Page:The General Strike (Haywood, ca 1911).pdf/33

Rh we make this comparison we shall find to our surprise, that though we have been letting them have it all their own way, their position is weak compared to ours.

It is we who manufacture the wealth, and it is they who enjoy it. It is they who organize wars, but as we have already seen it is we who supply the material and fight them. It is they who order our comrades of the army to shoot us down, but it is we who manufacture the rifle. Every time it is our activity, but we have allowed them to think it out.

We may understand from this that our power is of a very different nature from theirs. They give the order, but there is no strength in that alone. It is the prison, the bludgeon, the rifle and the maxim gun—all of them instruments of destruction—these which lurk behind the order and the law, are the real power of the master class.

The power of the worker is of quite a different nature and much more effective. He, when he is bold enough to know it, is master of the situation because he is the maker of all the things upon which the master class depends. Their power is that of destruction, ours is that of construction. Their indeed is the army of death, and ours the army of life.

They will keep from war upon us only so long as the factory worker does his allotted task and produces what the master needs. We will refrain from war upon them only when the factory workers are free and when the people of the slums come out to work with us and enjoy the world's wealth.

This is the class war, about which the socialists have so often talked but which they have never waged. It is the only war which can bring the final settlement, and until it is reached nation after nation will rise and fall, and in the process millions will be slaughtered and millions more degraded and depraved in the trade of murder.