# American Syndicalism/Chapter 12

XII
SABOTAGE
As the meaning of the word gentleman depends upon the person who speaks it, sabotage is the most doubtful of terms until we know something of him who uses it. Like the term "direct action," if one is inclined to violence, sabotage readily lends itself to extreme measures. In the thick of a desperate and losing strike, it has many times meant outrageous ruin to property.
In the early stage of the discussion in Germany, a Syndicalist saw in his paper an account of some slight accident in the machinery of the Belfast Rope Works, whereby four thousand men were instantly left in idleness. This came to him like one of those happy accidents which has so often led to great scientific discoveries. Just a little break in the machinery and four thousand men must stop! A hint like that was not to be lost. If properly reasoned out, it might be "utilized for great social purposes." To elevate such accidents into a social policy; to instruct labor in the art of turning blind casualties into a planned onslaught against capitalism is "a project to stir men's blood." After this manner the delighted discoverer reasoned about this thrilling invention. Like many another invention, the thing itself has far off origins.
From the wooden shoe of the peasant, sabot, it has acquired all its mischievous significance. A French ​syndicalist says it became popular after striking weavers, in 1834 in Lyons, had smashed both glass and machines with their heavy foot-gear.
A university professor of France has traced for me some further niceties in the history of the word, but for our main purpose it has no difficulties. In substance, it is as old as the strike itself. It is a specialized form of making trouble for the employer. Trade unions have been as familiar with its uses as with any other weapon in their fighting career. It is the familiar "ca canny" of the Scotch which got much advertising at the strike of Glasgow dockers in 1889. They had asked a rise of wages which was refused. The union official instructed the men in sabotage. Farm laborers had been brought in to fill the places of the strikers. "Let us go back to the job," said the official, "and do it exactly as the land lubbers do it. Those butterfingers break things and drop things into the water from the docks. See to it, lads, that you imitate them until the masters learn their lesson." "If they like that kind of work, let them have plenty of it."
It is such as these in great numbers and from many countries that I. W. W. instructors give us for illustration. A father of Syndicalism, Emil Pouget, writes expressly on sabotage partly, it seems, to assure the outside public that (as consumer) it need have no fear. "Sabotage is solely against the boss."
In recent strikes among bakers, the bread in its early stages has been spoiled by some unappetizing addition, (like castor oil or petroleum) to the dough. Though it cannot be eaten, the eater is reassured by ​M. Pouget that in no case is it poisoned,—unpalatable, yes; "but not injurious to health."
In California, during the strike on the Harriman roads, a machinist who had left his job made the same distinction. "We refuse," he said, "to put the public to serious risk. We can manipulate the machinery easy enough—from the engines to the track, we can put big trouble and big expense onto the managers." Another told me, "We'll bleed that crowd white before we get through. We've forced them to hire an army of spies and Pinkertons. They talk cheerful to the public, but we'll take so many millions out of them that they will think more than twice before turning us down again." He too, like M. Pouget, was sure that the public was safe, but his reasoning was even less reassuring.
The variety of these practices is as diverse as modern industry itself. In the life of that famous utopian, Fourier, we are told that his first moral revolt against the competitive system came to him when he discovered that as clerk he was expected to lie to the purchaser whenever necessary. Of great spiritual sensitiveness, he could not bring himself to this and went on blurting out the truth about the various wares until the infuriated employer turned him from the shop.
I have sometimes heard this delicate cruelty of exact truth telling recommended by the I. W. W. as one of the most perfected forms of sabotage for clerks and retail vendors generally. "Get together, study the foods, spices, candies, and every adulterated product. Study the weights and measures, and all of you tell the exact truth to every customer."
