Text: Russia did it (full transcription below).

Year: 1919.

Publisher: Industrial Workers of the World/Socialist Party.

Artist: NA.

Additional information: Illustration shows a worker pointing at a capitalist as he guards his mountain of ‘war profits’ while the text below calls on the workers to seize the shipyards in the spirit of the Bolsheviks. 40,000 copies printed during the general strike, when some 65,000 workers went on strike for five days between 6-11 February before it was called off as a result of pressure on labour leaders and organisations. The strike stoked fears of ‘Bolshevism’ in the US, which in turn nourished the burgeoning Red Scare.

Text reads in full:

SHIPYARD WORKERS — You left the shipyards to enforce your demands for higher wages. Without you your employers would be helpless. Without you they cannot make one cent of profit – their whole system of robbery has collapsed.

The shipyards are idle; the toilers have withdrawn even tho the owners of the yards are still there. Are your matters building ships? No. Without your labor power it would take all the shipyard employers of Seattle and Tacoma working eight hours a day the next thousand years to turn out one ship. Of what use are they in the shipyards?

It is you and you alone who build; you create all the wealth of society today; you make possible the $75,000 sable coats for millionaire’s wives. It is you alone who can build the ships.

They can’t build the ships. You can. Why don’t you?

There are the shipyards: more ships are urgently needed: you alone can build them. If the masters continue their dog-in-the-manger attitude, not able to build the ships themselves and not allowing the workers to, there is only one thing left for you to do.

Take over the management of the shipyards yourselves; make the shipyards your own: make the jobs your own; decide the working conditions yourselves; decide your wages yourselves.

In Russia the masters refused to give their slaves a living wage too. The Russian workers put aside the bosses and their tool, the Russian government, and took over industry in their own interests.

There is only one way out: a nation-wide general strike with its object the overthrow of the present rotten system which produces thousands of millionaires and millions of paupers each year.

The Russians have shown you the way out. What are you going to do about it? You are doomed to wage slavery until you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have not one thing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers must take over the control of your jobs, and thru them, the control over your lives instead of offering yourselves up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil.