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AMERICAN SYNDICALISM

coöperative societies. Through industrial organizations and Socialist education the agricultural laborers acquired the power, the technical capacity, and the moral energies to fight for, obtain, and run their industry.

These last lines contain the gist of these winged hopes. Through the technical and moral development of the trade union, labor is to enter into possession of one important industry after another. It is to do this by proving its technical and moral superiority over capitalism already dying before our eyes.

We here have the syndicalist view of the laborer as the creating unit that lives and has his being inside the machinery of production. He is in the mine, factory, shop, ship, and bank. Here his skill and faculty develop. On this basis his trade union is to rest. It is the primary industrial cell. It is to be built into federations with delegates that shall represent the whole industrial life. To the minutest part these, and these only, know the process through which foods, stuffs, metals, are made. It is these real creators who also carry all products to the consumer. Here, then, should be the seats of power. What is now called politics will be remade. With the workers once enthroned, politics will express the administrative necessities of the new order in which "none shall live except by work." Youth, age, infirmity, shall be cared for, as under socialism, by direct appropriations from the social product. But investments, interest, profits, rent, and all inheriting of these values, are to be stopped, in order that loafers, rich and poor alike, shall have an end.