The Essentials of Socialism

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Macmillan, 1912 - Socialism - 152 pages
 

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Page 66 - Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
Page 42 - That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting...
Page 42 - ... the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes...
Page 92 - Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeois mode of production ; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, ie to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.
Page 92 - The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.
Page 64 - Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.
Page 39 - Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!
Page 152 - Anything of Mr. Spargo's is well worth reading, for it is written with conviction and with a sense of concrete life far removed from mere doctrinairism. . . . Anybody who wants to know exactly what the American Marxian of the saner sort is aiming at will find it here. In view of the present situation it is a book that every thoughtful person will want to read and read carefully.
Page 47 - The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

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