thrall, but not so the machine proletarian. He must be quick of body and alert of intellect—only as a trained man is he useful to the masters—therefore his reactions on his environment are more intelligent and more vigorous than those of any servile worker that has preceded him. He takes up the cudgel to defend himself. All the knowledge of the world is at his command and he quickly learns that labor power applied to the materials of the earth is the source of all wealth, and that the source of the master's riches lies in his appropriation of the surplus of wealth remaining after the workers are miserably fed, clothed and housed. Conversely, he learns that the worker's poverty arises from the fact that he does not retain the surplus of his own labor for himself, but allows it to be taken by another. The proletarian learns that governments and laws are used to awe him into submission to the looting of his labor; and that school and church and press are used to lull him into quietness. Is it then strange that he despises governments, despises courts, rebukes teachers, loathes editors, abhors priests and seeks only to seize the materials and machinery of production, that thereby he may turn them to his own advantage and, through them, destroy the domination of class and the governments, laws, schools, presses and pulpits that uphold class domination?
The machine proletariat attacks private property as a human institution. It recognizes the fact that through that institution all the other institutions of modern society have their force and effect, and nothing short of its destruction as an institution will ever be satisfactory. The proletariat knows that it can build a better society—a society, into which poverty, with all its hideous concomitants, can never come—and it is thoroughly determined to build it.
THE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION
The historic mission of the proletariat is to overthrow the present master class and to replace this civ-