​This is near akin to something far more widely practiced. For railway employees to submit an exact obedience to every rule imder which they work, is to create instant havoc on that road. A train is not started on schedule tick while two or three old ladies are in the act of climbing onto the car. There has always to be the "margin of discretion" in applying rules. French and Italian Syndicalists brought utmost confusion to the railroads by their "conspiracy of literal obedience." It is one of the French phrases, "Study the time, the condition of trade, the technique of the machinery. Wherever you find the most sensitive nerve—attack it with acute refinement." In a French restaurant an objectionable employer was driven half insane on finding that his waiters were serving guests, as publicly advertised, "with perfectly fresh foods." They were practicing sabotage by dropping out all the traditional ingenuities through which half-spoiled material could be given artistic satisfaction to the eater. The cutters in a tailors' strike won their contest by preparing garments up to the standard promised by the proprietor, but with a finished excellence which left him with a deficit.
In Bordeaux gas works, scabs were kept from the establishment by the strikers' following the contract and remaining at their posts, but doing their work so as to shower the managers with public complaint.
If the resources of sabotage are made a study; if all its possibilities are investigated and the results turned into suggestive material for general use, it may become a rare and exciting sport. It is as easy on the farm as ​on the railroad. These finer points of the game have thus far had little use in the United States. They only appear in literary form as hints for talents and occasions that may in time arise. That we may some time have a "university of the proletariat" for still wider instruction appears in a report published in Paris two years ago, in which definite instruction is given as to the various forms of sabotage and their uses in different industries. Both authors of this document are confessed Anarchists, one of them having resigned from the socialist section to which he had belonged. As long as machinery is owned by employers, says the report, "it is the enemy of the man who operates it. Its private possession must be made so vexatious and troublesome that no man will care to own it. 'Then labor will come by its own.' That sabotage can be carried on without money is thought to be one of its chief advantages. This propaganda is 'the great university of the proletariat.'"
The talents developed thus far by our I. W. W. have not shown themselves in "acute refinements." In northwestern saw mills timber lengths were changed so that only misfits were left for the planned structure. Logs were so laid that in sawing half the value was lost. Nails were so driven as to damage the saw and in the hauling from the woods, teams, harnesses and tools were "skilfully injured."
A group of our Italian excavators met a cut in their wages by straightway taking their shovels to a machine which clipped from the blade enough of its surface to correspond to the cut in wages. They sent in ​their explanation: "Less pay, less shovel." A good translation of à mauvaise paie mauvais travail.
The advantages which are supposed to follow a shrewd use of sabotage are that it enables the men to hold their job, even while half ruining it. The risk and waste of long strikes have been learned. Sabotage, "if made an intellectual process," may strike at the employer a swifter and more deadly blow and lessen the chances of scabbing.
In order to show the easy resources of sabotage, Emile Pouget rather vauntingly puts down a list of rare accomplishments during only twenty days of July, 1910, when telegraph and telephone lines were cut to the number of 795. Instruction is given to show what can be done with "only two cents' worth of chemicals to spoil machine products."
The Technical World reports an I. W. W. strike in British Columbia that shows the strategy among highly paid labor. In the official statement of the general secretary, it is laid down as a principle of action that only by the exercise of power can the slightest concession be won from capital. During strikes, he says:
"The works are closely picketed and every effort made to keep the employers from getting workers into the shops. All supplies are cut off from strike bound shops. All shipments are refused or missent, delayed and lost if possible. Strike breakers are also isolated to the full extent of the power of the organization. Interference by the government is resented by open violation of the government's orders, going to jail en ​masse, causing expense to the taxpayers—which are but another name for the employing class.
"In short, the I. W. W. advocates the use of militant 'direct action' tactics to the full extent of our power to make good."
The above extract rewards study. It is not a product of soap-box oratory. It is coolly written down in the official history. Government "interference" is to be met by "open violation." The general body of taxpayers is identified with the employing class, thus turning into an enemy of labor, all those who support the government by paying taxes. Against these, militant direct action is to be used upon the one principle, the degree of strategic power possessed by strikers.
Such peculiarity as there is in syndicalist teaching on this point is to make it an object of instruction, to make it more universal, more conscious and more ingeniously adapted to its end.
