(4) I.W.W. Preamble

The Preamble was amended as follows:

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 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 and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same Industry, thereby helping to defeat one another in wage wars.

Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest 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 the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

The politicians attempted to set up another organization, claiming to be the real industrial movement. It is nothing but a duplicate of their political party and never functions as a labor organization. It is committed to a program of the "civilized plane," i. e., parliamentarianism. Its publications are the official organs of a political sect that never misses an opportunity to assail the revolutionary workers while they are engaged in combat with some division of the ruling-class. Their favorite method is to charge the revolutionists with all the crimes that a cowardly imagination can conjure into being. "Dynamiters, assassins, thugs, murderers, thieves," etc., are stock phrases.

Following the victory of the Lawrence Textile workers the S.L.P. politicians renewed their efforts to pose as the I.W.W. By representing that they were the I.W.W. and THE ONLY I.W.W. they were enabled to deceive several thousand textile workers in Patterson, Passaic, Hackensack, Stirling, Summit, Hoboken, Newark, New Jersey; and Astoria, Long Island, and collect from them initiation fees and dues.

In every instance these political fakers betrayed the workers into the hands of the mill owners, and the efforts of the workers to better their conditions resulted in defeat. At Paterson and Passaic the S.L.P. entered into an alliance with the police to prevent the organizers of the I.W.W. from exposing them to the workers.

Their own actions, however, resulted in exposing them to the workers in their true colors and today they are thoroughly discredited with the workers throughout that district.

For a time the other wing of the political movement contented itself with spreading its venom in secret. Since the conclusion of the Lawrence strike the publications of the Socialist Party (with a very few exceptions) have never failed to use their columns to misrepresent and slander the organization and its active membership. Their attacks have extended to members of their own party who happened to be active members or supporters of the I.W.W.

Next page: (5) Structure of the I.W.W.