INDUSTRIAL PIONEER vails there has been demonstrated time and again through the failures of the various railroad workers' strikes. The most flagrant example of this is to be found in the recent collapse and routing of the shop men. every strike engaged in by the various craft unions has been lost. That such has been the case is not an accident. To expect any other result in the unequal struggle between labor divided, and capital united, would be expecting the impossible. The Strength of Capital Why has it been impossible for craft unions to flourish in the automobile or the textile, the steel or the packing industries? For the simple reason that these industries are operated and controlled by big business; they are in the hands of gigantic combines of capital wielding tremendous power. When we come to transportation by water the present prospects are more encouraging. After the final defeat of the longshoremen's and the seamen's craft unions, through numerous unsuccessful strikes, the marine transport workers seem to have seen a light, and are at present joining the Marine Transport Workers' Industrial Union of the Industrial Workers of the World in great numbers. But it will take time, grit, and a great deal of hard work to build up an organization here that will be powerful and highly efficient mechanism of the steel enough to make the masters come to terms. The fiasco of the packing house strikes is well known to everybody who has kept in touch with labor history in recent years. Needless to say, the packing house workers are at present without any form of organization. This applies also to almost as great an extent to the foodstuff workers in the restaurants, bakeries, hotels, and other places where food is handled. We thus see that the major industries in the United States, with the possible exception of one or two, can be looked upon as being altogether unorganized. Can anybody be foolish enough to believe that labor will be able to secure any measure of power while this condition prevails? The Craft Unions The strength of the craft unions is to be found in the building, construction, printing, coal mining, and railroad industries. Neither the building nor the printing industries are organized over fifty per cent, nor can they be counted among the pivotal or major industries. The coal miners are organized in most states, but their brand of organization and leadership has been amply illustrated by the failure of the recent coal miners' strike. It is a notorious fact, well known to all students of recent labor history, that during the last six or seven years practically In order to organize the steel mills the workers have to buck the colossal power trust. In order to organize the oil industry the workers have to prove themselves not only equal, but superior to the machine built up and kept in smooth working order by the most powerful organization in the world to-day, the Standard Oil. In order to obtain a foothold and to spread organization in the woolen, cotton and silk mills, the textile workers have to be able to outmaneuver and out-fight the textile trust. The same applies, only in a lesser degree, to the other industries. The Weakness of Labor This, then, is the problem that confronts us. If any body of men think that they can revolutionize and amalgamate the now existing conservative craft unions, why, let them go to it! We have good reasons for thinking that this cannot be accomplished, but, for the sake of the argument, let us admit that it could. After they have amalgamated to show existing craft unions, what will they have? Why, they will have nothing to speak of; nothing that will be able to effect any appreciable change in the destinies of the working class. The workers in the major industries will still be unorganized. The power of resistance to the colossal combines of capital will still be almost as smal. as it is to-day. We thus see that altho the amalgamation of the craft unions might be a laudable object, surely it is nothing to get excited over; and this altogether aside from the question as to whether or not the amalgamation can be consummated. "Organize the Unorganized!" The United States is the ideal example of an industrial country. The whole country, its industries, and everything else in it, is run, managed, and owned by a handful of big financiers and captains of industry. They are the possessors of all power because they are possessors of economic power. The only way the working class can even make an attempt to oppose the will of the capitalist class is by acquiring at least a MAY, 1923 semblance of economic power through organization at the point of production. This is the big task that confronts us. When we set to work organizing the now unorganized industries we will find that we may have to change our tactics in accordance with the different conditions that prevail in the various industries. We will have to use the tools best suited to turn out the work. the work. But surely labor ought to be able to rise to the necessities of the occa sion. No task should prove to be impossible of accomplishment by those who keep the whole world agoing. Let all of us therefore put our shoulders to the wheel! From now on, let our slogan be "Organize