Workmen's advocate., 1889-05-18
experience of the hard facts around


 per classes themselves are at last ready to discuss. They have almost given up trying to laugh Social Democrats out of Court, and are carefully reading our books and pamphlets, while endeavorlng to show that what we demand is not in accordance with political economy. If this were true, so much the worse for political economy It would be necessary to reconstruct 1t from end to end in order to suit the re- quirements of mankind. But as scientific political economy tells for us instead of against us, It Is just as well to be able to meet our antagon- ists and to beat them on their own chosen ground with their own favor ite weapon. Even Socialists have enough of the old Adam left in them to render that sort of victory and it is not difficult to win-eX- ceedlngly pleasant to the vlctors. And the reward being, in the long run, nothing less than the organiza tion of Social Democratic con- munity, workers have incentive enough to study seriously on their own account.
 Again, at the present time, we are troubled with plague of fraud ulent phrases and false remedies. This is always the case at all periods of revolutionary agitation. Forty years ago or more Free Trade was the favorite fraud wherewith to de- Jude the workers in Great Britain. In France first midde-class repub- lie and then semi-Socialist "Sayior of Society" gulled the proletariat. Of late years in nearly all European countries, in one shape or another, we have seen emigration, protit-shar- ing, cooperation in small doses, thrift, political reforms, free land, held up to the laboring classes as objects worth striving for. At this juncture, in Great Britain, Mir. Henry Georges single-tax nostrum on the one hand, and peasant pro- prletary on the other, are offered as panaceas; while some who ought to know better still write as if mere mechanical readjustments of admin istratve forms and political methods would solve the social problem; and others-these are the most hopeless of all-still cling to the wretched Malthusian fallacy, and practically tell the workers that the best hope for the future of humanity is not to perpetuate the producing class at all, Now, 1t is not too much to say that any man or woman who has once thoroughly mastered Marks theory of value and surplus-value, who understands therefore that, under our existing capitalist system, or any conceivable modification of it which leaves the payment of wages as wages untouched, the workers must compete with one another for employment and hand over to the owners of the means and instru- ments of production, including the land, the greater part of the values they produce-any man or woman who has got even that far will never again be led astray by the various and highly favored red herrings which are being SO carefully dragged across the path of the workers. Political readjustments, republican forms of government, can never change the system of themselves. Tax the landlords till they haven't shirt to their backs, or make the land as ''free" as the Rule Britan- nia-slnging Englishman, and still the iron law of competition wages will hand over to the capitalist class the full surplus-yalue which their monop- oly enables them to squeeze out of the propertyless proletariat. Political economy teaches that or it teaches nothing. Even John Stuart Mill, whose well-meaning but utterly con- fused eclecticism has done go much to obscure the real issues, admits that surplus-value is got out of the. worker during the process of pro- duction by paying him in wages only the cost of his maintenance Princi- ples of Political Economy, Book II, chapter l5, section 51. Political economy, consequently, shows, as