Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/13

 possible the present manner of production must be brought to an end. The economic basis of society—that is, the system of wage labor—must be transformed.

The mother of all social wealth, of all culture, is labor. Whatever we are and have, we are and have through labor. We have labor to thank for everything. Not our personal labor, at least only to an inconsiderable degree, but the general social labor. It is very possible indeed—and we see it frequently enough—to enjoy the blessings of culture without personal work; but it is also absolutely impossible for the most industrious and efficient worker with the most strenuous toil to live as men of culture live without the general social labor that first created culture and without which we were beasts, not men. From this we see the communistic nature of labor, its essentially associative character, on which all state and society rests. Labor has always had this communistic character, with the ancient slave and the vassal of the middle ages as well as with the modern wage-earner. But he did not have the product of his labor, nor has he it yet. The ancient slave worked for his master, the mediæval vassal for the lord of the manor, and the modern wage slave works for the capitalist. Here is the inconsistency, here the injustice to remedy which is the object of the social democracy. The social communistic character of labor must be extended to the product of labor, the product of labor shall be the property of labor, labor no longer be the companion of misery but of enjoyment.

One can see how absurd the allegation is that we propose to abolish property. Not the abolition of property is sought but the abolition of the deprivation of property, the false property which is the appropriation of others' property; the social thievery.