the Unorganized!" H In the Grip of a Dead Hand ERE is a steel mill. By VERN SMITH Who are they that shiver in front of the entrance gates so early in the morning? Why, they are workingmen, going to work or else looking for jobs,-the sons of toil who make everything that is made on the earth, and who represent the Dignity of Labor. The dignity is not apparent in their faces, to be sure, because those of them who have jobs are afraid the others will get them, and 'the others are afraid they will not get them. The walls of the building are black and dusty, for it does not pay to clean them; the boss does not live here. The air is cold and damp. The looks that the workingmen bestow upon each other are chilly and furtive; they are eloquent of suspicion, wretchedness, a gnawing at the heart, a sinking at the stomach, a feeling of vague and dumb terror. A whistle's peremptory scream, and the doors are flung wide open-some go in to serve the rumbling machines, and some go up to face a grumbling master. The machine must be tended, the master must be, placated. Why this fear, dread, apprehension of impending danger? Why the subdued lights in this picture of lust workingmen-so superbly endowed with the fu dignity of labor? Because all their lives long these men have bee thinking, as did their fathers before them, that the are but puny struggling creatures in a world gigantic forces; that they can get no food, no cloth ing, no shelter, except through the gracious bene olence of the exalted power which owns the mi and gives them money in return for services re dered. The preservation of their families, their hope happiness, their very lives, depend on placating th power, so they think. They crawl to it as basely as ever savage crawled to his blood-smeared idol to pay homage. They think they must do this, for does not the corporation, the capitalist, possess a power greater than that wielded by the deity? The deity gave life unasked. The capitalist not only gives it but can also take it away, or at least the fulness of The workingmen it, if it pleases him to do so. fear him, for he holds the threads of their fate in his hands, and, like Caliban dreaming himself Setebos, this one he kills, and to that one he grants a morsel of bread, if the man begs for it. * * The army of humanity marches on, out from the grim caverns of the unknown past into the misty And on its way from land of an obscure future. a darkness to a darkness, it passes through smoke and dust and noise, through factories, mines and farm lands; it travels over endless stretches of land, and over the face of great lakes and the limitless expanse of the oceans. Every child born into the world finds awaiting him certain institutions which form the structure of the society in which he has to live-his place of earthly abode, so to speak. As far as he knows by direct evidence, and not by hearsay, these institutions are as much a part of nature as the sun and the moon. The child passes through other That is not all. sorts of factories,—thought or "mind-fixing" factories. There are newspapers, moving pictures and games which artfully engage his time and attention; All there are churches which he should go to on Sunday, and there are schools which he must attend. these are as little his as the factories he is thrown They are outamong, yes, into, at a too early age. side of his personality and beyond his control, but they supply the moulds into which his whole being is cast. As far as the child knows, these institutions likewise are as much a part of nature as the Steel Mills. * Accepting then, these things,-the factory and the thought factory-will not this child and these childmen accept also the product that pours from them? The product of the factory is the commodity, the fruit of a commodity-built society; the product of the school and of the newspaper is a mental thing-certain traditions, chief of which is the sacredness of private property, and the right of every owner to "do what he wants with his own." The commodity is older than the factory, in form and in use. The factory today produces shovels and rakes cheaper and better, and of a more uniform standard grade, than was done in the past. The tradition is older than the newspaper, but it is brought up to date, standardized, and cheapened, well as made more abundant, by the thought factory. For in the final analysis, the substance of men's thoughts is determined by what reaches their minds from the outside. MAY, 1923 When every craftsman had his own tools, every iron worker his own forge and In their time and place these ideas were good. The blacksmith should own the product of his own forge, when he operates it himself, for it is to the social advantage that he be secure in the possession of the fruits of his labor applied to the forge. But what about the steel mills? Do the cringing, worried, whitefaced men and boys work in them? They certainly do. Do they get the value of their product? They certainly do not. The owner still applies his traditional right, "to the full product of the forges," although the ownerthe corporation,-is a thing without hands or feet, incapable of working a single machine, of stoking a single furnace. (Needless to say, the stockholders are too