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It was not that members of the employing class were consciously inhuman. It was simply that they were blinded to the human problems which were involved. They had become accustomed to regard as natural and inevitable a wage-slavery of the many to the few. Labour was a commodity in the market. The workman was a unit of labour.
They would no longer be forced to toil at demoralising work for low wages; they would be independent producers instead of earning a living by providing luxuries for the rich, who had enslaved them by monopolising the land. The single tax thus created would ultimately overthrow the present "civilisation" which is chiefly built up on wage-slavery.
In my arguments I had thought to appeal to her by referring to that feature of wage-slavery which more than even child-labour stirs the moral sense of women, but to my utter consternation I discovered that here was a woman nearly a year married who did not know what prostitution was.
It would be the uprising of the women; the first upward step from sheer wage-slavery; the first advance toward the ideal of that coming woman, who should be a man in her freedom and her strength and her power, and yet woman of woman in her love and her motherhood and wife-hood.
Thus reasoning, with perfect clarity and a long-headedness that proved him a strategist at four-and-twenty, Gabriel Armstrong whistled a louder note as he tramped away to northward, away from the hateful presence of Herzog, away from the wage-slavery of the Oakwood Heights plant, away with that precious secret in his brain toward the far scene of destined warfare, where stranger things were to ensue than even he could possibly conceive.
But labourers and craftsmen, weavers and men of science, are all wage-servants of the State "all officials," as was said lately, to gild the pill. Well, then, the coming Revolution could render no greater service to humanity than by making the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and by rendering Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution.
With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes set to work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and militarism for four centuries. As a church scholar, Prof.
Since then the process of abolishing wage-slavery went slowly forward until at last the war came not only to threaten its destruction altogether but also to place the emancipated workers in a position where they could dictate terms and conditions to capital, to employers, to government and to the general public; while even now in many parts of Europe and America, besides Russia, overt attempts are being made to bring back the old slavery, only with the former bondsmen in supreme dictatorship, the former employers and the "bourgeoisie" in the new serfage.
The peculiar character of the Social Democracy is summed up in this that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as the means, not to remove the two extremes Capital and Wage-slavery , but in order to weaken their antagonism and transform them into a harmonious whole.
As a matter of fact, admitting its existence, as I think we must do, it is the birth of the sense of insecurity which is the shadow cast before by the approaching dissolution of modern society founded on wage-slavery.
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