Educational Bureau of the Industrial Workers of the World

“ These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all. Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system." It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. ”

“ That after the workers achieve unity in a Federal Union the capitalists take charge of it and divide it up to suit their own interests. You, as a worker, would desire such a union as is implied in the Federal Labor Union—all workers in one union. An employing group, or even an individual employer, would want them divided up, and bound by rules and agreements, so that they could not act together. The Federal Union and what becomes of it demonstrates the difference between a working class conception of a union and a capitalist conception. ”

“ Fellow Workingman, do you, can you expect any aid from craft unions? Is not their treason and their swindling exposed in a thousand deeds? If you get hold of this little book before the great panic, which we, the Industrial Workers of the World tell you is certain to come, then use a half day's wages to take out a card in our organization, and if this writing does not fall into your hands, until the chaos is upon us, and the capitalist is "retrenching" at your expense, why then employ your leisure, you'll have lots of it, in studying the plan and method of the Industrial Workers of the World. ”

“ It tears the sham from the craft unions and exposes them, showing up all their fallacies and weaknesses. It is the terror of the craft union oligarchy, as it is of the capitalists. Both have vilified, slandered, and persecuted it. No other organization has been so grieviously misrepresented and pitilessly persecuted. While its members have, and are yet, selected for victimization in industry and by the legal authorities, the organization itself has gained membership and influence, and is today strategically the most advantageously placed economic organization in America. ”

“ Why can't the union serve both the employer and the employes? Because their interests are opposed. The boss wants low wages, while the workers want high wages; the employer wants the workers to speed up, while the worker does not wish to. So that it would be impossible for the union to serve these opposing interests. 18. Do not some unions admit the employers? These are not labor unions. They are employers' unions, no matter what they call themselves, or are alleged to be. 19. Well, how about letting the bosses join the union? ”

“ By organizing industrially the workers will form the structure of a new society within the shell of the old, and prepare for the change which will revolutionize social conceptions, forms and methods. The worker as worker—producer—alone can carry out the historical social process.
Politics is the temptation of careerists. It may offer a future to some of them, but only at the expense of that understanding at which labor must arrive. The great duty of the present is economic organization along class lines, guided by the conception that labor is the important social factor. ”

“ Every man is vain enough to desire the good opinion of his neighbors, and in the labor world, as in national life, every man and group desires to be regarded as a patriot. It is popular to be patriotic when patriotism calls for nothing more than pretense. So we find the appearance of unity in the craft union system, concealing effective and disastrous division. A system that not only divides, while pretending to unite, but which finds its main excuse for existence in the internicene strife that it cannot eradicate without destroying itself, is in the nature of a conspiracy. ”

“ It is folly for labor to foster the belief that the union can function successfully in two opposite directions; that it can secure an adequate return from the employers by lessening the need for it. If the workers are provided for, even insufficiently, during their periods of sickness or unemployment they are so protected, however, that the rigors of capitalism do not effect them, as they would if they were not so protected; and consequently, the workers are not inspired to fight for increased wages, or to find a solution for unemployment. ”

“ What do we mean by an industrial union? All the workers, all over the world, have a common interest and are interdependent — the workers of one country upon the workers of all other countries. So, likewise, the workers in one industrial calling are dependent upon the workers in all the other callings and these other workers upon them. Yet, in industry, national and international, there are more or less clearly defined divisions which we know as industries, such as coal mining, railroading, lumbering, farming, steel, manufacturing, etc. ”

“ Labor when divided is weak and powerless. The one reliable source of labor's power lies in its control over the means of production—the vitals of society. This power inheres in the worker as producer. It can be organized effectively in no other capacity. It cannot be organized politically. Economic organization by the workers will produce economic changes, and, in the very nature of things, the state will accommodate itself to the modified arrangement. Actual changes in the wage relationship will compel political changes while rule by the capitalist class obtains. ”

“ The moment the laborer no longer yields the maximum of profits he is thrown upon the scrap pile, to starve alongside the discarded machine. A dead line has been drawn, and an age limit established, to cross which, in this world of monopolized opportunities, means condemnation to industrial death.
The worker, wholly separated from the land and the tools, with his skill of craftmanship rendered useless, is sunk in the uniform mass of wage slaves. ”

“ The United States, more plainly than any other modern country, shows the state to be not only the means by which the existing class relationship is maintained, but the very means by which the ownership out of which it grows was instituted. Railroad grants, timber, mineral and oil steals plainly demonstrate that government (the State) has been the instrument by which the capitalist class has risen to power and the working class has been reduced to its present plight in the United States. ”

“ Yet, the whole superstructure of modern society is upreared and rests upon the working class. To exist and to progress capitalist society must control the labor power of the working class. It must, and it will, use any means or any weapon which will assist it in achieving this end. Political pretensions only conceal industrial ambitions. The important thing, therefore, for the workers to recognize, is the industrial character of our society, and the true nature of the state. ”

“ Whenever a union tries to function anywhere else than on the job, it is neither successful as a union nor in any other capacity. The union is designed for one purpose—the regulation of the job in the interest of the workers. It cannot function in any other manner. It can no more be a union and an insurance society at the same time, than a saw can be a soldering iron, or a plumber can wipe a lead join with a shovel. 14. Should a union function only in industry? ”

“ The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. ”

“ Nevertheless, down even to this day, the conception of the organized workers as a political force has survived; that unions can function effectively in more than one capacity. Though the past of American labor proves beyond cavil or doubt that the introduction of political action exerts a disruptive and paralyzing influence upon unions in their economic functions, there are still those who, perhaps because they have not understandingly analyzed the past, maintain that political action is a proper and legitimate function of a labor union. ”

