Socialism As It Is Part 43

[268] Paul Louis, "Le Syndicalisme contre l'etat," pp. 4-7.

[269] Paul Louis, "Le Syndicalisme contre l'etat," p. 244.

[270] Karl Kautsky, "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," pp. 136 and 137.

CHAPTER VI

THE "GENERAL STRIKE"

Nearly all strikes are more or less justified in Socialist eyes. But those that involve neither a large proportion of the working cla.s.s nor any broad social or political question are held to be of secondary importance. On the other hand, the "sympathetic" and "general" strikes, which are on such a scale as to become great public issues, and are decided by the att.i.tude of public opinion and the government rather than by the employers and employees involved, are viewed as a most essential part of the cla.s.s struggle, especially when in their relation to probable future contingencies.

The social significance of such sympathetic or general strikes is indeed recognized as clearly by non-Socialists as by Socialists--even in America, since the great railroad strike of 1894. The general strike of 1910 in Philadelphia, for instance, was seen both in Philadelphia and in the country at large as being a part of a great social conflict. "The American nation has been brought face to face for the first time with a strike," said the _Philadelphia North American_, "not merely against the control of an industry or a group of allied industries, but _a strike of cla.s.s against cla.s.s, with the lines sharply drawn_.... And it is this antagonism, this cla.s.s war, intangible and immeasurable, that const.i.tutes the largest and most lamentable hurt to the city. It is, moreover, felt beyond the city and throughout the entire nation." (My italics). It goes without saying that all organs of non-Socialist opinion feel that such threatening disturbances are lamentable, for they certainly may lead towards a revolutionary situation. Both in this country and Great Britain the great railway strike of 1911 was almost universally regarded in this light.

The availability of a general strike on a national scale as a means of a.s.saulting capitalism at some future crisis or as a present means of defending the ballot or the rights of labor organizations or of preventing a foreign war, has for the past decade been the center of discussion at many European Socialist congresses. The recent Prime Minister of France, Briand, was long one of the leading partisans of this method of which he said only a few years before he became Premier: "It has the seductive quality that it is after all the exercise of an incontestable right. It is a revolution which commences with legality.

In refusing the yoke of misery, the workingman revolts in the fullness of his rights; illegality is committed by the capitalist cla.s.s when it becomes a provocator by trying to violate a right which it has itself consecrated." That Briand meant what he said is indicated by the advice he gave to soldiers who might be ordered to fire against the strikers in such a crisis. "If the order to fire should persist," said Briand, "if the tenacious officer should wish to constrain the will of the soldiers in spite of all.... Oh, no doubt the guns might go off, but it might not be in the direction ordered"--and the universal a.s.sumption of all public opinion at that time and since was that he was advising the soldiers that under these circ.u.mstances they would be justified in shooting their officers.

The Federation of Labor of France has long adopted the idea of the general strike as appropriate for certain future contingencies, as has also the French Socialist Party--"To realize the proposed plan," the Federation declares, "it will be necessary first of all to put the locomotives in a condition where they can do no harm, to stop the circulation of the railways, to encourage the soldiers to ground their arms."

As thus conceived by Briand and the Federation, few will question the revolutionary character of the proposed general strike. But in what circ.u.mstances do the Socialists expect to be able to make use of this weapon? The Socialists of many countries have given the question careful consideration in hundreds of writings and thousands of meetings, including national and international congresses. Through the gradual evolution of the plans of action developed in all these conferences and discussions, they have come to distinguish sharply between a really general strike, _e.g._ a nation-wide railroad strike, when used for revolutionary purposes, and other species of widespread strikes which have merely a tendency in a revolutionary direction, such as the Philadelphia trouble I have mentioned, and they have decided from these deliberations, as well as considerable actual experience, just what forms of general strike are most promising and under what contingencies each form is most appropriate. Henriette Roland-Holst has summed up the whole discussion and its conclusions in an able monograph (indorsed by Kautsky and others) from which I shall resume a few of the leading points.[271] She concludes that railroad strikes for higher wages, unless for some modest advance approved by a large part of the public, like the recent British strike (which, in view of the rising cost of living, was literally to maintain "a living wage"), can only lead to a ferocious repression. For a nation-wide railroad strike is paid for by the whole nation, and its benefits must be nation-wide if it is to secure the support of that part of the public without which it is foredoomed to failure. Otherwise, says Roland-Holst, "the greater has been the success of the working people at the beginning, the greater has been the terror of the middle cla.s.ses," and as a consequence the measures of repression in the end have been proportionately desperate.

