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The nature of the machinery of production; the subdivision of labor, which aids cooperation and which cooperation fosters, and which is necessary to the plentifulness of production that civilization requires, compel a harmonious working together of all departments of labor, and thence compel the establishment of a central directing authority, of an orchestral director, so to speak, of the orchestra of the cooperative commonwealth.
Such is the State or government that the Socialist revolution carries in its womb. Today, production is left to anarchy, and only tyranny, the twin sister of anarchy, is organized. Socialism, accordingly, implies organization; organization implies directing authority; and the one and the other are strict reflections of the revolutions undergone by the tool of production. The second nerve center of Socialism that will serve to illustrate the difference between reform and revolution is its materialistic groundwork.
Take, for instance, the history of slavery. The human race, in its necessity to seek for food, often found it easier to make a raid and take from others the food they had gathered. In those olden, olden days of the barbarism of our ancestors, when they conquered a people and took away its property, they had no further use for the conquered; they killed them, spitted them over a good fire, roasted and ate them up. It was a simple and the only profitable way known of disposing of prisoners of war.
They did with their captives very much what bees do yet; when they have raided and conquered a hive they ruthlessly kill every single denizen of the captured hive. Our ancestors continued cannibals until their social system had developed sufficiently to enable them to keep their prisoners under control.
From that moment they found it more profitable to keep their prisoners of war alive and turn them into slaves to work for them, than it was to kill them off and eat them. With that stage of material development, cannibalism was dropped.
From the higher material plane on which our ancestors then stood, their moral vision enlarged and they presently realized that it was immoral to eat up a human being. Cannibalism disappeared to make room for chattel slavery. And what do we see? In the North, chattel slavery disappeared just as soon as the development of machinery rendered the institution unprofitable. The immorality of chattel slavery became clear to the North just as soon as, standing upon that higher plane that its higher material development raised it to, it acquired a better vision.
The benighted South, on the contrary, that had no machinery, remained with eyes shut, and she stuck to slavery till the slave was knocked out of her fists. The moral sentiment is to a movement as important as the sails are to a ship. Nevertheless, important though sails are, unless a ship is well laden, unless she is soundly, properly and scientifically constructed, the more sails you pile on and spread out, the surer she is to capsize.
So with the organizations that are to carry out a revolution. Unless your Socialist organizations are as sound as a bell; unless they are as intolerant as science; unless they will plant themselves squarely on the principle that two and two make four and under no circumstances allow that they make five, the more feeling you put into them, the surer they are to capsize and go down. On the contrary, load your revolutionary ship with the proper lading of science; hold her strictly to the lodestar; try no monkeyshines and no dillyings and dallyings with anything that is not strictly scientific, or with any man who does not stand on our uncompromisingly scientific platform; do that, and then unfurl freely the sails of morality; then the more your sails, the better off your ship; but not unless you do that, will you be safe, or can you prevail.
Socialism knows that revolutionary upheavals and transformations proceed from the rock bed of material needs. A third nerve center of Socialism by which to distinguish reform from revolution is its manly, aggressive posture. The laws that rule sociology run upon lines parallel with and are the exact counterparts of those that natural science has established in biology.
In the first place, the central figure in biology is the species, not the individual specimen. In sociology, the economic classes take the place of the species in biology. Consequently, that is the central figure on the field of sociology that corresponds to and represents the species on the field of biology. Hence, Socialism recognizes in modern society the existence of a struggle of classes, and the line that divides the combatants to be the economic line that separates the interests of the property-holding capitalist class from the interests of the propertiless class of the proletariat.
You remember I referred to the fact that internal, i. For instance:. The Socialist revolution demands, among other things, the public ownership of all the means of transportation. But, in itself, the question of ownership affects only external forms: The Post Office is the common property of the people, and yet the real workers in that department are mere wage slaves. In the mouth of the Socialist, of the revolutionist, the internal fact, the cardinal truth, that for which alone we fight, and which alone is entitled to all we can give to it - that is the abolition of the system of wage slavery under which the proletariat is working.
The standpoint from which they proceed is that of middle class interests as against the interests of the upper capitalists or monopolists. The railroad monopolists are now fleecing the middle class; these want to turn the tables upon their exploiters; they want to abolish them, wipe them out, and appropriate unto themselves the fleecings of the working class which the railroad monopolists now monopolize. With this reactionary class interest in mind, the duper-Populist steps forward and holds this plausible language:.
The reform straws are regularly taken in by this seeming truth; they are carried off their feet; and they are drawn heels over head into the vortex of capitalist conflicts. Not so the revolutionist. His answer follows sharp and clear:. Guess you do want to nationalize the railroads, but only as a reform; we want nationalization as a revolution. You do not propose, while we are fixedly determined, to relieve the railroad workers of the yoke of wage slavery under which they now grunt and sweat.
By your scheme of nationalization, you do not propose, on the contrary, you oppose all relief to the workers, and you have set dogs at the heels of our propagandists in Chautauqua County, N.
While we, the revolutionists, seek the emancipation of the working class and the abolition of all exploitation, duper-Populism seeks to rivet the chains of wage slavery more firmly upon the proletariat. There is no exploiter like the middle class exploiter. For the same reason, the middle class, the employer of few hands, is the worst, the bitterest, the most inveterate, the most relentless exploiter of the wage slave.
You may now realize what a grave error that man will incur who will rest satisfied with external appearance. Take now an illustration of the revolutionary principle that the material plane on which man stands determines his perception of morality. Each of these looks at morality from the standpoint of his individual or class interests.
