Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/29



and great land-owners. To the proletariat and the rapidly sinking middle classes, the small tradesmen of the towns and the peasant proprietors (Bauern), it brings an increasing uncertainty of existence, increasing misery, oppression, servitude, degradation and exploitation (Ausbeutung).

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of every industrial country The gulf between the propertied classes and the destitute is widened by the crisis arising from capitalist production, which becomes daily more comprehensive and omnipotent, which makes universal uncertainty the normal condition of society, and which furnishes a proof that the forces of production have outgrown the existing social order, and that private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their full development and their proper application.

Private ownership of the means of production, formerly the means of securing his product to the producer, has now become the means of expropriating the peasant proprietors, the artisans and the small tradesmen, and placing the non-producers, the capitalists and large land-owners in possession of the products of labor. Nothing but the conversion of capitalist private ownership of the means of production—the earth and its fruits, mines and quarries, raw material, tools and machines, means of exchange—into social ownership, and the substitution of socialist production, carried on by and for society in the place of the present production of commodities for exchange, can effect such a revolution that, instead of the large industries and the steadily growing capacities of common production being, as hitherto, a source of misery and oppression to the classes whom they have despoiled, and they may become a source of the highest well-being and of the most perfect and comprehensive harmony.