Class Warfare
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War Of The Classes - Jack London
Unfortunately or otherwise, people are prone to believe in the reality of the things they think ought to be so.
This comes of the cheery optimism which is innate with life itself; and, while it may sometimes be deplored, it must never be censured, for, as a rule, it is productive of more good than harm, and of about all the achievement there is in the world.
Out of their constitutional optimism, and because a class struggle is an abhorred and dangerous thing, the great American people are unanimous in asserting that there is no class struggle.
And by "American people" is meant the recognized and authoritative mouth-pieces of the American people, which are the press, the pulpit, and the university. The journalists, the preachers, and the professors are practically of one voice in declaring that there is no such thing as a class struggle now going on, much less that a class struggle will ever go on, in the United States. And this declaration they continually make in the face of a multitude of facts which impeach not so much their sincerity, as affirm their optimism.
There are two ways of approaching the subject
of the class struggle. The existence of this struggle can be shown theoretically, and it
can 
be shown actually.
For a class struggle to exist in society there must be, first, a class inequality, a superior class and an inferior class, as measured by power; and, second, the outlets where the strength and ferment of the inferior class could escape are closed.
That there are classes in the United States is vigorously denied by many; but it is incontrovertible, when a group of individuals is formed, wherein the members are bound together by common interests which are peculiarly their interests and not the interests of individuals outside the group, that such a group is a class.
The owners of capital, with their dependents, form a class of this nature in the United States; the working people form a similar class. The interest of the capitalist class, say, in the matter of income tax, is quite contrary to the interest of the laboring class . . .
If between these two classes there be a clear
and vital conflict of interest, all the factors are present which make a class struggle;
but this struggle will lie dormant if the strong and capable members of the inferior class
be permitted to leave that class and join the ranks of
the superior class.
The capitalist class and the working class have existed side by side and for a long time in the United States; but hitherto all the strong, energetic members of the working class have been able to rise out of their class and become owners of capital.
They were enabled to do this because an
undeveloped country with an expanding frontier gave equality of opportunity to all. In the
almost lottery-like scramble for the ownership of vast unowned natural resources, and in
the exploitation of which there was little or no competition of capital, itself rising out
of exploitation, the capable, intelligent member of the working class found a field in
which to use his brains to his own advancement. Instead of being discontented in direct
ratio with his intelligence and ambitions, and of radiating amongst his fellows a spirit
of revolt as capable as he was capable, he left them to their fate and carved
his own way to a place in the superior class.
But the day of an expanding frontier, of a lottery-like scramble for the ownership of natural resources, and of the upbuilding of new industries, is past.
Farthest West has been reached, and an immense volume of surplus capital roams for investment and nips in the bud the patient efforts of the embryo capitalist to rise through slow increment from small beginnings. The gateway of opportunity after opportunity has been closed, and closed for all time.
These doors will not open again, and before
them pause thousands of ambitious young men to read the placard: No Thoroughfare.
- from War of the Classes, by Jack London. Published
1905, New York: Macmillan Co)
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Class
Struggle and the Wobblies Rejected
by most old-time AFL craft unions, unskilled and semi-skilled workers gravitated to a more
radical organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905 by a
group that included They were led by a big, brawling former miner with a booming voice know as "Big Bill" Haywood. He was openly and proudly committed to destruction of the employer class and the "capitalist state." The Preamble to the IWW's Constitution began with a ringing declaration that the "Working class and the employing class have nothing in common." Employers and the press depicted the IWW as an organization of the unwashed and unwanted; popular cartoonists pretended the initials stood for "I Won't Work." Since the IWW considered itself to be at war with capitalism it openly advocated sabotage and did not hesitate to use violence in organizing workers, black and white, immigrants and the unskilled, into "One Big Union." IWW organizers were a reckless, brawling, hell-bent-for-leather, irreverent and singing bunch of agitators. They led many bitterly fought strikes of mill workers, copper miners, lumber men, ranch hands, dock wallopers and others who had been by-passed by what the IWW called the "American Separation of Labor." Two of the strikes for which they were best remembered shut down the textile industry in Lawrence and the silk mills in Paterson. Adopting a tactic developed by the European labor movement the IWW sent strikers' children to live with working families in other cities, so that the workers would know their children would eat even if the parents starved. Reformers and intellectuals of the period romanticized the IWW. They raised funds, wrote articles and made speeches. But they were rarely found in the mining camps or other outposts where the real battles were fought. They had little understanding of the depths of the desperation that drove workers into unequal battles in response to the misery of their daily lives. In the decade or so in which the IWW flourished,it attacked craft unions as vigorously as it did employers and government. Though membership reached a peak of 200,000 by the eve of World War I, the IWW was eventually crushed by the power of the United States Government. Under wartime espionage laws, federal agents suppressed IWW publications, jailed more than 150 officers and scattered the membership with threats, harassment, prosecution and deportation. The
