﻿T-Bone Slim Says It’s Time to Pull Over on New York 

We want industrial freedom. The bosses also desire to give us industrial freedom, but there is a joker attached to the proposal.
They want us to enjoy our freedom on the scrap pile without benefit of nose-bag—after all that we did for them! We don’t want it. We want our industrial freedom at the point of production— right at the point where industrial autocracy struts its stuff now. And we want it to the accompaniment of pie a la mode. We do not want political persimmons, honey-dewed promises, and mildewed realization. No sentiment here. Economics is the driving force— any grave-digger will tell you not half enough people are dying. Every grave is his meal ticket. That’s how the capitalist system works. It encourages grave diggers to step out and make work for themselves at our expense.
Far a long time the world household (its economy) has been run on the principle of sloth and territorial aggrandizement. The natural law of transplantation has been ignored— they built their barn too far from the house. In the program of aggrandizement the exponents thereof could well see the possibilities in exploitation of labor and slaves. Such states must of need fall by the wayside, along with the super astuteness so generated, because it offers no inducements to labor, but, on the contrary, puts a premium on chore-dodging.
Nothing the matter with their silly little gray cells, except that they are on the wrong premise. A worker’s commonwealth on the other hand offers every inducement to a man to become a useful member of the world (and points beyond, if any). And freed of all such fantasies herein , before mentioned the old ball would roll as before and its inhabitants could sweeten their coffee to the full taste of their capabilities.
Note: I do not chide the thinkers of the past. Their hokum was good, but times have changed, and it will not work today. Distant pastures are all gobbled up, and to take them means a war. War means worse—a wasted life. Wars of conquest no longer pay. So let us build a commonwealth of toil and scrap the arts of our mistaken past.
Verily the capitalist system does not deliver the goods. This is because of no flaw in the system. The system is still all there as before. Only the demands made of it have changed. The system has not changed. It has not changed to meet the demands. Upon the advent of new machinery, displacing man-power by the millions, the system did not adjust its distribution so as to take up the slack in the disemployed’s belt. I
Ever see an engine running wild? That gives you an idea of how capitalism works. It has slipped its halter and the lines are under his tail—the governor shaft is bent or crooked. To remedy this the steam must be shut off, the engine be brought to a dead stop, and the governor adjusted.
If a dictator shuts off the steam, the governor will be adjusted to steal only as much as it did before mechanical progress began on a large scale. If a general strike shuts off the steam, the governor shall be adjusted so as to put a stop to all stealing. In the former, precedent is the rule. In the latter, scientific principles shall prevail.