_Written for Success Magazine_
_The article being reduced and some vital passages omitted, on account
of space limitations, it was reproduced in its complete form in the
Appeal to Reason, March 17, 1906._
Not many of those schooled in old-party politics have any adequate
conception of the true import of the labor movement. They read of it in
the papers, discuss it in their clubs, criticise labor unions, condemn
walking delegates, and finally conclude that organized labor is a thing
to be tolerated so long, only, as it keeps within “proper bounds,” but
to be put down summarily the moment its members, like the remnants of
Indian tribes on the western plains, venture beyond the limits of their
reservations. They utterly fail or refuse to see the connection between
labor and politics, and are, therefore, woefully ignorant of the
political significance of the labor movement of the present day.
It is true that in all the centuries of the past labor has been “put
down” when it has sought some modicum of its own, or when it has even
yearned for some slight amelioration of its wretched condition, as
witness the merciless massacre of the half-famished and despairing
subjects of the Russian czar, a few months ago, for daring to hope that
their humble petition for a few paltry concessions might be received and
considered by his mailed and heartless majesty.
It is likewise true, that, in the present day, and in the United States,
all the powers of government stand ready to “put down” the working class
whenever it may be deemed necessary in the interest of its industrial
masters.
All great strikes prove that the government is under the control of
corporate capital and that the army of office-holders is as subservient
to the capitalist masters as is the army of wage-workers that depends
upon them for employment.
But, true as these things are, it is not true that labor is ignorant of
them, nor is it true that such conditions will continue forever.
The labor movement has advanced with rapid strides, during the last few
years, and is, today, the most formidable factor in quickening the
social conscience and in regenerating the human race. It is not the
millions that are enrolled as members of labor unions that give power
and promise to this world movement, but the thousands, rather, that are
not trade-unionists merely, but working class unionists as well; that is
to say, working men and women who recognize the identity of the
industrial and political interests of the whole working class; or, in
other words, are conscious of their class interests and are bending all
the powers of their minds and bodies, spurred by the zeal that springs
from comradeship in a common cause, to effect the economic and political
solidarity of the whole mass of labor, irrespective of race, creed or
sex.
These class-conscious workers—these Socialists—realize the fact that the
labor question, in its full and vital sense, is also a political
question, and that the working class must be taught to extend the
principle of unionism to the political field, and there organize on the
basis of their economic class interests; and, although they are engaged
in a herculean task, the forces of industrial evolution and social
progress are back of them, and all the powers of reaction cannot prevail
against them.
The labor movement has had to fight its way, inch by inch, from its
inception to its present position, and to this very fact is due the
revolutionary spirit, indomitable will, and unconquerable fiber it has
developed, and which alone fit it for its mighty historic mission.
In the beginning the workers organized in their respective trades simply
to improve working conditions. They had no thought of united political
action. The employing class at once combined to defeat every attempt at
organization on the part of its employes; but, notwithstanding this
opposition, the trade union, which had become an economic necessity,
grew steadily until at last the employers were compelled to recognize
and deal with it. Being unable to destroy it, they next proceeded to
control its operations by confining it to its narrowest possible
limitations, thus reducing it to inefficiency—from a menace to a
convenience.
The late Marcus A. Hanna crushed the trade union with an iron boot in
the beginning of his career as a capitalist. In his maturer years he
became its patron saint. He did not change in spirit, but in wisdom.
What is true of Mr. Hanna is true of the principal members of the Civic
Federation, that economic peace congress conceived by far-sighted
capitalists, sanctified by plutocratic prelates, and presided over by a
gentleman who, but a few months ago, engaged James Farley and his army
of five thousand professional strike-breakers to defeat the demands and
destroy the unions of his New York subway employes.
A new unionism has struggled into existence, and the coming year will
witness some tremendous changes. The old forms cramp and fetter the new
forces. As these new forces develop, the old forms must yield and
finally give way to transformation.
The old unionism, under the inspiration of a Civic Federation banquet,
exclaims jubilantly: “The interests of labor and capital are identical.
Hallelujah!”
To this stimulating sentiment the whole body of exploiting capitalists
give hearty assent; all its politicians, parsons, and writers join in
enthusiastic approval; and woe be to the few clear, calm, and candid
protestants who deny it. Their very loyalty becomes treason, and the
working class they seek to serve is warned against them, while the false
leaders are loaded with fulsome adulation.
