The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people, and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the ́earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping to defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing indus'trially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. 2

There is nothing in the preamble or manifesto which does not conform to Socialist doctrines, or to which the International Socialist movement might not subscribe. It is the interpretation of the preamble by individual members of the organization which has attached the Industrial Workers of the World to the Syndicalist rather than to the Socialist movement.

The declaration in the manifesto that the workers should own and operate their own tools, and that they alone should enjoy the fruits of their labor, would mean, according to American Socialists, that all workers, through a political state, or regulated by it, would operate, own, and enjoy collectively all tools and the product of industry.

Moreover, Socialists who are not bureaucrats see in the labor unions the future administrative units of industrial democracy. With this point of view, they can subscribe to the section of the preamble which reads, "by organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." But this sentence, interpreted by the leaders of the Industrial Workers, is directly opposed to the political Socialism of America. It is the declaration of the Syndicalists that the new social order will not be dependent on political action or a political state, but it will be an industrial commonwealth in which all governmental functions as we know them to-day will have ceased to exist, and in which each

industry will be controlled by the workers in it without external interference.

But whether the workers are Syndicalists or Socialists is less important to the Industrial Workers of the World than is usually supposed. What the workers actually believe in regard to the future, the Industrial Workers of the World considers of less importance than what they accept as true or reject as false in their own present relations to their work and fellow workers. The Syndicalist theory that each group of workers shall control the industry in which they work, is simpler in form and easier to grasp than the idea of social ownership of all production politically managed. The point the Industrial Workers is keen about making is that wealth belongs to labor.

To organized labor it is also unimportant whether the Industrial Workers' philosophy is Syndicalist or Socialist, or even whether it is sound or unsound in its details of a future state. It is unimportant except as it serves agitation purposes. Whatever weakness or strength is inherent in the philosophy is for the time being of interest to theorists rather than to labor organizations in active operation from day to day.

The use of the Syndicalist theory is part of the avowed purpose of the Industrial Workers to force the labor movement to accept the doctrine of the class struggle to acknowledge the irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor. The organization pro

poses to carry these doctrines through an aggressive and militant campaign into the ranks of the workers without property and without skill. Of the forms of organization chosen by the Industrial Workers for accomplishing its purpose and waging its warfare, the first in importance is the substitution of industrial for craft unionism. An official statement from the secretary of the organization says:

The craft plan of organization is a relic of an obsolete stage in the evolution of capitalist production. At the time of its inception it corresponded to the development of the period; the productive worker in a given industry took the new raw material, and with the tools of the trade or craft, completed the product of that industry, performing every necessary operation himself. As a result the workers combined in organizations the lines of which were governed by the tools that they used. At that period this was organization. To-day, in view of the specialization of the processes of production, the invention of machinery, and the concentration of ownership, it is no longer organization but division. And division on the economic field for the worker spells defeat and degradation. 3

3

The Industrial Workers set itself the task of gathering together the workers of the separate trades of an industry, the workers of the branches of an industry, and at last all the workers of all branches of all the industries into what it calls "One Big Union."

For the purpose of sympathetic action, the Industrial Workers proposes to abolish all forms of labor

union contract with capital, to introduce low dues and low initiation fees in place of the high dues and initiation fees of certain trade unions; the short strike followed by the use of sabotage on the return to work after a lost strike, and the education of the workers to reliance on direct action rather than political or delegated action.

The opposition of the Industrial Workers to the contract between labor unions and capital follows the dogma of the irreconcilable interests of the contracting parties. But contracts are opposed on practical grounds as well. The Industrial Workers points out that it is a cut-throat policy, disastrous to labor as a whole, to permit one group of workers to tie themselves to capital in a determinate or indeterminate contract, and because of the contract to remain at work if another group in a related trade strikes and needs the help of the tied-up group to win its fight. The Industrial Workers states that there is only one contract that workers in all honesty can make,-the contract to stand by a fellow worker.

The Industrial Workers opposes the limitation to union membership which is created by the trade unions through their practice of imposing high dues and initiation fees. It opposes it on the ground that it creates an aristocracy of labor and is in its essence the denial of fraternity; that the gains of the few are bought at the sacrifice of the many; that it destroys the spirit of unification of all labor and