Hellraisers Journal: Speech of IWW Organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at Spokane on June 29, 1909, Part I

Quote EGF re Useless Capitalist Class, Ptt Prs p47, Sept 27, 1908 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday July 10, 1909
Spokane, Washington – June 29th Speech of Gurley Flynn, Part I

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of July 8, 1909:

ELIZABETH G. FLYNN ADDRESS TO WORKERS
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Address of Miss Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Organizer and lecturer of the Industrial Workers of the World, given at Spokane, Wash., on Tuesday evening, June 29, 1909.

This meeting as you well know, is held under the [auspices?] of the Industrial Workers of the World. The organization is a new form of labor organization, one that stands for the industrial working class and that class alone. We are not interested in the welfare or the ideas of any other class in society; and we who are the members of the tolling class have in these sufficient of our own interests that need looking after, that we have no time to bother with other classes.

The working class of this country look out upon a situation where there are natural resources present to supply the entire world with plenty; they look out upon an industrial situation which has invented machinery capable of getting these natural resources with but little labor expenditure into finished commodities of necessities or luxuries. Yet in spite of that and in spite of the productiveness made possibly by men who labor and the natural abundance of the earth itself, in spite of that, we have people starving in this country and five million idle; over a million child laborers in the United States; seventy thousand children in New York City and fifty thousand in Chicago that go to school without a breakfast in the morning we have a condition in which the majority of the people are a propertyless class, are a class that own no land, that control none of that productive machinery, that control absolutely nothing in this land of the free and home of the brave but their own labor power, their own abilities to work. Just the same as the mule can pull a big load, so a worker can handle his labor power, muscular energy; and is the only thing he has; and if some trust could have been organized to separate us from that, to divide us from ourselves. I suppose even that would have been done long ago.

The working class of this country have not the obstacles that faced their ancestors. They have not the natural impediments; they have not the fear that the soil will not be productive not the fear that there may be not enough rain or that there may be too much rain-all of these things that nature heaps upon men and that man has long ago overcome. Today the working class have only conditions that they themselves are in a position to remedy, they have only false conditions, not nature’s making, but man’s making, that they themselves can overthrow; and we who have this labor power for sale who have only our abilities to work that we control, have to go out on the labor market and sell that ability to work.

Think of it! When fool politicians and the preachers come out and tell us that we want to go out and defend home and country and not have anything to do with the socialist because they say they destroy your home, something like the hotel we passed this evening, the Taft Hotel, a hotel in which you can get a room for 15 cents a night, a home in which the visitors are so abundant you can’t sleep at night. (Applause.) That is the kind of a home they want us to defend! Don’t you feel big when you pay your 15 cents to sleep in a great big room where there are two or three hundred more sleeping at the same time? I venture if you got a spy glass, and went looking for it, there are none of you that could find your section of the country. All we have is our ability to labor and the capitalist class have not that one commodity; they have the factories, they have the land, they have the railroad but they have not the labor power, the power of wealth producing. (Applause.)

Of course they could work-that is if some of them could get rid of the gout and some of them could get rid of the surplus flesh that they have accumulated through high living and if some could get rid of the soft white hands, then perhaps they might be able to work; but there is no particular fun in being a capitalist if you have to work yourself. The point is to get some other fellow or as many other fellows as we can to work for us; that is the point of being a capitalist; and we have in our possession that power-wealth producing. Now one would suppose that a class that controls that weapon, which the capitalist would strive to do, would not go without clothing to cover their nakedness and without shelter to house them from the heat, the cold and the wind, one would suppose that the class that could control that power would be in a position to dictate the basis upon which they should labor, should be able to say, “Either I will get so much for my labor or I will not labor at all.” (Applause.) And they would do that were it not for the reason, first, there are too many of us.

Competition Among Workers.

There are a whole lot more men in this country than there are jobs for the men, more men than there is work for, not more men than can supply the needs of the people-oh no! There are bakers that you would find among the ranks of the hobo probably, riding the rods tonight that could bake bread for these seventy thousand, there are tailors that could make clothes for them that need them; there are carpenters and plumbers and masons that could build houses and homes for those that live in lodging houses and shacks.

But what stands before them and the work that they could do and that is in need of being done, is the master class and their control of the jobs. They don’t want more produced than there is a demand for, and a demand is not the need of the people, but the money of the people; not what you need but what you can pay for. You may need bread, you may starve for bread, but you have not got the dime to pay for the bread, you may starve in this country. It is not what you need but what you can purchase, that represents demand to the master class; and so even in the days of the high-handed prosperity and in the days of the full dinner pail there are more men, three to one, than there are jobs to be filled. And what does that mean? It means that the workers have got to compete with one another as to who will get the jobs. It means that you and I and all the rest of us are cutting each others’ throats as to who will get a chance to be exploited by the capitalist. It means if you go to work and ask for $4.00 a day-it may be 50 per cent of your production, but the capitalist will send to the nearest hospital and ask them to send a padded ambulance to remove a dangerous lunatic! Why? Because there are lots of fellows in this country that are willing to work for $2.50 a day and glad to work for it.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]
[Continued in tomorrow’s Hellraisers Journal.]