But this applies only when such strikes are for aggressive ends, like that of 1910 in France, and promise nothing to any element of society except the employees immediately involved.

If a nation-wide railroad strike or a prolonged coal strike is aggressive, it will inevitably be lost unless it has a definite public object. And the only aggressive political aim that would justify, in the minds of any but those immediately involved, all the suffering and disorder a railroad strike of any duration would entail, would be a social revolution to effect the capture of government and industry. The only other circ.u.mstances in which such a strike might be employed with that support of a part at least of the public which is essential to its success would be as a last resort, when some great social injustice was about to be perpetrated, like a declaration of war, or an effort to destroy the Socialist Party or the labor unions. Jaures says rightly, that even then it would be "a last and desperate means less suited to save one's self than to injure the enemy."

These conclusions as to the possibilities and limitations of the general strike are based on a careful study of the military and other powers of the existing governments. "The power of the modern State," says Roland-Holst, "is superior to that of the working cla.s.s in all its _material_ bases either of a political or of an economic character. The fact of political strikes can change this in no way. The working cla.s.s can no more conquer economically, through starvation, than it can through the use of powers of the same kind which the State employs, that is, through force. In only one point is the working cla.s.s altogether superior to the ruling cla.s.s--in purpose.... Governmental and working cla.s.s organizations are of entirely different dimensions. The first is a coercive, the second a voluntary, organization. The power of the first rests primarily on its means of physical force; that of the latter, which lacks these means, can break the physical superiority of the State only by its moral superiority." It is almost needless to add that by "moral superiority" Roland-Holst means something quite concrete, the willingness of the working people to perform tasks and make sacrifices for the Socialist cause that they would not make for the State even under compulsion. It is only through advantages of this kind, which it is expected will greatly increase with the future growth of the movement, that Socialists believe that, supported by an overwhelming majority of the people, a time may arrive when they can make a successful use of the nation-wide general strike. It is hoped that the support of the ma.s.ses of the population will then make it impossible for governments to operate the railroads by military means, as they have hitherto done in Russia, Hungary, France, and other countries. It is thought by many that the general strike of 1905 in Russia, for example, might have attained far greater and more lasting results if the peasants had been sufficiently aroused and intelligent to destroy the bridges and tracks, and it is not doubted that a Socialist agricultural population consisting largely of laborers (see Chapter II) would do this in such a crisis.

Here, then, are the two conditions under which it is thought by Roland-Holst and the majority of Socialists that the general strike may some day prove the chief means of bringing about a revolution: the active support of the majority of the people, and the superior organization and methods and the revolutionary purpose of the working cla.s.ses.

In the preparation of the working people to bring about a general strike when the proper time arrives, lies a limitless field for immediate Socialist activity. Both Jaures and Bebel feel that it is even likely that the general strike will also have to be used on a somewhat smaller scale even before the supreme crisis comes. Jaures thinks that it will be needed to bring about essential reforms or to prevent war, and Bebel believes that it will very likely have to be used to defend existing political and economic rights of the working cla.s.s; in other words, to protect the Party and the unions from destruction. At the Congress at Jena in 1905 the conservative trade union official, von Elm, together with a majority of the speakers, argued that it was possible that an attempt would be made to take away from the German working people the right of suffrage, the freedom of the press and a.s.semblage and the right of organization. In such a case he and others advocate a general strike, though he said he fully realized it would be a b.l.o.o.d.y one. "We must reckon with this," he said. "As a matter of course, we wish to shed no blood, but our enemies drive us into the situation.... The moment comes when you must be ready to give up your blood and your property [here he was interrupted by stormy applause]. Prepare yourselves for this possibility. Our youths must be brought up so that among the soldiers here and there will be a man who will think twice before he shoots at his father and mother [as Kaiser Wilhelm publicly insists he must], and at the same time at freedom." The reception of von Elm's speech showed that his words represented the feeling of the whole German movement.

