dentical with the blacklist. The employer boycotts union
leaders and union men. The employees boycott the non-union products of
the employer; while sabotage, the most ancient weapon of labor, answers
poor pay with poor work, and broken machines for broken lives. And, if
the working class was striking back with the same weapons that were
being used against it, so, too, were the "pan-destroyers," except that
for the most part their weapons were incredibly inadequate and
ridiculous. Sticks and stones and barricades were their method of
combating rifles and trained armies. All this again is more evidence of
the mire of confusion.

However, if the weapons of the rebellious were utterly futile and
ineffectual, there were no others, for every move the workers or their
friends made was considered lawless. All political and trades
associations were against the law. Peaceable assembly was sedition.
Strikes were treason. Picketing was intimidation; and the boycott was
conspiracy in restraint of trade. Such associations as existed were
forced to become secret societies, and, even if a working-class
newspaper appeared, it was almost immediately suppressed. And, if all
forms of trade-union activity were criminal, political activity was
impossible where the vast majority of toilers had no votes. With methods
mainly imitative, retaliative, and revengeful; with no program of what
was wanted; in total ignorance of the causes of their misery; and with
little appreciation that in unity there is strength, the workers and
their friends, in the middle of the last century, were stuck in the
mire--of ignorance, helplessness, and confusion.

This was the world in which Marx and Engels began their labor. Direct
action was at its zenith, and the struggle of the classes was ferocious.
Indeed, all Europe was soon to see barricades in every city, and thrones
and governments tumbling into apparent ruin. Yet in the midst of all
this wild confusion, and even touching elbows with the leaders of these
revolutionary storms, Marx and Engels outlined in clear, simple, and
powerful language the nature of capitalism--what it was, how it came
into being, and what it was yet destined to become. They pointed out
that it was not individual employers or individual statesmen or the
Government or even kings and princes who were responsible for the evils
of society, but that unemployment, misery, and oppression were due to an
economic system, and that so long as capi