“ Government has always been a disguise under which acquisitive predatory powers moved for the conquest of socially necessary things and by which they held the producers of the United States and other countries in subjection. This ownership and the class relationship, the state will array all the powers at its command to defend and to continue indefinitely. That, primarily, is its function. It is a social instrument only in the sense and where a slave relationship exists within a society, or a social division. ”

“ But do not craft unions organize unskilled workers? Not as they should and must be organized. "No man understands better than the king, how much a man the king is." And no man knows better than the modern "craftsman" how much a fiction his alleged "craft skill" is. When the craft unions move their membership lines to include helpers, it is not done to assist the helper but to remove a menace to themselves. The average helper can, in a comparatively short time, learn to perform the operation upon which he assists the "journeyman." ”

“ We do not have to tell you that your government has done nothing but marshal the forces of capitalism against you. We have proved to you in its pamphlet that the craft union system has shifted you into positions where capitalism can not help but defeat you. ”

“ It was enabled to turn attacks upon it to its own advantage with the versatility of that proletariat whom it can truly claim to represent. When a task is to be performed in industry, it is to be performed; there must be no acknowledgement of defeat. The same spirit has dominated the I. W. W. This makes it an enigma to the capitalist class and a thorn in the side of "the Labor Lieutenants of Capitalism," as Mark Hanna aptly termed the craft union officialdom. They do not understand the workers' problem and are only concerned about the capitalist side of the problem. ”

“ We must consider, in dealing with unionism, that we are dealing with an instrument designed to serve definite purposes in industry, and nowhere else. If unions provide for their sick and injured, to the extent that they do so, they defeat their own purpose, which is to force from the capitalists a return which would make such relief by unions unnecessary. This discourages the spirit that would force the recognition that proper provision for the workers should be the first charge against industry. ”

“ As long as a permanent organization for soliciting labor legislation is passed off for effective combination of national unions, the organized workers are being imposed upon. If the best that more than two million workers can do is to provide themselves with a lobbying committee, some influence, that is not a labor influence, is misguiding them. And what is not a labor influence in capitalist society is a capitalist influence. ”

“ These divisions, far from representing differences in skill or interests among the workers, are imposed by the employers that workers may be pitted against one another and spurred to greater exertion in the shop, and that all resistance to capitalist tyranny may be weakened by artificial distinctions.
While encouraging these outgrown divisions among the workers the capitalists carefully adjust themselves to the new conditions. They wipe out all differences among themselves and present a united front in their war upon labor. ”

“ When two unions each claim jurisdiction over the workmen who perform a certain operation, and such disputes occur continually, it is not the interest of unionism that is involved in the controversy but the "rights" of the conflicting officials to the dues emanating from workmen who are employed on such jobs. If it were only the interest of unionism, the one requirement would be good standing in any union. If it were working class interest, the ability to do the work would be the only requirement. ”

“ Universal economic evils afflicting the working class can be eradicated only by an universal working class movement. Such a movement of the working class is impossible while separate craft and wage agreements are made favoring the employer against other crafts in the same industry, and while energies are wasted in fruitless jurisdiction struggles which serve only to further the personal aggrandizement of union officials. ”

“ Remember that the early capitalist class saw clearly the necessity of working class organization, and feared it. The capitalists have lost none of their cunning, and have never had scruples or a conscience to lose. ”

“ In the United States the word is so lost in a maze of misunderstanding as to mean almost anything. State legislators, at the instigation of employers and aided by the press, have so perverted and misrepresented syndicalism that most people believe it to be a criminal and iniquitous conspiracy. Syndicalism is derived from the French word syndicate, meaning a local trade union. In France the labor union movement has two wings—radicals and conservatives. To distinguish themselves from the conservatives, the radicals call themselves "revolutionary syndicalists." ”

“ The capitalist state functions for the ruling class in modern society just as the state functioned for the ruling classes in chattel slave and feudal times—to preserve an industrial relationship by which the fruits of the labor of one class are the property of another class. ”

“ The workers need not, and indeed should not direct their efforts against the state but against the wage relationship of which it is the guardian, custodian and defender.
The right to strive for shorter hours, higher wages and better conditions—modifying the class relationship—is acknowledged, even in capitalist circles, as a legitimate ambition and effort of the workers. Such readjustment as will presently lessen and ultimately eliminate unemployment is also admitted as a worthy endeavor of the workers. ”

“ Because unless we see the craft unions as a system, we fail to understand their significance. A body of men following a special line of work might advantageously organize themselves into a union to advance their interests. Then when they found out that such a union was unequal to serving them, they would naturally incline to enlist with them such other labor classifications as would enable them to meet and deal with a condition or conditions which they could not favorably influence alone. ”

“ Trade lines have been swallowed up in a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend. New machines, ever replacing less productive ones, wipe out whole trades and plunge new bodies of workers into the ever-growing army of tradeless, hopeless unemployed. As human beings and human skill are displaced by mechanical progress, the capitalists need use the workers only during that brief period when muscles and nerve respond most intensely. ”

“ To construct and develop an instrumentality by which the workers in the industries can assert and advance their interest as social factors against their employer is to have generated a power that will compel the state to modify its programs and conduct so as to accord with the changes which the workers will force in this relationship to the employers. As the organized proletariat advances in the control of labor power, the prestige of the capitalist class declines and the state as a repressive power is weakened correspondingly. ”