Socialism begins at work. The text of a vey early Communist Party of America leaflet published in a run of 250,000 copies during the Autumn, 1919 General Steel Strike on controlling your workplace as a step towards control of society.

‘Your Shop’ Propaganda Leaflet No. 3, Issued by the Communist Party of America, 1219 Blue Island Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

It should be your shop (or your factory, your store, your mill, your mine, or your railroad), yours to work in, yours to produce in, yours to manage with the help of your fellow workers.

You spend most of your waking hours in the shop. The conditions under which you work and produce determine your life, your happiness.

If you and your fellow workers controlled the shop, determined the hours of labor, the working conditions, and apportioned the rewards for the services rendered, you would be able to create the conditions that would bring happiness to you. You would so arrange your work that you would not have your life sapped by long hours and bad working conditions and so that the wealth you produced would be yours, yours to secure the enjoyment of good food, good clothing, a good home, and the opportunity for education and healthy recreation.

There is enough wealth produced to give these things to all who work. But the capitalists own the shops that should be yours. The capitalists make you work long hours under bad working conditions; they take from you as their profit the lion’s share of what you produce.

They will do that as long as they own and control the shop. There is no hope as long as the shop is not yours.

Workingmen everywhere are learning this. The workingmen of Russia have shown the way. In Russia the shops, as well as all other means of production and distribution, belong to the workers.

The Russian workers organized their power. They created shop committees in every plant and united these in workers councils. Thus they built up the means for united action. When the crisis came they were prepared to use their mass power. Before their mass power the government of the capitalists and landowners broke up and disappeared. The workers councils became the organs of the working-class government. The workers controlled the state power, the police, the army.

Having taken from the capitalist the governmental power through which the capitalists maintain their control of the shop and the exploitation and oppression of the workers, the workers took control of the shops. The shop committees they elected took over the management. They told the capitalists that their days as autocrats, Czars and Kaisers, of industry were over. They told them there would be no more robbery of the workers through paying them for only a part of what they produced. They told them that the shops now belonged to all the workers and that they, the capitalists, would have to go work for a living.

And in Russia the workers are building the society that means happiness for all in spite of all the efforts of the capitalists of the world to overthrow their government and strike down their new economic system.

The workers everywhere are growing more and more dissatisfied with the capitalists’ control of the shops in which they work and spend most of their lives. That is the meaning of the great strikes in England and of the great industrial struggles in this country.

But the workers must organize to secure control of the shops. The first step is to organize a shop committee in the shop in which you work.

Bring together all the enlightened workers who are ready to participate in the struggle to win control of the shop. Organize them in a Communist Party Shop Branch. This committee will carry on the work of agitation and education among the other workers. It will collect funds and secure papers and pamphlets for distribution in the shop.

The work of the committee will be to unite all the workers in the shop in a shop organization, machinists, carpenters, shipping clerks, workers of every trade, all must unite in the one workers organization in their shop.

Workers! You must build up the organs of working-class power if you are to win your freedom. The shop organization is the basis for the organization of the mass power of the workers.

Prepare to take control of your shop, of your work, of your lives and happiness.

ORGANIZE AND MAKE IT YOUR SHOP.

Propaganda Leaflet No. 3, Issued by the Communist Party of America, 1219 Blue Island Avenue, Chicago, Ill.