Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/23

 18 unions, in winning the shorter workday and in establishing the foundations of democracy in industry; the breath of progress is not in them. The international policy of our movement is a joke, when not a tragedy. Our labor journalism is colorless, stupid, and often corrupt; our co-operative movement is in its infancy; our labor leadership is incomparably reactionary. While the labor movements abroad, keeping pace with a growing capitalism, have gone ahead developing new conceptions, consolidating their organizations, and winning new conquests, we have practically stood still, stagnant, unresponsive, unprogressive. Finally we have arrived at the paradoxical situation where, apparently in contradiction to economic principles, the United States has at once the most highly developed industrial system and the weakest working class organization of the modern, capitalist world. So decrepit and unfit is our labor movement that, unless ways are found to revive and re-invigorate it, it is actually threatened with extinction by the employers in the present great "open shop" drive The American labor movement is bankrupt.