World Labor Unity/Chapter 1
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.
3. That in every country where capitalism has had a chance to develop, it has brought into existence a working class, yoked to the wage system, victimized by capitalist wars, and regimented into its mines and factories. This working class makes up the majority of the population in all capitalist countries. The master class in each country owns and controls the machinery of production, the machinery of information and education, and the machinery of the state. The working class uses the machinery of production and accepts the authority of school, press, and state. Out of the product created in the industrial process the workers receive a subsistence. The owners of the system enjoy surplus and leisure.
4.That the workers as a whole can no longer hope to gain by co-operating with the owning class. The struggle between the owners has reached too acute a stage. Class collaboration merely means that the workers are assisting the owners to prepare for another world war and thus to destroy what the workers have produced by their labor.
5. That out of the capitalist order, which has made its contribution to the world and is rapidly disintegrating, there is arising a new social order based on labor and co-operation instead of ownership and competition. The standard bearers of this new order are the organized workers. Already, in the Soviet Union, this new social order has been tested out for nearly a decade, and with amazing success. The workers in other countries, as they realize these facts, grow more restive under the old yoke. China is breaking free. All over Europe the consciousness of purpose and power is coming to the workers.
6.That the new organization of the workers must be world-wide in the same sense that economic and social life have become world-wide.
7.That in order to establish this world organization the labor movement must achieve world unity. Thus World Labor Unity appears as the biggest immediate problem before the workers.