_Speech at Chicago, November 25, 1905_
The unity of labor, economic and political, upon the basis of the class
struggle, is at this time the supreme need of the working class. The
prevailing lack of unity implies lack of class consciousness; that is to
say, enlightened self-interest; and this can, must and will be overcome
by revolutionary education and organization. Experience, long, painful
and dearly bought, has taught some of us that craft division is fatal to
class unity. To accomplish its mission the working class must be united.
They must act together; they must assert their combined power, and when
they do this upon the basis of the class struggle, then and then only
will they break the fetters of wage slavery.
We are engaged today in a class war; and why? For the simple reason that
in the evolution of the capitalist system in which we live, society has
been mainly divided into two economic classes—a small class of
capitalists who own the tools with which work is done and wealth is
produced, and a great mass of workers who are compelled to use those
tools. Between these two classes there is an irrepressible economic
conflict. Unfortunately for himself, the workingman does not yet
understand the nature of this conflict, and for this reason has hitherto
failed to accomplish any effective unity of his class.
It is true that workers in the various departments of industrial
activity have organized trade unions. It is also true that in this
capacity they have from time to time asserted such power as this form of
organization has conferred upon them. It is equally true that mere craft
unionism, no matter how well it may be organized, is in the present
highly developed capitalist system utterly unable to successfully cope
with the capitalist class. The old craft union has done its work and
belongs to the past. Labor unionism, like everything else, must
recognize and bow to the inexorable law of evolution.
The craft union says that the worker shall receive a fair day’s pay for
a fair day’s work. What is a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work? Ask
the capitalist and he will give you his idea about it. Ask the worker
and, if he is intelligent, he will tell you that a fair day’s pay for a
fair day’s work is all the workingman produces.
While the craft unionist still talks about a fair day’s pay for a fair
day’s work, implying that the economic interests of the capitalist and
the worker can be harmonized upon a basis of equal justice to both, the
Industrial Worker says, “I want all I produce by my labor.”
If the worker is not entitled to all he produces, then what share is
anybody else entitled to?
Does the worker today receive all he produces? Does he receive anything
like a fair (?) share of the product of his labor? Will any
trade-unionist of the old school make any such claim, and if he is bold
enough to make it, can he verify it?
The student of this question knows that, as a matter of fact, in the
capitalist system in which we live today the worker who produces all
wealth receives but enough of his product to keep him in working and
producing order. His wage, in the aggregate, is fixed by his living
necessities. It suffices, upon the average, to maintain him according to
the prevailing standard of living and to enable him to reproduce himself
in the form of labor power. He receives, as a matter of fact, but about
17 per cent of what his labor produces.
The worker produces a certain thing. It goes from the manufacturer to
the jobber, from the jobber to the wholesaler, and from the wholesaler
to the retailer—each of these adding a profit, and when it completes the
circle and comes back to the worker who produced it and he stands face
to face with the product of his own labor, he can buy back, upon the
average, with his paltry wage but about 17 per cent of it. In other
words, he is exploited, robbed, of about 83 per cent of what his labor
produces. And why? For the simple reason that in modern industry, the
tool, in the form of a great machine with which he works and produces,
is the private property of the capitalist, who didn’t make it, and could
not, if his life depended upon it, use it.
The evolution is not yet complete.
By virtue of his private ownership of the social tool—made and used by
the co-operative labor of the working class—the employer has the
economic power to appropriate to himself, as a capitalist, what is
produced by the social labor of the working class. This accounts for the
fact that the capitalist becomes fabulously rich, lives in a palace
where there is music and singing and dancing, and where there is the
luxury of all climes, while the workingmen who do the work and produce
the wealth and endure the privations and make the sacrifices of health
and limb and life, remain in a wretched state of poverty and dependence.
The exploiting capitalist is the economic master and the political ruler
in capitalist society, and as such holds the exploited wage worker in
utter contempt.
No master ever had any respect for his slave, and no slave ever had, or
ever could have, any real love for his master.
