Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/9

 Besides the city and country laborers must be included also the small farmers and traders who groan under the burden of capital, even as the laborers proper. Yes; in many cases yet more. There are hundreds of thousands of small masters who are obliged on Saturday to run about for hours in order to borrow the week's pay for their workers and who are happy if their profit is equal to the wages of a factory laborer.

Now to that which we propose to do.

From May 22 to 27, 1875, delegates (127 in number) from the whole democratic body of Germany, met in Gotha and accepted unanimously, after mature deliberation, the following programme:

I. Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture, and since universal productive labor is possible only through society, therefore to society, that is to all its members, belongs the collective product of labor. With the universal obligation to labor, according to equal justice, each should have in proportion to his reasonable needs.

In the present society the means of labor are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the servitude of the laboring class, which is the outgrowth of this, is the cause of misery and of slavery in all forms.

The liberation of labor demands the transformation of the means of production into the common property of society and the associative regulation of the collective labor with general employment and just distribution of the proceeds of labor.

The emancipation of labor must be the work of the laboring class, opposed to which all other classes are only a reactionary body.

II. Proceeding from this principle the socialist labor party of Germany seeks through all legal means the free state and the socialist society, the destruction of the iron law of wages, the overthrow of exploitation in all forms and the abolition of all social and political inequality.

The socialist labor party of Germany, though