Violence and the Labor Movement Part 10

Toward the end of the nineties another element came to the aid of the anarchists. It is difficult to cla.s.s this group with any certainty. They are neither socialists nor anarchists. They remind one of those Bakouninists that Marx once referred to as "lawyers without cases, physicians without patients and knowledge, students of billiards, etc."[7] "They are good-natured, gentlemanly, cultured people," says Sombart; "people with spotless linen, good manners and fashionably dressed wives; people with whom one holds social intercourse as with one's equals; people who would at first sight hardly be taken as the representatives of a new movement whose object it is to prevent socialism from becoming a mere middle-cla.s.s belief."[8] In a word, they appear to be individuals wearied with the unrealities of life and seeking to overcome their _ennui_ by, at any rate, discussing the making of revolutions. With their "myths," their "reflections on violence,"

their appeals to physical vigor and to the glory of combat, as well as with their incessant attacks on the socialist movement, they have given very material aid to the anarchist element in the syndicalist movement.

For a number of years I have read faithfully _Le Mouvement Socialiste_, but I confess that I have not understood their dazzling metaphysics, and I am somewhat comforted to see that both Levine[9] and Lewis[10] find them frequently incomprehensible.

Without injustice to this group of intellectuals, I think it may be truthfully said that they have contributed nothing essential to the doctrines of syndicalism as developed by the trades unionists themselves; and Edward Berth, in _Les Nouveaux Aspects du Socialisme_, has partially explained why, without meaning to do so. "It has often been observed," he says, "that the anarchists are by origin artisan, peasant, or aristocrat. Rousseau represents, obviously, the anarchism of the artisan. His republic is a little republic of free and independent craftsmen.... Proudhon is a peasant in his heart ... and, if we finally take Tolstoi, we find here an anarchism of worldly or aristocratic origin. Tolstoi is a _blase_ aristocrat, disgusted with civilization by having too much eaten of it."[11] Whether or not this characterization of Tolstoi is justified, there can be no question that many of this type rushed to the aid of syndicalism. Its savage vigor appeals to some artists, decadents, and _decla.s.ses_. Neurotic as a rule, they seem to hunger for the stimulus which comes by a.s.sociation with the merely physical power and vigor of the working cla.s.s. The navvy, the coalheaver, or "yon rower ... the muscles all a-ripple on his back,"[12]

awakens in them a worshipful admiration, even as it did in the effete Cleon. Such a theory as syndicalism, declares Sombart, "could only have grown up in a country possessing so high a culture as France; that it could have been thought out only by minds of the nicest perception, by people who have become quite _blase_, whose feelings require a very strong stimulus before they can be stirred; people who have something of the artistic temperament, and, consequently, look disdainfully on what has been called 'Philistinism'--on business, on middle-cla.s.s ideals, and so forth. They are, as it were, the fine silk as contrasted with the plain wool of ordinary people. They detest the common, everyday round as much as they hate what is natural; they might be called 'Social Sybarites.' Such are the people who have created the syndicalist system."[13] On one point Sombart is wrong. All the essential doctrines of revolutionary syndicalism, as a matter of fact, originated with the anarchists in the unions, and the most that can be said for the "Sybarites" is that they elaborated and mystified these doctrines.

There are those, of course, who maintain that syndicalism is wholly a natural and inevitable product of economic forces, and, so far as the actual syndicalist movement is concerned, that is unquestionably true.

But in all the maze of philosophy and doctrine that has been thrown about the actual French movement, we find the traces of two extraneous forces--the anarchists who availed themselves of the opportunity that an awakening trade unionism gave them, and those intellectuals of leisure, culture, and refinement who found the methods of political socialism too tame to satisfy their violent revolt against things bourgeois. And the philosophical syndicalism that was born of this union combines utopianism and anarchism. The yearning esthetes found satisfaction in the rugged energy and physical daring of the men of action, while the latter were astonished and flattered to find their simple war measures adorned with metaphysical abstractions and arousing an immense furore among the most learned and fashionable circles of Europe.

However, something in addition to personality is needed to explain the rise of syndicalist socialism in France. Like anarchism, syndicalism is a natural product of certain French and Italian conditions. It is not strange that the Latin peoples have in the past harbored the ideas of anarchism, or that now they harbor the ideas of syndicalism. The enormous proportion of small property owners in the French nation is the economic basis for a powerful individualism. Anything which interferes with the liberty of the individual is abhorred, and nothing awakens a more lively hatred than centralization and State power. The vast extent of small industry, with the apprentice, journeyman, and master-workman, has wielded an influence over the mentality of the French workers.

Berth, for instance, follows Proudhon in conceiving of the future commonwealth as a federation of innumerable little workshops. Gigantic industries, such as are known in Germany, England, and America, seem to be problems quite foreign to the mind of the typical Latin worker. He believes that, if he can be left alone in his little industry, and freed from exploitation, he, like the peasant, will be supreme, possessing both liberty and abundance. He will, therefore, tolerate willingly neither the interference of a centralized State nor favor a centralized syndicalism. Industry must be given into the hands of the workers, and, when he speaks of industry, he has in mind workshops, which, in the socialism of the Germans, the English, and the Americans, might be left for a long time to come in private hands.