I must beg you to indulge the hoarseness of my voice, which has been
somewhat strained addressing meetings of the Industrial Workers held in
and about Chicago during the last two or three evenings; but,
fortunately, my eyesight has not been strained reading the accounts of
these meetings in the capitalist papers of Chicago.
Alert, vigilant, argus-eyed as the capitalist dailies of Chicago are,
there is not one of them that knows of this meeting of the Industrial
Workers. But if this were a meeting of the American Federation of Labor
and an old trade union leader were here, you would read tomorrow morning
a full account of it and him in every capitalist paper in the city.
There is a reason for this that explains itself.
The capitalist papers know that there is such an organization as the
Industrial Workers, because they have lied about it. Just now they are
ignoring it. Let me serve notice on them through you and the thousands
of others who flock to our meetings everywhere, that they will reckon
with the Industrial Workers before six months have rolled around.
There are those wage workers who feel their economic dependence, who
know that the capitalist for whom they work is the owner of their job,
and therefore the master of their fate, who are still vainly seeking by
individual effort and through waning craft unions to harmonize the
conflicting interests of the exploiting capitalist and the exploited
wage slave. They are engaged in a vain and hopeless task. They are
wasting time and energy worthy of a better cause. These interests never
can and never will be harmonized permanently, and when they are adjusted
even temporarily it is always at the expense of the working class.
* * * * *
It is no part of the mission of this revolutionary working class union
to conciliate the capitalist class. We are organized to fight that
class, and we want that class to distinctly understand it. And they do
understand it, and in time the working class will also understand it;
and then the capitalist class will have reason to understand it better
still. Their newspapers understand it so well even now that they have
not a single favorable comment to make upon it.
When the convention of delegates was in session here in June last for
the purpose of organizing the Industrial Workers, every report that
appeared in a Chicago paper—capitalist paper I mean; every single report
was a tissue of perversion, misstatement and downright falsehood. They
knew that we had met for a purpose, and that that purpose was to fight
the class of which they are the official mouthpieces. Now, it seems to
me that this uniform hostility of the capitalist press ought to be
significant to even the unthinking workingman. Capitalist papers are, as
a rule, quite friendly to the craft unions. They do not misrepresent
them; do not lie about them; do not traduce their representatives. They
are exceedingly fond of them, because they know enough about their own
interests to know that the craft unions are not only not a menace to
them, but are in fact bulwarks of defense to them. And why? Because,
chiefly, craft unions divide and do not unite the working class. And I
challenge contradiction.
There was a time when the craft union expressed in terms of unionism the
prevailing mode of industry. That was long ago when production was still
mainly carried on by handicraftmen with hand tools; when one man worked
for another to learn his trade that he might become its master. The
various trades involved skill and cunning; considerable time was
required to master them. This was in the early stages of the capitalist
system. Even at that early day the antagonism between employer and
employed found expression, although the employer was not at that time
the capitalist as he is today. The men who followed these trades found
it necessary in order to protect themselves in their trade interests to
band together, form a union, so that they might act together in
resisting the encroachments of the “boss.” So the trade union came into
existence.
The mode of production since that time has been practically
revolutionized. The hand tool has all but disappeared. The mammoth
machine has taken its place. The hand tool was made and used by the
individual worker and was largely within his own control. Today the
machine that has supplanted the old tool is not owned nor controlled by
the man, or rather the men, who use it. As I have already said, it is
the private property of some capitalist who may live at a remote point
and never have seen the machine or the wage slaves who operate it.
In other words, the production of wealth, in the evolution of industry,
from being an individual act a half a century ago has become a social
act. The tool, from being an individual tool, has become a social
instrument. So that the tool has been socialized and production has also
been socialized. But the evolution is yet to complete its work. This
social tool, made socially and used socially, must be socially owned.
In the evolution of industry the trade has been largely undermined. The
old trade union expresses the old form of industry, the old mode of
individual production based upon the use of the individual tool. That
tool has about disappeared; that mode of production has also about
disappeared, but the trade union built upon that mode of production,
springing from the use of the hand tool, remains essentially the same.
