 | The “Scab” : A Result of ConditionsBy Lucy Parsons (1892) |
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| The “Scab” : A Result of ConditionsBy Lucy Parsons (1892) |
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IWW Founder, Anarchist Activist, and Labor Organizer
: In addition to defending the rights of African-Americans, Lucy spoke out against the repressed status of women in nineteenth century America. Wanting to challenge the notion that women could not be revolutionary, she took a very active, and often militant, role in the labor movement... (From: IWW.org.)
• "I say to the wage class: Think clearly and act quickly, or you are lost. Strike not for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less." (From: "The Principles of Anarchism," by Lucy E. Parsons.)
• "...order can only exist where liberty prevails..." (From: "The Principles of Anarchism," by Lucy E. Parsons.)
• "People have become so used to seeing the evidences of authority on every hand that most of them honestly believe that they would go utterly to the bad if it were not for the policeman's club or the soldier's bayonet. But the anarchist says, 'Remove these evidence of brute force, and let man feel the revivifying influences of self responsibility and self control, and see how we will respond to these better influences.'" (From: "The Principles of Anarchism," by Lucy E. Parsons.)
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The “Scab”
Scab is a new word, and like the individual it represents, it is the result of, and is coined from, the conditions of today. We believe in organization among the wealth-producers because it, for a time at least, enables the wage-slave to withstand the encroachments of the capitalists; it disciplines the raw material of the factory; and besides, men and women who are too ignorant or indolent to organize in the unions of their trades are too ignorant to be amenable to the teachings of the science of economies. But the “scab” is here; he is a factor, and is becoming a more important factor with each day’s momentum of the capitalistic system.
Analyzed, who is the scab? A poverty-stricken, disheartened wage-slave—no more, no less.
According to very conservative statistics there are constantly from a million to a million and a half of wealth-producers out of employment. What an army from which to manufacture the scab! And this army is ever on the increase. Can the unionist hope to keep his wages at the present maximum standard with this vast army of men and women who possess every essential of life that he does? Whose daily needs are the same as his? Then what is the unionist and the scab to do?
Stop fighting each other and say unanimously and unitedly the wage-system has outgrown its usefulness, if it ever had any, and must go. Trades Unionist and scab, this is the situation which confronts you today. Will you accept it or will you reject it, and thus rivet tighter the chains that bind you?
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org
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The “Scab”
