Eugene Debs, Class Unionism, 1905, Part 2

What is wage-slavery, and how can we organise to break the cycle of exploitation?

 

When workingmen join the one economic working class organization that unites them upon the basis of the class struggle, they can do something to better their working condition; not only will they have the economic power to do this, but they will represent a new and a vital force to which they are now total strangers—the revolutionary force that industrial unionism generates in the body.
There is something far different between a strike on the part of unions in which men are ignorant, blindly striking against something that they only vaguely understand, with no comprehension of the class struggle—there is something vastly different between that kind of a strike and the strike of a body of class-conscious, revolutionary workingmen, who, while they are striking for an immediate advantage, at the same time have their eyes clearly fixed upon the goal. And what is that goal? It is the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery.
The Industrial Workers is essentially an educational organization—and one of the vitally important things it will teach the workers is the complete operation and control of the industry in which they are employed. Have you ever thought about that? Has it ever been brought to your attention in craft unions?
I have already reminded you that you workingmen have made all the machinery there is in operation everywhere; that only you can use it. Now, why should not you own it? Why shouldn’t you be your own employers? Why shouldn’t you be the masters of your own jobs? Why depend upon the capitalist for a chance to work? Why clothe him with power to discharge and starve you at will? Why engage him to take from you all you produce except enough to keep you at work?
That is all that remains for you. You get a wage, and that wage suffices to keep you working for the capitalist. The tool you work with has got to be oiled, and you have got to be fed. The wage is simply your lubricant. The wage oils you and keeps you in working order. The capitalist doesn’t intend that you shall ever be anything but his wage-slave. He would scout the suggestion that you are his equal. He doesn’t associate with you. He belongs to another class; and the class to which he belongs is called the upper class. You, as a workingman, belong to the lower class. The working class has always been the lower class, and is today; and you will be the lower class as long as you are content to be that class. It is in your power to make yourselves the upper class, and in fact the only class. You are in an overwhelming majority. There are only a few capitalists as compared to you. And yet, they own practically everything and rule the land: and will keep on owning and ruling the land as long as you workingmen allow them to; and you will allow them to as long as you persist in remaining divided in trade unions and being used against each other, instead of uniting and acting solidly with and for each other and against the capitalists.
The Industrial Workers is organized—and we declare it boldly—to fight the capitalist class. We want it distinctly understood that we claim nothing in common with that class. They have economic interests separate from and opposed to the economic interests of the working class. And we propose that the working class shall be organized economically and politically to retire the capitalist class from business.
Our business is to put the exploiters of labor out of business.
You, Mr. Workingman, don’t need a capitalist; and if you think you do, it is because of your ignorance. It is because you don’t understand your own interest. You don’t need him. You imagine that he gives you a job; but he does nothing of the kind. You give him a job. You employ him to take from you what you produce; and he faithfully sticks to his job. Why, the capitalist could not exist a second without you. Can you imagine a capitalist without workingmen?
Capitalism is based upon the exploitation of the working class; and when the working class ceases to be exploited, there will no longer be any capitalists.
Now, while the capitalist could not exist without you, you would just begin to live without him. He is on your back; he rides you, and he rides you even when he rides in the automobile that you make. You make it. You never knew of a capitalist that ever made an automobile. The capitalist doesn’t make it, but rides in it; the workingman does make it, but does not ride in it.
If it were not for you, the capitalist would have to walk, and if it were not for him, you would ride.
You don’t need the capitalist; he is, in fact, a curse to you. What has the capitalist owner of a modern plant to do with its operation? Absolutely nothing. He might as well live in the moon, as far as you are concerned. There may be a group of them, but they have nothing to do with the mill. They simply get what is produced there, because you will have it so. You are organized on that basis. In your moss-covered old unions you say, “Our interests are mutual.” Certainly, if you can stand this arrangement the capitalist can. He has no grievance. He does nothing and gets everything, and you do everything and get nothing.
If you can stand this he can: and if you don’t put an end to it he won’t. And why should he? And why shouldn’t you? Mr. Workingman, you are a man. You ought not to be satisfied to be a mere wealth-producing animal. You have a brain, and you ought to develop it. You should aspire to rise above the animal plane. If you can work in a mill and produce wealth for a capitalist, who holds you in contempt, you can also work in that mill as a free man and produce wealth for yourself and your wife and family to enjoy. If not, why not?
It is upon this basis that the Industrial Workers is organized. It is with this supreme mission that the Industrial Workers has entered the field.
