Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/8

Rh few years ago its leaders used to tell us they were striving for "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work," but since that nonsensical conception has been exploded they dodge the issue altogether. Consequently the movement just drifts along aimlessly and planlessly, fighting for petty immediate demands, most of which are founded upon false bourgeois premises, and which lead the workers into a swamp of defeat. American Labor, because of its ignorance of its true goal, is short-sighted and crassly materialistic, It knows nothing of that wonderful spirit of sacrifice and idealism which is always born of the workers' hope for a new day. Mr. Gompers and the others who justify this condition of ignorance and fight relentlessly against every attempt to enlighten the workers about capitalist society and to get them to formulate real working class intellectual conceptions, are as generals of an army who have neither a plan of strategy nor a knowledge of the enemy they have to contend with. It is our calamity and discredit that one has to come to America to find the sad spectacle of a great labor movement which has not yet freed itself intellectually from the bonds of capitalism, and which is still persisting in the foolish and hopeless task of patching up the wage system.

No less primitive is American Labor's conception of political action. In this respect also we stand in a class by ourselves, at the foot of the list. In all important foreign countries the labor movements have come to understand that they must carry on the class war in the political as well as the industrial field. With them it is no longer a debatable question as to whether or not the workers should organize politically on class lines. Such organization is so well understood as to be taken for granted as a self-evident necessity. The only matter at issue is whether their political parties should be Labor, Socialist, Syndicalist, or Communist in make-up. Only in the United States is the labor movement so altogether raw and undeveloped that it still has this fundamental lesson to learn. This is the one modern country where the mass of organized workers have no political party of their own, and where they continue to tail along in the train of the capitalist parties, pursuing the program of