The Workers and War

Table of Contents

The Workers and War (1912)
Quote from “The Trial A Farce” (1911)
Reflections of a Propagandist (1911)
Useful and Useless Labor (1905)
Quote from “A Piece of History” (1895)

The Agitator, Home, Washington, February 15, 1912

The anti-military spirit which is developing among the masses of Europe will tell the governments of the earth that the workers have no trouble that needs to be settled by cruel war; and if the rulers have trouble, they can settle them by fighting it out among themselves. The working class want to enjoy the fruits of their toil, the short time they have to journey on this fair earth. But we are told that kind of talk is unpatriotic, that every man ought to be willing to fight for his country. What country belongs to the wage class?

Lucy E. Parsons

From “The Trial A Farce”

“It is useless for the ruling class to stand on the shore of discontent and attempt to force this tide back to its depths of poverty, for it swells up from the hearts of the people. And though they should erect gallows along all the highways and byways, build prisons and increase armies, the tide will continue to rise until it overwhelms them in a world-wide revolution. This is the lesson of history.”

Lucy E. Parsons, The Trial A Farce, The Agitator, Home, Washington, November 15, 1911

Reflections of a Propagandist

The Agitator, Home, Washington, March 1, 1911

I have been here in New York City for the last three months, selling the famous speeches of the Chicago martyrs. Here humanity is piled up in heaps, stored away in layers; forty families in a single tenement that should only suffice for a fourth that number. In these eastern cities, tens of thousands of children are born annually who will never know the beauties of nature. From the tenement they will have for playing space the hard, dirty, unhealthy, stone sidewalks and pavements, then a few years in school, where the training will be as inadequate to the development of a strong, self-asserting individuality as were the previous conditions to the up-building of a strong, physical body; then comes the last step, the factory, the slave pen. From there some will graduate to prisons, some to the hangman, and some become prostitutes, offering upon the streets, for a price, the remnant of a depleted body. This is the goal towards which the long procession of the working class is ever moving. Is the picture overdrawn? None could wish more sincerely than the writer that it is imaginary, but, alas, it is too terribly true.

I have before me two reports from committees, returned in the last few days from New York City. One states there were born in the city in 1910 8,750 children of weak minds, and that “this tendency is ever on the increase.” The other, that something will have to be done to check the alarming overcrowding of tenements. There is no overcrowding up town, where the rich live.

I met with very courteous treatment from the unions in the West and am meeting with the same here. I have credentials and endorsement from the Central Federated Union, and my success is splendid in the locals. But I find organized labor weak and dispirited. I have called the attention of several leaders to this fact, and asked for an explanation. They simply say: “You have no Ellis Island problem in the West to solve as we have here.”

I think there is a lot of reason in this position. For the countless thousands form a never-ending stream of humanity, dumped down in a strange land, hearing a strange language, with little money or means of a livelihood, they fall an easy prey to the sharks, little and big, and are used as an instrument to beat down and keep wages near the dead line of want.

The revolutionary societies of New York City held a very successful memorial meeting in honor of our Japanese martyrs. The large hall was packed and the speeches were good and to the point. After the speaking had been going on for a few hours, some of the young blood in the hall wanted to see the speeches translated into action. One of them went to the front and called upon the audience to go to the street, fall in line, and march upon the Japanese Embassy and voice their protest.

There was some opposition to the carrying out of this part of the meeting, but the young blood carried everything before it. The result was a fine demonstration in the streets, with the red flag. The only time the red flag ever typifies death is at the time of the death of a martyr to liberty, then it is appropriately draped in mourning, as it was on this occasion. Of course the capitalist press made heroes of the police and also got themselves all worked up to a great sensation.

The only regret I have about the street demonstration is owing to a misunderstanding and the slow exit of the large audience, I missed being with the “mob” of marchers. I have been kicking myself about this ever since.

Lucy E. Parsons

Useful and Useless Labor

Lucy E. Parsons, The Liberator, Chicago, November 22, 1905

Every person who is rendering no good to humanity is useless, no matter how hard he works. Head work and hand work are equally hard and equally useful if rightly applied. All men, rich and poor, are working at something; perhaps one at useful labor, the other at useless labor. Nevertheless they are each and all using their energies at some occupation.

Men work because they cannot hold their physical and mental energies in check without causing themselves pain. But we have made work disagreeable because we have allowed conditions to obtain which force us to continue to work after we are tired, or at something for which we have no taste, take no interest in and have no adaptability for.

For this reason we lose pleasure in work and it becomes irksome to us; for this reason, often what we do is done in a slovenly manner and the community loses thereby. The selfish scheme called “property rights” has superseded human rights and created four times more useless work than is required to produce and distribute all the comforts and luxuries of life.

All these useless workers are either capitalists or the allies of capitalists. In this class of workers whose sole business is to sustain the “rights of property” can be classed the lawyers, jailers, police, bankers, insurance companies, agents and nearly all bosses in all branches of industry; add to these those who cannot get work and those in prisons, and we get some conception of the vast hordes that must be supported by those who perform useful labor, and these must devote their entire life’s energies in keeping up the “rights of property,” a thing which they have neither a share nor interest in. And this condition of affairs makes paupers, suicides, thieves, cut-throats, liars, vagabonds, hypocrites, and unsocial beings generally.

Who, pray, are benefitting by all this waste and confusion? The few, a mere small percentage of the population of the world. All the remainder submit, because they think “it always has been so and it must always be so.” The work of those who have a conception of a true society of the future, must devote all their efforts toward disabusing the people’s minds of the ancient falsehoods. It can be done. Many other hoary lies have passed away, so will this one, too.

From “A Piece of History”

“The great struggle of this age is to be between the governing few and the governed many. The billows of discontent will roll up from among the masses, the ruling class will attempt to drive them back in a sea of blood, but the pages of history show how futile has ever been this attempt, when those billows were along the lines of evolution. The people will yet learn to look away from government for relief; then they will have severed the last chain which binds them to a dark past.”

Lucy E. Parsons, A Piece of History, The Rebel, Boston, October 20, 1895