A foreman in a textile mill told me the racy details of sabotage as practiced in his own department. Its cunning effectiveness was such, in his opinion, that only concerted action and a good deal of tutoring by the more clever men could account for the result. The I. W. W. journals have an ample stock of informing suggestions to show the high values of this invention. A little half-heartedly they insist that violence is stupid, because the objects of sabotage can be reached with more subtle effectiveness without it. "If a teamster scabs,—don't hit him, but just hide the axle nuts of his wagon and put some artistic cuts in his harnesses." Much is said of sabotage as "a ​labor-saving device." "We make the machinery of production go on strike, instead of ourselves. If we strike too, that is incidental."
In one of the severer struggles in western Canada an I. W. W. reporter states the wages of the teamsters at three dollars a day with board, and the common shoveler at two seventy-five. These men disliked piece work and the required purchase of dynamite from the boss. As it was "contrary to principles," more than 700 of them "go out at the drop of the hat," without making any demands whatever. Their relations once severed, they act in the spirit of Syndicalists trained for their task. Then came formal presentation of grievances; here and there, shorter working time, changes in the contract system, and better fare at table. Word went out that no violence would be permitted by the strikers; they even organized their own police. They took severe measures against the too free sale of liquor in the saloons—"only one drink a day." The strike-breakers hurried on from the coast were met and persuaded to return. I. W. W. men put in jail for "unlawful assembly" were paid by the strikers one dollar daily "for the common good." "Let a few hundred of us go to jail," it was said, "and see if the province likes the expense." The forms of sabotage were discussed. It was easy to have "accidental fall of rocks or embankments." If strike-breakers got through, they were to be hospitably met with hot coffee. "There may be something in that coffee—a pause—sugar of course." The striker chosen to instruct the reporter says, "Before they get through, they will find it cheaper to make terms with ​us than fight us. 'I Won't Works' they call us. They are right. 'I Won't Works' for capital."
He then continues: "We are striking to educate the workers to their power—to show them if they unite that they can paralyze every wheel of industry and compel the expropriation of all industry from that side of the line to this side of the line; from capital to labor. That is where our organization differs from all other organizations. You think we are beaten? We will go back to work and accumulate funds; and strike yet again, till the public finds it cheaper for us to operate all industry than to tolerate the recurring deadlock. We are striking solely to overthrow the capital system. First, in England, it was the railways. Then, it was the coal mines. Now, it is the docks. Here we have begun operations because labor is so scarce that we can show our power. We have tied up one road for two months. Next time, we'll tie up three roads for three months; and so we'll go on and educate and educate and educate labor to a knowledge of its own strength and solidarity till it realizes it has only to unite in order to take over all industry and overthrow the capital system."
That Canada has for this very kind of disagreement, the best of all Arbitration Acts, was well known to the men. They even discussed it, but no appeal to it was allowed, as the strikers were "not out to patch things up." "We are out against the wage system itself."
The truth about sabotage is that its essence is destruction. All.the dulcet phrases about "mere passive resistance," "only fold the arms or put your hands ​in your pockets and keep them there," or, as I heard a speaker say, "Why, you've nothing to do but just stand round and look sweet,"—all this does not hide the fact that the machinery of production is stopped and to that extent product (wealth) is destroyed. "Quietly change the address on freight cars filled with perishable foods, so they shall go one or two hundred miles south instead of north to Paris, and then get side-tracked a few days more," was one among many guiding hints to the railway strikers. It sounds as gentle as a friendly salute or as the pretty French name, la grève perlée, for a strike that may be ugly in the extreme.
With time, the sabotier has, like the rest of us, gained civility and inteliigence. He does not burn and wreck every new machine in sight like his English brothers seventy years ago, or Russian peasants a generation later. But his gain in humor and affability does not imply that he is one whit less a destroyer that his ruthless forerunner.
