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Updated: July 19, 2025
In countries where the bourgeoisie has already conquered political power, and where political rule is nothing less than the rule, not of the individual bourgeois over the workers, but of the bourgeois class over the whole of society, Mr Heinzen's dictum has lost its meaning. The propertyless are, of course, not affected by political rule, so far as it relates directly to property.
It has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between the continually less numerous but constantly richer capitalists and the more numerous, but on the whole, continually poorer propertyless wage-workers.
The propertyless owned nothing, not to speak of a judge, but the capitalists owned whole strings of judges, and those whom they did not own or corrupt were generally influenced to their side by association or environment. "All of this," reported the Assembly Investigating Committee of 1873, speaking of the means employed to overthrow Gould, "has been done without authority of law."
In other words if we exclude the possibility of force, robbery, and cheating absolutely, if we take the position that all private property originally depended upon the personal labor of its possessor and that equivalents are always exchanged we nevertheless come, in the course of the development of production and exchange, of necessity, to the modern capitalistic methods of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and livelihood in the hands of a single class few in numbers, to the degradation of the other consisting of the immense majority of producers to the position of propertyless proletarians, to the periodical alternations of swindling operations and trade crises and to the whole of the present anarchy in production.
This would be true were it not for the fact that as soon as we turn from the economic to the political field we find that not only in this country, but also in Europe nearly all the strategical positions are held by the small capitalists. They outnumber the large capitalists and their retainers ten to one, and they hold the political balance of power between these and the propertyless classes.
The moment a propertyless person stole, the assumption at once was that he was prima facie a criminal; but let the powerful propertied man steal and government at once refused to see the criminal intent; if he were prosecuted, the usual outcome was that he never went to jail. Hundreds of specific instances could be given to prove this.
State legislatures and courts already protect the taxpayers from any measure in the least Socialistic, whatever form of local government and whatever party may prevail. It has caused more than a little resentment among the propertyless that the taxpayers should actually have the effrontery to propose the still more conservative commission plan as being a radically democratic reform.
But neither in the United States nor elsewhere is there any hope that a majority of the absolutely propertyless, even if it becomes a large one, will become sufficiently large within a generation, or perhaps even within a century, to enable it to overthrow the capitalists, unless it draws over to its side certain elements at least, of the middle classes, who, though weaker in some respects are better educated, better placed, and politically stronger than itself.
Even in the home country, where the issue is clearly made, the imperial class will sacrifice the happiness, the health, the longevity, and the lives of the propertyless class in the interest of "law and order" and "the protection of property." The life, liberty and happiness of the individual citizen is a matter of small importance so long as the empire is saved.
Much of the rough work of Switzerland is done by Savoyards, as houseworkers, and by Italians, as farm hands, laborers, and stone masons: showing that as a body even the poorest of the propertyless Swiss have some choice of the better paid occupations. Every spring sees Italians, by scores of thousands, pouring over the Alps for a summer's work in Switzerland.
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