William Dudley Haywood

“ In a word the last war will be fought when the workers of all the various nations begin to capture their own countries from the real enemy which now holds them—an enemy so brutal that not only is it ever prepared to wage relentless war against the workers, but in time of peace commits more outrages than the most savage armies of the most ruthless war lords. Figures and facts condemn them beyond the lowest damnation.
What German atrocity can equal that committed by the master class here at home, which enjoys the wealth of the land while millions struggle with and even succumb to poverty? ”

“ It is the prison, the bludgeon, the rifle and the maxim gun—all of them instruments of destruction—these which lurk behind the order and the law, are the real power of the master class.
The power of the worker is of quite a different nature and much more effective. He, when he is bold enough to know it, is master of the situation because he is the maker of all the things upon which the master class depends. Their power is that of destruction, ours is that of construction. Their indeed is the army of death, and ours the army of life. ”

“ The great European war has come. The truth has almost staggered our imagination, we do not know what to do and the one only definite thought is that we must win. To this end all our efforts are bent. We fight, we pray, we die, and we pay all to attain victory for our arms. It is the same with the men and women of France, of Russia, of Belgium. It is exactly the same, alas! with the men and women of Germany and Austria. We are all prompted by the same strong feelings of patriotism. ”

“ How thin is the mask of hatred that the rich and respectable have managed to stretch over the faces of the opposing countries! Through the mask we are constantly seeing appears that look of comradeship and fellow feeling which is destined by and by to bring together the workers of all lands in a common brotherhood. How clearly we may see how the last war will be reached—when the workers "will be fed up and refuse to go on shooting." ”

“ It is to this great contradiction in human affairs—on the one hand our undoubted power to achieve great things of infinite worth, and on the other our inability even to fill our stomachs or supply ourselves with clean beds on which to lie—it is this that demands the first attention of all who would work in any great cause. It is exactly this subject, however, that is avoided by all our great movements, which are financed by the very people who have captured the wealth of our countries, and who thus produce poverty. ”

“ I feel now that I would hate to be in Buccafori's place. It is better, when charged with crime by a capitalist or by the capitalist class, to hold a prominent office in a great labor organization. You will then draw around you support—support sufficient to protect and to save your life. Had I been an ordinary member of the rank and file of a labor organization no more prominent than a shoe worker of Brooklyn I would not be here to-night. ”

“ So, on this great force of the working class I believe we can agree that we should unite into one great organization—big enough to take in the children that are now working; big enough to take in the black man; the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities—an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries, and one that will become the great industrial force of the working class of the world. ”

“ The Czar of Russia and his friends, who have been hanging or imprisoning every thinker in Russia for many years, they have their reasons for joining in this great game of finance and murder. The politicians of France and England too know what they are about—but what of us? We who are not politicians, or kings, or czars, or kaisers; we who serve in the shops, who work in the factories, drive the trams—and, in a word, make and distribute all that is necessary for life; we surely have a very different view of things from those who have organized this war and who call on us to fight it. ”

“ Many a man in each army engaged today knows in his heart that the enemy soldiers are men just as he is, no better and no worse. These dim thoughts only lack boldness, and they would make of each such soldier a revolutionist, who would refuse to fire in such a cause.
It is by this growing courage that the industrial workers will presently form their army—not indeed an army like that which their masters possess, where the soldiers blindly obey their officers and care not if their cause is right or wrong. The workers' army organized for a different purpose must be a very different affair. ”

“ If there is ever to be a time when there is no poverty and no slums, in other words, if the time is coming when the wealth manufactured in our factories will be kept and used by those who labor, and when the land will be free to those who alone can make it bear fruit, then it is certain that that class which now owns it will die hard, and fight to maintain its happy existence living on the labor of the poor. ”

“ Is it to be supposed that England will maintain unquestioned for all time her position as ruler of the waves and owner of vast colonies all over the world, when we know that young and vigorous races and nations are developing? So long as national ideals, the world over, lead men only to rejoice in the extension of their nation, so long will there be ceaselessly war and preparations for wars. ”

