Page:Shop Talks on Economics.djvu/54

 ing conditions, or to improve them where they become unendurable.

It is obvious that men or women working from ten to sixteen hours daily will have little strength or leisure for study, or activity in revolutionary work. It is also patent that wages are bound to be higher where men toil eight hours a day than where they work sixteen hours. It requires two shifts of men, working eight hours daily, to run a machine that one man runs sixteen hours.

It is not only necessary, but it is a highly desirable matter, that we continue to resist and to advance and attack in our daily struggle with the capitalists. For it is through present defeats and victories that we learn our strength and our weaknesses. We learn to fight by fighting. New tactics are often evolved in struggles that seem to be total failures. And class solidarity becomes a living thing, a resistless weapon, when we are fighting and acting more or less as a class.

Even group struggles—the isolated wars waged by craft unions against their employers—bear fruitful lessons in class solidarity. For craft wars are becoming more uniformly failures, and they show the vital need for revolutionary industrial unionism.

But craft union struggles have not always failed in that which they set out to accomplish, although victories are becoming increasingly difficult and impossible with the advance of productive machinery that