"In some countries these revolting, desperate masses may come out victorious, and establish a rule of their own, like the Russian Bolsheviki, only to find that they will have to keep on running society on private ownership basis, until industrial organization of the workers is so far advanced that it can take over the responsibility. There is no way in which the masses can escape industrial unionism. What they do not want to do now at our prompting, they will have to do later of their own initiative, driven by economic necessity. Our new society is bound to come. It will be firmly established in ten years if we are energetic. It will take longer if we are indifferent. We cannot stand still socially, because there is no footing before we reach the bottom. We cannot go back, any more than the butterfly can again become a larva. We must go forward to Industrial Democracy."
On page 23 of the same issue of "The One Big Union Monthly" we are informed that Industrial Unionism is International:
"Industrial unionism arises out of and is modeled after modern capitalism. Unlike trade unionism, it is not born of the capitalism of fifty years ago. Industrial unionism recognizes that capitalism is not only interindustrial, so to speak, but also international. That just as it binds industries together by means of machine processes and financial investments, so also does capitalism tend to bind nations together. Industrial unionism follows the same trend. It, too, is not only interindustrial but also international. Industrial unionism seeks to organize the industrial workers of the world just as capitalism seeks to exploit them. Industrial unionism is spreading wherever international capitalism exists. Like international capitalism, industrial unionism knows no boundaries, color, race, creed or sex. As international capitalism knows only profit, industrial unionism knows only the industrial exploitation by which profit is possible. Industrial unionism organizes to make industrial exploitation an impossibility. And capitalism is its most valued assistant."
Ettor, in "Industrial Unionism," page 21, tells us, that the I. W. W. does not organize by trades, but by industries: "All the workers in any plant, factory, mine, mill or any given industry in a given locality organize in one Local Industrial Union. All the Local Industrial Unions of a given general industry are banded together in the National Industrial Union. The National Industrial Unions are banded again stronger in the Industrial Department and then all Departments, six in all, are brought under one head, the General Administration of the I. W. W. One Big Union of all workers, welded together in such a manner that, imbued with the war cry: 'an injury to one is an injury to all,' all its members can act together in fighting the common enemy."
Explaining organization by industries rather than by trades, "The One Big Union Monthly," March 1, 1919, page 25, takes for instance the stockyards:
"We do not know how many crafts there are in the stockyards, but there are many. According to the old style, these crafts would be organized each by itself, the carpenters belonging to the national union of carpenters, the engineers to the national union of engineers, the butchers to the national union of butchers, etc. It also belongs to old style unionism to leave the unskilled workers unorganized. Our method would be to organize all the workers in a plant, as a branch of the Stockyard Workers' Industrial Union. This would imply the cancelling of trade distinctions and craft lines. As against the employer we would face him not as butchers, laborers, carpenters or engineers, but as stockyard workers, no matter whether we are office clerks or laborers, or carpenters, or engineers. This is what we mean with industrial unionism. The various branches would combine into district organizations if necessary, and all of them together would form the Stockyard Workers' Industrial Union as part of the Industrial Workers of the World. By being thus organized we hope to be able to carry on the fight locally, or by districts, or on a national scale with better chance of success, than if we were split up in a great number of unions in each plant, with little or no contact with one another. The advantages of the one big union idea are so apparent that no honest worker will, in earnest, contradict us."
The famous Preamble to the platform of the I. W. W. throws a startling light upon this revolutionary industrial union, which has, within recent years, been getting a very strong hold on immigrants from Europe:
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people, and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life.
"Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system.
"We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class.
"These conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one, an injury to all.
"Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work,' we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.'
"It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming a structure of the new society within the shell of the old."
Giovannitti, editor of the New York City Italian Socialist publication, "Il Proletario," one of the official Socialist organs enumerated in the "Proceedings[9] of the 1910 National Congress of the Socialist Party," writing in the April 5, 1913, edition of his paper, says:
"The aim of the Socialists and of the Syndicalists is precisely that of dispossessing the middle class by transferring property to the working class.
"We shall take possession of the industries for three very simple reasons: because we need them, because we desire them, and because we have the power to take them.
"Whether it is just or unjust, moral or immoral, it is no concern to us. We shall waste no time whatever in providing the validity of our legal titles, yet, if it will be necessary, after the dispossession will have been accomplished, we shall engage a couple of lawyers and judges to adjust the contracts and to render the act perfectly legal and respectable. So, too, if it will be necessary, we shall find a couple of most learned bishops to sanctify it. These matters can always be arranged--all that is strong and powerful becomes in time just and moral--and for this reason, we Syndicalists maintain that the social revolution is not a question of necessity and justice, but of necessity and strength."