In harmony with the above facts, we find that the strongest centers of syndicalism in France, Italy, and Spain are in those districts where the factory system is very backward. Where syndicalism and anarchism prevail most strongly, we find conditions of economic immaturity which strikingly resemble those of England in the time of Owen. In all these districts trade unionism is undeveloped. When it exists at all, it is more a feeling out for solidarity than the actual existence of solidarity. It is the first groping toward unity that so often brings riots and violence, because organization is absent and the feeling of power does not exist. Carl Legien, the leader of the great German unions, said at the international socialist congress at Stuttgart (1907): "As soon as the French have an actual trade-union organization, they will cease discussing blindly the general strike, direct action, and sabotage."[14] Vliegen, the Dutch leader, went even further when he declared at the previous congress, at Amsterdam (1904), that it is not the representatives of the strong organizations of England, Germany, and Denmark who wish the general strike; it is the representatives of France, Russia, and Holland, where the trade-union organization is feeble or does not exist.[15]

Still another factor forces the French trade unions to rely upon violence, and that is their poverty. The trade-unionists in the Latin countries dislike to pay dues, and the whole organized labor movement as a result lives constantly from hand to mouth. "The fundamental condition which determines the policy of direct action," says Dr. Louis Levine in his excellent monograph on "The Labor Movement in France," "is the poverty of French syndicalism. Except for the _Federation du Livre_, only a very few federations pay a more or less regular strike benefit; the rest have barely means enough to provide for their administrative and organizing expenses and cannot collect any strike funds worth mentioning.... The French workingmen, therefore, are forced to fall back on other means during strikes. Quick action, intimidation, sabotage, are then suggested to them by their very situation and by their desire to win."[16] That this is an accurate a.n.a.lysis is, I think, proved by the fact that the biggest strikes and the most unruly are invariably to be found at the very beginning of the attempts to organize trade unions.

That is certainly true of England, and in our own country the great strikes of the seventies were the birth-signs of trade unionism. In France, Italy, and Spain, where trade unionism is still in its infancy, we find that strikes are more unruly and violent than in other countries. It is a mistake to believe that riots, sabotage, and crime are the result of organization, or the product of a philosophy of action. They are the acts of the weak and the desperate; the product of a mob psychology that seems to be roused to action whenever and wherever the workers first begin to realize the faintest glimmering of solidarity. History clearly proves that turbulence in strikes tends to disappear as the workers develop organized strength. In most countries violence has been frankly recognized as a weakness, and tremendous efforts have been made by the workers themselves to render violence unnecessary by developing power through organization. But in France the very acts that result from weakness and despair have been greeted with enthusiasm by the anarchists and the effete intellectuals as the beginning of new and improved revolutionary methods.

Both, then, in their philosophy and in their methods, anarchism and syndicalism have much in common, but there also exist certain differences which cannot be overlooked. Anarchism is a doctrine of individualism; syndicalism is a doctrine of working-cla.s.s action.

Anarchism appeals only to the individual; syndicalism appeals also to a cla.s.s. Furthermore, anarchism is a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while syndicalism is a product of an immature factory system. Marx and Engels frequently spoke of anarchism as a petty-bourgeois philosophy, but in the early syndicalism of Robert Owen they saw more than that, considering it as the forerunner of an actual working-cla.s.s movement. When these differences have been stated, there is little more to be said, and, on the whole, Yvetot was justified in saying at the congress of Toulouse (1910): "I am reproached with confusing syndicalism and anarchism. It is not my fault if anarchism and syndicalism have the same ends in view. The former pursues the integral emanc.i.p.ation of the individual; the latter the integral emanc.i.p.ation of the workingman. I find the whole of syndicalism in anarchism."[17] When we leave the theories of syndicalism to study its methods, we find them identical with those of the anarchists. The general strike is, after all, exactly the same method that Bakounin was constantly advocating in the days of the old International. The only difference is this, that Bakounin sought the aid of "the people," while the syndicalists rely upon the working cla.s.s. Furthermore, when one places the statement of Guerard on the general strike[Y] alongside of the statement of Kropotkin on the revolution,[Z] one can observe no important difference.

While it is true that some syndicalists believe that the general strike may be solely a peaceable abstention from work, most of them are convinced that such a strike would surely meet with defeat. As Buisson says: "If the general strike remains the revolution of folded arms, if it does not degenerate into a violent insurrection, one cannot see how a cessation of work of fifteen, thirty, or even sixty days could bring into the industrial regime and into the present social system changes great enough to determine their fall."[18] To be sure, the syndicalists do not lay so much emphasis on the abolition of government as do the anarchists, but their plan leads to nothing less than that. If "the capitalist cla.s.s is to be locked out"--whatever that may mean--one must conclude that the workers intend in some manner without the use of public powers to gain control of the tools of production. In any case, they will be forced, in order to achieve any possible success, to take the factories, the mines, and the mills and to put the work of production into the hands of the ma.s.ses. If the State interferes, as it undoubtedly will in the most vigorous manner, the strikers will be forced to fight the State. In other words, the general strike will necessarily become an insurrection, and the people without arms will be forced to carry on a civil war against the military powers of the Government.

If the general strike, therefore, is only insurrection in disguise, sabotage is but another name for the Propaganda of the Deed. Only, in this case, the deed is to be committed against the capitalist, while with the older anarchists a crowned head, a general, or a police official was the one to be destroyed. To-day property is to be a.s.sailed, machines broken and smashed, mines flooded, telegraph wires cut, and any other methods used that will render the tools of production unusable.

