new society and, in its turn, was displaced by yet another class which set up another society in its turn. Following the parallelism, it is quite unbelievable that the proletariat—a class having large intelligence and a militant spirit—should continue to submit indefinitely to the dominion of a dwindling few, who, from every practical viewpoint, have become absolutely parasitic.
CRAFT UNIONISM
Immediately the capitalist class settled itself into power, it began to have trouble with the wage slave class. The "iron law of wages," which decrees that "wages shall always tend to sink to the lowest point at which the worker can maintain the efficiency demanded by the development of industry and reproduce his kind," began to operate forcefully. The wage workers awoke to the fact that the boasted freedom of the capitalists meant, for the workers, an unlimited freedom to starve. Private property in the lands, tools and machinery of production gave the proprietors a right of exclusion and, unless the workers accepted the terms laid down by the masters, they would starve.
The individual worker found himself helpless, and the early history of the factory system is too shocking and too shameful to be repeated here. It is enough to say, that out of the suffering and humiliation of the workers, the first Labor Unions arose. Originally, these were Mutualist Associations, with the design of conforming the worker to his environment by providing sick and burial benefits, and in other ways assisting him to make both ends meet; but later, the craftsmen, finding the automatic machine encroaching upon their skill, converted them into defensive institutions with the purpose of protecting the crafts.
The craftsmen now set up the plea that "skill is a property" and, therefore, possessors of skill should have the same rights as other property holders; and, so long as the machine processes were crude and imperfect and the