We have declared war upon the capitalist class, and upon the capitalist system. We are of the working class. We say: Arouse, you workingmen! It is in your power to put an end to this system. It is your duty to build up this great revolutionary economic organization of your class, to seize and take control of the tools with which you work, and make yourselves the masters instead of being the slaves of industry.
Wipe out the wage system, so that you can walk this earth free men!
Not only is it your right, not only have you the opportunity, but it is your solemn duty to do this, unless you are base enough to be guilty of treason to yourself and to your class.
Let me say to you, my fellow workers, that the hour has struck for a great change in the world of organized labor. Long enough have we suffered ourselves to blindly and stupidly follow a leadership that has misled and deceived and betrayed. Long enough have we been clubbed by the police, and it may be pertinent to observe that when the club of a policeman descends upon the head of a workingman he hears the echo of the vote he cast at the preceding election.
It is only necessary for us to do a bit of serious reasoning on our own account to satisfy ourselves that the Industrial Workers is the only working class organization in the field. It requires but a little intelligent reflection to satisfy ourselves that we have got to build up this organization, unless we have given up in the struggle and succumbed to defeat and despair. Is it possible that we could for a moment make up our minds that we and those who are to come after us are forever doomed to wage slavery? The very suggestion is abhorrent to every worker with a spark of manly blood coursing in his veins. Why, you men, you workingmen, are more than the salt of this earth. Without you society would perish. Society does not need the idle capitalists. They are parasites. They are worse than useless. They simply take what you make, leaving you in poverty; thousands of you idle; if not now, when the times become hard. And every few years the times become hard in the capitalist system, for reasons you can easily understand, but I have not the time to fully explain this evening.
A panic comes, industry is paralyzed, because with machinery you can produce so much more than your paltry wage will allow you to consume. You make all things in great abundance, but you  cannot consume them. You can only consume that part of your product which your wage, the price of your labor power, will buy. If you cannot consume what you produce, it follows that in time there is bound to be overproduction, because the few capitalists cannot absorb the large surplus. The market is glutted, business comes to a standstill, and mills and factories shut down. At such a time Chicago is hit, and hit hard; and you workingmen find yourselves out of employment, a drug on the market. Nobody wants your labor power, because it cannot be utilized at a profit to the capitalist who owns the tools, and when he cannot use your labor power at a satisfactory profit to himself he doesn’t buy it. And if he doesn’t buy your labor power you are idle, and when you are idle you don’t draw any wages, and you can’t buy groceries and pay rent; you can’t buy clothing and shoes, and you begin to look seedy and shabby. By degrees you become a vagrant and a wanderer and lose what little self-respect you had. And then you hear that your wife has been evicted, and that is a thing that happens every day in the week. Your child is now upon the streets and your former cottage home is deserted. You now start out on what proves to be a never-ending journey. The road you are now traveling stretches wearily on, and from the hedges bark the dogs of capitalism. You are a tramp.
Are there not thousands and thousands of tramps all over this country today? There were none half a century ago. There is a great army of them now. They have been recruited in capitalist society; they are the product of the capitalist system.
A man is out of work a good while and he gets hungry; he still has a little self-respect and steals rather than beg. That is how men become tramps and thieves and criminals: that is why we have an army of tramps; that is why all the penitentiaries are crowded: why the insane asylums are overflowing and why thousands commit suicide. All these shocking evils are the outgrowth of the capitalist system, to which the Industrial Workers proposes to put an everlasting end.
If you think that these horrors ought to be; if you, as a workingman, think that you ought to have a master—just as the ignorant chattel slave on the plantation in the south used to think that he had to have a master to rob him of what he produced—if you think that you are so helpless that you would die unless you had a master to give you a job and take from you all except just enough to keep you working for him; if you think that workingmen ought to fight each other; if you think that unity, the unity of the working class, would be a bad thing for the working class; if you think that your interest is identical with the interest of the capitalist who robs you; if you think that you ought to be in slavish submission to the capitalist who does nothing and gets what you produce; if you think that, then certainly you ought to stay in the old trade union and keep out of the Industrial Workers.
But if you have a bit of intelligence, just enough to realize that you are a workingman and that, as a workingman, you are a human being; if you are capable of understanding that you have the inherent power of self-development, that the brain you have can be developed so that you can think clearly for yourself; if you will use that intelligence just enough to satisfy yourself that you ought to be the master of your own job; then, instead of being a wage-slave you will soon be a man among men, and if you have intelligence enough to conceive and to express that thought then, let me say to you, a revolutionary light will be kindled in your eyes and you will feel the thrill of a new-born joy, and for the first time in your life you will stand perfectly erect and know what it is to be self-reliant and touch elbows with your fellow-workers throughout the world.
