What Means This Strike?

An address delivered at the City Hall, New Bedford, Mass., February 11, 1898

Workingmen and workingwomen of New Bedford:

Ye striking textile workers; and all of you others, who, though not now on strike, have been on strike before this, and will be on strike some other time:

It has been the habit in this country and in England that, when a strike is on, “stars” in the labor movement are invited to appear on the scene, and entertain the strikers; entertain them and keep them in good spirits with rosy promises and prophesies, funny anecdotes, bombastic recitations in prose and poetry; stuff them full of rhetoric and wind—very much in the style that some generals do, who, by means of bad whiskey, seek to keep up the courage of the soldiers whom they are otherwise unable to beguile.

Such has been the habit in the past; to a great extent it continues to be the habit in the present; it was so during the late miners’ strike; it has been so to some extent here in New Bedford; and it is so everywhere, to the extent that ignorance of the social question predominates.

To the extent, however, that Socialism gets a footing among the working class such false and puerile tactics are thrown aside.

The Socialist workingmen of New Bedford, on whose invitation I am here; all those of us who are members of that classconscious revolutionary international organization of the working class, that throughout the world stands out today as the leading and most promiseful feature of the age—all such would consider it a crime on the part of the men, whom our organization sends forth to preach the gospel of labor, if they were to spend their platform time in “tickling” the workers.

Our organization sends us out to teach the workers, to enlighten them on the great issue before them, and the great historic drama in which most of them are still unconscious actors.

Some of you, accustomed to a different diet, may find my speech dry. If there be any such here, let him leave. He has not yet graduated from that primary school reared by experience in which the question of wages is forced upon the workers as a serious question, and they are taught that it demands serious thought to grapple with, and solve it.

If, however, you have graduated from that primary department, and have come here with the requisite earnestness, then you will not leave this hall without having, so to speak, caught firm hold of the cable of the labor movement; then the last strike of this sort has been seen in New Bedford; then, the strikes that may follow will be as different from this as vigorous manhood is from toddling infancy; then you will have entered upon that safe and sure path along which eternal disaster will not, as heretofore, mark your tracks, but New Bedford, Massachusetts, and the nation herself, will successively fall into your hands, with freedom as the crowning fruit of your efforts.

Three years ago I was in your midst during another strike.

The superficial observer who looks back to your attitude during that strike, who looks back to your attitude during the strikes that preceded that one, who now turns his eyes to your attitude in the present strike, and who discovers substantially no difference between your attitude now and then, might say, “Why, it is a waste of time to speak to such men; they learn nothing from experience; they will eternally fight the same hopeless battle; the battle to establish safe relations’ with the capitalist class, with the same hopeless weapon: the pure and simple’ organization of labor!”

But the Socialist does not take that view. There is one thing about your conduct that enlists for and entitles you to the warm sympathy of the Socialist, and that is that, despite your persistent errors in fundamental principles, in aims and methods, despite the illusions that you are chasing after, despite the increasing poverty and cumulating failures that press upon you, despite all that, you preserve manhood enough not to submit to oppression, but rise in the rebellion that is implied in a strike.

The attitude of workingmen engaged in a bona fide strike is an inspiring one. It is an earnest that slavery will not prevail. The slave alone who will not rise against his master, who will meekly bend his back to the lash, and turn his cheek to him who plucks his beard - that slave alone is hopeless. But the slave, who, as you of New Bedford, persists, despite failures and poverty, in rebelling, there is always hope for.

This is the reason I have considered it worth my while to leave my home and interrupt my work in New York, and come here, and spend a few days with you. I bank my hopes wholly and build entirely upon this sentiment of rebellion within you.