Approximately nine months later, in January of 1905, members of a numbers of labor organizations met in Chicago , Illinois to address the fact that craft unionism divides workers among themselves, while a great industrial union would permit unity. The document below is the manifesto adopted by that assembly. Social relations and groupings only reflect mechanical and industrial conditions. The great facts of present industry are the displacement of human skill by machines, and the increase of capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed. Because of these facts, trade divisions among laborers and competition among capitalists alike are disappearing.
Class divisions grow ever more fixed, and class antagonisms more sharp.
Trade lines have been swallowed up in a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend. New machines, ever replacing less productive ones, wipe out whole trades, and plunge new bodies of workers into the ever-growing army of tradeless, hopeless unemployed. As human beings and human skill are displaced by mechanical progress, the capitalists need use of the workers only during that brief period when muscles and nerves respond most intensely. The moment the laborer no longer yields the maximum of profits, he is thrown upon the scrap pile, to starve alongside the discarded machine. A deadline has been drawn, and an age limit established, to cross which, in this world of monopolized opportunities, means condemnation to industrial death.