hysical endurance of the workers themselves will allow. And the workers find themselves forced constantly to fight in order to hold the little they already have. So that, on every side, we see little groups of workers in conflict with their employers, fighting to maintain working conditions, or to improve them where they become unendurable.
It is obvious, that men or women working from ten to sixteen hours daily will have little strength or leisure for study, or activity in revolutionary work. It is also patent that wages are bound to be higher where men toil eight hours a day than where they work sixteen hours. It requires two shifts of men, working eight hours daily, to run a machine that one man runs sixteen hours.
It is not only necessary, but it is a highly desirable matter, that we continue to resist and to advance and attack in our daily struggle with the capitalists; For it is through present defeats and victories that we learn our strength and our weaknesses. We learn to fight by fighting. New tactics are often evolved in struggles that seem to be total failures. And class solidarity becomes a living thing, a resistless weapon, when we are fighting and acting more or less as a class.
Even group struggles–the isolated wars waged by craft unions against their employers–hear fruitful lessons in class solidarity. For craft wars, are becoming more uniformly failures, and to show the vital need for a wider and even broader organization of the workers of the world.
But craft union struggles have not always failed in that which they set out to accomplish, although victories are becoming increasingly difficult and impossible with the advance of productive machinery that abolishes the need of skilled laborers. Skilled workers have often been able to form skilled labor monopolies, or unions, where their particular skill has been in demand, and have forced their employers to give them shorter hours, higher wages or better working conditions. But these victories have been due to a monopoly of a particular kind of skill, and not at all to any class consciousness on the part of the workers.
Just at present workers all over the world in the countries where gold is the recognized standard of value are demanding, and generally securing, higher wages. This is owing to the decreasing value of gold, which exchanges for fewer commodities than formerly, and which has consequently caused a rise in prices, and an increase in the cost of living.
These workers are gaining higher wages; from the employing capitalists because it costs more to "keep" them, just as the man owning a horse has to pay a bigger bill when the price of "feed" goes up, if he wants to keep the horse. They are not gaining higher wages through class conscious efforts, although every struggle is a breeder of class consciousness, even though it be only in a negative way.
Modern machinery is eliminating the need of skilled labor and unskilled labor with ever increasing speed. Skilled workers are thrown into the ranks of the unskilled and unskilled workers are thrown into the ranks of the unemployed. And gradually all workers are being more and more forced to compete with each other for jobs upon a common level. Nothing can stop the progress of the automatic machine, the most wonderful invention of man through all ages–the machine that will one day free mankind from ceaseless anxiety and degrading toil!
But struggle we must–today and tomorrow. And the fight will grow keener with the passing years.
Men and women are being hurled into the ranks of the unemployed by thousands and by hundreds of thousands. We must reduce the number of jobless workers.
We must organize along industrial lines to shorten the hours of labor. If an eight-hour day were inaugurated, it would mean the additional employment of millions of men and women in America tomorrow. It would insure us leisure for study and recreation-for work in the Army of the Revolution, and it would mean higher wages in america generally. For the fewer men there are competing for jobs, the higher the wage they are able to dem