The Gastonia textile strike was part of a larger phenomenon rising from the tensions of the industry's rapid and disruptive development throughout the South. After World War 1, northern interests increasingly gained ownership of southern mills and relocated other shops to the region to take advantage of cheap labor. The number of spindles in Gaston County, N.C., grew from 3000 in 1848 to 1,200,000 in 1930 making it first in the state and the South, and third in the nation. The town of Gastonia swelled from 236 in 1877 to 30,000 in 1930, primarily from the influx of mountaineers exchanging their exhausted land for jobs in the new factories. Loray Mill, Gastonia's largest, was the first in the county to be owned and operated by Northerners seeking the benefits of a 'poor white' labor pool. In 1926, a southern textile worker earned an average of $15.81 for a 55-hour week compared to the $21.49 for a 48-hour week earned by his or her New England counterpart. The Loray Mill was also the first in the South to undergo new 'scientific management' techniques designed to fully exploit this labor savings, the 'stretch-out'. In early 1929, the anger and bitterness of thousands of textile workers exploded in mill towns throughout the region. The Gastonia strike at Loray Mills is the most famous of that movement. The history of textile workers continues to be taught from the top down. Joe Separk's definitive History of Gaston County barely mentions the strike. Today, of the 130 textile plants employing 28 to 30 thousand workers in Gaston County, only one small factory is organized. Fred Ratchford, executive secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and himself a longtime employee of Burlington Industries - the world's largest textile company - said of the 1929 strike in Loray, "One good thing about it is that there have been several efforts to organize here in the plants and not a one has been successful. Some of the old folks in the plants remember that earlier time." That earlier time described by Vera Buch has not changed much. Just over a decade ago, the longest strike in North Carolina history occurred at the Henderson cotton mills. This strike brought a violent reaction on the part of "law and order" forces-mill owners and state law enforcement personnel, who crushed the strike and imprisoned Textile Workers Union of America southern district director Boyd Payton for four years on a trumped-up conspiracy charge. Only in the final days of his administration did Governor Terry Sanford, the state's most liberal governor of the century, dare to pardon Payton. Even Sanford might not so easily have defied the textile interests if he had not had the public support of evangelist Billy Graham. The viciousness of the mill owners' resistance to textile organizing since the late 1920's has discouraged workers' efforts in the Carolinas to the present. Now TWUA has mounted a sustained effort against the textile magnates, particularly the Burlington and Cone Mill families. Notable victories were made recently in the Oneita Knitting Mills in Andrews and Lane, South Carolina, and in several Greensboro, North Carolina plants. As workers and their children learn the history of earlier organizing efforts, they will gain strength for their continuing battle with the textile bosses. As a TWUA official in the Charlotte district office told us, "Half the importance in winning a strike is in the telling of its history so that we learn from it."
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The IWW Songbook Various types of folk music have been popular in the U.S. throughout this century. Much of the folk music that was prominent around 1905 and later was political music in the form of topical songs. These protest songs were used regularly by the Industrial Workers of the World as one way of fostering solidarity among the workers. Songs played a very important role in this labor movement. The IWW called itself the "Singingest Union of them all." The IWW's use of music as a direct organizing arm inspired later song agitators by offering songs as a front-line device for building morale, recruiting new members, and garnering publicity. Their music also functioned as a continuing oral history: many of their major strikes, campaigns, and martyrs were recorded in song. In addition to the many pro-labor songs of this era, others were written as protests to World War I. Thirty editions of the IWW songbook were printed between 1911-1961. It was referred to as the "Little Red Songbook" and was inscribed with the motto, "To Fan the Flames of Discontent". The IWW used tunes from well-known songs such as hymns and hobo songs but wrote new words to go with them. A group which included musicologist Charles Seeger, along with John and Alan Lomax and others, worked to put folk music at the forefront. Conservatives of the era called this the "left-wing folk song conspiracy".
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Mr. Block represents the fool, the deceived, the believer, a person who time and time again "falls for all the games of their many masters who exploit them to the limit." "He is ignorant, gullible, spineless, patriotic, superstitious, religious, xenophobic, racist and jingoistic. Unlike her hopeless husband Mrs. Block, in a few strips, shows unmistakable signs of working-class consciousness, and is notably impatient with her mate's endless capacity for getting hoodwinked as a result of his inane faith in the goodness of "free enterprise". Her generally sympathetic portrayal reflects the IWW's principle of equality of the sexes and its emphasis on organizing women, points raised as early as the union's founding convention (by Lucy Parsons and others) and frequently reiterated in its agitational literature." The cartoon even inspired another fellow worker to write a song that went by the same name "Mr. Block" by Joe Hill. First published in the 1913 edition (fifth edition) of the Industrial Worker "Little Red Songbook".
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