If you followed the advice “mail that coupon to-day” for some time ago;— if you are sitting up nights cudgeling your brains over mail-order courses teaching how to become a “big executive”, if you are lying awake nights building air castles on that foundation and muttering in your sleep: “Here is another fifty dollars, Grace, I am making real money now” — In short, if you think that your main chance in life consists in making an attempt to rise out of your class, this article is not very likely to interest you.

If, on the other hand, you have arrived at the conclusion that individual attempts by you to improve your economic conditions have only an infinitesimal chance for success, and that the only sure way of improving your conditions is through organized effort together with other members of your class, an article on The Work People’s College cannot fail to interest you.

As most readers of the Industrial Pioneer have arrived at the second conclusion, there is no need of proving the correctness of it here.

The Work People’s College is no technical institution. It does not turn out stenographers, bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, mechanics, or any other professionals or tradesmen. Its purpose is to give its students knowledge of the structure, aims, methods and philosophy of the I.W.W. and make them able to become more powerful factors in the class struggle.

The majority of the students are members of the I.W.W. and nobody comes there for any other purpose than that mentioned above. The classes are arranged for the purpose and can roughly be divided into three groups: social sciences, organization work and elementary subjects.

Under the heading of social sciences come economics, sociology, and history of the United States. The importance of a clear understanding and knowledge of these three subjects can hardly be overestimated from the organization point of view.

Curriculum Can’t Be Beaten

When you are trying to convince a worker that the I.W.W. is the only organization that has got a practical program worth while, it is not enough to answer his objections by telling him that he is wrong. Such a procedure will usually only irritate him and make him determined not to be convinced, and in that way make it much harder for you.

If you do not know anything about economics, it very difficult for you to answer even such old and exploded objections as: “What is the use of organizing? If we get higher wages they — the capitalists — will only raise the prices and we shall be no better off”. Or, “The high wages caused high prices, that is the reason why we have got a panic now. The only way to get better times is by getting prices down to normal again, and that can’t be done without cutting wages”. If you are well grounded in Marxian economics, such objections are only grist to your mill. If you are not, chances are that either you or the worker you are trying to convince will lose patience.

Besides freeing you from disadvantages of that kind, to judge intelligently on any industrial problem, it is necessary to have more than a superficial knowledge of the material basis of society, and the only way of acquiring that is through the study of economics.

The average worker has got a vague idea that human institutions have changed, but he often believes that they are no longer subject to such change. A study of sociology will pretty soon explode such beliefs. After having traced the changes of society from primitive communism, through chattel slavery and serfdom, to wage slavery, it is rather easy to see that forces are existing today that are going to do away with wage slavery, and to see that these forces are economic and can only be given full play when united in an economic organization — in a union of the working class.

The course in history of the United States is giving special application to the principles arrived at in sociology. At the end of the course the origin of the I.W.W. is described, showing how it grew out of American conditions, and how it has become the natural fighting organization of the American working class.

Under the heading of organization work, three classes are conducted: organization bookkeeping, organization work proper, and industrial survey.

The course in organization bookkeeping covers the field from filling out a job delegate report to keeping the books in the general office; explaining such things as duties of auditing committees, preparing financial statements, etc.

In organization work proper the functions of job delegates, traveling delegates, G.O.C. members and secretaries are described. Parliamentary procedure is taught with special reference to I.W.W. customs and rules at job meetings, branch meetings, committee meetings, conventions, conferences, etc. In the same class the I.W.W. preamble and constitution are analyzed, and many organization and administration problems are examined.

The course in industrial survey is teaching the students how to use statistical handbooks, tables, etc., to compare results gained through them with their own and their fellow worker’s observations on the job, and in that way produce a clear picture of general conditions prevailing in the industry in question.

The elementary subjects cover English and mathematics and are like most other subjects graded, so that the students can study in groups where all have approximately the same knowledge of the subject and the same capacity for studying it.

The advanced grades in the English classes are studying public speaking and labor journalism, not for the purpose of developing into professional soap-boxers and writers, but so that they will be able to give an intelligent account of their ideas, whether it be on the platform or in print.

Costs and Accommodations

The students are living in the college that can house 65 of them. At the present every room is filled; but as arrangements have been made to furnish rooms in the neighboring houses the college is able to accommodate 200 students. The charge is in either case $39.00 a month for tuition, room and board.

In addition to the regular classes two open forums are conducted every week, where subjects of interest to the labor movement in general and the I.W.W. in particular are discussed. One of the students starts the discussion with an opening speech limited to 40 minutes. After he has answered questions from the audience for 30 minutes, the floor is thrown open for discussion for another 30 minutes, and the speaker has 20 minutes for rebuttal.

Saturday and Sunday there are no classes; these days give the student an opportunity to rest up or, if he so prefers, to study in his room. Every Friday night there is a business meeting where the affairs of the college are decided.

Friday night there is a dance in the college. Besides that, the students have this year already had two entertainments, both of them very successful. The students do not need to go outside the college for recreation or to have any big expenditures for that purpose.

