Do you know what I expect to see? I expect to see a general strike in the city of Chicago. I would rather see it here than in any other city in America; than any other in the world.
The capitalists are drunken with their power. They are running things to suit themselves, and they are going to keep the working class in subjection just as the remnants of the Indians are kept on their reservations out on the plains. And if you object they are so completely in control that they will club you, or they will jail you, or kill you if necessary.
I want to see the time when the workers of Chicago will be so thoroughly organized in their economic capacity that they can quit work and paralyze industry in Chicago for just twenty-four hours, and when they are organized well enough to do that they will have every capitalist in the city and nation suing for peace. When they are organized well enough to do that they will secure more economic concessions in five minutes than they can get in five years striking and boycotting along the old trade union lines.
How is it now? Why, the union butcher workmen go out on strike, and they strike bravely and loyally to the bitter end. But all other union men remain at work until the butcher workmen are used up.
The capitalists are rich; the loss of a few hundreds or thousands of dollars doesn’t hurt them, because they get it all back again. So they can wait until this corps of the working army is defeated and its stanchest supporters are out of jobs. Many of these quit the union; it is no use. They tried the union and are disgusted with it, and in all probability some of them will stay at work in the next strike and help defeat the union.
Next comes the strike of the Chicago machinists, and that lasts a long time. All their fellow unionists remain at work. Here we have a large body of machinists engaged in a life and death struggle, and they hold out wonderfully well. They levy assessments on all other machinists who keep at work to help these strikers in idleness for many weary months, and then at last, when all the resources are exhausted and the men are on the point of starvation, they have got to surrender, and they go back defeated, and the open shop system is established, and the union, so far as any usefulness to the machinist is concerned, is practically wiped out of existence.
What good has the machinists’ union done to these machinists? It collects high dues and pays high salaries. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are contributed by the workers with which to buy their own defeat. Now, defeat would be bad enough if it came about free of charge, but if you have to pay $174,000 for it, as the official report of the machinists show, it is time you were doing a little thinking on your own account.
Mr. James O’Connell is at the head of the machinists’ union, and he is also a labor lieutenant of the capitalist class. He sits at the same banqueting table with the capitalists and is hand in glove with August Belmont—the employer of James Farley, the professional strikebreaker, who, when you go on strike, steps in and gets as much pay in a day as you get in a year.
You can hardly blame the men who get disgusted with unions as they are run in Chicago. Not alone Mr. O’Connell, but Mr. Mitchell, president of the Mine Workers; Mr. Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, and other pure and simple union leaders are in economic tune with the master class, and are held up as model labor leaders by capitalist newspapers.
Periodically these model leaders go to New York to attend a love feast between capitalists and wage workers, or, rather, between capitalists and leaders of wage workers.