Page:Onward Sweep of the Machine Process (ca 1917).pdf/9

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THE ONWARD SWEEP
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help each other or get unity of action. But there are thousands of workers who are beginning to realize that they have nothing in common with the employer they are working for. While the craft unions (the American Federation of Labor) says that the workers must organize to get a "fair share" of what they produce, the industrial organization (the Industrial Workers of the World) says that the workers must organize to get all they produce. The I. W. W. also says: "The workers made the machines, and the workers run the machines; therefore, by God, the machines should also belong to the workers."

The Future.

The number of those making millions out of the hides of the workers is increasing, at the same time as the number of those starving is increasing. In 1861 there was only one millionaire in the United States; today there are over 40,000 of them, with a good many owning hundreds of millions.

The number of parasites is increasing constantly and at the same time the bread lines are getting longer and larger. No longer are there individual shoemakers, or fifty or a hundred men only thrown out of work—but today we have the whole of organized society, with its murderous institutions, jails, pens, militia, armies and navies, pitted against the men and women who are closed out because of modern machinery. In order to change this and to do away with the misery, injustice and degradation caused by this grinding "civilization," the workers must organize on such lines that they can all stand together and meet the organized masters with a union just as widely, well, and powerfully organized as is their enemy's; and thus, by tying up ALL THE INDUSTRIES at once, change the whole to a better world—a world of the workers.

That is what the workers of all ages have been after—a better world. No one knows the suffering better than the slave himself, and therefore it must be he who must free himself from the lash of the masters. Noth-