But, nevertheless, the clear voice of the awakened and dauntless few
cannot be silenced. The new unionism is being heard. In trumpet tones it
rings out its revolutionary shibboleth to all the workers of the earth:
Our interests are identical—let us combine, industrially and
politically, assert our united power, achieve our freedom, enjoy the
fruit of our labor, rid society of parasitism, abolish poverty, and
civilize the world!
The old unionism, living in the dead past, still affirms that the
interests of labor and capital are identical.
The new unionism, vitalized and clarified by the living present,
exclaims: We know better; capitalists and wageworkers have antagonistic
economic interests; capitalists buy and workers sell labor power, the
one as cheaply and the other as dearly as possible; they are locked in a
life-and-death class-struggle; there can be no identity of interests
between masters and slaves—between exploiters and exploited—and there
can be no peace until the working class is triumphant in this struggle
and the wage system is forever wiped from the earth.
The months immediately before us will witness a mighty mustering of the
working class, on the basis of the class struggle, and the day is not
far distant when they will be united in one vast economic organization
in which all the trades will be represented, “separate as the waves, yet
one as the sea,” and one great political party that stands
uncompromisingly for the working class and its program of human
emancipation.
In the late national election, for the first time, the hand of the
working class was clearly seen.
The Socialist party is distinctively the party, and its vote is
distinctively the vote, of the working class.
More than four hundred thousand of these votes were counted; probably
twice as many were cast. This was but the beginning. From now on there
is “a new Richmond in the field.”
There is but one issue from the standpoint of labor, and that is: Labor
versus Capital. Upon that basis the political alignment of the future
will have to be made. There is no escape from it.
For the present the ignorance of the workers stands in the way of their
economic and political solidarity, but this can and will be overcome. In
the meantime, the small capitalists and the middle class are being
ground to atoms in the mill of competition. Thousands are being driven
from the field entirely, beaten in the struggle, bankrupt and hopeless,
to be swallowed up in the surging sea of wage-slavery; while thousands
of others cling to the outer edge, straining every nerve to stem the
torrent that threatens to sweep them into the abyss, their condition so
precarious that they anticipate the inevitable and make common issue
with the wage-workers in the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system
and reconstruct society upon a new foundation of co-operative industry
and the social ownership of the means of life.
Of all the silly sayings of the self-satisfied of the present day, the
oft-repeated falsehood that there are “no classes” in this country takes
the lead, and is often made to serve as the prelude to the preposterous
warning that periodically peals from rich and sumptuous club banquets,
at which the president and other patriots are guests, that “it is
treason to array class against class in the United States.”
If there are no classes, how can they be arrayed against each other?
The fact is that precisely the same classes and conditions that exist in
the monarchies of the old world have also developed in our capitalist
republic. The working class sections, including the tenements and slums
of New York and London, are strikingly similar; and the wealth-owning
class of the United States represents as distinct an aristocracy as
England can boast, while the laboring elements of both countries are
distinctively in the “lower class” by themselves and practically on the
same degraded level.
Deny it as may the retainers of the rich, the classes already exist;
they are here, and no amount of sophistication can remove them, nor the
chasm that divides them. The rare and exceptional wage-worker who
escapes from wage-slavery simply proves the rule and emphasizes the doom
of his class in capitalist society.
The existing classes and the struggle going on between them are not due
to the mischievous influence of labor agitators, as certain politicians
and priests, the emissaries of the “rich and respectable,” would have it
appear.
The long swell of the wave but expresses the agitation of the deep.
The agitator is the product of unrest—his is the voice of the social
deep; and, though he may be reviled as a demagogue who preys upon the
ignorance of his fellows, the unrest continues and the agitation
increases until the cause of it is removed and justice is done.
Classes and class rule and their attendant progress and poverty, money
and misery, turmoil and strife, are inherent in the capitalist system.
Why? Simply because one set of men owns the tools with which wealth is
produced, while another set uses them, and there is an irrepressible
conflict over the division of the product.
The capitalist owns the tools he does not use; the worker uses the tools
he does not own.
The principal tools of production and distribution in the United
States—mammoth machines, complex social instruments, made and used
co-operatively by millions of workingmen, their very lives, their wives
and babes being dependent upon them—are the private property of a few
hundred capitalists, and are operated purely to make profits for these
capitalists, regardless of the poverty and wretchedness that ensue to
the masses.
In virtue of the individual ownership of the social instruments of
production, one capitalist may exploit the labor of a million workingmen
and become a billionaire, while the million workers struggle through
life in penury and want, to a bleak and barren old age, to find rest at
last in the pauper asylum, the morgue and the potter’s field.
