a political movement for the peaceful transformation of society.

VII

Nowhere in the world, at any time in its history, has the antagonism of
classes been more evident than in the United States at the present time.
With an average of over a thousand strikes a year,[128] some of them
involving, directly, tens of thousands of producers, a few capitalists,
and millions of noncombatants, consumers; with strikes like this,
boycotts, lockouts, injunctions, and all the other incidents of
organized class strife reported daily by the newspapers, denials of the
existence of classes, or of the struggle between them, are manifestly
absurd. We have, on the one hand, organizations of workers, labor
unions, with a membership of something over two million in the United
States; one organization alone, the American Federation of Labor, having
an affiliated membership of one million seven hundred thousand. On the
other hand, we have organizations of employers, formed for the expressed
purpose of fighting the labor unions, of which the National Association
of Manufacturers is the most perfect type yet evolved.

While the leaders on both sides frequently deny that their organizations
betoken the existence of a far-reaching fundamental class conflict, and,
through ostensibly pacificatory organizations like the National Civic
Federation, proclaim the "essential identity of interests between
capital and labor"; while an intelligent and earnest labor leader like
Mr. John Mitchell joins with an astute capitalist leader like the late
Senator Marcus A. Hanna in declaring that "there is no necessary
hostility between labor and capital," that there is no "necessary,
fundamental antagonism between the laborer and the capitalist,"[129] a
brief study of the constitutions of these class organizations, and their
published reports, in conjunction with the history of the labor struggle
in the United States, in which the names of Homestead, Hazelton, Coeur
d'Alene and Cripple Creek appear in bloody letters, will show these
denials to be the offspring of hypocrisy or delusion. If this
much-talked-of unity of interests is anything but a stupid fiction, the
great and ever increasing strife is only a matter of mutual
misunderstanding. All that is necessary to secure permanent peace is to
remove that misunderstanding. If we believe this, it is a sad commentary
upon human limitations, upon man's failure to understand his own life,
that not a single person on