Austin Lewis

“ The real object of a labor union should be the true and ultimate welfare of labor, of the employer, and of the country in which it does business. I am a great believer in organized labor, but it is a big mistake to misdirect itself by attempting to bring a good man down to the level of a poor man. Its aim should be to encourage the man who wants to work and who is efficient, and to undertake to educate the inferior man to become as good as the best and thereby increase the production of its organization as a whole. ”

“ Economically, the smaller capitalist has been crushed out by this process, he has become a proletarian in receipt of a salary. Obviously he cannot be generally described as a capitalist large or small, and, according to the Marxian idea, he ought to be ranged with the proletarian class, but, as a matter of fact, he is no proletarian. He becomes a good servant of his new master, he accepts the political views of his new master as a good servant should, and he is not to be reckoned as a force with the revolution but as a distinct acquisition to the power of his destroyer. ”

“ The future of the nation is inseparable from the future of the nation's workers. It was not for nothing that Capt. John Smith insisted,—"He who will not work, neither shall he eat."
Fronted by these facts, we are deliberately working out an economic system which glorifies ownership and penalizes work. The owner prospers; the worker exists. The owner lives upon the fat of the land, which the worker has created.
A survey of the relative positions occupied by the recipients of service and of property income, shows that the property owners hold practically all of the strategic points. ”

“ The rapid growth of property values during recent years has accentuated and emphasized the conflict between work and ownership. On the one hand, are the people who devote their time and energy to the production of wealth. On the other hand are the people who own income-yielding property. The workers receive a wage or a salary; the owners receive payments of rent, interest and dividends. Many of the workers are growing clamorous over "human rights." The property owners, persistent, and ever watchful, urge the "rights of property." ”

“ The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with bourgeois family relations, modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. ”

“ With respect to the beaten small bourgeois, he does not count. There is no revolutionary effectiveness in a beaten class, and the defeated small tradesman either sinks into oblivion, buried in the slums, the cemeteries of the unfit, or perambulates the earth an uneasy ghost entirely out of place in society and tampering with reactionary politics, in the ranks of the Roosevelt pseudo-progressives or playing with the Socialist Party. ”

“ They have placed on one side the majority of the population, who carry the burdens of economic society, and put forth the energy necessary to propel industry. On the other side, the economic forces have ranged a small group of persons in whose hands is concentrated the great bulk of the income-yielding wealth of the community. The forces of economic society are sharpening the contrast between service and property income, and adding daily to the irony of a status which compels workers to skimp and abstain while property owners may idle and luxuriate. ”

“ In fact, the capital of the great trusts rests largely upon the subscribed capital of middle-class stockholders. It is clear that the economic interests of these people are not with any other than the greater capitalism into which they have become merged.
The small fish swallowed is transformed into part of the shark, and the petit-bourgeois losing his economic identity is absorbed in the Nirvana of the greater capitalism. ”

“ A proletarian movement can have no part, however slight, in the game of politics. The moment it takes a seat at that grimy board is the moment it dies within. After that it may for a time maintain a semblance of life and motion, but in truth it is only a corpse. ”

“ The Industrial Workers of the World may be regarded as the first definite step in the organization of the real proletariat.
With the advent of the unskilled into the ranks of organized labor there can be no further blinking or obscuring of the real point at issue between the capitalist and the laborer.
The unskilled laborer knows without any telling that he is exploited at the point of production. No question of taxes can help him, municipalization or nationalization is no remedy for his ills, no scheme of municipal or other reforms can meet the circumstances of his case. ”

“ And I do not know why we should not look for an American ideal in Socialism that will listen to no compromise, play no games in politics, care nothing for temporary success at the polls, seek to elect no particular individual to any office, never lower the standard, look beyond the skirmishes of the day, and following unhesitatingly and confidently the one ideal of the emancipation of the working class as the only object to which it will pay any attention. ”

“ When a trust takes over the field of an industry it disposes of its opponents two ways. It buys them out and takes the best brains of the smaller industry into its own service, the rest it annihilates by sheer force of economic superiority. ”

“ He challenges the whole structure of modern society at its base, the contract of employment. He matches his no-property against all the property of the dominant class, his no-law against the law of the industrial and commercial masters, his ability to starve against all the resources of civilization. ”

“ The rapidity with which large fortunes have been acquired is one of the wonders of the modern world. At the present time, the United States numbers its millionaires by thousands. The mere mention of such names as Vanderbilt, Gould, Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, Havemeyer, Belmont, Whitney, Goelet, Carnegie, Armour, Harriman and Dupont (all of them families numbered among the multi-millionaires whose wealth was acquired, for the most part, since the Civil War) calls to mind the immense concentration of income-yielding wealth which has been going on within the past century. ”

“ When the greater capitalist finds approval for the craft union it is obvious that the latter can no longer be regarded as a very serious protagonist of labor.
It has ceased to have fighting capacity because that for which it seeks to fight is already doomed.
A new form of organization is taking its place. This new form, called Industrial Unionism, implies more than the possession of a more effective weapon by the working class. ”

