Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/7

2 out of it, it will be well for us to demonstrate the extreme undevelopment of the American labor movement by considering a few of its principal phases:

A prime requisite for carrying on Labor's fight successfully against the exploiters is a clear understanding of just what that fight is about. Otherwise practical programs and effective tactics are out of the question. American Labor, aside from the weak revolutionary groups, is particularly lacking in this vital respect. It has not yet opened its eyes to the true meaning of the labor struggle, nor is it trying to do so. It is intellectually blind.

In all other important countries, particularly in Europe, Organized Labor has awakened to the revolutionary character of the working class movement. It has come to acquire a revolutionary point of view regarding private property, the State, the wage system, the class struggle, and capitalist society generally. It knows that the wrestlings between the workers and the capitalists are but so many incidents of a revolutionary struggle in which either side seizes from the other all that it has the power and intelligence to take. With eyes that have been opened, Labor abroad is conscious of its revolutionary mission, and it is striving constantly, despite a thousand timidities and mistakes, towards the only way to solve the labor problem, towards the abolition of the capitalist system and the establishment of a proletarian regime.

But American Labor is still asleep, drugged into insensibility by bourgeois propaganda. It is the only important labor movement in the world not yet aware of the revolutionary character of the fight that it is carrying on; it is the only one which has not declared for some sort of a socialist society as its ultimate goal. And the worst of it is that it is making no effort toward such an awakening. European Labor studies present day society deeply and draws fundamentally revolutionary conclusions therefrom, but American Labor takes capitalist economics and morals for granted. An earnest study of social institutions by a typical American labor leader would be a world curiosity.

In this philosophical backwardness, in this positive refusal to see capitalism in its true light, originate most of the evils from which our labor movement is now suffering. American Labor has no social vision, no real understanding of what it is trying to accomplish. A