Page:One Big Union of All the Workers the Greatest Thing on Earth (ca 1919, Chicago).pdf/9

Rh must be equipped with the knowledge, must construct the organizations, by which the cause of social classes can be removed. Industrial inequality is the source of all other inequality in human society. The change in the ownership of the essentials of life will bring automatically, so to say, the change in the intercourse and the associations, and also in the institutions for the promotion of these things, between the human beings upon the globe.

Good will, revolutionary will-power, determination, courage are valuable assets in the struggle for the change. But they are like the water on the millwheels, unconscious of the great service that they are rendering. To convert force and power into useful operation requires intelligence. And that intelligence must guide us to use the accumulated force for a defined purpose. That purpose, as it seems to be agreed, is to form a new social, or rather industrial structure within the shell of the old. To accomplish this the advocates, the militants for the new, must know to what extent the present factors in industrial development have organized and systematized industrial production. When this is fully understood, this may also explain the subsequent domination of industrial possession over the political, social and other agencies in present day and previously existing societies.

The workers of the world, conscious of their historic mission, will learn to avoid the mistakes they would make should they depend on other forces than their own for the solution of the world's problem. Agencies and institutions deriving their lease of existence from the industrial masters of today can not be looked to for support. They may feign being in favor of radical changes in the effects—they will, however, strenuously and violently oppose any attempt at destroying the base, or the cause.

The working class alone is interested in the removal of industrial inequality, and that can only be