This deed may be committed _en ma.s.se_, or it may be committed by an individual. It is when Pouget grows enthusiastic over sabotage that we find in him the same spirit that actuated Brousse and Kropotkin when they despaired of education and sought to arouse the people by committing dramatic acts of violence. In other words, the _saboteur_ abandons ma.s.s action in favor of ineffective and futile a.s.saults upon men or property.

This brief survey of the meaning of syndicalism, whence it came, and why, explains the antagonism that had to arise between it and socialism.[AA] Not only was it frankly intended to displace the socialist political parties of Europe, but every step it has taken was accompanied with an attack upon the doctrines and the methods of modern socialism. And, in fact, the syndicalists are most interesting when they leave their own theories and turn their guns upon the socialist parties of the present day. In reading the now extensive literature on syndicalism, one finds endless chapters devoted to pointing out the weaknesses and faults of political socialism. Like the Bakouninists, the chief strength of the revolutionary unionists lies in criticism rather than in any constructive thought or action of their own. The battle of to-day is, however, a very unequal one. In the International, two groups--comparatively alike in size--fought over certain theories that, up to that time, were not embodied in a movement. They quarreled over tactics that were yet untried and over theories that were then purely speculative. To-day the syndicalists face a foe that embraces millions of loyal adherents. At the international gatherings of trade-union officials, as well as at the immense international congresses of the socialist parties, the syndicalists find themselves in a hopeless minority.[AB] Socialism is no longer an unembodied project of Marx. It is a throbbing, moving, struggling force. It is in a daily fight with the evils of capitalism. It is at work in every strike, in every great agitation, in every parliament, in every council. It is a thing of incessant action, whose mistakes are many and whose failures stand out in relief. Those who have betrayed it can be pointed out. Those who have lost all revolutionary fervor and all notion of cla.s.s can be held up as a tendency. Those who have fallen into the traps of the bureaucrats and have given way to the flattery or to the corruption of the bourgeoisie can be listed and put upon the index. Even working-cla.s.s political action can be a.s.sailed as never before, because it now exists for the first time in history, and its every weakness is known.

Moreover, there are the slowness of movement and the seemingly increasing tameness of the mult.i.tude. All these incidents in the growth of a vast movement--the rapidity of whose development has never been equaled in the history of the world--irritate beyond measure the impatient and ultra-revolutionary exponents of the new anarchism.

Naturally enough, the criticisms of the syndicalists are leveled chiefly against political action, parliamentarism, and Statism. It is Professor Arturo Labriola, the brilliant leader of the Italian syndicalists, who has voiced perhaps most concretely these strictures against socialism, although they abound in all syndicalist writings. According to Labriola, the socialist parties have abandoned Marx. They have left the field of the cla.s.s struggle, foresworn revolution, and degenerated into weaklings and ineffectuals who dare openly neither to advocate "State socialism"

nor to oppose it. In the last chapter of his "Karl Marx" Labriola traces some of the tendencies to State socialism. He observes that the State is gradually taking over all the great public utilities and that cities and towns are increasingly munic.i.p.alizing public services. In the more liberal and democratic countries "the tendency to State property was greeted," he says, "as the beginning of the socialist transformation.

To-day, in France, in Italy, and in Austria socialism is being confounded with Statism (_l'etatisme_).... The socialist party, almost everywhere, has become the party of State capitalism." It is "no more the representative of a movement which ranges itself against existing inst.i.tutions, but rather of an evolution which is taking place now in the midst of present-day society, and by means of the State itself. The socialist party, by the very force of circ.u.mstances, is becoming a conservative party which is declaring for a transformation, the agent of which is no longer the proletariat itself, but the new economic organism which is the State.... Even the desire of the workingmen themselves to pa.s.s into the service of the State is eager and spontaneous. We have a proof of it in Italy with the railway workers, who, however, represent one of the best-informed and most advanced sections of the working cla.s.s.

" ... Where the Marxian tradition has no stability, as in Italy, the socialist party refused to admit that the State was an exclusively capitalist organism and that it was necessary to challenge its action.

And with this pro-State att.i.tude of the socialist party all its ideas have unconsciously changed. The principles of State enterprise (order, discipline, hierarchy, subordination, maximum productivity, etc.) are the same as those of private enterprise. Wherever the socialist party openly takes its stand on the side of the State--contrary even to its intentions--it acquires an entirely capitalist viewpoint. Its embarra.s.sed att.i.tude in regard to the insubordination of the workers in private manufacture becomes each day more evident, and, if it were not afraid of losing its electoral support, it would oppose still more the spirit of revolt among the workers. It is thus that the socialist party--the conservative party of the future transformed State--is becoming the conservative party of the present social organization. But even where, as in Germany, the Marxian tradition still a.s.sumes the form of a creed to all outward appearance, the party is very far from keeping within the limits of pure Marxian theory. Its anti-State att.i.tude is not one of inclination. It is imposed by the State itself, ... the adversary, through its military and feudal vanity, of every concession to working-cla.s.s democracy."[19]

