Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/35

Rh destruction of the wage system and the emancipation of the working class.

You say: Surely it was something gained in New Zealand to secure limited hours of employment, to have sanitary factories, clean luncheon rooms, old age pensions, workingmen's compensation. Surely all these things represented progress and an advance toward the true ideal.

Yes. But every one of these things has been magnified, distorted and exaggerated for the purpose and with the result of keeping the workingman quiet about more vital things. How say you to that? Every pretended release from his claims has been in fact a new form of tether on his limbs. What about that? I should think meanly of myself if I did not rejoice every time a workingman's hours are reduced or the place wherein he is condemned to toil is made more nearly tolerable. But what shall we conclude when these things are deliberately employed to distract his thoughts from fundamental conditions and when all this state of stagnation is wrought by the alluring game of politics?

I cannot help thinking that all this has or ought to have a lesson for the Socialist movement in America. If it be desired to kill that movement the most effective way would be to get it entangled in some form of practical politics. Then the real and true aim of the movement can at once be lost sight of and this party can go the way of every other proletarian party down to the pit. I should not think that was a very good way to go.

When we come to reason of it calmly what can be gained by electing any human being to any office beneath the skies? To get in and keep in does not seem any sort of an object to anyone that will contemplate the possibilities of the Co-operative Commonwealth. How shall it profit the working class to have Mr. Smith made sheriff or Mr. Jones become the coroner? Something else surely is the goal of this magnificent inspiration. In England the radicals have all gone mad on the subject