Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/30



This social revolution involves the emancipation not merely of the proletariat hut of the whole human race, which is suffering under existing conditions. But this emancipation can be achieved by the working class alone, because all other classes, in spite of their mutual strife of interests, take their stand upon the principle of private ownership of the means of production and have a common interest in maintaining the existing social order.

The struggle of the working classes against capitalist exploitation must of necessity be a political struggle. The working classes can neither carry on their economic struggle nor develop their economic organization without political rights. They cannot effect the transfer of the means of production to the community without being first invested with political power.

It must be the aim of socialism to give conscious unanimity to this struggle of the working classes and to indicate the inevitable goal.

The interests of the working classes are identical in all lands governed by capitalist methods of production. The extension of the world's commerce and production for the world's markets make the position of the workman in any one country daily more dependent upon that of the workman in other countries.

Therefore the emancipation of labor is a task in which the workmen of all civilized lands have a share. Recognizing this, the social democrats of Germany feel and declare themselves at one with the workingmen of every land who are conscious of the destinies of their class.

The German social democrats are not, therefore, fighting for new class privileges and rights, but for the abolition of class government, and even of classes themselves, and for universal equality in rights and duties, without, distinction of sex or rank. Holding these views, they are not merely fighting against the exploitation and oppression of the wage-earners in the existing social order, but against every kind of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against class, party, sex or race.