Bebel spoke with the same decision, advocating the use of the general strike under the same conditions as did von Elm, while at the next congress at Mannheim he declared that it would also be justified, under certain circ.u.mstances, not only for protecting existing rights, but for extending them, _e.g._ for the purpose of obtaining universal and equal suffrage in Prussia. Bebel did not think that the party or the unions were strong enough at that moment to use the general strike for other than defensive purposes, but he said that, if they were able to double their strength,--and it now seems they will have accomplished this within a very few years,--then the time would doubtless arrive when it would be worth while to risk the employment of this rather desperate measure for aggressive purposes also.

While Socialism is thus traveling steadily in the direction of a revolutionary general strike, capitalist governments are coming to regard every strike of the first importance as a sort of rebellion. In discussing the Socialist possibilities of a national railroad strike, Roland-Holst, representing the usual Socialist view, says that it makes very little difference whether the roads are nationally or privately owned; in either case such a strike is likely to be considered by capitalistic governments as something like rebellion.

But while this applies only to the employees of the most important services like railroads, when privately operated, it applies practically to _all_ government employees; there is an almost universal tendency to regard strikes against the government as being mutiny--an evidence of the profoundly capitalistic character of government ownership and "State Socialism" which propose to multiply the number of such employees. Here, too, the probable governmental att.i.tude towards a future general strike is daily indicated.

President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, has written that any strike of "servants of the State, in any capacity--military, naval, or civil," should be considered both treason and mutiny.

"In my judgment loyalty and _treason_," he writes, "ought to mean the same thing in the civil service that they do in military and naval services. The door to get out is always open if one does not wish to serve the public on these terms. Indeed, I am not sure that as civilization progresses loyalty and _treason_ in the civil services will not become more important and more vital than loyalty and _treason_ in the military and naval services. The happiness and the prosperity of a community might be more easily wrecked by the paralysis of its postal and telegraph services, for example, than by a mutiny on shipboard.... President Roosevelt's att.i.tude on all this was at times very sound, but he wabbled a good deal in dealing with specific cases. In the celebrated Miller Case at the Government Printing Office he laid down in his published letter what I conceive to be the sound doctrine in regard to this matter.

It was then made plain to the printers that to leave their work under pretense of striking was to resign, in effect, the places which they held in the public service, and that if those places were vacated they would be filled in accordance with the provisions of the civil service act, and not by reappointment of the old employees after parley and compromise.... To me the situation which this problem presents is, beyond comparison, the most serious and the most far-reaching which the modern democracies have to face."

Dr. Butler concludes that this question "will wreck every democratic government in the world unless it is faced st.u.r.dily and bravely now, and settled on righteous lines." (My italics.)[272]

Our Ex-President, however, has ceased apparently to "wabble." In Mr.

Roosevelt's medium, the _Outlook_, an editorial on the strike of the munic.i.p.al street cleaners of New York City reads in part as follows:--

_Men who are employed by the public cannot strike. They can, and sometimes they do, mutiny. When they should be treated not as strikers but as mutineers._

This issue was presented by the refusal of the men to do what they were ordered to do. _When soldiers do that in warfare they are given short shrift._ Of course, in combating acc.u.mulating dirt and its potent ally, disease, an army of street cleaners is not face to face with any such acute public dangers as those confronting a military force; and therefore insubordination among street cleaners does not call for any such severity as that which is absolutely necessary in war times; _but the principle in the one case is the same as that in the other--those who disrupt the forces of public defense range themselves on the side of the public enemy_. They are not in any respect on the same basis as the employees of a private employer. _They are wage earners only in the sense that soldiers are wage earners._[273]

When Senator La Follette indorsed the right of railway mail clerks to organize, President Taft said (May 14, 1911):--

"This presents a very serious question, and one which, if decided in favor of the right of government employees to strike and use the boycott, will be full of danger to the government and to the republic.

"The government employees of France resorted to it and took the government by the throat. The executive was entirely dependent upon these employees for its continuance.

"When those in executive authority refused to acquiesce in the demands, the government employees struck, and then with the helplessness of the government and the destruction of all authority and the choking of government activities it was seen that to allow government employees the use of such an instrument was to recognize revolution as a lawful means of securing an increase in compensation for one cla.s.s, and that a _privileged cla.s.s_, at the expense of all the public....

"The government employees are a privileged cla.s.s whose work is necessary to carry on the government and upon whose entry into the government service it is entirely reasonable to impose conditions that should not be and ought not to be imposed upon those who serve private employers."

