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Hellraisers Journal: Saturday June 20, 1908
Chicago, Illinois – Socialist Party Platform and Principles
From the International Socialist Review of June 1908:
Socialist Platform.
PRINCIPLES.
Human life depends upon food clothing and shelter. Only with these assured are freedom, culture and higher human development possible. To produce food, clothing or shelter, land and machinery are needed. Land alone does not satisfy human needs. Human labor creates machinery and applies it to the land for the production of raw materials and food. Whoever has control of land and machinery controls human labor, and with it human life and liberty.
To-day the machinery and the land used for industrial purposes are owned by a rapidly decreasing minority. So long as machinery is simple and easily handled by one man, its owner cannot dominate the sources of life of others. But when machinery becomes more complex and expensive and requires for its effective operation the organized effort of many workers its influence reaches over wide circles of life. The owners of such machinery become the dominant class.
In proportion as the number of such machine owners compared to all other classes decreases, their power in the nation and in the world increases. They bring ever larger masses of working people under their control, reducing them to the point, where muscle and, brain are their only productive property. Millions of formerly self-employing workers thus become the helpless wage slaves of the industrial masters.
As the economic power of the ruling class grows it becomes less useful in the life of the nation. All the useful work of the nation falls upon the shoulders of the class whose only property is its manual and mental labor power—the wage worker—or of the class who have but little land and little effective machinery outside of their labor power—the small traders and small farmers. The ruling minority is steadily becoming useless and parasitic.