All this sounds most familiar, and I cannot resist quoting here our old friend Bakounin in order to show how much this criticism resembles that of the anarchists. If we turn to "Statism and Anarchy" we find that Bakounin concluded this work with the following words: "Upon the Pangermanic banner" (_i. e._, also upon the banner of German social democracy, and, consequently, upon the socialist banner of the whole civilized world) "is inscribed: The conservation and strengthening of the State at all costs; on the socialist-revolutionary banner" (read Bakouninist banner) "is inscribed in characters of blood, in letters of fire: the abolition of all States, the destruction of bourgeois civilization; free organization from the bottom to the top, by the help of free a.s.sociations; the organization of the working populace (_sic!_) freed from all the trammels, the organization of the whole of emanc.i.p.ated humanity, the creation of a new human world."[AC] Thus frantically Bakounin exposed the antagonism between his philosophy and that of the Marxists. It would seem, therefore, that if Labriola knew his Marx, he would hardly undertake at this late date to save socialism from a tendency that Marx himself gave it. The State, it appears, is the same bugaboo to the syndicalists that it is to the anarchists. It is almost something personal, a kind of monster that, in all ages and times, must be oppressive. It cannot evolve or change its being. It cannot serve the working cla.s.s as it has previously served feudalism, or as it now serves capitalism. It is an unchangeable thing, that, regardless of economic and social conditions, must remain eternally the enemy of the people.

Evidently, the syndicalist identifies the revolutionist with the anti-Statist--apparently forgetting that hatred of the State is often as strong among the bourgeoisie as among the workers. The determination to limit the power of the Government was not only a powerful factor in the French and American Revolutions, but since then the slaveholders of the Southern States in America, the factory owners of all countries, and the trusts have exhausted every means, fair and foul, to limit and to weaken the power of the State. What difference is there between the theory of _laissez-faire_ and the antagonism of the anarchists and the syndicalists to every activity of the State? However, it is noteworthy that antagonism to the State disappears on the part of any group or cla.s.s as soon as it becomes an agency for advancing their material well-being; they not only then forsake their anti-Statism, they even become the most ardent defenders of the State. Evidently, then, it is not the State that has to be overcome, but the interests that control the State.

It must be admitted that Labriola sketches accurately enough the prevailing tendency toward State ownership, but he misunderstands or willfully misinterprets, as Bakounin did before him, the att.i.tude of the avowed socialist parties toward such evolution. When he declares that they confuse their socialism with Statism, he might equally well argue that socialists confuse their socialism with monopoly or with the aggregation of capital in the hands of the few. Because socialists recognize the inevitable evolution toward monopoly is no reason for believing that they advocate monopoly. Nowhere have the socialists ever advised the destruction of trusts, nor have they anywhere opposed the taking over of great industries by the State. They realize that, as monopoly is an inevitable outcome of capitalism, so State capitalism, more or less extended, is an inevitable result of monopoly. That the workers remain wage earners and are exploited in the same manner as before has been pointed out again and again by all the chief socialists.

However, if socialists prefer monopoly to the chaos of compet.i.tion and to the reactionary tendencies of small property, and if they lend themselves, as they do everywhere, to the promotion of the State ownership of monopoly, it is not because they confuse monopoly, whether private or public, with socialism. It is of little consequence whether the workers are exploited by the trusts or by the Government. As long as capitalism exists they will be exploited by the one or the other. If they themselves prefer to be exploited by the Government, as Labriola admits, and if that exploitation is less ruinous to the body and mind of the worker, the socialist who opposed State capitalism in favor of private capitalism would be nothing less than a reactionary.

Without, however, leaving the argument here, it must be said that there are various reasons why the socialist prefers State capitalism to private capitalism. It has certain advantages for the general public. It confers certain benefits upon the toilers, chief of all perhaps the regularity of work. And, above and beyond this, State capitalism is actually expropriating private capitalists. The more property the State owns, the fewer will be the number of capitalists to be dealt with, and the easier it will be eventually to introduce socialism. Indeed, to proceed from State capitalism to socialism is little more than the grasp of public powers by the working cla.s.s, followed by the administrative measures of industrial democracy. All this, of course, has been said before by Engels, part of whose argument I have already quoted.

Unfortunately, no syndicalist seems to follow this reasoning or excuse what he considers the terrible crime of extending the domain of the State. Not infrequently his revolutionary philosophy begins with the abolition of the State, and often it ends there. Marx, Engels, and Eccarius, as we know, ridiculed Bakounin's terror of the State; and how many times since have the socialists been compelled to deal with this bugaboo! It rises up in every country from time to time. The anarchist, the anarchist-communist, the _Lokalisten_, the anarcho-socialist, the young socialist, and the syndicalist have all in their time solemnly come to warn the working cla.s.s of this insidious enemy. But the workers refuse to be frightened, and in every country, including even Russia, Italy, and France, they have less fear of State ownership of industry than they have of that crushing exploitation which they know to-day.

Even in Germany, where Labriola considers the socialists to be more or less free from the taint of State capitalism, they have from the very beginning voted for State ownership. As early as 1870 the German socialists, upon a resolution presented by Bebel, adopted by a large majority the proposition that the State should retain in its hands the State lands, Church lands, communal lands, the mines, and the railroads.[AD] When adopting the new party program at Erfurt in 1891, the Congress struck out the section directed against State socialism and adopted a number of propositions leading to that end. Again, at Breslau in 1895, the Germans adopted several State-socialist measures. "At this time," says Paul Kampffmeyer, "a proposition of the agrarian commission on the party program, which had a decided State-socialist stamp, was discussed. It contained, among other things, the retaining and the increase of the public land domain; the management of the State and community lands on their own account; the giving of State credit to cooperative societies; the socialization of mortgages, debts, and loans on land; the socialization of chattel and real estate insurance, etc.

