WORLD LABOR UNITY
I. Issues before Labor
Labor has not found itself. It is not united. The workers have no idea of their organic power. Only here and there, in Russia, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and a few other countries has the labor movement taken any leading part in public life. The great unorganized masses in the remainder of the world work and suffer silently. They are still the defenceless victims of exploitation and aggression. Lacking any means of effective protest, they continue to carry the crushing burdens of poverty, over-work, and unemployment which the system of capitalist imperialism presses upon their shoulders.
This is the beginning, however, not the end, in the story of organized labor. Economic conditions are changing with great rapidity. The labor movement has grown up in less than a century as one of the many products of the industrial revolution.
Where the labor movement has become conscious of its destiny and of the immediate tasks which it faces, it understands:
1.That human life is now organized on a world scale. Individual nations can no longer contain within their boundaries the economic and social pursuits of their citizens. The ends of the earth are tied together by the exchanging of raw materials and of finished products; by the activities of investors; by the migrating masses of workers; by the growing speed with which the masses in one country are acquainted with events elsewhere. World economic and social interdependence is a fact—probably the most important fact arising out of present day life.
2.That the employing or owning class is powerfully organized within each country, and that it is rapidly uniting internationally in its efforts to control raw materials and markets and to exploit workers. There is now going on a fierce struggle among the masters to determine which group of capitalists shall dominate and exploit the earth. The World War, one phase of that struggle, wrecked whole nations and left Europe in chaos. The struggle for power still continues, however, threatening even greater destruction when it next emerges on the military plane. Meanwhile a revolution in Hungary or the establishment of a workers' government in Russia brings the terrified exploiters momentarily together until they have re-established capitalism and set up a white terror.
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