The pure and simple trade union, in seeking to preserve its autonomy, is
forced into conflict with other trade unions by the unceasing operation
of the laws of industrial evolution. How many of the skilled trades that
were in operation half a century ago are still practiced?
At the town where I live there used to be quite a number of cooper
shops. Barrels were made by hand and a cooper shop consisted wholly of
coopers. The coopers’ union was organized and served fairly well the
purposes of the coopers of that day, but it does not serve the purposes
of the workers who make barrels today. They do not make barrels in the
way they used to be made. Today we want a union that expresses the
economic interests of all the workers in the cooperage plant engaged in
making and handling barrels. But a few coopers still remain, a very few.
It is no longer necessary to be a cooper to make a barrel. The machine
is the cooper today. The machine makes the barrel, and almost anyone can
operate the machine that makes the barrel.
You will observe that labor has been subdivided and specialized and that
the trade has been dissipated; and now a body of men and boys work
together co-operatively in the making of a barrel, each making a small
part of a barrel. Now we want a union which embraces all the workers
engaged in making barrels. We lose sight of the cooper trade as
evolution has practically disposed of that. We say that since the trade
has completely changed, the union which expressed that trade must also
change accordingly. In the new union we shall include not only the men
who are actually engaged in the making of barrels directly, but also
those who are placing them upon the market. There are the typewriters,
the bookkeepers, the teamsters, and all other classes of labor that are
involved in the making and delivering of the barrels. We insist that all
the workers in the whole of any given plant shall belong to one and the
same union.
This is the very thing the workers need and the capitalist who owns the
establishment does not want. He believes in labor unionism if it is the
“right kind.” And if it is the right kind for him it is the wrong kind
for you. He is more than willing that his employes shall join the craft
union. He has not the slightest objection. On the contrary, it is easily
proven that capitalists are among the most active upholders of the old
craft unions.
The capitalists are perfectly willing that you shall organize, as long
as you don’t do a thing against them; as long as you don’t do a thing
for yourselves. You cannot do a thing for yourselves without
antagonizing them; and you don’t antagonize them through your craft
unions nearly as much as you buttress their interests and prolong their
mastery.
* * * * *
The average workingman imagines that he must have a leader to look to; a
guide to follow, right or wrong. He has been taught in the craft union
that he is a very dependent creature; that without a leader the goblins
would get him without a doubt, and he therefore instinctively looks to
his leader. And even while he is looking at his leader there is someone
else looking at the same leader from the other side.
You have depended too much on that leader and not enough on yourself. I
don’t want you to follow me. I want you to cultivate self-reliance.
If I have the slightest capacity for leadership I can only give evidence
of it by leading you to rely upon yourselves.
As long as you can be led by an individual you will be betrayed by an
individual. That does not mean that all leaders are dishonest or
corrupt. I make no such sweeping indictment. I know that many of them
are honest. I know also that many of them are in darkness themselves,
blind leaders of the blind. That is the worst that can be said of them.
And let me say to you that the most dangerous leader is not the corrupt
leader, but the honest, ignorant leader. That leader is just as fatal to
your interests as the one who deliberately sells you out for a paltry
consideration.
You are a workingman! Now, at your earliest leisure look yourself over
and take an inventory of your resources. Invoice your mental stock; see
what you have on hand.
You may be of limited mentality; and that is all you require in the
capitalist system. You need only small brains, but huge hands.
Most of your hands are calloused and you are taught by the capitalist
politician, who is the political mercenary of the capitalist who fleeces
you, you are taught by him to be proud of your horny hands. If that is
true he ought to be ashamed of his. He doesn’t have any horns on his
hands. He has them on his brain. He is as busy with his brain as you are
with your hands, and because he is busy with his brain and you neglect
yours, he gets a goodly share of what you produce with your hands. He is
the gentleman who calls you the horny handed sons of toil. That fetches
you every time. I tell you that the time has come for you to use your
brains in your own interest, and until you do that you will have to use
your hands in the interest of your masters.