Bebel agreed to all these State-socialist propositions. He recalled the fact, that the nationalizing of the railroads had been accomplished with the agreement of the social-democracy."[21] "That which applies to the railways applies also to the forestry," said Bebel. "Have we any objections to the enlarging of the State forests and thereby the employment of workers and officials? The same thing applies to the mines, the salt industry, road-making, the post office, and the telegraphs. In all of these industries we have hundreds of thousands of dependent people, and yet we do not want to advocate their abolition but rather their extension. In this direction we must break with all our prejudices. We ought only to oppose State industry where it is antagonistic to culture and where it restricts development, as, for instance, is the case in military matters. Indeed, we must even compel the State constantly to take over means of culture, because by that means we will finally put the present State out of joint. And, lastly, even the strongest State power fails in that degree in which the State drives its own officers and workers into opposition to itself, as has occurred in the case of the postal service. The att.i.tude which would refuse to strengthen the power of the State, because this would entrust to it the solution of the problems of culture, smacks of the Manchester school. We must strip off these Manchesterian egg-sh.e.l.ls."[22]

Wilhelm Liebknecht also dealt with those who opposed the strengthening of the cla.s.s State. "We are concerned," he said, " ... first of all about the strengthening of the State power. In all similar cases we have decided in favor of practical activity. We allowed funds for the Northeast Sea Ca.n.a.l; we voted for the labor legislation, although the proposed laws did decidedly extend the State power. We are in favor of the State railways, although we have thereby brought about ... the dependence of numerous livings upon the State."[23] As early, indeed, as 1881 Liebknecht saw that the present State was preparing the way for socialism. Speaking of the compulsory insurance laws proposed by Bismarck, he refers to such legislation as embodying "in a decisive manner the principle of State regulation of production as opposed to the _laissez-faire_ system of the Manchester school. The right of the State to regulate production supposes the duty of the State to interest itself in labor, and State control of the labor of society leads directly to State organization of the labor of society."[24] Further even than this goes Karl Kautsky, who has been called the "acutest observer and thinker of modern socialism." "Among the social organizations in existence to-day," he says, "there is but one that possesses the requisite dimensions, and may be used as the framework for the establishment and development of the socialist commonwealth, and that is the _modern State_."[25]

Without going needlessly far into this subject, it seems safe to conclude that the State is no more terrifying to the modern socialist than it was to Marx and Engels. There is not a socialist party in any country that has not used its power to force the State to undertake collective enterprise. Indeed, all the immediate programs of the various socialist parties advocate the strengthening of the economic power of the State. They are adding more and more to its functions; they are broadening its scope; and they are, without question, vastly increasing its power. But, at the same time, they are democratizing the State. By direct legislation, by a variety of political reforms, and by the power of the great socialist parties themselves, they are really wresting the control of the State from the hands of special privilege.

Furthermore--and this is something neither the anarchists nor the syndicalists will see--State socialism is in itself undermining and slowly destroying the cla.s.s character of the State. According to the view of Marx, the State is to-day "but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole capitalist cla.s.s."[26] And it is this because the economic power of the capitalist cla.s.s is supreme. But by the growth of State socialism the economic power of the private capitalists is steadily weakened. The railroads, the mines, the forests, and other great monopolies are taken out of their hands, and, to the extent that this happens, their control over the State itself disappears. Their only power to control the State is their economic power, and, if that were entirely to disappear, the cla.s.s character of the State would disappear also. "The State is not abolished. _It dies out_"; to repeat Engels' notable words. "As soon as there is no longer any social cla.s.s to be held in subjection, ... nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary."[27]

The syndicalists are, of course, quite right when they say that State socialism is an attempt to allay popular discontent, but they are quite wrong when they accept this as proof that it must inevitably sidetrack socialism. They overlook the fact that it is always a concession granted grudgingly to the growing power of democracy. It is a point yielded in order to prevent if possible the necessity of making further concessions. Yet history shows that each concession necessitates another, and that State socialism is growing with great rapidity in all countries where the workers have developed powerful political organizations. Even now both friends and opponents see in the growth of State socialism the gradual formation of that transitional stage that leads from capitalism to socialism. The syndicalist and anarchist alone fail to see here any drift toward socialism; they see only a growing tyranny creating a cla.s.s of favored civil servants, who are divorced from the actual working cla.s.s. At the same time, they point out that the condition of the toilers for the State has not improved, and that they are exploited as mercilessly by the State as they were formerly exploited by the capitalist. To dispute this would be time ill spent. If it be indeed true, it defeats the argument of the syndicalist. If the State in its capitalism outrageously exploits its servants, tries to prevent them from organizing, and penalizes them for striking, it will only add to the intensity of the working-cla.s.s revolt. It will aid more and more toward creating a common understanding between the workers for the State and the workers for the private capitalist. In any case, it will accelerate the tendency toward the democratization of the State and, therefore, toward socialism.

