id="Page_42" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[42]"/> by the County or some Sick and Death Benefit Fund.

In the example we used above we assumed that the laborer worked three hours a day to produce a value equal to the value of his labor-power. The price of this value, the value produced by his paid labor, we call "Wages." This price is often reduced by the competition of "scabs" and other victims of capitalist exploitation, below the real value of labor-power, but we have not time to go into that here, so we will assume that the laborer gets in wages the full value of his labor-power.

Well, then, if he produces in three or four hours a value equal to the value of his labor-power or wages, why doesn't he stop work then, and take his coat and hat and go home and devote the rest of the day to study, reading, games, recreation and amusement? He don't because he can't. He has to agree (voluntarily, of course) to any conditions that the class who by owning his tools own him choose to impose upon him, and the lash of the competition of the unemployed, Capital's Reserve Army, as Marx called it, is ever ready to fall upon his naked back.

Why is he so helpless? Because he and his class have been robbed of the land and the tools and all the means of sustenance and production, and have nothing left them but that empty bauble, legal liberty, liberty to accept wages so small that they barely enable them to live like beasts, or liberty to starve to death and be buried in unmarked graves by the public authorities.

The wage system necessarily implies this surplus labor or unpaid labor. So long as there are wages, workingmen, you will never get the full product of your labor. Let no reformer beguile you into a struggle which simply aims to secure a modification of the wage system! Nothing short of the annihilation of the wage system will give you justice and give you the full product of your labor.

But while wages necessarily imply surplus-labor, the reverse is not true. You can have surplus-labor without wages. Surplus-labor is not an invention of modern capitalists. Since Mankind emerged from the state of Primitive Communism typified by the Garden of Eden in the Hebraic myth, there have been three great systems of economic organization: 1. Slavery; 2. Serfdom; 3. The Wage System. It is interesting to note the varying appearances of surplus or unpaid labor under these three systems.

Under the first, Slavery, all labor appears as unpaid labor. This is only a false appearance, however. During a part of the day the slave only reproduces the value of his maintenance or "keep." During that part of the day he works for himself just as truly as the modern wage slave works for himself during a part of his day. But the property relation conceals the paid labor.

Under the second system, Serfdom, or the Feudal System,—the paid labor and the unpaid labor are absolutely separate and distinct, so that not even the most gifted orthodox political economist can confuse them.

Under the third system, Wage Slavery, the unpaid labor apparently falls to Zero. There is none. You voluntarily enter into a bargain, agreeing that your day's work is worth so much, and you receive the full price agreed upon. But again this is only a false appearance. As we saw by our analysis, a part of the wage-slave's day is devoted to paid labor and a part to unpaid. Here wages or the money relation conceals the unpaid labor and disguises under the mask of a voluntary bargain the struggle of the working class to diminish or abolish unpaid labor, and the class-conscious, pitiless struggle of the capitalist class to increase the unpaid labor and reduce the paid labor to the minimum, i. e., to or below the level of bare subsistence. In other words the Wage System conceals the Class Struggle.

III

The Class Struggle

The third of the great ideas that will always be associated with the name of Karl Marx is that of the Class Struggle. The Class Struggle is logically such a necessary consequence of both the Materialistic Conception of History and the Law of Surplus-Value, that as we have discussed them at some length, but little need be said of the Class Struggle itself. In discussing the Materialistic Conception of History we showed with sufficient fullness and clearness that, in the language of the Communist Manifesto, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of Class Struggles." Hence it is clear the doctrine of class struggles is a key to past history. But it is more than this. It is a compass by which to steer in the present struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat, who cannot, fortunately, emancipate themselves without emancipating and ennobling all mankind.

The Law of Surplus-Value has shown us that there is a deep-seated, ineradicable conflict between the direct class interest of the proletariat which coincides with the true interests of the human race, and the direct, conscious guiding interest of the class who own the means of production and distribution. There is here a direct clash between two hostile interests. This fact has been skilfully hidden from the eyes of the workers in the past, but the modern socialist movement, aided by the growing brutality of the capitalist class, is making it impossible to fool them in this way much longer. In other words, the workingmen are becoming Class-Conscious, i. e., conscious of the fact that they, as a class, have interests which are in direct conflict with the selfish interests of the capitalist class. With the growth of this class-consciousness this conflict of interests must inevitably become a political class struggle. The capitalists, the economically privileged class, struggle to retain possession of the State that they may continue to use it as a weapon to keep the working class subjugated, servile and dependent. The proletariat, the working-class, struggle to obtain possession of the State, that they may use it to destroy every vestige of economic privilege, to abolish private property in the means of production and distribution, and thus put an end to the division of society into classes, and usher in the society of the future, the Co-operative Commonwealth. As the State is in its very nature a class instrument, as its existence is dependent upon the existence of distinct classes, the State in the hands of the victorious proletariat will commit suicide, by tearing down its own foundation.

Until a man perceives and is keenly conscious of this class conflict, a conflict which admits of no truce or compromise, and ranges himself on the side of the workers to remain there until the battle is fought and the victory won, until the proletariat shall have conquered the public powers, taken possession of that class instrument, the State (for so long as the State exists it will be a class instrument) and made it in the hands of the working class a tool to abolish private ownership in the tools and the land, in the means of production and distribution, and to abolish all classes by absorbing them all in the Brotherhood of Man; until a man has thus shown himself clearly conscious of the Class Struggle, with its necessary implications, his heart may be in the right place, but laboring men can not trust him as a leader. The fact that the hearts of many popular reformers, political candidates and so-called "friends of labor," who ignore the class struggle, are on the right side, but gives them added power to mislead and betray workingmen. Workingmen, I beg you to follow no leader who has not a clear enough head to