International Socialist Review (1900) Vol 17

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW 21
of industrial departments, each of which
shall include many and closely-related
grades of labor. This is the only real embodiment
of the idea of solidarity of labor.
Under such a form of organization
"an injury to one would be regarded as an
injury to all," and rightly so. The capitalists
strive to drive the wages of the
workers down to the standard of the lowest-paid
man, and strive to depress the
wages of the lowest-paid man still lower.
The cost of female labor becomes the
standard to which the cost of male labor
continually tends, just as the cost of a
Chinese proletarian or wage-slave becomes
the level to which the cost of the
European worker's subsistence gradually
falls. The industrial union would permit
of and promote the strike of a whole industry,
embracing many crafts, or, if necessary,
the strike of a whole series of
industries, in order to defend the workers,
or to promote their interests. The industrial
union is a class union.
Third—the advocates of industrial unionism
hold that the ultimate and neverto-be-forgotten
object of the working
men's industrial movement must be to
seize and to hold as their own collective
property, all the means of production.
Capitalism, even for the highest paid
worker, is a system of robbery and a social
crime. Its main feature, private or
class ownership of the -materials and instruments
of production, is the outcome
of successive acts of theft by the ruling
class of the past, and is the means whereby
the capitalists force the workers to
hand over their labor power for a pittance.
Capitalism condemns the worker to the
# try, and, by that means, raise their ability
life of a slave, whose burden becomes
heavier, and whose reward grows ever
smaller. Never will the workers be masters
of their products until they are masters
of the tools. To that consummation
society must move. Rapidly and inevitably
the industries of the land are becoming
centralized in fewer and fewer hands,
while the labor of the wage-slaves in field
or factory, in workshop, mill and mine,
becomes more co-operative and interlinked
than ever. Industrial unionism prepares
the way for and lays the sure foundation
of the Socialist Republic, by producing
a working class industrially organized
throughout the length and breadth
of the land, and round the globe.
Industrial unionism combines the workers
that they may run the plants themselves,
that they may directly control the
various industries under the truest form
of democracy. Under the new economic
regime, the central directing authority
will be a parliament of industry, composed
of representatives of the various
departments of production, and will be
elected from below.
Fourth—industrial unionism, based as
it is on the fact of the class struggle, promotes
the political unity of labor by
achieving labor's industrial unity. The
new union will establish itself simply as
the economic organization of the working
class, it will proclaim the necessity for
political as well as industrial unity, it will
marshal the workers on the field of indus-
for unified action against capital in
the arena of politics.—The Maoriland
Worker.
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