efenders toward the socialist-minded vanguard. These banner-bearers of reaction do not dread so much the importation of ideas from abroad, for they welcome fascism and other brands of obscurantism. What they fear is the enlightenment and inspiration Marxism can give American workers in working out the ways and means of their emancipation. Hence the irreconcilable hostility toward “the philosophy of Marx, Engels and Lenin” expressed in Harvard President Conant’s call to ideological battle.
When the pioneers of bourgeois society confronted their precapitalist foes, they had both the power and the historical right to conquer. Their plutocratic heirs of the twentieth century have neither. In our time the workers are the pioneers and builders of the new world, the bearers of a higher culture. They embody a more efficient method of production and are fully capable of assimilating, mastering and applying all the achievements of science and technology, including the science of social change and the techniques of struggle for political power.
Uprooting all the abominations of class society, and cultivating everything worthy in the techniques, knowledge, and culture taken over from capitalism, the artificers of the coming society will vindicate the achievements of the past by surpassing them. The “liberty, equality and fraternity” known in America’s infancy, which the bourgeoisie blasphemed and buried, will be regenerated and enjoyed in its finest forms through the socialist revolution of the working people.
It is the capitalist proprietors who are the barbarians in the midst of modern society, resorting in their desperate struggle for survival to the most fiendish weapons and practices. To remove them from the seats of power is the central task of our generation. Mankind cannot resume its upward climb until civilization is rescued from capitalist barbarism.
Last updated on: 6.2.2006