If a law or an election, distasteful to the ruling class, was forced through; if, for any one of the thousand and one causes, apt to arise whenever a… - Daniel De Leon

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If a law or an election, distasteful to the ruling class, was forced through; if, for any one of the thousand and one causes, apt to arise whenever actual oligarchic power is draped in the drapery of democratic forms, the Ruling Class of Rome found it prudent to yield in Forum and Senate Hall;-- in such cases the Colleges of Priests would conveniently discover some flaw in the auspices, some defect in the sacrifices. That annulled the election or the law, as "condemned by the gods."

English
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About Daniel De Leon

Daniel De Leon (December 14, 1852 – May 11, 1914) was a Curaçao-born American socialist and Syndicalism-influenced trade unionist of Spanish Jewish origin. He would later become the most influential leader of America's first socialist political party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP).

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Daniel DeLeon Daniel Deleon Daniel De León Jesurum

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Additional quotes by Daniel De Leon

Socialism rejects the premises and the conclusions of anarchy upon the State and upon government. What socialism says is "Away with the economic system that alters the beneficent functions of the central direction authority from an aid to production into a means of oppression." And it proceeds to show that, when the instruments of production shall be owned no longer by the minority, but shall be restored to the Commonwealth; that when, as a results of this, no longer the minority or any portion of the people shall be in poverty and classes, class distinctions and class rule shall, as they necessarily must, have vanished, that then the central directing authority will lose all its repressive functions and is bound to reassume the functions it had in the old communities of our ancestors, become against a necessary aid, and assist in production.

Our system of production is in the nature of an orchestra. No one man, no one town, no one state, can be said any longer to be independent of the other; the whole people of the United States, every individual therein, is dependent and interdependent upon all the others. The nature of the machinery of production; the subdivision of labor, which aids cooperation and which cooperation fosters, and which is necessary to the plentifulnesss of production that civilization requires, compel a harmonious working together of all departments of labor, and thence complete the establishment of a central directing authority, of an orchestral director, so to speak, of the orchestra of the cooperative commonwealth.

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We Socialists are not reformers; we are revolutionaries. We Socialists do not propose change forms. We care nothing for forms. We want a change of the inside of the mechanism of society, let the form take care of itself.

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