50 Years Ago: Life Here or Hereafter

In season and out of season we preach Socialism: the possession by a community of workers the world over, of the things needful for human existence. The end of production for profit; the abolition of slave-jobs and subsistence wages; the end of commercial rivalry and the struggle for political supremacy on the part of rival groups of bosses; the end of the wholesale slaughter of the workers by the machines they themselves produce; the death of blinding superstition and the birth of rational hope; the end of all things capitalistic and the beginning of a real society; the beginning of production for social use, of co-operation for mutual welfare, of universal brotherhood; life, not death!

Show us if you can, you idealistic praters, a fairer dream than this. Conjure up, if you will, a vision to be “realised” when we are dead and cold. We prefer to live now. Why rush to death? Why be butchered to make a capitalist victory? What can heaven hold that is half so sweet as the probabilities of this existence?