The work of organizing has little, if any, permanent value unless the work of education, the right kind of education, goes hand in hand with it.
There is no cohesiveness in ignorance.
The members of a trade-union should be taught the true import, the whole object of the labor movement and understand its entire program.
They should know that the labor movement means more, infinitely more, than a paltry increase in wages and the strike necessary to secure it; that while it engages to do all that possibly can be done to better the working conditions of its members, its higher object is to overthrow the capitalist system of private ownership of the tools of labor, abolish wage-slavery and achieve the freedom of the whole working class and, in fact, of all mankind.
Karl Marx recognized the necessity of the trade union when he said, * * * “the general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages or to push the value of labor more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. * * * By cowardly giving way in their every-day conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.”
Marx also set forth the limitations of the trade-union and indicated the true course it should pursue as follows:
“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wage system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these every-day struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wage system.’ * * * * * *
“Trades unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wage system.”
In an address to the Knights of St. Crispin, in April, 1872, Wendell Phillips, the eloquent orator and passionate hater of slavery in every form, said:
“I hail the Labor movement for the reason that it is my only hope for democracy.”