MIA > Archive > Bill Haywood
Source: From International Socialist Review, Vol. 12 No. 1, July 1911, p. 7.
Transcription: Matthew Siegfried.
HTML mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists Internet Archive (2019).
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2022). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
It is better to be a traitor to a country than to be a traitor to your own class. A battlefield is the Foolkiller’s paradise.
Workingmen fighting for capitalists are their victims.
A live soldier is a hobo. A dead soldier is a hero. More monuments!
An armory is a school where the young idea is taught to shoot to kill.
A militiaman is a scab on the regular soldiers.
The regular army is an institution for making widows, orphans and pensions.
Capitalists have no country, no flag, no patriotism, no honor and no God but Gold! Their emblem is the dollar mark. Their ensign the black flag of commercial piracy. Their symbol the skull and cross bones of little children, and their pass word is Graft.
Society is in three layers. There are the dregs on the bottom, deputies, detectives, soldiers and strikebreakers; the working class – the great pay streak in the center; and the parasites – the scum on top.
The policeman is a pimple, the soldier a boil on the body politic, both the result of a diseased system. They can be readily eradicated by a strong dose of that medicine called Socialism.
The Socialist party is not a political party in the same sense as other existing parties. The success of Socialism would abolish practically every office existing under the present form of government. Councils, legislatures and congresses would not be composed principally of lawyers, as they are now, whose highest ambition seems to be to enact laws with loop-holes in them for the Rich. But the Congresses of the Workers would be composed of men and women representing the different branches of Industry and their work would be directed to improving the conditions of labor, to minimize the expenditure of labor-power and to increase production.
Last updated on 10 June 2022