Remember that no matter who or what a worker may be, if he works for wages he is in precisely the same economic position that you are. He is in your class: he is your brother; he is your comrade.
As an individual worker you cannot escape from wage-slavery. It is true that one in ten thousand wage workers may become a capitalist, to be pointed out as a man worth a million who used to be a clerk, but he is the exception that proves the rule. The wage worker in the capitalist system remains the wage worker.
There is no escape for you from wage-slavery by yourself, but while you cannot alone break your fetters, if you will unite with all other workers who are in the same position that you are; that is, if instead of being bound up in a little union of a score, or a hundred, or thousand, that is almost as helpless to do anything for you as you are to do anything by yourself—if you will join the organization that represents our whole class, you can develop the power that will achieve your freedom and the equal freedom of all.
The working-man who does this is a missionary in the field of sound working class organization; he wears the badge of the Industrial Workers; he has a new idea of unionism. Instead of being satisfied with the ancient, out-of-date, reactionary methods, he will have the advanced and progressive ideas of industrial revolutionism. That is to say, he will understand that when the workers are united in one great economic organization and one great political organization; when they strike together and vote together, they can put their class in power in every council, in every legislature and in the national congress; they can abolish the capitalist system, take over the industries to themselves, and rule the land forevermore.
The Industrial Workers propose first to unite all workers within one organization, classified in the various departments representing their several trades and occupations, to bring them all into harmonious economic relation with each other. The next thing is to co-ordinate them within their several industries with an eye to operating these industries when they secure control of them. That is the central function of the new union, and by far the most important one.
The old union never makes any reference to industrial self-control, because, so far as the old union is concerned, wage-slavery is to prevail forever.
The Industrial Workers declares that it is organized to put an end to the wage system, to free the workers, to make them the masters of the mills and other plants in which they are employed. In order to fit them to operate these enterprises in their own interests when they are turned over to them, it is necessary that they undergo a thorough process of industrial education and self-imposed restraint and discipline.
Don’t you think we are capable of effecting this change? I do. I not only think it. I know it. And I know, moreover, that it is inevitable.
Upon the one hand the capitalists are combining. It will be but a short time until practically all the lands, railroads, telegraphs, steel mills, sugar refineries, breweries, and other great establishments will be controlled by a gigantic trust composed of a few triumphant capitalists. But while they are combining and centralizing their capital, we are organizing the workers that they may act together, economically and politically, and possibly in other ways, before the struggle is ended and the victory won.
In the Industrial Workers they will vote as they strike, and strike as they vote—all together.
Do you know what I expect to see? I expect to see a general strike in the city of Chicago. I would rather see it here than in any other city in America; any other city in the world.
The capitalists are drunken with their power. They are running things to suit themselves, and they are going to keep the working class in subjection just as the remnants of the Indians are kept on their reservations out on the plains. And if you object they are so completely in control that they can club you, or they can jail you, or kill you if necessary.
I want to see the time when the workers of Chicago will be so thoroughly organized in their economic capacity that they can quit work and paralyze industry for just twenty-four hours, and when they are organized well enough to do that they will have every capitalist in the city and nation suing for peace. When they are organized well enough to do that they will secure more economic concessions in five minutes than they can get in five years striking and boycotting along the old trade union lines:
How is it now? Why, the union butcher workmen go out on strike and they strike bravely and loyally to the bitter end. But all other union men remain at work until the butcher workmen are used up.
The capitalists are rich: the loss of a few hundreds or thousands of dollars doesn’t hurt them, because they get it all back again. So they can wait until this detachment of the working class army is defeated and its stanchest supporters are out of jobs. Many of these quit the union; it is no use. They tried the union and are disgusted with it, and in all probability some of them will stay at work in the next strike and help defeat the union.
Next comes the strike of the Chicago machinists, and that lasts a long time. All their fellow-unionists remain at work. Here we have a large body of machinists engaged in a life and death struggle and they hold out wonderfully well. They levy assessments on all other machinists who keep at work to help these strikers in idleness for many weary months and then at last, when all the resources are exhausted and the men are on the point of starvation, they have to surrender, and they go back defeated, and the open shop system is established, and the union, so far as any usefulness to the machinist is concerned, is practically wiped out of existence.
