The ideal that has been sought for centuries and even millenniums will be realized through the logical means of eliminating the material cause of war. Up to very recently, the working masses of society never had the material possibility of removing their exploiters and finishing with them for good. But modern machinery and modern technology have now provided such a possibility. They have made it possible for the masses to dispense with an owning and exploiting class altogether, and to produce a full and abundant life for themselves in the bargain. To many of today s anti-war fighters, this seems somehow irrelevant.
Many sensitive people are deeply conscious of the alienation caused by the machine age.
But the great masses themselves have been forced to become actual appendages to the machine, except when they are made superfluous and left to rot outside the field of production altogether. Society can be changed so that a constant material expansion can be accomplished without exploitation and profit making, without conquest of other countries, without war. Under such a system, the machine will become an appendage of human beings, rather than the reverse. It will become an extension of people s faculties and a liberation from a large part of the physical drudgery of the past. This is the perspective, not of the distant future, but of what is already materially possible.