# American Syndicalism/Chapter 08

VIII
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
For our own country, it has considerable significance that the newer immigrant is everywhere conspicuous in the I. W. W. The older American leadership has to consider him in all its tactics. That so many of these new-comers are without votes is no mean asset for revolutionary propaganda.
In the language of English suffragettes, "Because we have no votes, we must choose other means to gain our ends," is an argument I have heard used with the same effect, as the lack of funds in French trade unions is thought to be good reason for direct action. They can neither afford nor wait results of slow and indirect activity.
Of the same nature as a characteristic is the youth of the membership. The groups I saw in the West bore this stamp so unmistakeably as to suggest bodies of students at the end of a rather jolly picnic. The word "bum" usually applied to them in that region does not fit them. There are plenty of older men, as there are men with every appearance of being "down and out"—with trousers chewed off at the heels, after the manner of tramps, but in face and bearing they are far from "bums."
In one of the speeches the young were addressed as "best material," because they could stand the wear and tear of racking journeys. They were free from ​family responsibilities, and could at any moment respond to the call of duty. In a report of this year's Convention (1912) "the predominance of young blood" is noted with approval. "Ninety per cent were under thirty years of age," which means a large percentage of very young. But of most importance in this breezy commotion is the extreme and even frantic assertion of its main ideas and practices.
Only a small and unknown fraction of labor in any country has any conscious relation to what is distinctive in Syndicalism, but this defect is more than made up by daring and dramatic assertion of its "principles." These in the main are not new, except in changes wrought by the technical revolution of modern industry. The dream of throwing the labor masses into one all-embracing Union is at least as old as the "Grand National Consolidated Trade Unions" of 1834, with the addition, moreover, of the "General Strike" as its great weapon. We have seen how much of Syndicalism was a propelling force in the meteoric career of the Knights of Labor. As this streak of fire burned out in the early nineties, Syndicalism reappears in France. It appears in action, in metaphysical quiddities, and in literary rhapsodies. In action, it rebels against the halting ineffectiveness of legislative reforms in cities and government. It is noted that every law and ordinance to improve things socially has to be amended year after year before it works at all, and even then, it works but lamely for the general good. Against these discouragements, the more fiery and headlong spirits among Socialists rebel and intellectually fraternize with anarchists. They rebel ​against the State (as anarchists always have) and against its lumbering procedure through parliamentary delays. These social laws, says one of them, "are mere substitutes for action. They move with feet of lead when we want wings." To fly to their goal instead of walking to it, becomes a passion. As they turn gruffly from the State and from the lazy ways of legal change, they also turn from the employer. This is among the drolleries of the situation. After employers have been revelling in their own refusal to "recognize" trade unions, our I. W. W. turn the tables. "We, too, refuse to 'recognize' employers." "We quit work without consulting them. We go back to work without notice. In all ways they shall be ignored."
If capitalism is "organized corruption," why should labor, the "all-creative," recognize it? This, too, it is said is as insincere and farcical as to recognize the politician and the state. This impatient activity was all there before it got philosophic expression in the writings of George Sorel. He gave to it the metaphysical touch that works as mystically on the imagination as the shadowy dialectic of Marx worked upon the awed devotees who could but faintly guess his meaning.
Rapidly a group of writers, either workingmen or in the closest way identified with them, put the new purpose into a literature for propaganda. If there is no help from the State, the politician, or the employer, the logic is evident. The worker must turn to himself and to the trade union as his fighting arm. If the State and employer alike are the enemy, this enemy must be disabled, in all ways badgered and ​discomfited. As all the workers are to be brought in, the lowest possible dues must be charged or even no dues at all. The strike then becomes supreme. It must be short, sharp and unexpected. It must be sudden and explosive to show its power. It must aim at the most vital spot. For practice, you may keep your hand in by strikes in smaller industries, but transportation is the great target,—the railroad best of all, because it is the nerve system of distribution. Cripple this, and hunger will stalk the streets within a fortnight. Always, too, sabotage is in order. It frets and harries the employer. It strikes at his profits. With skill and a "fine conspiracy " among the laborers, the spoiled product cannot be traced. The destroyer may work as subtly as a disease with no fear of punishment.