“ It would have been bad politics for the Labor Party to have appeared in the least indifferent to the childish and silly tricks of the coronation; hence it must leave nothing undone to show its loyalty, lest our enemies get ammunition to use against us and we shall not be able to stay in. Nothing more absurd and degrading can be imagined than the participation of any Labor Party in such a spectacle, but such are the conditions of this game. If you start in to play it you must play it, and you must play it in the way that will win. ”

“ Before a tree can be cut or a ton of coal mined; before a wheel can turn or a locomotive speed along the steel pathway; before a wage-earner can raise a hand to labor for himself and his family, the proper owners must be assured that they will receive a specified rate of return on their holdings.
Society, for the use of the earth which was here before our forefathers came, and for the use of the machinery of production which the people of America have spent three centuries in building, must pay a royalty, or tax, to the owners of land of machinery. ”

“ It will give no heed to anything else, and the few men that with clear vision and inspiration continue to insist that the only way to emancipate the working class is to emancipate it are like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. If the capitalists had designed the very best way in which to perpetuate their power they could not have hit upon anything better for themselves than this. It keeps the working class occupied; it diverts their minds from the real questions that pertain to their condition ”

“ The present system of property ownership places no limitations on the amount of income-yielding property which one individual may control. The Rockefellers, Guggenheims and Carnegies may secure title to a hundred-thousand, a hundred-million, or a hundred-billion estate. There is nothing in the custom or law of the land to check such a procedure, and in the course of the undertaking, business practice affords every conceivable advantage. The modern property-owning world is organized on the assumption that every man has a right to as much property as he can get. ”

“ Nothing has been done that could in the least disturb the currents of sacred business. It was recognized as not good politics to antagonize business interests. Let the administration keep along with the solid business interests of the country, reassuring them for the sake of general prosperity and helping them to go on in the same safe, sane and conservative way as before. It was essential that business men should feel that business was just as secure under the Labor administration as under any other. Nothing that can in the least upset business, you know. ”

“ Such organization to be effective must be expressed in terms of industrial unionism. Each industry must be organized in its entirety, embracing all the workers, and all working together in the interest of all, in the true spirit of solidarity, thus laying the foundation and developing the superstructure of the new system within the old, from which it is evolving, and systematically fitting the workers, step by step, to assume entire control of the productive forces when the hour strikes for the impending organic change. ”

“ When the unskilled laborer enters the fight he drags the rest of the crafts after him. They must take up his fight. Even the respectable petit-bourgeois socialist must dance to his tune, as is seen in the French chamber where the Socialist representatives vigorously took up the cudgels for Durand, the syndicalist, unjustly sentenced for the killing of a scab.
What is still more remarkable he, by means of the industrial union, builds up a society within society, an "imperium in imperio." ”

“ The nation is built on the work of its workers.
Today, as in every past age, the idler and the parasite are burdens on national life. They add nothing to national well-being, while they cost their keep.
The workers are the nation. As they thrive, the nation thrives. As they succeed in life, the nation is prosperous and great. ”

“ Meantime the condition of the workingman, absolutely and relatively, is worse than it has ever been; the government placed in power and held there by workingmen's votes gives to them such treatment as you would expect from a member of the National Manufacturers' Association; and a man that preaches the social revolution among them is looked upon as a strange, weird beast. What do we want of a social revolution? There is an election next year, and if you talk like that you may injure the chances of our candidate. People are not ready for that sort of thing, you know, and we must be practical. ”

“ By all the kinds of labor we do not mean merely all the crafts, but in addition factors which have been overlooked in the organization of crafts—factors which appear at each end of the productive apparatus—at the one end, clerks, salesmen, stenographers, telephone operators, telegraphers, and all the non-handworking staff which is essential to the practical handling of a great business, and at the other end the unskilled laborers who are equally essential but so far unorganized and unrecognized. ”

“ Socialism or nothing. If this cause of Socialism is worth believing in it is worth following to the end without compromise. Either it is the greatest boon, incomparably, that ever was dreamed of for the human race, or we are a lot of lunatics. If it is what we believe it to be, then what shall we gain for it by compromise or coalition or turning for one moment from the ultimate goal? ”

“ The carpenters, masons and journalists that led the first movement lost sight of the real labor question as soon as they began to scheme and dream about getting office and keep it. After twenty years of government by the Labor Liberal combination, the telegraph operator, now became Prime Minister, slips over to Great Britain a present of a Dreadnaught battleship, taxes every man, woman and child in the country ten dollars to pay for the gift, and then parades England in the glory of his achievement. ”

“ The craft unions are thereupon compelled to look in another direction and to turn their eyes towards industrial unionism as a remedy. Louder and louder the demand arises that the only way in which the working class can expect to achieve progress in face of the odds which confront it is by organization in terms of the capitalist industry, and that means the practical elimination of the crafts, as protectors of special property interests. ”