The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1926-07-10


of that day number of useful lessons
very much the same lessons that twentieth
century European labor learned from the war
OF 19l4-l91S They learned that capital de-
clares war, and the workers do the fighting;
that capital reaps immense profits from war,
and the workers, intensified exploitation. But
above all, they learned the effectiveness of or
gained, united action, and the necessity of
meeting force with force. When the time be-
came ripe for it, after the terrible misery of
the panic year of '73, when capital was begin
ming to succeed in it's efforts at crushing the
class organizations of labor that had attained
such strength in the years following the war
and was trying to beat labor into complete
submission, this war-taught acceptance of
force frequently came to expression in the la
Dor press The Workngmen's Advocate, for
instance, a sober and very influential labor pa
per, writing in '73 on the use of militia in a
current lockout, and ''the determination to
substitute contract coolie labor at starvation
rates for the locked out workers declares:
'It will not be done without bloody strug-
gle. And if the issue must come in that
shape before the American workingman. he
VIII not be found slow to accept it. The rattle
of musketry and the belching of cannon has
hardly died away from the ear. The scenes of
carnage are still fresh in the vision of those
who survived the battlefield; and when it
COAeS 10 d CHOICE OF ueaLnS-Dy SLOWLY starry
ing, or meeting it in the face of the lannon's
mouth-the American workmen will not be
slow to accept the issue. "And when, four
years later, the issue did come in Just that
FORM, at the time Of the great general strike of
1877, the workers accepted it without hesita-
ton.
The years Immediately following the Civil
War were the years of the firm establishment
IN power of northern capital. The rapid rail-
road expansion of the previous decade during
which the government handed over immense
stretches of the public domain to the railroad
capitalists without COST the accompanying de-
Velopment OF markets on national scale; the
destruction of the southern feudal economy:
the great fortunes founded on war-profiteer-
ing; and, above ALL the tremendous industrial
development of these years, combined to give
1t complete supremacy both in the state appar-
atus and on the economic field.
The one effective challenge to the autocracy
of capital was organized labor which was rap
IDLY organizing on a national scale in line with
the national expansion of industry; and every
day becoming increasingly conscious of its
separateness, its class interests and its rights.
With its first realization of the existence of
this obstacle to its dream of complete domin-
alton and boundless profits, capitalism set it.
self to break down this resistance to it's rovaI
will by any and every means at its disposal.
1t was perfectly and brutally frank about it's
intentions; the pretty phrases of class-colab-
Grafton had not yet come into vogue
The tremendous mechanical development of
these years pointed the way. The mutipIica-
ton and perfecting of machines, with the ac-
companying possibility for the division of labor