and the political system which protects it are to be considered immutable. These alone are exempt from radical reconstruction and so close to perfection that they cannot be surpassed, at least not in any foreseeable future.
Whatever changes there may be, they say, must remain within the boundaries of capitalist relations and cannot overstep them. The method of social development must be restricted to small doses of change portioned to the needs of the ruling class.
There is no warrant for such arbitrary assumptions in American history, in the dynamics of our productive forces, or in the present state or prospects of class relations. The forms of property and methods of production in America have undergone at least three vast transformations in the past. When Indian tribalism, British-born feudalism and Southern slavery collided with the new bourgeois forces of production, they were demolished. How absurd it is for the defenders of capitalism to bank for its salvation upon the very expansion of the productive forces which, increasingly stifled by capitalism, must lead to its downfall.
These students of history stubbornly refuse to learn from the past when the slow, steady evolution of social conditions exploded at critical junctures into tremendous upheavals which overturned the old order. American history is full of such sudden transitions and forward leaps. After the Indian tribes held the continent for thousands of years, invaders burst in from overseas, ousted the natives, and built an entirely different type of society here. Mother England dominated her thirteen colonies for over a century and a half until abruptly within a decade a definitive break occurred between the former ruler and the American people. Then, beginning with 1800, the planting power became predominant in national affairs – until the election of Republican President Lincoln in 1860 unleashed the Civil War.
Such reversals of existing conditions, resulting in a radical reconstruction of American society, are not at all restricted to the past. 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 d