This gospel of destruction has a quite fascinating versatility. On the one hand we are assured that capitalism has reached senility. Though never more prolific of depravity, never more active in parasitic lecheries, its real power is so near its end, that a few years of adroit and vigorous assault and it will tumble of its own weight.
Others speak as if the strength of capitalism was never so great. The proof offered is that three generations of social and other legislation meant to curb its power have obviously failed.
The supposed discovery of this failure of political and social reform is vital. If these attempts have done nothing to relieve the exploitation of the weak: if reform does not even show a tendency to such alleviation then sedition may justify itself.
​It is the essence of "social legislation" that it stands for the public welfare and not for any special interest. Piece by piece, since 1802, in England, it has been built up. It has tried to "regulate" the more lawless forces of competing private interests, as well as the health, housing, hours and conditions of labor, the child in industry, occupational diseases, industrial insurance, and then, with more specific intent, the direct curbing of corporate powers in banks, railways, insurance, and the whole extending network of big business as it becomes national in its affiliations. It is generally believed that these forces have been restrained to the common good; that they cannot, as of old, show contempt for public opinion, even if they feel it. Large sections of English, German and French Socialists agree in this, that legislative reforms have already produced immense benefits and that the way, even for Socialists, is along this same pathway of enlarged and more coherent amelioration.
True or false this issue cuts to the marrow of our question. It presents the case about which the main struggle of the future is to turn. Is the present society to be "reformed" into some tolerable measure of justice and "equal hope for all"? Are the main lines of this regeneration already traced, with such clearness that we have only to continue as we have begun? Or, are we to confess their futility and fall to, in good I. W. W. fashion, to ridicule charities, philanthropies, social settlements, welfare work, sliding scales, arbitration and the full score of other attempts to unite and organize the entire good will of society and not merely a "class conscious" part of it?
​But syndicalist criticism goes much further. We have, for example, taken the Post Office away from the private profit maker to manage it democratically and directly for public uses. Most of the world's railroads have been taken by the State; a large part of trolley lines, gas, telephone, telegraph; a good deal of private insurance, mines and water powers, together with a long list of municipal hotels, restaurants, milk, supplies; all these have already been "socialized," "taken over" for public administration "in the interests of all." These are for the most part imperfectly managed, but their intent is socialistic, because they lessen the area of private investment. Are we to continue in this direction by carrying out this same process to its supposed logical completeness? When it is applied to banks, land, shipping, mills, mines, and the entire body of more important industries, shall we have the essentials of the Socialist State?
In every advanced country, this is the express claim of a most influential part of the active and disciplined leadership among Socialists. At the points where they secure political power and responsibility, this opinion steadily gains in influence. This view assumes that the evils of capitalism are slowly being lessened and that the way to diminish them further still, is to extend the whole regulating and "socializing" process now under way.
The hot protest against the above is not confined to the I. W. W. Hosts of more revolutionary spirits reject these "bourgeois conciliations," but none reject them with more contemptuous unanimity than Syndicalists in general. They tell us that our ​prevailing business system never was more triumphant or unrepentant. Never did it strip labor closer to the bone. Never did it lug away to private vaults so large a share of that wealth wrung from the toil and sweat of those who labor. From its inner kingdom of finance, its cunning devices of "underwriting" and control of credit, marketing securities, overcapitalization, and such like juggleries, the powers of capitalism so control the final dividing of products as to get absolutely and relatively an increasing pillage for their share. In these round terms of condemnation Syndicalists speak to us of discredited social and economic reform alike. It has no more fundamental characteristic than this.
No man believing this could escape the syndicalist logic. If for nearly three generations, all the stupendous energies to curb the competitive spirit working through capitalism, have come to nothing; if these energies, working through local and parliamentary activities have left us relatively more enfeebled than ever before the tyrannies of private capital, why should further appeal to politics and "reforms" inspire a spark of hope?
Syndicalism represents this "army of the disillusioned." As one of them writes—"In good faith we asked elected officials to get redress through new laws only to find that, one by one, each spouting coward lost himself body and soul to the real interests of the proletariat. When we had seen John Burns, Millerand, Viviani Briand and scores of lesser socialist officials yield to the tawdry fopperies of bourgeois entertainers and official ceremonies, we got onto ​that game. Now we know where to look. What is to be done will be done directly by ourselves, the working class, and we will forge the weapons to do it."