What good has the machinists’ union done to these machinists? It collects high dues and pays high salaries. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are contributed by the workers with which they buy their own defeat. Now, defeat would be bad enough if it came about free of charge, but if you have to pay $174,000 for it, as the official reports of the machinists show, it is time you were doing a little thinking on your own account.
Mr. James O’Connell is at the head of the machinists’ union, and he is also a labor lieutenant of the capitalist class. He sits at the same banqueting table with the capitalists and is hand in glove with August Belmont—the employer of James Farley, the professional strike-breaker, who when you go on strike, steps in and gets as much pay in a day as you get in a year.
You can hardly blame the men who get disgusted with unions as they are run in Chicago. Not alone Mr. O’Connell, but Mr. Mitchell, president of the Mine Workers: Mr. Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, and other pure and simple union leaders are in economic tune with the master class, and are held up as model labor leaders by capitalist newspapers.
Periodically these “model leaders” go to New York to attend a love feast between capitalists and wage workers, or rather between capitalists and accredited leaders of wage workers.
You are only the common herd. They don’t have anything to do with you, and they don’t need to have anything to do with you. They deal with your leaders and between them they fix things, and all you have to do is to work and put up the money and they will attend to the rest.
Last fall, a year ago, when I was in New York, there came near being a strike on the Interborough railway lines. The employes had been outraged by the management of the Interborough under an agreement that had been shamefully violated by the company. They threatened to go out on strike. It happened to be a national election year, and under the pressure that was brought to bear upon him, Mr. Belmont, the president of the system, on the eve of the election, settled with the men and averted the impending strike.
In a speech I made in New York that night, I ventured the prediction that the settlement was temporary and made for political effect, and that soon after the election was over the corporation would begin methodically to violate the agreement and goad the men to strike. And so it came to pass. After the election was over the corporation renewed its offensive tactics until at last 6,000 of the men went out on strike. And now we behold an exhibition of the impotency, if not the crime, of outgrown unionism.
When these 6,000 men went out on strike August Belmont already had James Farley and his army of professional strike-breakers on the ground; had them three weeks in advance. And they were getting their pay, $5 a day and expenses, while Farley got an advance payment, said to have been $10,000. August Belmont, the president of the Interborough, was photographed with Farley, the strike-breaker. They were pictured side by side; they occupied the first page of the New York newspapers; they were represented as the modern strike-breakers. August Belmont, the capitalist, and James Farley, his mercenary minion.
The strike was soon defeated and the places of the men filled with scabs.
The union men who were in the power houses, who could and who should have shut off the power, kept those great plants in operation. They said, “We are in sympathy with you and would like to help you, but we cannot go out on strike without violating our contract.” And so, to preserve the sanctity of their craft contract, they cut the throats of their 6,000 fellow unionists, virtually scabbing on them, so far as the effect of their action, or rather non-action, was concerned. These union men might as well have stepped out of the power houses and taken the places that were vacated by the strikers.
Now comes the closing chapter of this story, the blackest of all. A little while after the 6,000 union men had gone out on strike and had been defeated by strike-breakers under Farley, the lieutenant of Belmont, the Civic Federation held its periodical banquet. August Belmont attended this banquet, being the president of the Federation. So also did the labor leaders. In their regular order came President Gompers, President Mitchell, President O’Connell, President Duncan and the rest of the presidents. They surrounded the banqueting board and sat and feasted and laughed and made joy together. The labor question was speedily settled, so far as they were concerned.
You may feel assured that there is no officer of the Industrial Workers who will ever banquet with the Civic Federation.
In closing, I appeal to you, as workingmen, to think for yourselves; to cut loose from those who have misled and betrayed you; to close up the ranks and unify your forces. I appeal to you to ally yourselves with the economic organization which embraces your entire class; I appeal to you to join the union that truly represents you, the union that unites you, the union in which you can stand shoulder to shoulder, regardless of your occupation; the union in which you will move forward, step by step, marching to the inspiring music of the coming emancipation. I appeal to you to declare yourselves here and now, to be for once and forever true enough to yourselves to join the only industrial union that is absolutely true to you.
And if you join this union in sufficient numbers, if you build up this organization and give it the power it ought to have—if you rally to the standard of this revolutionary union—then, as certain as I stand before you, you will carry that banner to victory. Then the workers will be the sovereign-citizens, the rulers of this earth. They will build houses and live therein; they will plant vineyards and eat the fruit thereof. The labor question will have been settled, and the working class, emancipated from the fetters of wage-slavery, will begin the real work of civilizing and humanizing the human race.