“ The German also, when this sad business is over will return to his daily work, and should he, with his friends, try also to capture a little of the country and its wealth for the workers, instead of the wealth-owning class, he will find soon that the German military are ready to shoot him. These facts surely force us to think. And we pause before we rejoice in the honor of dying for our country, for is it not true that we who are asked to die this glorious death in a foreign land are compelled even by the military to live but sad, inglorious lives here at home? ”

“ I argue this point because I want it to be clear that if we are really to understand what is wrong and how to ensure that the last of all wars shall soon be reached, then we must be guided in our judgment by something greater than this patriotism which allows us to see one side of the question only.
Let us frankly confess to ourselves what we have done. We are certainly not a savage or blood-thirsty people in our everyday life, and yet we are now doing, or helping others to do the bloodiest deeds that imagination and science can make possible. ”

“ Instinctively we feel reverence for him who stands in the shadow of death, for strangely enough we have more respect for the barren and useless end of things than for the active, fruitful course of life itself—but more of this hereafter. Let us for a minute consider the life he has lived rather than concern ourselves with the death he is possibly about to die.
Perhaps our man is a volunteer, or a reservist, and till the start of the war was engaged as a miner or railwayman, or it may be working in some factory. ”

“ Is it war or peace while the babies die in the slums and the rich grow richer on the cheap labor of their mothers.
It is war we proclaim, the last war, the international war in which the workers of all lands shall be united against the invaders—the rich who have seized the land and lived on the labor of the poor. ”

“ This is the class war, about which the socialists have so often talked but which they have never waged. It is the only war which can bring the final settlement, and until it is reached nation after nation will rise and fall, and in the process millions will be slaughtered and millions more degraded and depraved in the trade of murder. ”

“ To be so powerful to produce richness and yet so powerless to prevent abject poverty and starvation is surely an absurdity. At the whim of any rich man a palace of infinite beauty and luxury is hewn out of the stone and takes shape and form, but the thousands in our slums live and die generation after generation in fruitless longing, for they are ever surrounded in their hovels by dirt and poverty. ”

“ But tomorrow, when we have peace, these same kind people who now can think of nothing but woolen comforts and shrapnel, will be quite well satisfied when the soldier now in the trench is commanded to fire on the crowd of workers outside the factory, whose only sin has been that they loved their country and their kith and kin, so much that they have tried to reconquer some of the wealth of the land for their unhappy brothers. ”

“ We workers who have organized our petty strikes, and found nine out of ten of the strikers wavering and timidly wondering if they were quite justified in so upsetting the work-a-day world; we who have sometimes, in a strike, known a comrade to break a window or seen a policeman's bludgeon answered by a well-aimed bottle, and then have had to listen to the apologies of the labor leaders and the timid among the strikers, who declare that such actions are confined to hooligans and outsiders ”

“ You must not be content to come to the ballot box on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the ballot box erected by the capitalist class, guarded by capitalist henchmen, and deposit your ballot to be counted by black-handed thugs, and say, "That is political action." You must protect your ballot with an organization that will enforce the mandates of your class. I want political action that counts. I want a working class that can hold an election every day if they want to. ”

“ A yet more fatal result there is to this so thoughtless attitude of so many, who while half opposed to war still maintain that we must defeat the Germans. The politicians in this democratic land are very fond of what is termed secret diplomacy, by which the people are kept in ignorance as to the friendships and enmities of the various governments. By this plan our government may be secretly pledged by our politicians to fight, say, with France against Germany without our knowing anything about it, and without parliament itself knowing. ”

“ If those who today spend their lives in toil and service, were to turn "patriotic" in a new sense of the word, and were to tell each other that the love of their country was so great that in future they themselves meant to possess it, then indeed we should see how far goes the patriotism of those rich people who today are asking us to fight in their quarrel. ”

“ And coming down through the halls of time, the greatest strike is the general strike of Russia, when the workers of that country compelled the government to establish a constitution, to give them a form of government—which, by the way, has since been taken from them, and it would cause one to look on the political force, of Russia at least, as a bauble not worth fighting for. They gave up the general strike for a political constitution. The general strike could and did win for them many concessions they could gain in no other way. ”