busy attending church in Los Angeles, or booze parties in Bermuda, to lend a hand.) The tradition, the fruit of practical experience, the thought-out result of observation (of long ago) is still with us, though the facts which were observed have ceased to be. Now, why does not a new concept take the place of the old, lying, outworn tradition? Since the day when the capitalist masters found the factory rule sliding into their hands, they have labored incessantly to keep the fact of their rule concealed from all and sundry. They are worshipped and dreaded not as human beings but as representatives of a tradition, as priests of the mysterious "OWNERSHIP," "PRIVATE force, known PROPERTY," which is a mere notion, a vacuous idea. as The wage slave is a spiritualist, kneeling in abasement before a ghost, a disembodied spook of a former social morality. The Dead Hand of the past has him by the throat; the flail that beats out his manhood is made of bones that once were a saint's, perhaps, but are now but a dug-up pestilence which ought to be buried so that it would torment man no * * more. * So here is the situation, and the cause of the fear. The factory with its capitalist, who must be feared, because the thought factory, with its tradition of private property, permits no idea of his removal. Your factory sometimes produces a bit of work that is not at all what was intended. As it grows older, it must continually produce more and more work that is defective from the point of view of the capitalist. The thought factory does the same. Fifteen INDUSTRIAL PIONEER The new circumstances will, sooner or later, force a few men to base their ideas upon present-day facts, even though the men themselves may have gone through the "mind-fixing" mills owned and operated by the capitalists. The artificial information, the pretended facts, which the thought factory supplies, will be rejected by these few, and their minds will not be moulded by the fear that distorts everything into grotesque and untruthful shapes. If a man moves alone to menace capitalism, the police and the juries, its attendant vultures, will tear out his liver. But the Industrial Workers of the World call working men to rise up from their faces, to con out of the mists of a rotting past, to cast off ghostly restraints. No more reverence for outwor beliefs, no more cringing before millionaires, :' more fleeing from mirages. Capitalism and its pac sack of animated corpses, its gibbets and jails a judges and preachers, its rubbish of ancient mor ity, and its dungeon filth, will no more restrain t might of labor in mass than the mists of night w stand against the noon-day sun. T Go East, Young Man, and By ALOIS SENNEFELDER, JR. HE advice of Horace Greeley, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country," will now stand a reversal, if it has not already been reversed for some time past. With the disappearance of the frontier, the westward march has ended. As a result, we see this westward migration recoiling on itself. We see the young men and young women of the west and midwest going east "to make their fortunes" and to grow up with giant industrialism there. The movement to drive the farmers off the farms into the big cities will give eastward tendencies still greater impetus in the near future. It is well to call attention to these new tendencies in order that the friends of industrial unionism may appreciate their full significance and act accordingly. There There is a superstition afloat to the effect that the West is the embodiment of everything progressive and ideal in industrial tendency. The fact of the matter is that, in the development of the continent from coast to coast the East long ago passed the stage now characteristic of the West. Chicago, for instance, now wants a subway, in emulation of the progressiveness of New York City. In other words, the West, instead of being in the forefront of industrial development, lags somewhat behind it. Big Industry in the East Behold the East! The home of Wa Street and the trusts! The land of big i dustrialism par excellence! Try your i dustrial union teeth on that; and, if you ca bite into that granite-to adapt to domest conditions a metaphorical phrase now cu rent in Germany-you can bite into any the problems of giant capitalism. And you cannot, the sooner you get a new set teeth-which means, a more effecti method of putting theoretical industria unionism into operation-the better. Look at New England, with its gia woolen trust and its cotton mill corpora tions! Or take the textile industry as whole the silk industry, for instance, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York ar Pennsylvania-there's a field that indu trial unionism must subdue, if it would wis Or look at the giant electrical manufactu ing development of the East. The Gener Electric Company, let us say, with its cha of plants at Lynn, Mass., Schenectady, Y.; Harrison, N. J.; Erie, Pa.; Fort Wayn Ind. Or consider the Westinghouse plan at Pittsburgh, Pa.; Cleveland, O., and oth points. And don't overlook the Weste Electric Co., of New York City and Chicag Here are corporations literally employin industrial armies-tens of thousands of e ployees, mostly unorganized or disorgal ized. |