Wealth & Money Quote by Roger Nash Baldwin

Baldwin isn`t offering a policy menu here; he`s staging a confession of faith meant to sort allies from dabblers. The pacing matters: socialism, then disarmament, then the endgame - abolishing the state. Each clause escalates the moral demand. Socialism is framed not as technocratic redistribution but as a legitimacy test: who gets to command property, violence, and the institutions that enforce both?

The subtext is an indictment of liberal reform as insufficiently honest about power. By centering "the propertied class", Baldwin treats inequality less like a social ill than a ruling structure with its own police, courts, and ideology. "Sole control of those who produce wealth" is a deliberately blunt moral inversion: producers as rightful sovereigns, owners as parasitic intermediaries. It`s a line designed to bypass sentimental appeals and go straight for the machinery.

Context sharpens the edge. Baldwin came of age in the ferment of early 20th-century labor struggle, the First World War, and the Red Scare - moments when the state didn`t present itself as neutral referee so much as a club swung at dissent. Disarmament in that era reads as both anti-militarism and a suspicion that the state`s ultimate argument is force. When he lands on "Communism is the goal", it functions less as branding than as horizon-setting: don`t mistake incremental wins for emancipation. The rhetoric is austere because it`s meant to be: a refusal to comfort the reader with moderation when the subject is domination.