This vast and resourceful country should be free from the scourge of
poverty and the blight of ignorance; but it never will be until the
private ownership of the means of sustaining life is abolished and
society is organized on the basis of social ownership of the social
means of wealth production and the inalienable right of all to work and
to produce freely to satisfy their physical needs and material wants. It
is for this great organic change, this world-wide social revolution,
that the Socialists of all countries are organizing, that it may be
intelligently guided, and come, if possible, in peace and order when the
people and conditions have been prepared for it.
The present order of society is developing all the symptoms of
degeneracy and dissolution. Only the individualist self-seekers and
their mercenaries—they who believe in making the animal struggle for
existence perpetual, in climbing to the top over the corpses of their
fellows—only they are satisfied, or would appear to be, and expatiate
upon our marvelous prosperity, and the incomparable glory of our “free
institutions.”
The man who can look upon New York or Chicago, today, and utter such
sentiments should blush for his perverted sense of justice, to say
nothing of his total lack of humanity.
Many thousands of men, women and children suffer for food and shiver in
the cold in these typical capitalist cities, while the beef trust is
crammed to bursting and the cotton kings of the South burn cotton to
keep up prices.
Has the world ever heard of such monstrous iniquity—such unspeakable
crime? In the name of all that has heart in it not yet turned to
adamant, has human life any value, even that of the lowest grade of
merchandise? And is it not high time to call a halt to the ravages of
capitalism and give a little thought and consideration to humanity?
Let us briefly note some of the crying evils which infest the
class-ruled society of the present day. First of all, millions are
poverty-stricken, the result, mainly, of no work or low wages. The great
book of Robert Hunter, on “Poverty,” recently published, abounds in
facts, supported by incontrovertible proofs, which silence all doubt
upon this point.
In New York City, alone, fifty thousand children, when they go to school
at all, go without sufficient and proper food, and one corpse in every
ten is dumped into the potter’s field.
New York and Chicago are filled with unemployed and suffering, and in
the country at large ten millions are in want. In the shoemaking
industry, fifty-one per cent of the laborers receive less than three
hundred dollars per year. In cotton spinning, the wages of thousands
average from two hundred and twenty dollars to four hundred and sixty
dollars per year. During the last year tens of thousands of coal miners
were allowed to work but from one to three days per week. Fall River
capitalists reduce wages three times in rapid succession, and lock out
and starve their employes for six months, declaring that they cannot
afford to pay the high price’s for cotton, while the planters of the
South burn up the cotton to keep up prices rather than clothe the naked
whose labor produced it.
The state of Colorado seethes with military brutality and reeks with
political corruption because the mine owners are practically proprietors
of the state and propose to do as they please with their own; and they
who have the temerity to protest are branded outlaws and bull-penned,
deported, or shot dead in their tracks.
The United States senate is dominated by the special representatives of
the trusts and corporations, and several of its members are under
indictment for playing the game of their masters in their own personal
interests. Think of Senator Chauncey M. Depew reforming the abuses of
the railroads, or Thomas C. Platt stopping the extortion of the express
companies, in the interest of the people!
The Pennsylvania Railroad company dictated the recent election of the
United States senator from Pennsylvania, and the most flagitious
political debauchery attended the election of many others, such
proceedings being regarded as so entirely in consonance with our
capitalist-owned republic as to excite little more than passing notice.
Only a short time ago the late John H. Reagan, the venerable ex-senator
of Texas, in discussing the federal courts, said that he expected no
improvement in them “as long as railroad lawyers are allowed to go on
the bench to interpret legislation affecting the management of the
railroads.” As long as the railroads are privately owned they will have
their judges on the bench, and the government, that is to say, the
capitalist politicians, will do their bidding.
Judge Reagan closed his sweeping arraignment of the courts as follows:
“I have seen such gross perversions of the law by the courts that I have
lost confidence in them and regret that I cannot feel the respect for
them that I once felt.”
These are ominous words and from a source that gives them the weight of
high authority.
Census figures recently published show that “every fifth child between
the ages of ten and fifteen in the United States is a breadwinner. One
out of every three of these children workers is a girl. There are one
million seven hundred and fifty thousand one hundred and seventy-eight
children employed, an increase of thirty-three and one-third per cent in
ten years.”
The land frauds, postal steals, and Indian graft all cry out in
condemnation of private ownership of capital, the source and inspiration
of all the political corruption that, like a pestilence, blights the
land.
