Industrial Unionism: What is it?

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 27, 8 September 1911, Page 7

Industrial Unionism: What is it?

IT HAS FOUR CARDINAL POINTS. THIRD—The advocates of Industrial Unionism hold that the ultimate and never to be forgotten object of the working men's industrial movement must be to seize and to hold as their own. collective property, all the means of production. Capitalism, even for the highest paid worker, is a system of robbery and. a social crime. Its main feature, private or class ownership of the'materials and instruments of production, is the outcome • of successive acts of theft by the ruling class of the past, and is the means whereby the capitalists force the workers to hand over their labor power for a pittance. Capitalism condemns the worker to the life of a slave, whose burden becomes heavier, and whose reward grows ever smaller. Never will the workers be masters of their products until they are masters of the tools. To that consummation society must move. Rapidly and inevitably the industries of the land are. becoming centralised in fewer and fewer hands, while the labor of the wage-slaves in field or factory, in workshop, mill and mine, becomes more co-operative and interlinked than ever. Industrial Unionism prepares the. way

for and lays the sure foundation of the Socialist Republic, by producing a working class industrially organised throughout the length and breadth of the land and round tlie globe. Industrial Unionism combines the workers that they may run the plants themselves, that they may directly control the various industries under the truest form of democracy. Under the new economic regime, the central directing authority will be a Parliament of Industry, composed of representatives of the various departments of production, a.nd will be elected from below. It is the historic work of the industrial union of the working class to rear that Parliament of Industry. FOURTH — Industrial Unionism, based as it is on the fact of the class struggle, promotes the Political Unity Oif Labor by achieving Labor's Industrial Unity. The new union will establish itself simply as the economic organisation of tihe working class, it will proclaim the necessity for political as well as industrial unity, it will marshal the workers on the field of industry, and, by that means, rariso their ability fo*r unified action against capital in the arena of politics.