As an alternative to this actual evolution toward socialism, the syndicalists propose to force society to put the means of production into the hands of the trade unions. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Owen, Proudhon, Blanc, La.s.salle, and Bakounin all advocated what may be called "group socialism."[28] This conception of future society contemplates the ownership of the mines by the miners, of the railroads by the railway workers, of the land by the peasants. All the workers in the various industries are to be organized into unions and then brought together in a federation. Several objections are made to this outline of a new society. In the first place, it is artificial. Except for an occasional cooperative undertaking, there is not, nor has there ever been, any tendency toward trade-union ownership of industry. In addition, it is an idea that is to-day an anachronism. It is conceivable that small federated groups might control and conduct countless little industries, but it is not conceivable that groups of "self-governing,"

"autonomous," and "independent" workmen could, or would, be allowed by a highly industrialized society to direct and manage such vast enterprises as the trusts have built up. If each group is to run industry as it pleases, the Standard Oil workers or the steel workers might menace society in the future as the owners of those monopolies menace it in the present. There is no indication in the literature of the syndicalists, and certainly no promise in a system of completely autonomous groups of producers, of any solution of the vast problems of modern trustified industry. It may be that such ideas corresponded to the state of things represented in early capitalism. But the socialist ideas of the present are the product of a more advanced state of capitalism than Owen, Proudhon, La.s.salle, and Bakounin knew, or than the syndicalists of France, Italy, and Spain have yet been forced seriously to deal with.

Indeed, it was necessary for Marx to forecast half a century of capitalist development in order to clarify the program of socialism and to emphasize the necessity for that program.

It is a noteworthy and rather startling fact that Sidney and Beatrice Webb had pointed out the economic fallacies of syndicalism before the French Confederation of Labor was founded or Sorel, Berth, and Lagardelle had written a line on the subject. In their "History of Trade Unionism" they tell most interestingly the story of Owen's early trade-union socialism. The book was published in 1894, two or three years before the theories of the French school were born. Nevertheless, their critique of Owenism expresses as succinctly and forcibly as anything yet written the att.i.tude of the socialists toward the economics of modern syndicalism. "Of all Owen's attempts to reduce his socialism to practice," write the Webbs, "this was certainly the very worst. For his short-lived communities there was at least this excuse: that within their own area they were to be perfectly h.o.m.ogeneous little socialist States. There were to be no conflicting sections, and profit-making and compet.i.tion were to be effectually eliminated. But in 'the Trades Union,' as he conceived it, the mere combination of all the workmen in a trade as cooperative producers no more abolished commercial compet.i.tion than a combination of all the employers in it as a joint stock company.

In effect, his Grand Lodges would have been simply the head offices of huge joint stock companies owning the entire means of production in their industry, and subject to no control by the community as a whole.

They would, therefore, have been in a position at any moment to close their ranks and admit fresh generations of workers only as employees at compet.i.tive wages instead of as shareholders, thus creating at one stroke a new capitalist cla.s.s and a new proletariat.[29] ... In short, the socialism of Owen led him to propose a practical scheme which was not even socialistic, and which, if it could possibly have been carried out, would have simply arbitrarily redistributed the capital of the country without altering or superseding the capitalist system in the least."[30]

Although this "group socialism" would certainly necessitate a Parliament in order to harmonize the conflicting interests of the various productive a.s.sociations, there is nothing, it appears, that the syndicalist so much abhors. He is never quite done with picturing the burlesque of parliamentarism. While, no doubt, this is a necessary corollary to his antagonism to the State, it is aggravated by the fact that one of the chief ends of a political party is to put its representatives into Parliament. The syndicalist, in ridiculing all parliamentary activity, is at the same time, therefore, endeavoring to prove the folly of political action. That you cannot bring into the world a new social order by merely pa.s.sing laws is something the syndicalist never wearies of pointing out. Parliamentarism, he likes to repeat, is a new superst.i.tion that is weakening the activity and paralyzing the mentality of the working cla.s.s. "The superst.i.tious belief in parliamentary action," Leone says, " ... ascribes to acts of Parliament the magic power of bringing about new social forces."[31]

Sorel refers to the same thing as the "belief in the magic influence of departmental authority,"[32] while Labriola divines that "parties may elect members of Parliament, but they cannot set one machine going, nor can they organize one business undertaking."[33] All this reminds one of what Marx himself said in the early fifties. He speaks in "Revolution and Counter-Revolution," a collection of some articles that were originally written for the New York _Tribune_, of "parliamentary _cretinism_, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything going on outside the walls of their house--wars, revolutions, railway constructing, colonizing of whole new continents, California gold discoveries, Central American ca.n.a.ls, Russian armies, and whatever else may have some little claim to influence upon the destinies of mankind--is nothing compared with the incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of their honorable house."[34]

No one can read this statement of Marx's without realizing its essential truthfulness. But it should not be forgotten that Marx himself believed, and every prominent socialist believes, that the control of the parliaments of the world is essential to any movement that seeks to transform the world. The powerlessness of parliaments may be easily exaggerated. To say that they are incapable of constructive work is to deny innumerable facts of history. Laws have both set up and destroyed industries. The action of parliaments has established gigantic industries. The schools, the roads, the Panama Ca.n.a.l, and a thousand other great operations known to us to-day have been set going by parliaments. Tariff laws make and destroy industries. Prohibition laws have annihilated industries, while legality, which is the peculiar product of parliaments, has everything to do with the ownership of property, of industry, and of the management of capital. For one who is attacking a legal status, who is endeavoring to alter political, juridical, as well as industrial and social relations, the conquering of parliaments is vitally necessary. The socialist recognizes that the parliaments of to-day represent cla.s.s interests, that, indeed, they are dominated by cla.s.s interests, and, as such, that they do not seek to change but to conserve what now exists. As a result, there _is_ a parliamentary _cretinism_, because, in a sense, the dominant elements in Parliament are only managing the affairs of powerful influences outside of Parliament. They are not the guiding hand, but the servile hand, of capitalism.

