Page:One Big Union of All the Workers the Greatest Thing on Earth (ca 1919, Chicago).pdf/30

28 forces, and harnesses them to render service for social good.

LABOR THE SOLE PRODUCER.

To all of the making and development of these social institutions the workers, and they alone, contribute their intellect and their manual labor. They have created the instruments to produce wealth with, and improved them as time rolled by.

These institutions are organized in their operative functions to yield profits for a few who never did, nor do, contribute to their making and maintenance, except in a manner to protect them in the possession of things that they did not make.

The human forces rendering these instruments, agencies and implements useful to all society, and adding value to matter and forces of nature, are divorced from their creations by powerful combinations of parasitic nature, by which a few control all the co-ordinate stations of industrial life through the means that they have organized and subjected to their rulership. Against these hostile powers the workers must organize their own resources and their own collective power, in organizations embracing all useful members of society and wealth producers.

THE MISSION OF THE WORKING CLASS.

A labor organization to correctly represent the working class must have two things in view.

First: It must combine the wage-workers in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect the interests of the workers of today in their struggles for fewer hours of toil, more wages and better conditions.

Secondly: It must offer a final solution of the labor problem—an emancipation from strikes, injunctions, bullpens, and scabbing of one against the other.