rty is in power, no matter what our
domestic policy is, how high the tariff or what the money standard,
every few years the cry goes up about "over-production" and the working
class is discharged by the thousands and thousands, and are idle, just
as the miners have been in this field for many weary months.

No work, no food, and after a while, no credit, and all this in the
shadow of the abundance these very workers have created.

Don't you agree with me, my brothers, that this condition is an
intolerable and indefensible one, and that whatever may be said of the
past, this system no longer answers the demands of this time? Why should
any workingman need to beg for work? Why forced to surrender to anybody
any part of what his labor produces?

Now, I ask this question, and it applies to the whole field of industry:
If a hundred men work in a mine and produce a hundred tons of coal, how
much of that coal are they entitled to? Are they not entitled to all of
it? And if not, who is entitled to any part of it? If the man who
produces wealth is not entitled to it, who is? You say the capitalist is
necessary and I deny it. The capitalist has become a profit-taking
parasite. Industry is now concentrated and operated on a very large
scale; it is co-operative and therefore self-operative. The capitalists
hire superintendents, managers and workingmen to operate their plants
and produce wealth. The capitalists are absolutely unnecessary; they
have no part in the process of production--not the slightest.

Now I insist that it is the workingman's duty to so organize
economically and politically as to put an end to this system; as to take
possession in his collective capacity of the machinery of production and
operate it, not to create millionaires and multi-millionaires, but to
produce wealth in plenty for all. That is why the labor question is also
a political question. It makes no difference what you do on the economic
field to better your condition, so long as the tools of production are
privately owned, so long as they are operated for the private profit of
the capitalist, the working class will be exploited, they will be in
enforced idleness, thousands of them will be reduced to want, some of
them to vagabonds and criminals, and this condition will prevail in
spite of anything that organized labor can do to the contrary.

The most important thing for the workingman to recognize is the class
struggle. Every capitalist, every