 They are inherent in the present situation of American capitalism which faces the same prospect as Indian tribalism, colonial feudalism and chattel slavery. It has become obsolete and opposed to progress. The major evils from which mankind suffers are directly attributable to the outworn institution of capitalist private property. The emancipation of mankind from poverty, tyranny and wars is inseparable from the liberation of the means of production from the grip of capitalist ownership and monopolist control.
At the same time the colossal expansion of socialized production under capitalist auspices has given birth to a new mighty social power. This is the industrial working class which is itself the principal force of production in modern economy. This class heralds the coming age of atomic energy used for constructive, not for destructive purposes. By its ideas, outlook and actions, labor opens up an unrestricted historical horizon for humanity in the socialist future of the free and equal. The material prerequisites for this new form of production and collective life form and ripen within the capitalist structure itself.
This new social power has already announced itself through the swift insurgence of the CIO in the late ’thirties when, after operating like uncontrolled despots in basic industry for many decades, the monopolists suddenly were challenged by powerful unions of industrial workers. These organized workers are now knocking on the doors of political power.
Let us assure both the witch-hunters and the witch-doctors of capitalism that the American monopolists will not be overthrown, like the Indians, by foreign forces.
They are destined to be dislodged from within, like the feudal landlords, the English crown and the Southern slavocracy. This job will be done by social forces generated under their own system and provoked by their own reactionary rule.
The instinctive dread of this prospect accounts for the malevolence of the monopolists toward the workers and the belligerence of their intellectual defenders 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