Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/25

 mental demand of social democracy—the Alpha and Omega of our agitation. Co-operative labor and association shall take the place of the wage system with its class rule.

The instruments of production must cease to be the monopoly of a class—they must be the public property of all. There shall be no more exploiter or exploited. Production and distribution of the produce must be regulated in the interest of the w-hole. As the present production, exploitation and robbery must be abolished, so likewise must the present traffic, which is only fraud.

In the order of equality the worker will perform all the labor necessary for the whole body of citizens. In place of the employer and his humble subservient or rebellious wage slaves there will be free comrades. Labor will be the torture of no one, but the duty of all. An existence worthy of a human being will be provided for every one who performs his duty to society. Hunger will become henceforth not the curse of labor but the punishment of the idle.

And in order that this may be realized the people's state must exist—the state composed of all and for all, the state, which consists of the wise and just organization of society, the universal guaranteed establishment of happiness and culture, and the fraternal association of free and equal men.

After what has been said it is superfluous to go through one by one the demands arranged in the two parts of our programme. They are very plain to every one who is half-way educated and capable of thought. As with every party and class that ever opposed the ruling abuses and took for their object the removal of those abuses, so it is with the social democracy. It is slandered and abused by the selfish and deluded adherents of the maladjusted state and society; it brings