The Everett Massacre: A history of the class struggle in the lumber industrySmith, Walker C.
History
The Everett Massacre: A history of the class struggle in the lumber industry
Smith, Walker C.
Industrial Workers of the World; Lumbering -- Washington (State); Lumbermen -- Washington (State)
Insofar as the law can be wielded for their immediate purpose a
capitalistic mob, such as these at Everett, will clothe their violence
in the form of ostensible legal process, yet often the letter and the
spirit of their own class-influenced laws will be ruthlessly thrust
aside. They want law and order, efficacious, impartial, august, in the
eyes of the general citizenry, but they want exemption of their class
from the rule of the law on certain occasions. Strongly would they deny
that all law is class law, made, interpreted and administered in behalf
of a privileged property-owning class, yet the facts bear out this
contention.
The conception of impersonal and impartial legalism has been generally
accepted along with traditional moral opinion and the naive belief in
the excellence of competitive, individualistic, and unrestrained
business. But this historical case has proven, as nothing else could
prove, that these bonds are relaxing and the faith and formulas
underlying the whole legal establishment are the subject of attack by an
increasingly large and uncompromising army of dissenters.
From the developments of the Everett situation one can sense the rising
tide of industrial solidarity. It was the unity of the workers that won
the great case. It will be the unity of Labor that will win the world
for the workers, just as the embryonic democracy of the toilers in its
blind groupings has already cracked the shell of the industrial
autocracy of the present day.
At present we are at the parting of the ways. There is not sufficient
faith in the Law to hold the dying wage system together and there is not
a sufficiently clear conception of the solidaric ideal of a new society
to bind the rebellious elements to a definite program. So chaos reigns
in society and events like those at Everett may be expected to arise
until the struggle of the exploited takes on a more constructive form
and develops the necessary power to overthrow capitalism and all its
attendant institutions.
Industrial unionism is the only hope of the disinherited and
dispossessed proletariat. It is the voice of the future. It spells at
once Evolution and Revolution. Its assured success means an end to
classes and class rule and the rearing of a race of free individuals.
The strength of the workers is in industry. Every worker, man, woman or
child, has economic power. The control of industry means the control of
the world.
He who strives to bring the workers closer together so that their
allied forces in an industrial organization may overthrow the wage
system and rear in its place an Industrial Republic in which slavery
will be unknown and where joy will form the mainspring of human
activity, pays the highest homage to those who, in order that the spirit
of Liberty might not perish from the land, gave their lives at Everett,
Washington, on Sunday, November 5th, 1917:
FELIX BARAN,
HUGO GERLOT,
GUSTAV JOHNSON,
JOHN LOONEY,
ABRAHAM RABINOWITZ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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