Now, after you have looked yourself over; after you have satisfied
yourself what you are, or rather, what you are not, you will arrive at
the conclusion that as a wage worker in capitalist society you are not a
man at all. You are simply a thing. And that thing is bought in the
labor market, just as hair, hides and other forms of merchandise are
bought.
When the capitalist requires the use of your hands, does he call for
men? Why, certainly not. He doesn’t want men, he only wants hands. And
when he calls for hands, that is what he wants. Have you ever seen a
placard posted: “Fifty hands wanted”? Did you ever know of a capitalist
to respond to that kind of an invitation?
President Roosevelt would have you believe that there are no classes in
the United States. He was made president by the votes of the working
class. Did you ever know of his stopping over night in the home of a
workingman? Is it by mere chance that he is always sheltered beneath the
hospitable roof of some plutocrat? Not long ago he made a visit here and
he gave a committee representing the workers about fifteen minutes of
his precious time, just time enough to rebuke them with the intimation
that organized labor consisted of a set of law-breakers, and then he
gave fifteen hours to the plutocrats of Chicago, being wined and dined
by them to prove that there are no classes in the United States, and
that you, horny handed veteran, with your wage of $1.50 a day, with six
children to support on that, are in the same class with John D.
Rockefeller! Your misfortune is that you do not know you are in the same
class. But on election day it dawns upon you and you prove it by voting
the same ticket.
Since you have looked yourself over thoroughly, you realize by this time
that, as a workingman, you have been supporting, through your craft
unions and through your ballots, a social system that is the negation of
your manhood.
The capitalist for whom you work doesn’t have to go out and look for
you; you have to look for him, and you belong to him just as completely
as if he had a title to your body; as if you were his chattel slave.
He doesn’t own you under the law, but he does under the fact.
Why? Because he owns the tool with which you work, and you have got to
have access to that tool if you work; and if you want to live you have
got to work. If you don’t work you don’t eat; and so, scourged by hunger
pangs, you look about for that tool and you locate it, and you soon
discover that between yourself, a workingman, and that tool that is an
essential part of yourself in industry, there stands the capitalist who
owns it. He is your boss; he owns your job, takes your product and
controls your destiny. Before you can touch that tool to earn a dime you
must petition the owner of it to allow you to use it, in consideration
of your giving to him all you produce with it, except just enough to
keep you alive and in working order.
* * * * *
Observe that you are displaced by the surplus product of your own labor;
that what you produce is of more value under capitalism than you who
produce it; that the commodity which is the result of your labor is of
greater value under capitalism than your own life. You consist of
palpitating flesh; you have wants. You have necessities. You cannot
satisfy them, and you suffer. But the product of your labor, the
property of the capitalist, that is sacred; that must be protected at
all hazards. After you have been displaced by the surplus product of
your labor and you have been idle long enough, you become restive and
you begin to speak out, and you become a menace. The unrest culminates
in trouble. The capitalist presses a button and the police are called
into action. Then the capitalist presses button No. 2 and injunctions
are issued by the judges, the judicial allies and servants of the
capitalist class. Then button No. 3 is pressed and the state troops fall
into line; and if this is not sufficient button No. 4 is pressed and the
regular soldiers come marching to the scene. That is what President
Roosevelt meant when he said that back of the mayor is the governor,
back of the governor the President; or, to use his own words, back of
the city, the state, and back of the state the nation—the capitalist
nation.
If you have been working in a steel mill and you have made more steel
than your master can sell, and you are locked out and get hungry, and
the soldiers are called out, it is to protect the steel and shoot you
who made the steel—to guard the men who steal the steel and kill the men
who made it.
* * * * *
I am not asking you to withdraw from the craft unions simply because the
Industrial Workers has been formed. I am asking you to think about these
matters for yourselves.