The man who owns a silver mine considers it the height of immorality to demonetize silver. The importer who can be benefited by free trade thinks it a heinous crime against good morals to set up a high tariff. The man whose wage slaves come on Monday somewhat boozy, so that he cannot squeeze, pilfer out of them as much wealth as he would like to, becomes a pietistic prohibitionist. He claimed, you know, that he traveled through the country with a collection of wax figures representing the great men and criminals of the time.
On one occasion he was in Maine. At about that time a little boy, Wilkins, had killed his uncle. Of course, the occurrence created a good deal of a sensation, and Artemus Ward tells us that, having an eye to the main chance, he got up a wax figure which he exhibited as Wilkins, the boy murderer. A few years later, happening again in the same Maine village, it occurred to him that the boy Wilkins had proved a great attraction in the place.
The people flocked in, paid their fifteen cents admission, and Artemus started to explain his figures. Three years ago you showed us the boy, Wilkins, he was a boy then, and died since; how can he now be a big man?
The material plane, on which the fraudulent showman stood, determined his moral impulse on patriotism. The higher the economic plane on which a class stands, and the sounder its understanding of material conditions, all the broader will its horizon be, and, consequently, all the purer and truer its morality. Hence it is that, today, the highest moral vision, and the truest withal, is found in the camp of the revolutionary proletariat.
Hence, also, you will perceive the danger of the moral cry that goes not hand in hand with sound knowledge. The morality of reform is the corruscation of the ignis fatuus ; the morality of revolution is lighted by the steady light of science. Take another illustration, this time on the belligerent poise of Socialism, to distinguish reform from revolution.
The struggles that mark the movements of man have ever proceeded from the material interests, not of individuals, but of classes. Individuals from the former class frequently took leading and invaluable part on the side of the latter, and individuals of the latter regularly played the role of traitors to civilization by siding with the former, as did, for instance, the son of the venerable Franklin when he sided with the British.
Yet in both sets of instances, the combatants stood arrayed upon platforms that represented opposite class interests. Revolutions triumphed, whenever they did triumph, by asserting themselves and marching straight upon their goal.
On the other hand, the fate of Wat Tyler ever is the fate of reform. Of all revolutionary epochs, the present draws sharpest the line between the conflicting class interests.
Hence, the organizations of the revolution of our generation must be the most uncompromising of any that yet appeared on the stage of history.
The program of this revolution consists not in any one detail. It demands the unconditional surrender of the capitalist system and its system of wage slavery; the total extinction of class rule is its object.
Nothing short of that—whether as a first, a temporary, or any other sort of step can at this late date receive recognition in the camp of the modern revolution. Upon these lines we organized in New York and Brooklyn, and prospered; upon these lines we have compelled the respect of the foe.
And I say unto you, go ye, and do likewise. And now to come to, in a sense, the most important, surely the most delicate, of any of the various subdivisions of this address. We know that movements make men, but men make movements. Movements cannot exist unless they are carried on by men; in the last analysis it is the human hand and the human brain that serve as the instruments of revolutions. How shall the revolutionist be known?
Which are the marks of the reformer? In New York a reformer cannot come within smelling distance of us but we can tell him. We know him; we have experienced him; we know what mischief he can do; and he cannot get within our ranks if we can help it. You may not know the external marks of the revolutionist. Let me mention them. The modern revolutionist, i. The modern revolutionist knows full well that man is not superior to principle, that principle is superior to man, but he does not fly off the handle with the maxim and thus turn the maxim into absurdity.
He firmly couples the maxim with this other that no principle is superior to the movement or organization that puts it and upholds it in the field. The engineer knows that steam is a powerful thing, but he also knows that unless the steam is in the boiler, and unless there is a knowing hand at the throttle, the steam will either evaporate or the boiler will burst.
Similarly, the revolutionist recognizes that the organization that is propelled by correct principles is as the boiler that must hold the steam, or the steam will amount to nothing. He knows that in the revolution demanded by our age, organization must be the incarnation of principle. Just the reverse of the reformer, who will ever be seen mocking at science, the revolutionist will not make a distinction between the organization and the principle.
The prisoner was charged with having stuck his hand and arm through a window and stolen something, whatever it was. The judge sentenced the man to the penitentiary. Kao: Thank you for your comments and support.
You have played a large role in encouraging me to grapple with some of these issues. For that, I am most appreciative. I agree with 1. I have to mull over 3 for a while. Thanks for bringing up these good points. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.
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Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Secondly, is the institutional character of Christianity worth saving? Finally, which method is most likely to bring about genuine change for women? Which method will bring change about quickest and with the most beneficial long-lasting consequences?
To answer these questions is to answer the main question of this article: reformer, revolutionary, or rationalist? Although I agree with the rationalist and revolutionary over the reformer, I applaud much of the work done by women to change the misogynistic tones of their religion. I cannot help but find it hard to believe that Christianity can eventually be morphed into something non-patriarchal. If one were to act like Thomas Jefferson and cut out all of the misogynistic passages in the biblical text, I believe we would have a very small bible!
If somebody started a tradition based on this new bible I would be less averse to it than to traditional Christianity. This, of course, is highly unlikely, and is the reason I choose to promote the social critiques of the revolutionary and the logical critiques of the rationalist. It is also possible that they simply engage in doctrinal reformulation while staying within their religion. Photo is courtesy of quinn.
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