We have not forgotten the advice of the "Grand Master" of the Knights of Labor, that every workman after drinking smash his beer bottle. How much work it would give to labor! How many unemployed could at once be set to work!
Yes, but why stop at beer bottles? Why not also break milk bottles, tea cups, plates and then, when the meal is finished, break up the table and chairs, ​destroy the carpet, and finally the house?—One and all—it would "make work."
On the same witless level is this whole annihilating scheme, recommended and urged upon crowds and individuals whose action is beyond control.
Fortunately, a large part of the labor world has learned that the mere smashing of machines is only heady stupidity. The labor of the future will learn that sabotage set up as a principle, or loosely advised, is an economic silliness because it is destructive. It means a deliberated lessening of products—a process in its aftermath always deadlier to the weak than to the strong. It has a grim pathos to hear the strongest man in our I. W. W. crusade congratulating a great and enraptured audience upon the successes of the latest English strike. It was bungled from the start and marked by horrors of suffering that made strong men sick to look upon.
No strike ever "succeeded" that was not encouraged and directed by some measure of practical wisdom. A strike, like any other rude force, is so much power applied for a specific object. It does not "succeed" because it is a strike. If it succeeds, it is only by virtue of shrewd and skilful adaptation to time, to place, and to conditions.
In many ways sabotage has more hazards—more risks of failure—because it is secret, underhand, and so easily beyond all control by those who recommend it. We are told it is "so easy," "so noiseless," "so sheltered." Yes, and so is an administered poison easy, noiseless, sheltered, but it is not necessarily good sense to recommend its indiscriminate use. ​Sabotage is not unlike a poison shot into an organism, but it is an organism of which every laboring man and woman is vitally a part. It is a poison that will never reach capital as something wholly separate from labor. The many who are nearest to the margin of want will suffer, first and in the end, most poignantly.
Very perfectly the wiser men in the socialist movement have learned this lesson. It may have lacked practical tact, that a few months ago, the socialist officials should vote expulsion from the party of all those who preached sabotage. This may have made "a too irritating issue" at the moment. But the kind of miscellaneous advocacy given to sabotage in this country deserves all that was meant by that action. Through its trade unions and through socialistic organization, labor has got at last quite organic strength enough to choose and hold fast to constructive plans. Every hour devoted to destruction is a weakening of its cause. This criticism refers solely to sabotage as actually taught and commended. So long as the fact of warfare in our industrial system continues, the strike, boycott, and sabotage will have a place in spite of the waste and disorder that follows. All of us together must endure them, as war is suffered, until we learn the sanity and moral self-restraint to substitute enlightened and constructive measures in our human intercourse.
The incurable vice of sabotage is in the kind of general doctrinal emphasis given it. Its logic is that of the class-war elevated into a principle and recommended to excited crowds. Its practical dangers are ​in the immediate consequences which the heated imagination is sure to draw from such advice.
It is not alone Socialists of penetration and maturity who see this, but Syndicalists themselves lift a warning finger. Lagardelle is now reported by Kautsky to be dismayed at the exhaustion which this destructive passion has brought with it. The possibilities of the strike and sabotage (as one weapon in its armory) are as sacred to him as ever, but he sees the havoc of any general popularizing of such a force. This vigorous propagandist of syndicalism said in 1907:
"If socialism consists wholly of the class struggle, socialism is as a matter of fact entirely contained within syndicalism, for outside of syndicalism there is no class struggle."
He objects to the Anarchists because they make too light of the class struggle or are merely muddle-headed about it. It is to him the greatness of Syndicalism that it has shown the proletariat to be the only section of society to which we may look for salvation. Nothing is to be hoped from political democracy, because it is engaged in the ignoble trickery of binding the classes closer together. The break, he says, must be absolute. Then and then only can we hope that "not one thing traditionally esteemed will survive destruction."