There are a gymnasium and shower baths in the college, and all the implements that are supposed to be connected with a gymnasium. The college is located at Spirit Lake. If you want to go skating, a couple of minutes’ walk will bring you to the skating rink. In that way the students are able to take care of their health with a minimum expenditure of time and energy. It goes without saying that where 70 Wobblies are together the time is passing fast, too fast.

The term starts November 15 and ends April 15. Most of the students arrive and depart on these two dates. Only a few who have to leave — on account of financial circumstances — do not stay the full term. The seven months between April and November enable many of the students to raise the necessary winter stake and to return term after term and in that way gain a solid and systematic education.

Students Make Better I.W.W.’s.

The value of the college to the I.W.W. can hardly be exaggerated. Every student is, after he leaves the college, much better equipped to do “his bit” in the class struggle, than he was before. Quite a few of the students went, when they left the college, right to California. One of them, John Bruns, is in St. Quentin now and will, like all of the class war prisoners, be glad to receive letters from his fellow workers on the outside.

Many other students have made a good record after leaving college. Some as G.O.C. members, others as traveling delegates, and nearly all the rest of them as job delegates. And all of them agree that their studies at the college have been a great advantage for them in the organization work and educational activities that they have helped to carry on.

At the rate the attendance is increasing it will soon be necessary to increase the number of teachers. For that reason the college intends to conduct special classes for teachers next term, besides a special summer course for teachers either this year or next year. The college will then be able to turn out its own force of instructors, and whenever a college would be opened up in another locality, it would have at its disposition instructors especially trained for that kind of work.

Members of the I.W.W. should bear in mind that whatever their previous education is, there will always be courses adapted for them at the college, from the most elementary school subjects to the most advanced studies in economics and sociology. Make up your mind now to attend college next year, and you will easily have the necessary funds— $200.00— by November 15. If you do so, you will not regret it.

Transcribed by Revolution's Newsstand site

THE request for an article from the editor of the Industrial Pioneer for the May Day issue comes at a time when I am so fully occupied with other matters that I can hardly hope to do justice to that publication, but I must, at least, do the best I can in the way of a May Day greeting to the Industrial Pioneer.

Before me as I write there lies a copy of the April issue of this working class publication, and I wish first of all to commend the editor and the organization it represents for the excellence of its contents. It is gotten up in most attractive form, printed on first class paper, is well illustrated pictorially, while its various departments are filled with articles of a wide scope by writers of the highest standing in the labor movement.

The Industrial Workers of the World, of which the Industrial Pioneer is an official publication, will soon have rounded twenty years of organized existence, and from beginning to end it has been a tempestuous period in the struggle of the American workers for industrial emancipation. No labor union in the entire history of the labor movement has been as shamelessly misrepresented, as relentlessly persecuted, as brutally attacked, and as savagely hunted down by the ruling class and its minions and mercenaries as the Industrial Workers of the World. During the recent international butchery when “patriotism” was the watchword on the lips of every traitor, coward and hireling, its offices were repeatedly raided, its books and other effects confiscated, its literature was destroyed, its meeting places mobbed, its workers assaulted, beaten up and jailed, and its organizers lynched and murdered in cold blood with the connivance of the public authorities and with the whole-hearted approval and applause of the bourgeois moron multitude.

But the organization still lives to celebrate May Day, 1925, and to marshal its forces for renewed attack upon the system which branded it as outlaw when itself was the criminal, the arch-criminal whose victims are to be found wherever workers toil and produce in servitude and are condemned to poverty and to die in despair.

As these lines are written the eight members of the Industrial Workers of the World serving life sentences at Walla Walla, Washington, for defending their hall at Centralia against an attack of American Legion hoodlums, cowards and coldblooded murderers are vividly before me, and I wonder as I have wondered a thousand times before, why the American workers permit these eight honest, innocent workingmen, whose only crime was that they stood up like men in defense of the cause of labor at a time when it took heroic blood to do it—why the American movement tolerates the infinite outrage of these men rotting away in one of the vilest prison pens in the country.

Those eight I.W.W. convicts at Walla Walla are heroes in the true sense of the term, and I hail them as such at this May Day celebration, proud of their high courage and self-respect, and ashamed to be at large while they are in that foul dungeon branded as felons.

In celebrating May Day the workers would be unworthy of the day, they would be guilty of inexcusable neglect and of gross betrayal of their vaunted solidarity if they failed to remember the class-war prisoners in Washington, in California, in Idaho, in Kansas, in Texas, in Massachusetts and other states, to proclaim their innocence, to glorify their heroism, and to demand in a commanding and determined voice their liberation.

May Day ought to be a glorious day for all the workers of the world. It is their international holiday; their day of universal rejoicing; their day of hope and inspiration.

