VI. The Future of Capital and Human Labor

This talk, this good behavior, must come to an end. The organization of human society in such a way that it truly meets the demands of good behavior is what is now going through the world as a call. What has emerged under the newer capitalism, what has developed more and more, what has now, so to speak, arrived at the pinnacle of its consciousness, namely its class consciousness, is the social group of people that, for the time being, basically consists only of the working population, of the proletariat. What needs to be done with regard to this social group? Well, this social group has, in a sense, practiced self-help, and it has also achieved many things for itself, which it has wrested from the capitalist-led state, the purely capitalist economic order, and so on. Cooperatives and trade unions have emerged to organize the social group – initially, the masses of workers were anarchic, not in their attitudes, but in their grouping, initially anarchic. But as long as we were under the old economic order, these attempts at organization could not achieve any real goal. Despite all the praise of workers' protection, workers' insurance, even international workers' protection and so on, none of these things were suitable for properly organizing the social groups that live as the proletarian population. Because something was left behind in all these attempts at organization: the opposing capital and its representatives remained. And so it emerged, as it still is today, that there was a struggle between one social class, the supporters of capitalism, and the other social class, the proletariat. Struggle, competition, that is what emerged. And we have seen what we have come to through this struggle, through this competition: the unionized worker must wrest his wage increase or something else from the representatives of capital through the union. What the proletariat feels today clearly expresses how little the previous organization was able to fulfill what lies within the proletariat as a demand.