Perhaps the very best way to run an industrial enterprise is on the currently accepted model of the Prussian State. It is simply a moot point and the I. W. W. has challenged the Prussian method. Whatever intrinsic merit there may be in the affirmative program of the Industrial Workers of the World, it must be admitted by even its most enthusiastic members that were they today given the power they ask, they would be no less relentless Prussians than are the corporations we have with us. Even though capitalism may be ripe for replacement, the I. W. W. are a long way from being fit to replace it. The Wobblies are grotesquely unprepared for responsibility. So far their own members do not understand how relatively unimportant is their much-talked-of _sabotage_ method. They have challenged the autocratic method, but they have done it very crudely and with a weird misplacement of emphasis. They whisper it in a footnote, as it were, to their strident blackface statements about method. "If labor is not allowed a voice in the management of the mines--apply _sabotage_!"
Unquestionably the I. W. W. ask too much when they ask that the producers be given _exclusive_ control of industry. As to certain phases of management the workers (including, of course, all hand and brain workers connected with the industry) should perhaps be given entire control. The hours of labor and the sanitary conditions in any productive enterprise are primarily, if not exclusively, the concern of the producers. But the amount of the product which ought to be turned out and the price at which it ought to be sold are matters in which the consumers have no little interest. Consumers, therefore, should share in the management of the industry so far as it relates to prices and the determination of the amount to be produced.
The following pages are devoted to a mere matter-of-fact description of the Industrial Workers of the World as an organization and to a record of the facts of its history. The purpose has been throughout to write from the sources. The writer has tried to have the "Wobblies" themselves do the telling, through interviews, soap-box speeches, convention proceedings and official papers and pamphlets. The bulk of the record is based upon documents and other materials collected and impressions received since 1909 when the writer first became interested in the I. W. W.
