﻿T-Bone Slim Slim poses Intelligence Test For Tired Radicals

Even if the worker is ignorant, that is no license for the bosses to rob him. It isn’t even sportsmanship. It is kicking a man when he is down.
Bosses do hire a few other than numb-skulls when profits are rolling in heavy—but it is strictly against their policy. We are employed, not just because we are profitable, but because we are more profitable than someone else. So, when a machine is more profitable than a man, the machine gets the job and the man gets “the relief.”
Whenever a child is more profitable than a man, or a woman, the child is hired; for the boss has autocratic powers, and he is endorsed by nine benign old gentlemen, so inviolate are the rights of industrial slavery. Then we are on the scrap pile wondering how it all happened.
It’s too late then. We should, start wondering before it happens, and we should assert ourselves to the end that it can’t happen here, or any place.
Intelligence is not paramount, because the problem is simplification personified: Get the parasites off our necks. A raving maniac can decifer that much. We are not bucking intelligence when we buck the boss; we are bucking power.
Let me re-state the case: The industrial autocrat robs us workers and thereby curtails our will to consume the things we produce. What’s the answer? Co-ordinate our power in One Big Industrial Union—One Big Union of All the Workers.
The material is all here. Let’s put it together.
Workers cannot be ignorant when the bosses know only what the workers tell them.
Workers have the intelligence, power, and numbers—all it takes is organization. And now, before the master relegates all us to perish on the scrap-pile, something should be done, action should be begun. Picked clean of health, raiment, and substance, better than two million are on the scrap-pile now, waiting the chinook. We are the next.
True enough the industrial slave has much for which to be sentimental, self-pity if nothing more. But those are side issues, and have nothing to do with the matter in hand. We are slaves, that is our only headache—and the only problem we have is how we can free ourselves from industrial autocracy. There is only one way—organize an industrial union at the point of production. Practice democracy therein, and establish industrial democracy as a matter of sequence. Industrial freedom follows, and with it political and social freedom. That’s the order of their sequence. (Germany tried to establish social democracy first—tried to climb the tree from a distance. That story is just too sad.)
The material is all here, Let’s put it together.