointed from the working class, or of that indispensable accompaniment of such a prohibition, sufficient school accommodation and an efficiently enforced compulsory law. A graduated income tax could be imposed by the Government only under the stress of the civil war and the State was the far-too-humble servant of its plutocratic owners to attempt stringent enforcement. Instead of universal compulsory military training we find the irresponsible mercenaries of the great corporations, the Pinkerton armed detective force, growing in recklessness from year to year; while the militia, once meant to serve the ends indicated by Jakoby, has been perverted, corrupted and hedged about with costly conditions until, to-day, it bears the character of a bourgeois volunteer re-enforcement of the regular army maintained by the State for the support of the capitalists in the suppression of lawful protests of the proletariat.

It is evident that all hope of help towards the peaceful solution of the labor question by the capitalist class and the State is illusory. The transition from the Wage-System to the Socialistic organization of society is going on around us and its peaceful consummation clearly rests with the Working Class. The clearer the insight of the workers the speedier and more peaceful the change. "In proportion as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the Revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge and savagery."

F. K. W.