The disastrous folly of a teaching like this is the more amazing when we recall what it is that Syndicalism sets before us. It is "to capture the machinery of production." From the inside, where the millions are toiling, they are to "take possession" of ​transportation, mines, and factories; but they are to do this, as almost every leader says, by showing themselves competent for the task. They must "prove" their possession of skilled capacities equal to the great undertaking. This raises the question—is it then possible that a long and wide practice in destroying things is a part of such education? If sabotage is to go on among the masses until they "take over" the great machinery, what habits meantime will sabotage develop? Can they practice it for some decades as a fitting preparation for administrative tasks as stupendous as they are delicate? The question requires no answer. To give sabotage the prominence found in I. W. W. opinion is only a little less intelligent than was the attempt of European Anarchists, a few years before the appearance of Syndicalism, to beat the capitalist system by a large scheme of creating and circulating counterfeit money which began at once to circulate among the poorest and stupidest people. If capitalism is to be overthrown, it is not by crippling negations and mere mischief making. If it is to be conquered, it must be mainly by the slow creation of substitutes that have higher business efficiency.
The issues raised by sabotage have furnished continuous occasion for the sharpest differences in opinion, not only among Socialists but within the ranks of Syndicalism.
​The fine technically trained intelligence of Sorel showed a wholesome fear of sabotage and cried out lustily against it, as does also Edouard Berth. H. G. Wells is the easy peer of M. Sorel. He has M. Sorel's dislike for Fabian politics, but these features of Syndicalism offer him no possible plan of social development. It is to him merely "a spirit of conflict." It is "the cheap labor panacea to which the more passionate and less intelligent portion of the younger workers drift." It is the "tawdrification of the trade unionism" and even its dream is "an impossible social fragmentation." Kautsky and the uncompromising Guèsde who despises parliamentary action, are little less severe. I do not bring against the I. W. W. the hostile opinions of the Webbs, Keir Hardy, MacDonald and German leaders. Such opposition is to be expected. It is more serious when men as untrammeled as Sorel, Guesde, Bax and Wells rise up against it. These writers, one and all, look upon sabotage as a clumsily out-of-date and reactionary device.
​With still more severity W. J. Ghent says in the Socialist National Organ: "To preach violence and sabotage to the working class is to preach not a working-class morality, not a socialist morality, but a slave morality. It is the morality of Roman slaves in the days of the empire. By lying, deceit, craft, and theft they sought to lessen the evils of their lot. They did not heroically strive for emancipation. They acquiesced in and compromised with slavery, and sought in cowardly ways only to mitigate its evils. They did not, in any general sense, mend their lot. The shrewd and adroit slave sometimes lightened his own burdens, and sometimes the burdens of a small group. But the slave system as a whole was not affected by this form of resistance—if it may be called by that term. Nor will the tenure of the capitalist system be affected by a like policy."
There are finally collective forms of sabotage very popular against public and legal authorities. The last one of many (Oct. 1, 1912) comes from the general secretary of the I. W. W., calling for help to aid the ​suffering strikers in Little Falls, N. Y. The local jail is already well-filled, but this leading official of the order asks that it be straightway so choked that another prison must be built. He does not ask his own membership for anything so commonplace as money, but urges all who can, to journey thither for the sake of being jailed. As they said in Fresno, California, "The town won't mind a dozen or two in jail, but if they have to provide for several hundred of us, they'll get sick." Mr. St. John wants to make town authorities in Little Falls sick by overloading and tiring out every protective and legal agency.
This is the round-about method by sabotage of discouraging and discrediting our present social mechanism. It is evenly on par with putting castor oil in bread, sifting sand into delicate machinery, or laming the horses of scab teamsters by setting the shoe on the hoof so that the nail reaches the soft part of the foot.
Precisely this is what the general secretary asks for the still more delicate machinery of society. It is to be clogged and rendered useless. A mill foreman told me he found the I. W. W. in one of his rooms using the knee against the parts of a machine which he said was "delicate as a baby." "It ruined the product for an entire day because the damage could not be seen till the next morning." "It was so easily done," he said, "that I never could prove to others that any one man did it." "Any one of them could spoil thirty dollars' worth of product in two seconds," was his estimate.