This bitterness of disappointment had wide expression in France before any "philosopher" (Sorel, Berth, Lagardelle or the supposed succor of Professor Henri Bergson) had given it more oracular expression. In the United States it is the same. Several years before our "intellectuals" furnished a literary ritual to the I. W. W., hundreds of soap-box evangelists had been telling their listeners to turn their backs both upon political reform and upon the whole "scavenger brood of trade union cormorants." "Until the working class turns to itself, every day is lost." As these disappointments gain in volume, literary organs, East and West, spring up to give them voice. From men of university training, we hear that "the proletariat is losing ground actually and relatively." "Against labor, capitalism is more and more holding its own." It grows more and more powerful. It does this because it has affiliations, economic and political, which give it such strategic pliancy that it can shift its ground, adapt itself to hostile legislation, to trade unions—which it honestly thinks a scourge and a nuisance; to costly welfare adjuncts, even to city and state ownership, without losing an atom of its essential dominance.
Mr. English Walling's able book Socialism As It Is, is filled with convictions and evidence on this point. When Col. Roosevelt gave out his program at Chicago (August, 1912), it was attacked from many quarters as "Socialistic." Socialist papers twitted him with ​stealing their thunder. The Nationalist Organ at Washington paralleled the Socialist and the new Roosevelt platforms to prove what valuable plunder the colonel had stolen from their camp. Yet Mr. Walling finds no item in Mr. Roosevelt's list that is in any intelligible sense socialistic. He writes:
Mr. Roosevelt's programme is, in the Socialist view, neither populistic nor socialistic in the slightest degree, but capitalistic. He has not appropriated a single Socialist demand. He has merely taken up certain measures the Socialists took from other radicals. These measures were placed on our programme because it was seen that they were capable of immediate realization, because though previously neglected, they might be accepted by the majority of capitalists without any loss to themselves or any necessary danger to the capitalist system.
To this the "National Socialist" replies through Mr. Ghent: "Mr. Walling would have come somewhat nearer the facts by saying just the opposite of what he here asserts. It is ridiculous to maintain that Roosevelt's programme is in no degree Socialistic." The editorial raises the great shade of Marx himself, who says that these reform measures "are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production." (August 24, 1912.)
The issue here seems to me obviously against Mr. Walling and those who hold with him. It is "ridiculous to maintain that Roosevelt's programme is in no degree Socialistic." The whole syndicalist flouting of "reforms" and the service they have performed, and are likely to perform, is, I think, just as obviously a mistaken view, but its emphasis is a hall-mark of Syndicalism. Its ideas became heady and extreme, ​they pass, as if caught in rapids that cannot be stemmed, to the most revolutionary limit, as "Class Consciousness" for example passes into "Class War." Our own labor history is here illuminating.
As the Knights of Labor began to totter and the Federation of Labor took shape, the extremists of the "class-war" type formed the "Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance," pitted both against the Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor. Every difference, every enmity toward the employing class and toward unionism "pure and simple" got more thumping emphasis.
In its later stages, the Knights of Labor were swept by this more revolutionary emotion. This temper has now passed to an order with another lettering—the I. W. W. It has much of the liturgy of the Knights of Labor; much of its more indiscriminate working-class inclusiveness. It has also much of which the Knights of Labor consciously knew little. This consists chiefly in sharpening the fighting edge of every revolutionary weapon in the socialist armory. An hundred Knights of Labor strikes practised sabotage, but they knew not the word, much less had they any philosophy about it. The new warfare has passed the fig-leaf innocencies and consciously clothes itself in pragmatic habits. It has its metaphysic and chooses for expositor, one of the most brilliant among modern philosophers who is thought to dignify and sanction our simpler and more direct activities. No less fateful is it that Syndicalism comes among us at a time when the general atmosphere is electric with rude and querulous discontent; when censure of our main ​stabilities, constitutions, courts, judges, will bring applause in any general audience in the United States. This criticism of our "secular sanctities" is not in the least an affair of mobs alone. It speaks openly and unashamed in the books and utterances of scholars and first rate publicists. In nearly three hundred regular socialist periodicals, this defiant criticism has become the habitual reading of some millions of our inhabitants. I have heard a large working-class audience burst into uproarious guffaws at this sentence spoken from the platform: "No society could exist that did not respect its courts of justice." A very able university President recently attempted the defense of our conserving institutions in a popular arena. He was so heckled and worsted that he left the meeting, feeling, as he told me, that "they thoroughly wiped the floor with me."