May Day as a holiday was not granted to them by their patronizing masters as a boon for slaves to be grateful for, but it was appropriated by themselves and dedicated to themselves as the day upon which to assemble their forces, to close up their ranks, to stand erect, shoulder to shoulder, to feel the touch and thrill and throb of proletarian solidarity; to take counsel of themselves; to take an inventory of their own mental, moral and spiritual as well as their physical resources; to recognize their common identity as wage slaves; to realize their class interests, their class aspirations, their class power and their class study; to draw the line sharply between their class, the toiling and producing millions, and the class of their exploiters and oppressors, and, face front, to wage the class struggle with unceasing energy, high resolve, and unrelaxing determination until the last citadel of capitalism has been captured and the workers of the world have made themselves the rulers of the world.

To this great end the workers must educate, organize and train themselves under their own self imposed discipline; they must, in a word, fit themselves for industrial mastery and for the fulfillment of their historic mission which means nothing less than the emancipation of the human race from ignorance, superstition and every form of servility and servitude.

May Day is the day for the proclamation of our clearest thoughts, our highest resolves, and our noblest aspirations.

Solidarity must ever be the battle cry of the workers in the face of all that is done by the ruling powers and their henchmen to prevent it.

The legislatures, the courts, the colleges, the newspapers, the churches: all the organized social forces and all the powers of government, aided and abetted by cowardly and treacherous labor leaders, so-called, are pitted in combination against the rising revolutionary movement of the working class in every capitalist nation on earth. But in spite of all this the movement is progressing steadily, increasing daily in numbers and in power, cultivating its capacity to think and act for itself, its self-respect and self-reliance, and marching bravely toward its goal.

Everything depends upon the thoroughgoing organization of the workers along industrial, political and co-operative lines, on the basis of the class struggle, and upon waging this struggle with increasing intelligence, intensity and determination through all the passing days and years.

There are numberless battles to be fought and many of them will be fierce enough to test us all in every fibre, but fortunately the movement we are fighting in and for is out of the depths, with the forces of evolution and revolution, of which it was born, sustaining it and pledged to its ultimate triumph, and though we may lose ten thousand battles we shall finally win the war for the liberation of the race.

Transcribed by Juan Conatz

Even leaders of reactionary trade unions occasionally refer to their organizations as being militant, implying that militancy In associations of workers for economic advancement is effective. Usually such references mark anniversary orations, while in the everyday relations between their members and the employers class collaboration is stressed and militancy is discouraged. But whatever we may think about militancy or its lack in the trade unions it is a fact that aggressiveness, the will to hold fast to every gain that has been secured and ceaselessly to struggle for additional improvement is as necessary to a real, functioning union as red blood is to a healthy, living body.

I. W. W. ideational soundness and the eager determination of its advocates to propagate the message of revolutionary industrial unionism, to establish the correctness of its theoretical position by the evidence of victories crowning its practical application, early aroused employing class antagonism. As circumstances and their tempers dictated they have seen fit to jail our members, to deport them, to lynch them, to deny free speech and press and to raid our halls. Now had we been appalled with a sense of our unworthiness or op-pressed with hopelessness; had the bosses been able to beat this red devil of industrial union conviction out of us there would now be no I. W. W.

Aggressively and defiantly our speakers delivered their message to the workers; our delegates and organizers continued lining up new members; for every man sent to prison in the struggle many others joined the organization; Wobblies deported for agitating returned to agitate some more, and when the ruling class forbade our presses to operate we published our opinions notwithstanding. These are not the acts of pacifists. We are engaged in class warfare. Recognizing this belligerency between workers and employers the capitalist press does not regard it as an insoluble problem, but the fierceness with which the battles of industry are waged has compelled reflection in the language of bourgeois publications. "Wage disagreements" as they were called a few years ago are now headlined as "Industrial Warfare". With these journalistic sciolists evincing such an advance in terminology is it not time for the workers to regard their struggle as a class war?

Moreover, it is also time for well-meaning liberals to cease mentioning Wobblies as pacifists, as men and women imbued with a "turn the other cheek" spirit, or with the non-cooperation philosophy of the Indian leader, Gandhi. Recognition of class war leaves no place in our tactical program for such systems, but their influence has been active in our organization. Whenever a labor union loses its militant spirit it is an a dying condition. We have no business as industrial unionists than that of opposing the employing class ay all times and striving for the enlistment of other workers to the struggle's support.

Christianity itself, which is usually glorified as a pacifistic philosophy, hid away in the darkness of catacombs so long as its leading protagonists adhered to a non-militant philosophy, and it came out of the hole to spread over the world only when its mission was propagated at the sword's point. Gandhi's philosophy already betrays inconsistencies, and we find him quite recently saying that it is all right to fight to defend what you have. No passivity there. The I.W.W. is abreast of the times, and we are not in the age of the spinning wheel any longer; neither, then, should our mental processes hark back to ancient pacifism that proved a failure. The working class is faced with a machine development that steadily throws larger and larger numbers of workers out of jobs; that contributes continually to capitalist concentration and working class misery. This class operates the machines socially and the solution to its problems is in the abolition of private ownership of these wealth producing tools. The I.W.W. is fighting for possession of these tools by the working class.

Martyrdom is incidental to the progress of this battle for proletarian freedom; it is not the objective, and any who have entertained such an idea have not grasped the purpose of our organization.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Pioneer (September 1925)
Typed up for libcom.org by Juan Conatz