Here the Socialists join issue squarely with the almost universally prevalent non-Socialist opinion. They do not consider government employment a "privilege" nor any strike whatever as "mutiny," "treason,"

or "rebellion." Socialists believe that the only possible means of maintaining democracy at all in this age when government employees are beginning to increase in numbers more rapidly than those of private industry, is that they should be allowed to maintain their right to organize _and to strike_--no matter how great difficulties it may involve. To decide the question as President Butler wishes, or as President Taft implies it should be decided, Socialists believe, would mean to turn every government into a military organization. The time is not far distant when in all the leading nations a very large part and in some cases a majority of the population will be in government employment. If even the present limited rights of organization are done away with, and the military laws of subordination are applied, Socialists ask, shall we not have exactly that military and autocratic bureaucracy, that "State Socialism" which Spencer so rightly feared? The fact that these perfectly legal and necessary strikes may some day lead to revolution is capitalism's misfortune, which society will not permit it to cure by turning the clock back to absolutism. The question of the organization of government employees, one of the most important to-day, will, as President Butler says, be the crucial question of the near future.

It is in France that the question has come to the first test, not because the French bureaucracy is more numerous than that of Prussia and some other Continental countries, but because of the powerful democratic and Socialist tendency that has grown up along with this bureaucracy and is now directed against it. Especially interesting is the fact that Briand, who not long ago advocated the Socialist general strike and certainly realized its danger to present government as well as its possibilities for Socialism, has, as Premier, evolved measures of repression against organizations of State employees more stringent than have been introduced in any country making the slightest pretension to democratic or semi-democratic government.

The world first became aware of the importance of this issue at the time of the organization and the strike of the French telegraphers and post office employees in the early part of 1909, and again in the railway strike in 1910. As early as 1906 the organized postal employees had been definitely refused the right to strike, and it became manifest that if they attempted to use this weapon to correct the very serious grievances under which they suffered, it would be looked upon as "a kind of treason against the State." At the end of 1908, however, after having discussed the matter for many years, a congress of all the employees of the State was held. More than twenty different a.s.sociations partic.i.p.ated and decided unanimously to claim the full rights of other labor organizations. Finally, when these organizations appealed to the General Federation of Labor to help them, there came the strike of 1909.

Unfortunately for the postmen, the French railway and miners' unions were at the moment still in relatively conservative hands, and the majority of their members were as yet by no means anxious to aid in the general strike movement. After a brilliant success in their first effort, a second strike a few weeks later proved a total failure.

The government then began to make it clear that public employees were to be allowed no right to strike, and Jaures pointed out that it was trying to carry this new repressive legislation by accompanying it by new pension laws and other concessions to the State employees,--a repet.i.tion of the old policy of more bread and less power, which is likely to play a more and more important role every year as we enter into the State capitalistic period.

The character of the organizations allowed for government employees, under the new laws, would remind one of Prussia or Russia rather than France. While certain forms of a.s.sociation are permitted, the right to strike is precluded, and the various a.s.sociations of government employees are forbidden either to form any kind of federation or to unite with other unions outside of government employments. "Councils of discipline are created where the employees are represented," but "in the case of a collected or concerted cessation of work all disciplinary penalties may be inflicted without the intervention of the councils of discipline; courts may order the dissolution of any union at the request of the ministry," which means that at any moment a police war may be inst.i.tuted against these organizations, in the true Russian style.

The reply of the postmen's organization to this kind of legislation is, that the administration of the post office is an industrial and commercial administration; that it is a vast enterprise of general utility; that the notion of loyalty or treason is entirely misplaced in this field. They have declared that the new legislation is wrong "because it perpetuates the bureaucratic tradition; because with a contempt for all the necessities of modern life it discountenances organization of labor; because it has const.i.tuted a repressive legal condition for wage earners; and because it is an act of authority which has nothing in common with free contract."

Here we see the public employees, supported by the Socialists, insisting on industrial and commercial considerations, on the rights of individuals and on free contract, as against the capitalists and governing cla.s.ses, who claim to defend these very principles from supposed Socialist attacks, but abandon them the moment they threaten capitalist profits and capitalist rule. This att.i.tude of the French Socialist shows the very heart of the Socialist situation. In fact, it is only as private capitalism becomes State capitalism, or "State Socialism," that Socialists will be able to show what their position really is. It is only then that the coercive aspect of capitalism, which is now partly latent and partly obscured by certain functions that it has still to fill in the development of society, will become visible to all eyes.