I belonged to a craft union from the time I was nineteen years of age. I
can remember the very evening I first joined the Brotherhood of
Locomotive Firemen. I can recall with what zeal I went to work to
organize my craft, and it was the pride of my life to see that union
expand. I did what I could to build it up. In time I was made to realize
that that union was not sufficient unto itself. I next did what I could
to organize other branches of the service and then establish a
federation of the various unions of railroad employes, and finally
succeeded; but soon after the federation was formed, on account of craft
jealousies, it was disrupted. I then, along with a number of others who
had had the same experience and had profited by it, undertook to
organize the railway men within one organization, known as the American
Railway Union. The railroad corporations were the deadly enemies of that
organization. They understood that its purpose was to unify all the
railroad employes. They knew that the unity of the working class meant
their end, and so they set their faces like flint against the American
Railway Union. And while they were using all their powers to crush and
to stamp out the American Railway Union, they were bestowing all their
favors upon the several craft brotherhoods, the engineers and the
firemen, the conductors and the brakemen. They knew that so long as
these craft unions existed there could be no unification of the men
employed in the railway service.
Are the railroad men of this country organized today? No! Not nearly
one-half of them are organized at all. And when the railroad
corporations from motives of good policy make a concession to the
engineers or the conductors, it is gouged out of the poor devils who
work for a dollar a day and are compelled to submit.
There are a great many engineers who are perfectly willing to be tied up
in a contract. They think they can save themselves at the expense of
their fellow-workers. But they are going to reap, sooner or later, just
what they have sown. In the next few years they will become motormen.
While we are upon this question, let us consult industrial history a
moment. We will begin with the craft union railroad strike of 1888. The
Brotherhood of Engineers and the Brotherhood of Firemen on the C., B. &
Q. system went out on strike. Some 2,000 engineers and firemen vacated
their posts and went out on one of the most bitterly contested railroad
strikes in the history of the country. When they went out, the rest of
the employes, especially the conductors, who were organized in craft
unions of their own, remained at their posts, and the union conductors
piloted the scab engineers over the line. I know whereof I speak. I was
there. I took an active part in that strike.
I saw craft union pitted against craft union, and I saw the Brotherhood
of Engineers and the Brotherhood of Firemen completely wiped from the
C., B. & Q. system. And now you find these men, seventeen years later,
scattered all over the United States. They had to pay the penalty of
their ignorance in organizing a craft instead of organizing as a whole.
In 1892 a strike occurred on the Lehigh Valley; the same result. Another
on the Toledo, Ann Arbor & North Michigan. Same result. The engineers
have had no strike from that time to this. Every time they have had a
strike they have been defeated.
The railroad corporations are shrewd enough to recognize the fact that
if they can keep certain departments in their employ in a time of
emergency they can defeat all of the rest. A manager of a railroad who
can keep control of 15 per cent of the old men can allow 85 per cent to
go out on strike and defeat them every time. That is why they have made
some concessions to the engineers and conductors and brakemen, and now
and then to the switchmen, the most militant labor union of them all.
A year and a half ago the telegraph operators on the Missouri, Kansas &
Texas went out on strike. The engineer remained at his post; so did the
fireman; the conductor at his; and the brakeman at his. And they hauled
the scabs that flocked from all parts of the country to the several
points along the line, and delivered them in good order to take the
places vacated by the strikers; worked all round them and with them
until they had mastered the details of their several duties; and having
done this, the strike was at an end, and the 1,300 craft unionists out
of jobs. You will find them scattered all over the country.
Now, were not these other craft unions scabbing on the telegraphers just
as flagrantly as if they had stepped into their positions and discharged
their duties? They were acting with the corporation against their union
fellow workingmen, helping the corporation to defeat and crush them.
Without their aid the corporation could not have succeeded. With their
aid it was very easily done.
Is it possible that a craft unionist can see such an object lesson as
this so plainly presented to him and still refuse to profit by it? Still
close his eyes and, as it were, shut up his reason, and absolutely
decline to see that this is suicidal policy and that its fruit must
always be disruption and disaster?
