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By this inexorable process large layers of the capitalist class are expropriated and compelled to identify themselves with the

proletariat.

If an employer is unable to purchase new machinery, if he is unable to produce as cheaply as his competitors, he is driven into bankruptcy. Thus the ranks of the capitalist class are thinned out and the class is made more powerful. Mills and factories become the property of ever fewer men. is a significant fact that a few men control huge aggregations of capital.

It

In the second place, competitors have, to a great extent, consolidated. They wipe out all differences among themselves and present a united front in their war upon labor. Competition among capitalists is disappearing, due to the displacement of human skill by machines and the increase in capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the means of production and distribution. Industry is high

ly corporate and at times monopolistic. This is a day of trusts and interlocking directorates.

Finally, the Employing Class, the Business Class, organizes Merchants', Manufacturers', and Employers' Associations corresponding to the solidarity of the mechanical and industrial concentration. Through these associations they control governments and courts. By injunctions of the judiciary and the use of military power they seek to crush, with brutal force, all efforts of Labor at resistance.1 or,

when the other policy seems more profitable, they delude and betray those whom they would rule and exploit. "The Republican party, likewise the Democratic, is a party of the 1.Industrial Union Manifesto."

capitalist class," said De Leon; "every man who is posted knows that; the conduct of its Presidents, Governors, Judges, Congresses, and Legislatures can leave no doubt upon the

subject.

mon,

,,1

These conditions breed the class struggle.

"The

working class and the employing class have nothing in com-
„2
declares the W. I. I. U. According to DeLeon,
"Whatever the interests may be of a class whose material
welfare towers up, and the interests of the class whose
material welfare and all that thereupon depends, sinks
perpendicularly and in even tempo with the former's rise,
....... whatever these two sets of interests may be, they
can have nothing in common. The relations between these
two sets of interests are..... the relations between the
..3
vampire and the victim. The working class and the em-

ploying class have nothing in common, any more than it is
possible, said De Leon, "to divide an apple in such a way
that each shall have the bigger chunk.

,,4

It is foolish to

prate about the "mutuality", the "brotherhood", the "identity of interests", of the Capitalist Class and the Working Class. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until private ownership in the means of production is abolished

1. Daniel De Leon, "What Means This Strike?" 27.

2. Constitution of W. I. I. U., Preamble.

3. Daniel De Leon, "Socialist Reconstruction of Society," 20-21. 4. Ibid, 21.

and working men enjoy the full fruit of their labors.

In this industrial warfare the employers' line of battle and methods of warfare correspond to the solidarity of industrial concentration, while working men still form their fighting organizations on lines of long-gone trade divisions. At present, quick and united action on the part of workers is hampered by the craft form of organization, which requires permission from international officers before a legal strike can

be called.

The recent steel strike would illustrate their analysis. A union which hopes to fight the Steel Trust successfully, the W. I. I. U. would say, must be organized in the same way that the Steel Trust is. The Steel Trust authority

It is a unit. All power over

is not divided or sub-divided. that mighty industry is centralized in the hands of the Board of Directors. Against a united master class the A. F. of L. pitted a labor union twenty-four times divided; for there are twenty-four craft unions which claim jurisdiction over different groups of Steel Trust employes. Every trade has a separate independent union. Labor, also, the W. I. I. U. insists, must learn to centralize and concentrate its mighty economic

power.

Not only are the various crafts in the same industry organized separately, but they sign contracts which expire at different times. They are not free to support each other if they would. So craft unionism becomes an "accomplice in capitalist crime" and a"scourge to the working class."l

.1

Consider an illustration which De Leon used in 1905 and see

1. Daniel De Leon, "Socialist Reconstruction of Society," 20.

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