The French railroad strike of October, 1910, brought the question of organizations of government employees still more into international prominence. Until the recent British upheaval it was, perhaps, the greatest and most menacing strike in modern history. It is true that its apparent object was only a few just, and relatively insignificant economic concessions--which were granted for the most part immediately after the struggle. But behind these, as every one realized, lay the question of the right of government employees to organize and to strike and the determination of the French Socialists and labor unionists to use the opportunity to take a step towards the "general strike."

Never has the issue between capitalism and Socialism been more sharply defined than in Premier Briand's impulsively frank declaration after the strike (though it was later retracted): "I say emphatically, if the laws have not given the government the means of keeping the country master of its railways and the national defense, it would not have hesitated to take recourse to illegality."

This is almost the exact declaration of Ex-President Roosevelt in his Decoration Day speech in 1911, when he said that really revolutionary men dreaded and hated him because they knew that _he wouldn't let the Const.i.tution stand in the way of punishing them if they did wrong_.

Milder but no less positive expressions of an intention to use illegal means to coerce labor, if it does not act as present authorities dictate, were to be heard from responsible sources both in England and America after the recent British railway strike. The non-Socialist press then came almost unanimously to the conclusion that an attempt must be made to take away the sole weapon by which labor is able to protect itself or advance its position as soon as "the public" is damaged by its use--which amounts to reducing wage earners to the status of children, soldiers, or other wards of the community. "If railroad and telegraph strikes are many and violent," said _Collier's Weekly_, "they will encourage government ownership without unionization."[274]

The _Outlook_ stopped short of government ownership, but announced a similar principle: "The railways are public highways; they must be controlled by the nation for the public good; the operation of the railways must not be stopped because of disputes; and, as a corollary to this last law of necessity, the government must furnish an adequate and just method of settling railway disputes."[275] Every step in government control is to be accompanied by a step in the control of labor, and restriction of the power of labor unions. The right of employees to protect themselves by leaving their work in a body is to be taken away completely, while the right to discharge or punish is to remain intact in persons over whom the employees can have little or no control.

Governments are evidently ready to proceed to illegality for the sake of self-preservation--even from a perfectly legal attack, if it threatens to destroy them or to transfer the government into the hands of the non-capitalist cla.s.ses. Of course a capitalist government can pa.s.s "laws," _e.g._ martial law, under which anything it chooses to do against its opponents becomes "legal" and anything effective its opponents do becomes illegal. In the present age of general enlightenment, however, this method does not even deceive Russian peasants. But the French government is now turning to this device.

Briand explained away his sensational declaration above quoted, and then proposed a law by which striking on a railway becomes a crime and almost a felony. This met universal approval in the capitalistic press and universal denunciation in that of the Socialists and labor unions. The _Boston Herald_, for example, said: "The Executive must be armed with greater authority than he now possesses. No Premier must be forced to say, as M. Briand did recently, that, with or without law, national supremacy will be preserved in case it is challenged by allied workers for the State, as well as by other toilers." Here there is no effort to disguise the fact that the new legal form is the _exact equivalent_ of the illegal force formerly proposed.

Now the peasants and the lower middle cla.s.ses of France, as well as the working people (land and opportunities being more and more difficult to obtain), are becoming extremely radical. Though they do not send Socialist deputies to the Chamber, they send representatives who are very suspicious of arbitrary, undemocratic, and centralized authority.

Only 215 members of the Chamber could be induced to approve of the government's conduct during the strike of 1910, while more than 200 abstained from voting on this point, and 166 voted in the negative. The proposed measures of repression were carried by a small majority, but it is not likely that they can be enforced many years without bringing about another and far more revolutionary crisis. Briand and his a.s.sociates, Millerand and Viviani, were forced to resign, partly on account of their conduct in this strike, and it is possible that after another election or two the Chamber will no longer give its consent to this relegation of workingmen to the status of common soldiers. Only six months after the strike, Briand's successor, Monis, with the consent of the Chamber, was bringing governmental pressure to bear on the privately owned railways to force them to take back dismissed strikers. In the next ministry, that of Caillaux, the Minister of Labor, Augagneur, the former Socialist, pursued the same policy of pressing for the reinstatement of a large part of the discharged employees of the private railroads while insisting that the employees of government railroads could not be allowed to strike. And again, at the end of 1911, the government secured only 286 votes in favor of this policy, to 193 against it.[276]