Again we tell you. (1914)

From the October 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

The average working man does not like the Socialist to tell him that he is a slave. But nevertheless he is a slave. The only freedom the worker has to day is the freedom to starve, or to change one employer for another. Even that, he finds from bitter experience, he cannot always do.

If the worker cannot find work to do he has no means to live on. It then soon dawns upon him that if he cannot find an employer to give him work, he will be forced into the workhouse, or, worse still, be compelled to steal and to become an outcast dodging the upkeepers of the capitalist laws.

We are Wage Slaves. It does not matter what class of labour we do, whether we work as navvies, clerks, or mechanics, we all come under the category of working men. The master class call us by one name: his employees.

Now we of the working class do not own the mines, factories, land, etc. We have no alternative, therefore, but to go to those that do own them, and ask them to give us permission to work. One thing is obvious: we have to work in order to live. If someone else owns the means by which we live then we are subservient to them. Are we not, therefore, slaves, when we have to ask others to let us work for them in order that we may live ?

It is only when we can make a profit for them (the masters) that we are allowed to work, so the thoughtful man can easily see that we are not considered for a moment. When the markets are glutted and our employers cannot sell the commodities we have produced, we are given the sack.

The poverty of the worker when he is working, and the nerve-wrecking fear of unemployment, makes his position as a wage slave worse than any previous form of slavery that was perpetrated upon his ancestors. The chattel slave had comparative security. We have not. The serf had security, less work, and more leisure, than we have.

The working man has no property. He can live in a house—or rooms—just so long as he can pay rent for it. He can go on paying rent for 50 years and the house is not his. His furniture ! Ah, yes ! That is his so long as he can pay the rent. If he cannot fulfil his obligations to the landlord then his furniture is taken.

To put the case in a few words, we own nothing but the power to work. As we own no property, I repeat, we are the slaves to those that do. “He owns my life who owns the means by which I live” is as true now as when Shakespeare wrote it. It will be, too, as long as we, the working class, like to keep a parasitic class upon our backs.

It is no longer necessary to do this. The capitalist class has served its purpose. It is now suffering from disorganisation and decrepit old age. The working class is the last class to achieve its freedom. We have now to carry out OUR mission. That is to take over the means of producing and distributing wealth ourselves, and use in the interests, not of a few, but of the whole community.

It should be obvious to the worker, surely, that if we control our owns means of living we will put a a end to slum dwellings and unhealthy places to work in. The majority of diseases and complaints which the worker suffers from are the result of the conditions under which he works or the unsanitary, over-crowded dwellings wherein he lives. That would be obliterated, never to show its ugly form in the future.

That is the goal before us. The ending of poverty which is the result of the private ownership of the means of life.

With the common ownership of the world’s means of production the social evils that we are faced with to-day would never occur again. That briefly is what Socialism offers. It is your place to take a firm stand one way or the other. If you do not believe that what we say is right, then fight us vigorously. But if you believe in the principles and policy which we expound, join us and help us to end such a system as can only hold out to the workers in their youth, starvation and misery as the fruits of unending and arduous toil, and in their old age, a five shilling pension or the workhouse. The means of producing wealth are now so fertile that only fools can accept poverty as a necessary condition of society to-day.

J. G. W. Stone