In season and out of season we preach Socialism: the possession by a community of workers the world over, of the things needful for human existence. The end of production for profit; the abolition of slave-jobs and subsistence wages; the end of commercial rivalry and the struggle for political supremacy on the part of rival groups of bosses; the end of the wholesale slaughter of the workers by the machines they themselves produce; the death of blinding superstition and the birth of rational hope; the end of all things capitalistic and the beginning of a real society; the beginning of production for social use, of co-operation for mutual welfare, of universal brotherhood; life, not death!
Show us if you can, you idealistic praters, a fairer dream than this. Conjure up, if you will, a vision to be “realised" when we are dead and cold. We prefer to live now. Why rush to death? Why be butchered to make a capitalist victory? What can heaven hold that is half so sweet as the probabilities of this existence?
From an article "The Consolations of Illusion" by E. Boden, Socialist Standard, July 1918.
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