This world only respects as it is compelled to respect; and if you
workingmen would be respected you must begin by respecting yourselves.
You have had enough of this sort of experience. You have had more than
enough of it right here in Chicago.
Why didn’t the steel trust annihilate the Amalgamated Steelworkers? Only
two years ago they defeated them completely. The trust had its iron heel
upon the neck of the Steelworkers’ Union, and could have, had it chosen,
completely crushed the life out of it. But Morgan was too wily. Schwab
was too wise. They used to oppose trade unions. They don’t oppose them
any longer. They have discovered that a union can be turned the other
way; that it can be made useful to them instead of being useful to the
working class. Morgan now says he is in favor of trade unions, and
Schwab agrees. They didn’t crush out the Steelworkers’ Union because
they knew that another and a better one would spring from its ruins.
They were perfectly willing that the old craft union should grow up
again and block the way to real union.
* * * * *
You have had a machinists’ strike here in Chicago. You are well aware of
this without my telling you. There is something pathetic to me about
every strike.
I have said and say again that no strike was ever lost; that it has
always been worth all it cost. An essential part of a workingman’s
education is the defeats he encounters. The strikes he loses are after
all the only ones he wins. I am heartily glad for myself that I lost the
strike. It is the best thing that ever happened to me. I lost the strike
of the past that I may win the strike of the future.
I am a discredited labor leader, but I have good staying qualities. The
very moment the capitalist press credits me with being a wise labor
leader, I will invite you to investigate me upon the charge of treason.
I am discredited by the capitalist simply because I am true to his
victim. I don’t want his favors. I do not court his approbation. I would
not have it. I can’t afford it. If I had his respect it would be at the
price of my own.
I don’t care anything about what is called public opinion. I know
precisely what that means. It is but the reflect of the interests of the
capitalist class. As between the respect of the public and my own, I
prefer my own; and I am going to keep it until I can have both.
When I pick up a capitalist newspaper and read a eulogy of some labor
leader, I know that that leader has at least two afflictions; the one is
mental weakness and the other is moral cowardice—and they go together.
Put it down that when the capitalist who is exploiting you credits your
leader with being safe and conservative and wise, that leader is not
serving you. And if you take exception to that statement, just ask me to
prove it.
* * * * *
The rank and file of all unions, barring their ignorance, are all right.
The working class as a whole is all right. Many of them are misguided,
and stand in the light of their own interest.
It is sometimes necessary that we offend you and even shock you, that
you may understand that we are your friends and not your enemies. And if
we are against your unions it is because we are for you. We know that
you have paid your dues into them for years and that you are animated by
a spirit of misdirected loyalty to those unions.
I can remember that it was not a very easy matter for me to give up the
union in which I had spent my boyhood and all the years of my young
manhood. I remember that I felt there was something in it in the nature
of a sacrifice, and yet I had to make it in the interest of the larger
duty that I owed myself and the working class.
Let me say to you, if you are a craft unionist, that infinitely greater
than your loyalty to your craft is your loyalty to the working class as
a whole. No craft union can fight this great battle successfully alone.
The craft is a part, a part only, of the great body of the working
class. And the time has come for this class, numerically overwhelmingly
in the majority, to follow in one respect at least the example of its
capitalist masters and unite as a whole.
In this barbarous competitive struggle in which we are engaged, the
workers, the millions, are fighting each other to sell themselves into
slavery; the middle class are fighting each other to get enough trade to
keep soul and body together, and the professional class are fighting
each other like savages for practice. And this is called civilization!
What a mockery! What a sham! There is no real civilization in the
capitalist system.
Today there is nothing so easily produced as wealth. The whole earth
consists of raw materials; and in every breath of nature, in sunshine,
and in shower, hidden everywhere, are the subtle forces that may, by the
touch of the hand of labor, be set into operation to transmute these raw
materials into wealth, the finished products, in all their multiplied
forms and in opulent abundance for all. The merest child can press a
button that will set in operation a forest of machinery and produce
wealth enough for a community.
