Talk:Victor L. Berger

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[We do not care] whether our Socialism is Marxian or otherwise, as long as we change the present system and emancipate all the people.

[The socialist state would] reserve as much right for the individual as is consistent with the welfare of all.

[there could be] "a great deal of 'Socialism in our time' even though we cannot have the full- fledged 'Co-operative Commonwealth."

how socialism would come, was it to be ballots or bullets? If society would accept evolutionary reform, "we reach our next goal in civilization by reason and the spirit of humanity." If not, Berger prophesied a grim future: "... the hungry millions will turn against the overfed few. A fearful retribution will be enacted on the capitalist class as a class—and the innocent will suffer with the guilty. Such a revolution will retrograde civilization—it might throw back the white race into barbarism." Disregard our offer of peaceful reform at your own peril was Berger's message on behalf of right-wing socialism to American society.

We agitate for the organization of the masses. And organization everywhere means order. We educate, we enlighten, we reason, we discipline. And, therefore, besides order we bring also law, reason, discipline, and progress. [...] It is, therefore, absolutely false to represent our Socialist Party as merely destructive, as intending to overthrow and annihilate society, as an appeal to the brute passions of the masses. Just the opposite is true. Our Socialist Party wants to maintain our culture and civilization, and carry them to rhe homes of every worker of the land. Our party wants to guard this Nation from destruction and bring it to a hitherto unknown in history. We appeal to the best in every man, to the public spirit of the citizen, to his love of wife and children.

As I view the situation, our main fight, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, ought to be an earnest and ceaseless fight against poverty.

If you want to defend property and, make sure of property rights—and that, gentlemen, seems to be your chief aim—see to it that everybody in our country gets property. The moment that everybody has property, property rights will be safe. So long, however, as only a few people have sufficient property, or when but a few people have the over whelming share of all property, you can not guarantee its possession to the owners, even if you do pay a bonus occasionally to the chosen Pretorian Guard.

That is why ancient Rome went down before a handful of German barbarians. That is why feudalism broke down in France, although Louis XVI had a herole Swiss guard to defend him.

In France before the French Revolution nearly one-third of all the land was owned by the King. Another third was owned by the church and the nobility. The last third only was owned by the 25,000,000 Frenchmen—the rest of the people. You know what happened. Frenchmen were bound to own France. They beheaded their King, many princes and more than 2,000 nobles, one archbishop, a dozen bishops, and 700 priests[, but when the thing was all over the 25,000,000 Frenchmen owned France.] [There are 6,000,000 peasant owners in France now. (what does this mean?)]
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"Our main fight ought to be to combat poverty. Poverty is a curse. Poverty is the mother of ignorance, of crime, of disease. Poverty is dangerous to everybody, but it is especially dangerous to the ruling class."
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"Socialism is the collective ownership and democratic management of the social means of production and distribution [...] but Bolshevism is an autocratic communism based upon a super state supported by terrorism [...] The day will never come when anybody can assemble the people in the market square and tell them that next Monday morning at 8 o'clock they will have Socialism. The Bolsheviki tried to put over communism in a sudden fashion and failed miserably."

The working class on whom our wonderful civilization is builded [sic(?)], does not assert its remarkable collective power and is therefore not feared. The supreme court is made up of corporation lawyers. The corporation is the ruling force in business today.
- https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/social-democratic-herald-us/020628-socdemherald-v04n52w204.pdf

I clip the following from an editorial of the Chicago Chronicle, June 4: "When will fraud, hypocrisy, humbug, and systematic false pretenses disappear from legislation? Or will they never disappear? Just so; legislation without these would be as the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out!" So says a writer in Free Society, the Anarchist paper. This is a stupid view of the situation, truly. It shows a lack of trust in human nature itself that nullifies all the Anarchist nonsense about people living together without social, collective regulations. The only reason legislation is corrupt today is because the people who make up the legislators live in a world in which selfishness and crookedness and foxiness pays. The way to stop the corruption is to change the system so that there would be a temptation to do good instead of evil.
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[Communism, he pointed out, called for community consumption as well as production. It represented "a step backward... a retrogression to a very primitive and low stage of human society."] "A Socialist Commonwealth," Berger pointed out, "will not do away with the individual ownership of property, but only with individual ownership of capital."

"political and social progress by catastrophe rather than by growth—progress not by evolution, but by 'revolution'."

In a letter to Morris Hillquit, the leader of the New York Socialists, Berger declared that "if there is to be a revolution some day, I and my crowd will surely be there. But that continuous threat of 'revolution' reminds me of a man who is continually brandishing a revolver which is not loaded."