Part 2 — CHAPTER VI. (continued 2)
Daniel De Leon translation
The measures to be adopted at the various phases of development depend upon the then conditions. It is impossible to foretell what measures may become necessary under given circumstances. No Government, no Minister, be he ever so powerful, can foresee what circumstances may require in the next few years. All the less is it possible to foretell measures, that will be influenced by circumstance, which elude all accurate calculation. The question of "measures" is a question of tactics in battle. These depend upon the enemy and upon the means at his disposal, and at mine. A measure that would be excellent to-day, may be harmful to-morrow, the circumstances that yesterday justified its application having changed to-day. With the goal in view, the means to attain it by depend upon time and tide; imperative is but the seizing of the most effective and thorough going ones that time and tide may allow. In forecasting the future, hypotheses alone are available: things must be supposed to exist that have not yet set in.
Accordingly, we suppose the arrival of a day when all the evils described will have reached such maturity that they will have become oppressingly sensible to the feeling as to the sight of the vast majority, to the extent of being no longer bearable; whereupon a general irresistible desire for a radical change will seize society, and then the quickest will be regarded the most effective remedy.
All social evils, without exception, have their source in that social order of things, which, as has been shown, rests upon capitalism, upon the capitalist system of production. Under this system, the capitalist class is the possessor of all instruments of labor—land, mines, quarries, raw material, tools, machines, means of transportation and communication—and it exploits and oppresses the vast majority of the people. The result of such abuses is an increased precariousness of livelihood, increased misery, oppression and degradation of the exploited classes. It is, consequently, necessary to convert this capitalist property into social property by means of a general expropriation. Production for sale must be converted into socialist production, conducted for and by Society. Production on a large scale, and the increasing fertility of social labor,—until now a source of misery and of oppression for the exploited classes—must be turned into a source of highest well-being and of full and harmonious culture.