Whatever may be said of the ignorant, barbarous past, there is no excuse
for poverty today. And yet it is the scourge of the race. It is the
Nemesis of capitalist civilization. Ten millions, one-eighth of our
whole population, are in a state of chronic poverty. Three millions of
these have been sunk to unresisting pauperism. The whole working class
is in a sadly dependent state, and even the most favored wage-worker is
left suspended by a single thread. He does not know what hour a machine
may be invented to make his trade useless, displace him and throw him
into the increasing army of the unemployed.
And how does labor live today? Here in Chicago you may walk along a
certain boulevard, say 18th street, and you will find it lined with
magnificent palaces. Beyond that you will find a larger district where
the still complacent middle class abide. Beyond that is a very much
larger territory where the working class exist; and still beyond that,
to complete the circle, you see the red lights flickering in the
distance.
Prostitution is a part, a necessary part, of capitalist society. The
department store empties in the slums.
I have been here enough to know that when the daughter of a workingman
is obliged to go up the street to look for employment, when she is
fourteen or fifteen years of age, and ought to be in the care and
keeping of a loving mother, and have all of the advantages that our
civilization makes possible for all—when she is forced to go to a
department store, to one of those capitalist emporiums, and there find a
place, if she can, and work for a wage of $3 a week, and have to obey a
code of cast-iron regulations, appear tidy and neatly dressed and be
subject to a thousand temptations daily, and then takes a misstep, the
first, as she is more than apt to do, especially if she has no home in
any decent sense of that term—the very instant this is added to her
poverty, she is doomed—damned. All the doors of capitalist society are
closed in her face. The coals of contumely are poured upon her head.
There is for her no redemption, and she takes the next step, and the
next, until at last she ends a disgraceful career in a brothel hell.
This may be your child. And if you are a workingman, and this should
fall to the lot of the innocent blue-eyed child that you love more than
you do your own life—I want you to realize that if such a horror be
written in the book of fate, that you are responsible for it, if you use
or misuse your power to perpetuate the capitalist system and working
class slavery.
You can change this condition—not tomorrow, not next week, nor next
year; but in the meantime the next thing to changing it is making up
your mind that it shall be changed. That is what we Industrial Unionists
have done. And so there has come to us a new state of mind, and in our
hearts there is the joy of service and the serenity of triumph.
We are united and we cannot be disunited. We cannot be stampeded. We
know that we are confronted by ten thousand difficulties. We know that
all the powers of capitalism are to be arrayed against us. But were
these obstacles multiplied by a million, it would simply have the effect
of multiplying our determination by a million, to overcome them all. And
so we are organizing and appealing to you.
* * * * *
The workingman today does not understand his industrial relation to his
fellow-workers. He has never been correlated with others in the same
industry. He has mechanically done his part. He has simply been a cog,
with little reference to, or knowledge of, the rest of the cogs. Now, we
teach him to hold up his head and look over the whole mechanism. If he
is employed in a certain plant, as an Industrial Unionist, his eyes are
opened. He takes a survey of the entire productive mechanism, and he
understands his part in it, and his relation to every other worker in
that industry. The very instant he does that he is buoyed by a fresh
hope and thrilled with a new aspiration. He becomes a larger man. He
begins to feel like a collective son of toil.
Then he and his fellows study to fit themselves to take control of this
productive mechanism when it shall be transferred from the idle
capitalist to the workers to whom it rightfully belongs.
In every mill and every factory, every mine and every quarry, every
railroad and every shop, everywhere, the workers, enlightened,
understanding their self-interest, are correlating themselves in the
industrial and economic mechanism. They are developing their industrial
consciousness, their economic and political power; and when the
revolution comes, they will be prepared to take possession and assume
control of every industry. With the education they will have received in
the Industrial Workers they will be drilled and disciplined, trained and
fitted for Industrial Mastery and Social Freedom.