Quotation from: War of the Classes

Written by: Jack London


When capitalistic production has attained its maximum development,
it must confront a dividing of the ways; and the strength of capital
on the one hand, and the education and wisdom of the workers on the
other, will determine which path society is to travel. It is
possible, considering the inertia of the masses, that the whole
world might in time come to be dominated by a group of industrial
oligarchies, or by one great oligarchy, but it is not probable.
That sporadic oligarchies may flourish for definite periods of time
is highly possible; that they may continue to do so is as highly
improbable. The procession of the ages has marked not only the rise
of man, but the rise of the common man. From the chattel slave, or
the serf chained to the soil, to the highest seats in modern
society, he has risen, rung by rung, amid the crumbling of the
divine right of kings and the crash of falling sceptres. That he
has done this, only in the end to pass into the perpetual slavery of
the industrial oligarch, is something at which his whole past cries
in protest. The common man is worthy of a better future, or else he
is not worthy of his past.

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