slowly toward the front of the platform, and a deep vibratory voice pronounced these words:
"I come, to speak for a class that CAN not speak for itself! (one light turned on.)
"I come, to speak for a class that WILL not speak for itself! (more lights.)
"I come, to speak for a class that DARE not speak for itself!
"I DARE (all lights flashed on) to speak for the working class!"
The "sky pilot" in this story typifies the eleven "leading socialists" who have thus presumed to deal with the question of "socialism and its revolutionary outcome." I shall endeavor to show you that no one of the eleven possesses the genius to grasp the proletarian standpoint of the question, and that their "practical socialism" amounts to a travesty even upon capitalist politics and is, therefore, the wildest of utopian dreams.
NO MENTION OF AN ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION.
None of the ten replies to the Saturday Evening Post's question contains mention of an economic organization of the working class in relation to the proposed transformation from capitalism to the Co-operative Commonwealth. Simons, in his speech before the Propaganda League, May 9, ridiculed the idea of the Union's; "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old," as the I. W. W. Preamble puts it[1].
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- ↑ A more recent statement of Mr. Simons' emphasizes this position. In a letter to William English Walling, published in the International Socialist Review for January 1910, Simons writes: "Personally, I have great sympathy with industrial unionism, but not as a panacea. I think its most deadly enemy is the man who talks about it as a means of getting the co-operative commonwealth. We are not organizing unions in the future or in the past but NOW, and for the purpose of fighting the class struggle." It will be remembered that Mr. Simons was one of the signers of the original Industrial Union Manifesto, and even boasted in his speech before the League of having written the greater part of the Manifesto. It is credibly reported that a great novelist, Sir Walter Scott, employed an amanuensis!
