"We believe in an industrial democracy; that the industry shall be owned by the people and operated on a co-operative plan instead of the wage plan; that there is no such thing as a fair day's pay; that we should have the full product of our labor in the co-operative system as distinguished from the wage system.
"Furthermore," went on the witness, as the jury leaned forward to catch his every word, "our ideas were suggested to us by conditions in modern industry, and it is the historical mission of the workers to organize, not only for the preliminary struggles, but to carry on production afterward."
"We object to this!" shouted Mr. Cooley, and the court sustained the objection.
Despite continual protests from the prosecution Thompson gave the ideas of the I. W. W. on many questions. Speaking of free speech the witness said:
"Free speech is vital. It is a point that has been threshed out and settled before we were born. If we do not have free speech, the children of the race will die in the dark."
The message of industrial unionism delivered thru the sworn testimony of a labor organizer was indeed an amazing spectacle. Judge Ronald never relaxed his attention during the entire examination, the jury was spell-bound, and it was only by an obvious effort that the spectators kept from applauding the various telling points.
"There is overwork on one hand," said Thompson, "and out-of-work on the other. The length of the working day should be determined by the amount of work and the number of workers. You have no more right to do eight or ten or twelve hours of labor when others are out of work, despondent, committing suicide, than you have to drink all the water, if that were possible, while others are dying of thirst.
"Solidarity is the I. W. W. way to get their demands. We do not advocate that the workers should organize in a military way and use guns and dynamite. The most effective weapon of labor is economic power: the modern wage workers are the living parts of industry and if they fold their arms, they immediately precipitate a crisis, they paralyze the world. No other class has that power. The other class can fold their arms, and they do most of the time, but our class has the economic power. The I. W. W. preaches and teaches all the time that a far more effective weapon than brickbats or dynamite is solidarity.
"We have developed from individual production, to social production, yet we still have private ownership of the means of production. One class owns the industries and doesn't operate them, another class operates the industries and does not own them. We are going to have a revolution. No one is more mistaken than those who believe that this system is the final state of society. As the industrial revolution takes place, as the labor process takes on the co-operative form, as the tool of production becomes social, the idea of social ownership is suggested, and so the idea that things that are used collectively should be owned collectively, presents itself with irresistible force to the people of the twentieth century. So there is a struggle for industrial democracy. We are the modern abolitionists fighting against wage slavery as the other abolitionists fought against chattel slavery. The solution for our modern problems is this, that the industries should be owned by the people, operated by the people for the people, and the little busy bees who make the honey of the world should eat that honey, and there should be no drones at all in the hives of industry.