“ The Industrial Workers of the World is an economic organization without affiliation with any political party or any non-political sect. I as an Industrialist say that industrial unionism is the broadest possible political interpretation of the working-class political power, because by organizing the workers industrially you at once enfranchise the women in the shops, you at once give the black men who are disfranchised politically a voice in the operation of the industries ”

“ Of course, the working class can starve eight days, but they can't starve nine. You don't have to teach the workingman how to starve, because there were teachers before you. There is no way out but fight, as I understand it. Do you think you will get your industrialism through peace or through revolution?
A.—Well, comrade, you have no peace now. The capitalist system, as peaceable as it is, is killing off hundreds of thousands of workers every year. That isn't peace. One hundred thousand workers were injured in this state last year. ”

“ And so, taught by the crowd, the politicians continue to settle matters first, and to manufacture the causes of war in private, knowing that the people will be willing to fight when the enemy is on the march. What is the alternative it may still be asked. How can we do other than defeat the Germans by helping our government, even though we may know that the latter is composed of the politicians who, tomorrow will send the army to shoot us? ”

“ If we had a clear idea of life and its purpose, if we knew what we wanted as clearly as do these great men, might we not organize our own wars for our own purpose, instead of merely fighting in their wars for their purposes—much better still—might we not finally organize an universal peace? ”

“ His little world, his country and his life have been rendered unbeautiful to him because the best of all which the worker can produce goes to make rich the master class. He has fought against this, fought so that he might bring a little more beauty into the lives of those he loves, and to help the class of which he is one. ”

“ If we are but a few in this movement, which will by and by make war and oppression impossible, it is certain that we should exercise no more influence by joining the hosts of English, French, and Russian invaders than we have by raising the standard of revolt in our countries at home. Powerful, or even powerless then, as the workers' movement may now be, it should take up its stand of definite and uncompromising opposition to the war. ”

“ By refusing to take part in the present war they might have confused their real enemies, strengthened their own forces and come a step nearer the desired end, but the real task before them is the war of the mines, the railways, the factories and the fields. When this has been fought successfully, so that those who use them enjoy the wealth that they yield, then we shall find there is no master class to make wars and slay us by thousands. There will be no longer the military power, the prisons and our law courts, by which the poor are kept in their slums. ”

“ The artistic dress made by the hands of ill-paid seamstresses is passed on to grace the figure of some woman in the upper class and to assist her in the belief that she is superior to the workers who created it.
Verily our blessings have become our curses. The more we produce, the greater our courage and endurance, the greater is the power which oppresses us. ”

“ Is not this more worth fighting for than the cause to which thousands of lives are being sacrificed today? This is indeed the real purpose and meaning of the labor movement, and thus we begin to see that there is much more to be done than merely refusing to shoot in the wars which are run by the master class, although such action may be a good starting point. ”

“ Yet in spite of the huge campaign of lies and all the efforts of the good, respectable Christian people of England and Germany, to make the working class of each country hate the workers of the other, they have but partially succeeded. In spite of the fact that they have, to their satisfaction, succeeded in getting the workers of so many countries to slay each other, nevertheless the war furnishes some remarkable examples of a comradeship between the soldiers of enemy trenches. ”

“ At any moment the soldier may become a real, live thinking man, and the moment he begins to think for himself, he is useless to those whom he now serves.
In the present war there have been certain symptoms which must have filled the war lords with alarm. The daily papers have done their dirty duty with enthusiasm, if with some stupidity. Never a chance has been missed to stir up hatred between the two parties.
According to the German papers the English are little better than savages, and according to those of England the Germans are a little worse. ”

“ If patriotism is to lead us to think that the others are always wrong; it will also lead others to think that we are never right. Patriotism has ever been inclined to play this trick on people, and consequently every army that has gone out to slay or be slain has done so with the calm assurance that God is on its side. ”

“ Wars will cease only when the people have higher national ambition than that of capturing foreign lands, when men are not willing to fight in the quarrels of nations, when the people are no longer contented to have their country owned by a class which lives entirely on their labor. ”