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are only able to do on the platform of the class struggle.
The harm of a compromise does not consist in the danger of a formal selling out or side-tracking of party principles. That has probably never been intended by any one in our party. Even when our comrades in Essen in the election before the last voted for the "cannon king" out of spite, they had no idea of surrendering even one iota of our program. The danger and root of the evil does not lie here. It lies in giving up, keeping in the background or forgetting the class struggle basis, for this is the source of the whole modern labor movement. It is necessary here to distinguish sharply, and not be misled by catchwords; in short, we must have an emancipation from phrases, as I said decades ago, with reference to the phraseology of anarchism, which poses as revolutionary, but in fact is only small bore reactionism, merely a late-arrived caricature of the bourgeois ideal of freedom and a theatrical masquerade of commercial free competition.
SOCIALISM AND ETHICS.
Pity for poverty, enthusiasm for equality and freedom, recognition of social injustice and a desire to remove it, is not socialism. Condemnation of wealth and respect for poverty, such as we find in Christianity and other religions, is not socialism. The communism of early times, as it was before the existence of private property, and as it has at all times and among all peoples been the delusive dream of some enthusiasts, is not socialism. The forcible equalization advocated by the followers of Baboeuf, the so-called equalitarians, is not socialism.
In all these appearances there is lacking the real foundation of capitalist society with its class antagonisms. Modern socialism is the child of capitalist society and its class antagonisms. With
