Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/23

 economic foundation of the present society be altered, for on it rest the present state and city whose abuse and injustice are the necessary consequence of the social and economic abuse and injustice.

What sort of picture does present society offer?

War and right of force rule between the people, between classes and between individual men. Through capitalistic production there is war between bourgeoisie and worker; through competition bourgeoise is in strife with bourgeoise, the laborer with the laborer. Socialism would set permanently a limit to this war of all against all. It insists on peace between men, peace between nations, peace between classes. No peace, however, is to be hoped for so long as the cause remains which gives rise to the conditions of war.

The cause is the present class rule, with its wage slavery, business frauds, its deceit in all lines of traffic, its adulteration of all physical and spiritual necessities of life, its strikes and lockouts, the murder of the laborers in a mass through hunger, infected dwellings and workrooms.

On the basis of the wage system towers the giant structure of present social and political institutions for the subjugation and exploitation of the laboring people—the Castle of Uri of the proletariat, the gloomy bastile of the class state, which has taken prisoner the bulk of the people, killed thought, broken and destroyed character and directed its cannon threateningly upon every one who did not bow himself in the dust before the ruling injustice.

The wage system must be done away with if peace, order, freedom and justice are to count for anything in the state and society. Thanks to this wage system and the monopolization of the instruments of labor (tools, machines, land, mines, railroads, etc.) by the minority,