Charles F. Kelly, speaker of the house of delegates, at St. Louis, the
convicted boodler, in making his confession, described in a few graphic
words the methods and motives of office-holders and politicians in the
grab-all regime of profitocracy. Said he: “Our combine was not along
party lines. Both democrats and republicans belonged to it. My
experience has been that boodlers line up according to their own
interests, and not under party standards. In the majority of the wards
of St. Louis both the democratic party and the republican usually
nominate men to go to the house of delegates for the money they can get
out of it. Each party man votes for his own fellows, and either one that
gets in serves those who rob the city of franchises.”
Be it noted that the corrupters of courts, the bribers of legislators,
and the debauchers of public morals are all capitalists in high
standing, the gentry whose subservient and hypocritical underlings are
forever preaching about “law and order” to the working class.
In the face of these frightful eruptions on the body-politic, President
Roosevelt coolly informs us that we are passing through a period of
“noteworthy prosperity,” and that “we must raise still higher our
standard of commercial ethics, and we must insist more and more upon
those fundamental principles of our country—equality before the law and
obedience to the law. _In no other way can the advance of Socialism,
whether evolutionary or revolutionary, be checked._”
The words “still higher” seem like sarcasm when applied to our so-called
“standard of commercial ethics,” that is mired in profit-mongering and
can never rise above the sordid level of brutal self-interest in the
declining stages of the competitive system.
The commercial pirates who rob the nation of its franchises and organize
monopolies to exploit the people are not in the business of raising the
standards of ethics, commercial or otherwise. The only ethics they know
is to “get there”; the end always justifying the means.
Just at present President Roosevelt, typical capitalist executive that
he is, is after the railroads—so we are told. His organs assure us that
he proposes to bring these great corporations to their knees, and make
them obey the law and stop robbing the people. And yet President
Roosevelt has had one of these criminal offenders in his own cabinet.
It is known of all men that Paul Morton, late secretary of the navy, is
a self-confessed lawbreaker, who would now be serving a prison sentence
if the law in his case had been enforced.
Then, again, can President Roosevelt consistently crack the whip above
the heads of these corporations after sharing in the special privileges
they enjoy at the expense of the people? In making his political
campaigns, and on other occasions since he has become a commanding
figure in national politics, the railroad corporations have provided Mr.
Roosevelt with the most luxurious special trains, sumptuously furnished
and abundantly stocked, _free of charge_. The thousands of dollars of
expense thus incurred by the railroad corporations could not have been
without some consideration, and, whatever that may be, it is not
calculated to inspire self-respecting and candid men who think for
themselves with faith in the sincerity of the president when he vaults
into the arena to do battle against the railroads as the champion of the
people.
It is not to reform the evils of the day but to abolish the social
system that produces them that the Socialist party is organized. It is
the party not of reform but of revolution, knowing that the capitalist
system has had its day and that a new social order, based upon a new
system of industry, must soon supplant the fast decaying one we now
have.
Every social system changes ceaselessly, and, ultimately, having
fulfilled its mission, passes away.
Capitalism is the connecting link between feudalism and Socialism.
The industrial forces are now making for Socialism, preparing the way
for it, and sooner or later it is sure to come.
On the one hand the capitalist class are combining their resources,
centralizing their capital, co-operating instead of competing,
organizing industry, and eliminating competition. This is the new and
better way. It is good as far as it goes. It is the limited application
of the economic principles of Socialism.
On the other hand, the working class are organizing. They are beginning
to spell solidarity and to pronounce Socialism. They are yearning for
emancipation from the galling yoke of wage-slavery, and with all the
power of their minds, all the strength of their bodies and all the
passion of their souls they are crusading against the ignorance of their
fellow-workers and the prejudice of the people.
Steadily the number of class-conscious toilers is increasing, and higher
and higher rises the tide that is to sweep away the barriers to progress
and civilization.
Let others talk about the tariff and finance—the enlightened workers
demand the ownership of the tools of industry and they are building up
the Socialist party as a means of getting them.
_The working class alone made the tools; the working class alone can use
them, and the working class must, therefore, own them._
This is the revolutionary demand of the Socialist movement. The
propaganda is one of education and is perfectly orderly and peaceable.
The workers must be taught to unite and vote together _as a class_ in
support of the Socialist party, the party that represents them as a
class, and when they do this the government will pass into their hands
and capitalism will fall to rise no more; private ownership will give
way to social ownership, and production for profit to production for
use; the wagesystem will disappear, and with it the ignorance and
poverty, misery and crime that wage-slavery breeds; the working class
will stand forth triumphant and free, and a new era will dawn in human
progress and in the civilization of mankind.