For the above reason, chiefly, the syndicalists are on safe ground when they declare that parliaments are corrupt. Corruption is a product of the struggle of the cla.s.ses. To obtain special privilege, cla.s.s laws, and immunity from punishment, the "big interests" bribe and corrupt parliaments. However, corruption does not stop there. The trade unions themselves suffer. Labor leaders are bought just as labor representatives are bought. Insurrection itself is often controlled and rendered abortive by corruption. Numberless violent uprisings have been betrayed by those who fomented them. The words of Fruneau at Basel in 1869 are memorable. "Bakounin has declared," he said, "that it is necessary to await the Revolution. Ah, well, the Revolution! Away with it! Not that I fear the barricades, but, when one is a Frenchman and has seen the blood of the bravest of the French running in the streets in order to elevate to power the ambitious who, a few months later, sent us to Cayenne, one suspects the same snares, because the Revolution, in view of the ignorance of the proletarians, would take place only at the profit of our adversaries."[35] There is no way to escape the corrupting power of capitalism. It has its representatives in every movement that promises to be hostile. It has its spies in the labor unions, its _agents provocateurs_ in insurrections; and its money can always find hands to accept it. One does not escape corruption by abandoning Parliament. And Bordat, the anarchist, was the slave of a mania when he declared: "To send workingmen to a parliament is to act like a mother who would take her daughter to a brothel."[36] Parliaments are perhaps more corrupt than trade unions, but that is simply because they have greater power. To no small degree bribery and campaign funds are the tribute that capitalism pays to the power of the State.

The consistent opposition of the syndicalists to the State is leading them desperately far, and we see them developing, as the anarchists did before them, a contempt even for democracy. The literature of syndicalism teems with attacks on democracy. "Syndicalism and Democracy," says emile Pouget, "are the two opposite poles, which exclude and neutralize each other.... Democracy is a social superfluity, a parasitic and external excrescence, while syndicalism is the logical manifestation of a growth of life, it is a rational cohesion of human beings, and that is why, instead of restraining their individuality, it prolongs and develops it."[37] Democracy is, in the view of Sorel, the regime _par excellence_, in which men are governed "by the magical power of high-sounding words rather than by ideas; by formulas rather than by reasons; by dogmas, the origin of which n.o.body cares to find out, rather than by doctrines based on observation."[38] Lagardelle declares that syndicalism is post-democratic. "Democracy corresponds to a definite historical movement," he says, "which has come to an end. Syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement."[39] These are but three out of a number of criticisms of democracy that might be quoted. Although natural enough as a consequence of syndicalist antagonism to the State, these ideas are nevertheless fatal when applied to the actual conduct of a working-cla.s.s movement. It means that the minority believes that it can drive the majority. We remember that Guerard suggested, in his advocacy of the general strike, that, if the railroad workers struck, many other trades "would be compelled to quit work." "A daring revolutionary minority conscious of its aim can carry away with it the majority."[40] Pouget confesses: "The syndicalist has a contempt for the vulgar idea of democracy--the inert, unconscious ma.s.s is not to be taken into account when the minority wishes to act so as to benefit it...."[41] He refers in another place to the majority, who "may be considered as human zeros.

Thus appears the enormous difference in method," concludes Pouget, "which distinguishes syndicalism and democracy: the latter, by the mechanism of universal suffrage, gives direction to the unconscious ...

and stifles the minorities who bear within them the hopes of the future."[42]

This is anarchism all over again, from Proudhon to Goldman.[43] But, while the Bakouninists were forced, as a result of these views, to abandon organized effort, the newest anarchists have attempted to incorporate these ideas into the very const.i.tution of the French Confederation of Labor. And at present they are, in fact, a little clique that rides on the backs of the organized workers, and the majority cannot throw them off so long as a score of members have the same voting power in the Confederation as that of a trade union with ten thousand members. All this must, of course, have very serious consequences. Opposition to majority rule has always been a cardinal principle of the anarchists. It is also a fundamental principle of every American political machine. To defeat democracy is obviously the chief purpose of a Tammany Hall. But, when this idea is actually advocated as an ideal of working-cla.s.s organization, when it is made to stand as a policy and practice of a trade union, it can only result in suspicion, disruption, and, eventually, in complete ruin. It appears that the militant syndicalist, like the anarchist, realizes that he cannot expect the aid of the people. He turns, then, to the minority, the fighting inner circle, as the sole hope.

It is inevitable, therefore, that syndicalism and socialism should stand at opposite poles. They are exactly as far apart as anarchism and socialism. And, if we turn to the question of methods, we find an antagonism almost equally great. How are the workers to obtain possession of industry? On this point, as well as upon their conception of socialism, the syndicalists are not advanced beyond Owenism. "One question, and that the most immediately important of all," say the Webbs, speaking of Owen's projects, "was never seriously faced: How was the transfer of the industries from the capitalists to the unions to be effected in the teeth of a hostile and well-armed government? The answer must have been that the overwhelming numbers of 'the trades union' would render conflict impossible. At all events, Owen, like the early Christians, habitually spoke as if the day of judgment of the existing order of society was at hand. The next six months, in his view, were always going to see the 'new moral world' really established. The change from the capitalist system to a complete organization of industry under voluntary a.s.sociations of producers was to 'come suddenly upon society like a thief in the night.'... It is impossible not to regret that the first introduction of the English Trade Unionist to Socialism should have been effected by a foredoomed scheme which violated every economic principle of collectivism, and left the indispensable political preliminaries to pure chance."[44] Little need be added to what the Webbs have said on the utopian features of syndicalism or even upon the haphazard method adopted to achieve them. "No politics in the unions"

follows logically enough from an avowed antagonism to the State. If one starts with the a.s.sumption that nothing can be done through the State--as Owen, Bakounin, and the syndicalists have done--one is, of course, led irretrievably to oppose parliamentary and other political methods of action.

