War of the Classes | Page 6

capitalist to rise through slow increment from
small beginnings. The gateway of opportunity after opportunity has
been closed, and closed for all time. Rockefeller has shut the door on
oil, the American Tobacco Company on tobacco, and Carnegie on steel.
After Carnegie came Morgan, who triple- locked the door. These doors
will not open again, and before them pause thousands of ambitious
young men to read the placard: NO THOROUGH-FARE.
And day by day more doors are shut, while the ambitious young men
continue to be born. It is they, denied the opportunity to rise from the
working class, who preach revolt to the working class. Had he been
born fifty years later, Andrew Carnegie, the poor Scotch boy, might
have risen to be president of his union, or of a federation of unions; but
that he would never have become the builder of Homestead and the
founder of multitudinous libraries, is as certain as it is certain that some
other man would have developed the steel industry had Andrew
Carnegie never been born.
Theoretically, then, there exist in the United States all the factors which
go to make a class struggle. There are the capitalists and working
classes, the interests of which conflict, while the working class is no
longer being emasculated to the extent it was in the past by having
drawn off from it its best blood and brains. Its more capable members
are no longer able to rise out of it and leave the great mass leaderless
and helpless. They remain to be its leaders.
But the optimistic mouthpieces of the great American people, who are
themselves deft theoreticians, are not to be convinced by mere
theoretics. So it remains to demonstrate the existence of the class
struggle by a marshalling of the facts.
When nearly two millions of men, finding themselves knit together by
certain interests peculiarly their own, band together in a strong
organization for the aggressive pursuit of those interests, it is evident

that society has within it a hostile and warring class. But when the
interests which this class aggressively pursues conflict sharply and
vitally with the interests of another class, class antagonism arises and a
class struggle is the inevitable result. One great organization of labor
alone has a membership of 1,700,000 in the United States. This is the
American Federation of Labor, and outside of it are many other large
organizations. All these men are banded together for the frank purpose
of bettering their condition, regardless of the harm worked thereby
upon all other classes. They are in open antagonism with the capitalist
class, while the manifestos of their leaders state that the struggle is one
which can never end until the capitalist class is exterminated.
Their leaders will largely deny this last statement, but an examination
of their utterances, their actions, and the situation will forestall such
denial. In the first place, the conflict between labor and capital is over
the division of the join product. Capital and labor apply themselves to
raw material and make it into a finished product. The difference
between the value of the raw material and the value of the finished
product is the value they have added to it by their joint effort. This
added value is, therefore, their joint product, and it is over the division
of this joint product that the struggle between labor and capital takes
place. Labor takes its share in wages; capital takes its share in profits. It
is patent, if capital took in profits the whole joint product, that labor
would perish. And it is equally patent, if labor took in wages the whole
joint product, that capital would perish. Yet this last is the very thing
labor aspires to do, and that it will never be content with anything less
than the whole joint product is evidenced by the words of its leaders.
Mr. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor,
has said: "The workers want more wages; more of the comforts of life;
more leisure; more chance for self-improvement as men, as
trade-unionists, as citizens. THESE WERE THE WANTS OF
YESTERDAY; THEY ARE THE WANTS OF TODAY; THEY WILL
BE THE WANTS OF TOMORROW, AND OF TOMORROW'S
MORROW. The struggle may assume new forms, but the issue is the
immemorial one,--an effort of the producers to obtain an increasing
measure of the wealth that flows from their production."
Mr. Henry White, secretary of the United Garment Workers of America
and a member of the Industrial Committee of the National Civic

Federation, speaking of the National Civic Federation soon after its
inception, said: "To fall into one another's arms, to avow friendship, to
express regret at the injury which has been done, would not alter the
facts of the situation. Workingmen will continue to demand more