Machine Slavery

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 3, 1 April 1913, Page 4

Machine Slavery

“ The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” Thus speaks the preamble of the Industrial Workers of tine World. Any wage worker who reads the daily paper and notes the world-wide spontaneous strikes; who is struck by the irresistible power of co-operative solidarity displayed by men and women of diverse creeds, colour and nationalities; who observes the ever-increas-ing multitude of paupers and social outcasts contrasted with the concentration of wealth and power into correspondingly fewer hands; must at once endorse the above pregnant passage. Any intelligent man must affirm it, and, in affirming it, must more or less vaguely affirm the clash of Interests, Work mg Class and Capitalist interests, known in common parlance as the Class Struggle. This struggle, locally and internationally, is waged around the present-day machine, the mighty product of working class genius, the outcome of an Aeon-long evolution of Working Class Brain and Muscle. This machine, together with the Land, is the Property of the Ruling Class. From this ownership springs the power of the Ruling Class, for so long as these things are in their hands, they can give or withhold the means of Life from the great bulk of the race; may starve, or feed them as their whims prompt. The intelligent worker understands how such power is derived, and consequently he knows that the only way to destroy that Power is to organise and seize the machines, and in seizing these machines, to socialise them, rendering them servants of the Common Interests.

Oht of this struggle for Human Emancipation are born the radical, scientific Labour organisations of to-day. They concentrate their energies in educating their fellows to organise to abolish the malignant thrall of the machine. And so every strike, every boycott, every industrial fight is. more or less, an

organised protest against presentday machine slavery. To capture and hold these vital instruments, the Working Class must strengthen their present slight hold on their masters; they must organise to revolutionise the hours of Labour A shortening of hours is a stronger hold: the abolition of foul conditions is a still firmer hold. The one eliminates the dangerous unemployed army upon which the machine and its masters depend for their power; the other makes the w orker more oi a rational being and less of a slave. The One Big Union form of organisation will destroy all prejudices, whether racial, religious-. or resulting from craft divisions. and will arouse that solidarity which alone can assure success. We must organise, educate, and agitate, then, when the One Big Union holds universal sway, and the “ Internationale” rings the w ide w orld over, the Working Class will no longer be the slaves of the machine ; their shackles will snap like twigs before the storm. The machine will have been conquered, socialised, and made the servant of the emancipated Workers of the World. Span w ire.