The Masses (periodical)/Volume 1/Number 1/Unite in Buying as in Selling

by Eugene Wood

Unite in Buying as in Selling

 

Advocating the Formation of a Union by the Workingmen to Prevent Their Being Exploited in
the Purchase of Commodities as They Are Exploited in the Sale of Their Labor Power
By Eugene Wood

 

WORKERS of the world, unite!"

I think you've heard that before. Or seen it somewhere. All the truer if you have. A butter-cake is all the better for being turned a couple of times on the griddle.

This is an appeal to a special class. It isn't charitably inclusive. Not a bit. It's just for a certain crowd. The others can be on their way. It doesn't say: "Workers and shirkers of the world unite." It expresses what we have learned by experience, that the two can't unite, unless it is after the fashion of the lamb and the lion lying down together—with the lamb on the inside.

It calls for all of us who get their living by working to associate ourselves into an alliance, to defend what we have already gained, and to conquer more. Because we are going to take more; we're going to take all, if you want to know precisely how much. Now there is a well-recogized way of uniting to sell the only thing we have to sell, our labor-power, in a bunch, collectively. We get more for it by doing that. When a union fails, you see wages go 'way, 'way down and the hours of labor stretch out like a rubber band. So we join a labor union and pay dues, and go out on strike when necessary and stay out on strike as long as necessary, suffering some little inconvenience at the time so that we and our families may have more of the comforts of life. That's what we are after: More of the comforts of life.

But some of us who sell our labor-power are in crafts that aren't organized or can't be organized. I don't know what union I, as a literary man, could join. The gas-fitters? Somebody that knows, please tell me. I'm with organized labor, heart and soul, but a union can't help me. I want to unite with you.

After all, it isn't the dollar more a week or the five dollars more a week that we want—that is, it isn't the extra pieces of paper in the pay-envelope that we want so much as it is what those pieces of paper will bring into the house, grub, and clothes, and shoes and all such. We sell our labor-power to an enemy of ours; we all know that. We also buy from enemies of ours; we all know that. Now suppose we unite to sell to each other, so that, instead of enemies of ours getting the profit, we get the profit, you and I and the union plumber, and the union hat-maker and so on. That increases the amount of comforts we can bring into the house just as effectively as a union does at its end of the game. If you can get $2 worth more comforts into your house for a week's work, that's just as good as if you went on strike and won the strike, and you don't run so many chances of having a policeman tap you on the cocoanut; you don't have Goff making a decision a hundred years behind the times. There's no law, legislative or judicial, that forbids you buying where you can get the most for your money.

"But," somebody will say, "if we can live so much cheaper by buying from the Co-operative, won't the bosses reduce wages by just that much?"

It's as broad as it's long. If you increase your wages, won't they raise the prices of what you buy? They're doing that, anythow, aren't they?

Don't forget this: When you fight the bosses to make them give you more wages, you attack them where they are strongest and most used to fight. To be sure, they have been losing for the last century, nearly. It used to be that a laborer who quit one employer to work for wages with another, could be lawfully put into jail; it used to be that a man that could work and wouldn't work—was out on strike—could be branded in the forehead with a red-hot iron, so that a capital letter V stayed with him till he rotted in the grave. They've been losing ground but still they know how to fight on that side. But the weak point of the bosses is the selling. Don't forget that. Let me say that again: The weak point of capitalism is that it must sell. A boss may cut down wages, and he may stick up prices, but unless he can sell to workingmen what workingmen produce, he's a gone dog. No sale, no profit. Sell or go bust. So anxious is he to make a sale that he gives the middlemen an enormous slice of his profits, the big difference between what it costs for the labor and material, and what the finished article costs the consumer over the counter. He's crazy to find an "outlet" for his wares. Let the American Wholesale Co-operative supply him with an outlet, and he'll unionize his works; he'll sell to it as cheaply as to a middleman, if he gets his money just the same. He'll betray his competitors in a holy minute if he can make a sale. And, instead of our enemies, the shirkers and non-producers, getting the dividends, we get them, we workingmen who have united not only to sell our labor-power but to buy what produces our labor-power.

But that's a small part of the benefit. If workingmen aren't practical business men it isn't because they haven't got the head for it, but because they haven't had the experience. But that's something they've got to have in the near future, because one of these days before long the Co-operative Commonwealth is going to arrive and bring its trunk for an extended stay with us. Workingmen will have to run this Co-operative Commonwealth, and they've got to learn how. Where is there so good a school for us to take lessons of, as the Co-operative store?

To sum it all up in one word, I should end as I have begun, with the advice to our kind of people to get together in every possible way, to defend what has been gained, and to conquer more, whether in the labor union where we sell our labor-power collectively or in the co-operative where we buy collectively what our labor-power produces, not only the men-folks who work outside the home and who bring in the most they can, but the women-folks who work inside the home and who make the men's wages go as far as they can—in one word: "Workers of the world, unite!"