THE BASIS OF INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 8, 1 September 1913, Page 3

THE BASIS OF INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM

The existing method of wealthproduction and exchange, together with all social relations resulting therefrom, including all institutions, whether political, religious, or judicial, has come to be known generally as CAPITALISM. We find society to be devided practically into two groups. One owning the natural resources and all wealth-producing agencies; the other dependent alone upon the sale from day to day of its power to produce wealth through machinery aplied to the raw materials. The dominant section of the employing class is known by the technical term of BOURGEOIS, while the entirely propertiless portion of the workers is called the PROLETARIAT. The bourgeois group lives upon profits; the proletarian exists upon wages. The fact that the toilers to-day are not given food, clothing and shelter at first hand, as were the chattel slaves, nor handed a portion of their product, like serfs of ancient days; but receive in return for their services a money payment, has given to capitalism the name of THE WAGE SYSTEM.

The interests of the employing class and the working class cannot possibly harmonise, as both are striving to obtain a larger part of the wealth that is created. When one gains the other loses. An increase in the rate of wages, generally speaking, means a decrease in the amount of profits, and vice

verse. The difference between wages and the total product of labour represents unpaid labourprofits theft SURPLUS VALUE.

The conflict arising as a consequence of the diametrically opposed interests of the two classes, breaks out in the form of strikes and lock-outs, boycotts and blacklists, slugging and sabotage, and similar actions more or less approaching a state of actual warfare. All these are manifestations of THE CLASS STRUGGLE.

■ In selling their labour power the workers are forced to part with it for a price that nowhere approximates the amount of wealth which they create; but rather tends to be the equivalent of the amount it takes to create them. In other words, they receive enough of the medium of exchange to allow them to purlicase the necessary food, clothing, and shelter to fit them to return to their task the next morning and to enable them to replace themselves with other proletarians when they are deemed unfit for the productive process. This price is conditioned by supply and demand, by the standard of living in a country or section of a country, and it is an economic law which holds OHLY where competition reigns supreme in the labour market.

The labour power of the workers is a commodity which is bought and sold upon the labour market,

but tlie important difference between this and other commodities is that labour power is wrapped up in human flesh and blood and has the capability of becoming conscious that it can cease to be a commodity through class organisation. Upon those who now realise this rests the burden of making other toilers conscious of the same fact; they must strive to create CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS.

The creation of class consciousness, while heightening the present struggle, brings nearer the day when society will be freed from class rule. Class consciousness creates a solidarity among the producers which bears the same relation to the rising structure as mortar does to brick. It cements the individual entities into an inseparable whole. It is one of the prerequisites to the building of a new society within the shell of the old —a society in which all who are physically able shall be useful producers and in which the workers shall receive the full equivalent of their social product.

The foregoing in brief is the basis upon which rests the Industrial Union which is to fight the every-day battles of the wageworkers, and which is to function as a new society when the overthrow of capitalism is an accomplished fact. Worker,” U.S.A.