This direct annihilation of property was not more thorough than filling jails in twenty different towns ​and cities. I tried once to reckon up the cost of one of these escapades in which nearly 200 men must have lost more than 100,000 days' earnings. There was not a baker's dozen of them who could not have had work in that community, if they had been willing to do it. They took long journeys in freight cars. Some paid their fares. I saw others driven from their hold beneath fast trains, and others I saw dropping off, smeared with dirt, as we slowed into the next station. The incidental public expenditure—lawyers, police, court trials and jails—furnish ugly hints of this colossal waste of values, actual and potential. To multiply this special instance by at least thirty, would give us approximate estimates of the last year's destruction.
I am in this not laying blame alone upon I. W. W. adventurers. Many and deeper causes are behind these adolescent pranks. But this method of sabotage, as practiced by wandering crowds in conflict with local police, is like its other forms of waste. It is purely destructive, as warfare and disease are destructive.
Explicitly the I. W. W. mean it for this purpose. Capitalism, they tell us, can be reached in no other way. One who was conspicuous at Lawrence told me, "Why, the only fright we gave the capitalists was by showing them that we had power to bring their business and their profits to a dead standstill. We taught them this, and at the same time gave an object-lesson to our own side. We had only to point to the empty mills and say,—'Look at your work. You see how helpless they are without you. ​They can't weave a yard or make a dollar without you.'" That was a fact, just as a deficit, an accident, or death is a fact; but it is not a fact to rejoice in.
If the wage earners are to get possession of the mills, as is the dream of the I. W. W., by no conceivable means will they get them, except by decades of positive and coöperative work with those who now own and direct the invested capital which these mills represent. Never will they get them by the waste, the negations, and evil habits which sabotage begets. Preached generally and as a doctrine, it separates them from their object and weakens them in every capacity to attain it.
* ↑ I. W. W. History, p. 17.
* ↑ Of this term la grève perlée, Professor Ernest Dimnet writes me, "It is railway slang. For several months the men just changed the addresses stuck on the cars, so they (the cars) were as hard to find as pearls that had dropped off the string."
* ↑ Already the organs of the I. W. W. are at swords' points with the acknowledged leaders of Socialism in the United States. Any reader curious to follow this inner feud has only to subscribe for six months to a paper like the Nationalist Socialist and to Solidarity, the I. W. W. sheet in Newcastle, Pa. Even Mr. Debs is attacked for raising doubts about sabotage. Last week I cut from an I. W. W. paper the following:"Sabotage repels the American worker," says Debs. That is not true. The American worker has used the methods of the sabotier right along. I witnessed as slick a piece of sabotage last week as was ever pulled off. Done right under the boss's eyes when he endeavored to speed the machines up. He did not recognize it as such, but he lowered the speed. Indifferent work is a form of sabotage. The American worker inclines to it when disposed to resent his treatment."The checker in freight houses, to my knowledge, often puts a package in the wrong car to avenge a fancied wrong. This is sabotage. I have seen in mining camps soap put in the blacksmith's tub to prevent a good temper being secured on the steel."
* ↑ Mr. Robert Hunter has just quoted Professor Herve (Call, Jan. 10,) as the "most daring and brilliant of all advocates of direct action and sabotage." This Syndicalist wrote of the recent German Socialist Victory as follows: "We have, by means of our internal dissensions, our sterile discussions of personalities, developed a party on the one hand and a general federation of labor on the other, equally stagnant, with equally ridiculous inefficiency, treasuries without money, journals without readers, and have engendered demoralization, skepticism and disgust."In truth, I begin to ask myself if with our great phrases of insurrection, direct action, sabotage, and 'chasing the foxes,' we are not, after all, from a revolutionary point of view, but little children beside the Socialist voters of Germany."