Any one who thinks these illustrations carry any exaggeration has only to spend some hours on a bundle of this literature which he may buy on the streets in any industrial center of the United States. The lengths to which this challenging goes may be seen in an incident two months ago in a western town. The judge, as he passed sentence for "conspiracy," had spoken gravely of what a court of justice signifies. He allowed the condemned man "a few words in his own behalf," and listened, apparently not much disturbed, to the following:
​There are two points which I want to touch upon—the indictment itself and the misstatement of the prosecuting attorney. The indictment reads: "The People of the State of California against J. W. Whyte and others." It's a hideous lie. The people in this courtroom know that it is a lie; the court itself knows that it is a lie, and I know that it is a lie. . . . You cowards throw the blame upon the people, but I know who is to blame and I name them—it is Spreckels and his partners in business and this court is the lackey and lickspittle of that class, defending the property of that class against the advancing horde of starving American workers.
The prosecuting attorney in his plea to the jury accused me of saying on a public platform at a public meeting: "To hell with the courts; we know what justice is." He told a great truth when he lied, for if he had searched the innermost recesses of my mind he could have found that thought, never expressed by me before, but which I express now. "To hell with your courts, I know what justice is," for I have sat in your courtroom day after day and have seen members of my class pass before this, the so-called bar of justice. . . .
I have seen you, Judge ————, and others of your kind, send them to prison because they dared to infringe upon the sacred rights of property. You have become blind and deaf to the rights of man to pursue life and happiness, and you have crushed those rights so that the sacred rights of property should be preserved. Then you tell me to respect the law. I don't. I did violate the law, and I will violate every one of your laws and still come before you and say: "To hell with the courts," because I believe that my right to live is far more sacred than the sacred right of property that you and your kind so ably defend.
​This speech has made a hero of the jailed Syndicalist. When his confinement ends, as a vendor of "hot stuff," his place upon the I. W. W. platforms will be secure.
To see the I. W. W. as it is; to see it with the eye that understands, whether forgivingly or in condemnation, is to see it as the child of strife. It is born out of conflict. The terrible struggle of the American Railway Union in and about Chicago which made Mr. Debs so famous, has the initial characteristic of Syndicalism becoming conscious of itself. The fight was so desperate that all the unions in the industry were thrown together. This gave that elated sense of collective force, out of which this revolutionary impulse springs. In saying that the I. W. W. began in the Colorado strike, means only that a more concentrated contest added enough intensity to the feeling of labor solidarity to make it more conscious of a new power. Mr. Debs' education in his own strike prepared him for the first I. W. W. Convention a few months later as effectively as if he had been among the miners. The most influential men in that Chicago gathering (1905) had had stormy and bitter experience.
It is this war-origin of the I. W. W. which is its weakness on the constructive side. That it is a child of strife, brings back upon itself the very qualities which are admirable for battle, but which make stability and organization impossible. They lead to the quarrels which disrupt the attempts at steady team work from the very start. The practical danger to the I. W. W. is absence of trouble. If industry were ​so organized as to prevent strikes, the I. W. W. would disappear.
In 1909, came the outbreak at McKees Rocks, with dictatorial mismanagement at the top which brought from some of our most capitalistic papers the most caustic censure. This high and mighty tone was the very breath of life to the I. W. W. Flocking from every quarter, it brought sympathizers ready to fight in their cause. It is this fighting feature which attracts so many journalists and those of artistic and literary temperament. It is an impulse so rich in dramatic satisfactions as to be the happiest windfall for their mood.
All the drudgeries and enduring strain demanded by reforms like civil service, good housing, social hygiene, insurance, and the like, are wan and colorless compared to the inscrutable pageantry—all the unexpectedness and mystery of an I. W. W. attack.
In its whole popular theory, as well as in the fieldwork of its practice, it has the same revolutionary emphasis which must be considered under successive heads.