[50]

necessary

know

[51]

should

“But”, you will say, “didn’t they go to war on account of John Brown and Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner?” Not on your life, they didn’t. If you will read the newspapers of that time you will see that they tried to lynch Garrison in Boston; they ostracized Wendell Phillips; they sneered at Sumner and damned John Brown. Why, nice, good, Christian people told them they were crazy—just as some of them tell Socialists now—and the anti-slavery orators couldn’t get the use of a church in New York either for love or for money. No, indeed. These men were grand old heroes—but no war was fought [52] on their account. The older system of chattel-slavery simply broke down to make way for the present system of wage-slavery, which pays better. Pays the capitalist, I mean.

[52]

chattel

Under the old system the capitalist owned the man; today he own the tools with which the man must work. These tools are the factories, the mines, and the machines. The system that owns them owns you and me and all the rest of us, black, white, brown, red, and yellow. We can’t live unless we have access to these tools, and our masters, the capitalists, see to it that we are separated from what we make by using these things, except so much as is necessary to keep us alive that we may be able to make more—for them. This little bit is called wages. They wouldn’t give us even that if they thought that we could live without it. In the good old days the chattel-slave would be fastened with a chain if they thought that he might escape. Today no chain is necessary to bind us to the tools. We are as free as air. Of course. We are free to starve. And that chain of the-fear-of-starvation binds us to the tools owned by the capitalist as firmly as any iron chain ever did. And this system doesn’t care whether the slaves who are bound in this new way are white or black. To the capitalist system all workers are equal—in so far as they have a 

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