e may engage in a little
agitation in the interest of his class. He is marked as an agitator, he
is discharged, and then what is his status?

The minute he is discharged he has to hunt for a new buyer for his labor
power. He owns no tools; the tools are great machines. He can't compete
against them with his bare hands. He has got to work. There is only one
condition under which he can work and that is when he sells his labor
power, his energy, his very life currents, and thus disposes of himself
in daily installments. He is not sold from the block, as was the chattel
slave. He sells ten hours of himself every day in exchange for just
enough to keep himself in that same slavish condition.

The machine he works with has to be oiled, and he has to be fed, and the
oil sustains the same relation to the machine that food does to him. If
he could work without food his wage would be reduced to the vanishing
point. That is the status of the workingman today.

What can the present economic organization do to improve the condition
of the workingman? Very little, if anything. If you have a wife and two
or three children, and you take the possibilities into consideration,
this question ought to give you grave concern. You know that it is the
sons of workingmen who become vagabonds and tramps, and who are sent to
jail, and it is the daughters of workingmen who are forced into houses
of shame.

You are a workingman, you live in capitalism, and you have nothing but
your labor power, and you don't know whether you are going to find a
buyer or not. But even if you do find a master, if you have a job, can
you boast of being a man among men?

No man can rightly claim to be a man unless he is free. There is
something godlike about manhood. Manhood doesn't admit of ownership.
Manhood scorns to be regarded as property.

Do you know whether you have a job or not? Do you know how long you are
going to have one? And when you are out of a job what can your union do
for you? I was down at Coalgate, Oklahoma, on the Fourth of July last,
where six hundred miners have been out of work for four long months.
They are all organized. There are the mines and machinery, and the
miners are eager to work. But not a tap of work is being done, and the
miners and their families are suffering, and most of them live in houses
that are unfit for habitation. This awful condition is never going to be
changed in capitalism. There is one way only and that is to