When the syndicalists throw over democracy and foreswear political action, they are fatally driven to the point where they must abandon the working cla.s.s. In the meantime, they are sadly misleading it. It is when we touch this phase of the syndicalist movement that we begin to discover real bitterness. Here direct action stands in opposition to political action. The workers must choose the one method or the other.

The old clash appears again in all its tempestuous hate. Jules Guesde was early one of the adherents of Bakounin, but in all his later life he has been pitiless in his warfare on the anarchists. As soon, therefore, as the direct-actionists began again to exercise an influence, Guesde entered the field of battle. I happened to be at Limoges in 1906 to hear Guesde speak these memorable words at the French Socialist Congress: "Political action is necessarily revolutionary. It does not address itself to the employer, but to the State, while industrial action addresses itself to the individual employer or to a.s.sociations of employers. Industrial action does not attack the employer _as an inst.i.tution_, because the employer is the effect, the result of capitalist property. As soon as capitalist property will have disappeared, the employer will disappear, and not before. It is in the socialist party--because it is a political party--that one fights against the employer cla.s.s, and that is why the socialist party is truly an economic party, tending to transform social and political economy. At the present moment words have their importance. And I should like to urge the comrades strongly never to allow it to be believed that trade-union action is economic action. No; this latter action is taken only by the political organization of the working cla.s.s. It is the party of the working cla.s.s which leads it--that is to say, the socialist party--because property is a social inst.i.tution which cannot be transformed except by the exploited cla.s.s making use of political power for this purpose....

"I realize," he continued, "that the direct-actionists attempt to identify political action with parliamentary action. No; electoral action as well as parliamentary action may be forms; pieces of political action. They are not political action as a whole, which is the effort to seize public powers--the Government. Political action is the people of Paris taking possession of the Hotel de Ville in 1871. It is the Parisian workers marching upon the National a.s.sembly in 1848.... To those who go about claiming that political action, as extolled by the party, reduces itself to the production of public officials, you will oppose a flat denial. Political action is, moreover, not the production of laws. It is the grasping by the working cla.s.s of the manufactory of laws; it is the political expropriation of the employer cla.s.s, which alone permits its economic expropriation.... I wish that someone would explain to me how the breaking of street lights, the disemboweling of soldiers, the burning of factories, can const.i.tute a means of transforming the ownership of property.... Supposing that the strikers were masters of the streets and should seize the factories, would not the factories still remain private property? Instead of being the property of a few employers or stockholders, they would become the property of the 500 or the 5,000 workingmen who had taken them, and that is all. The owners of the property will have changed; the system of ownership will have remained the same. And ought we not to consider it necessary to say that to the workers over and over again? Ought we to allow them to take a path that leads nowhere?... No; the socialists could not, without crime, lend themselves to such trickery. It is our imperative duty to bring back the workers to reality, to remind them always that one can only be revolutionary if one attacks the government and the State."[45] "Trade-union action moves within the circle of capitalism without breaking through it, and that is necessarily reformist, in the good sense of the word. In order to ameliorate the conditions of the victims of capitalist society, it does not touch the system. All the revolutionary wrangling can avail nothing against this fact. Even when a strike is triumphant, the day after the strike the wage earners remain wage earners and capitalist exploitation continues.

It is a necessity, a fatality, which trade-union action suffers."[46]

Any comment of mine would, I think, only serve to mar this masterly logic of Guesde's. There is nothing perhaps in socialist literature which so ably sustains the traditional position of the socialist movement. The battles in France over this question have been bitterly fought for over half a century. The most brilliant of minds have been engaged in the struggle. Proudhon, Bakounin, Briand, Sorel, Lagardelle, Berth, Herve, are men of undoubted ability. Opposed to them we find the Marxists, led in these latter years by Guesde and Jaures. And while direct action has always been vigorously supported in France both by the intellectuals and by the ma.s.ses, it is the policy of Guesde and Jaures which has made headway. At the time when the general strike was looked upon as a revolutionary panacea, and the French working cla.s.s seemed on the point of risking everything in one throw of the dice, Jaures uttered a solemn warning: "Toward this abyss ... the proletariat is feeling itself more and more drawn, at the risk not only of ruining itself should it fall over, but of dragging down with it for years to come either the wealth or the security of the national life."[47] "If the proletarians take possession of the mine and the factory, it will be a perfectly fict.i.tious ownership. They will be embracing a corpse, for the mines and factories will be no better than dead bodies while economic circulation is suspended and production is stopped. So long as a cla.s.s does not own and govern the whole social machine, it can seize a few factories and yards, if it wants to, but it really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hand a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of transportation."[48] "The working cla.s.s would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair for a method of revolution."[49]

The struggle, therefore, between the syndicalists and the socialists is, as we see, the same clash over methods that occurred in the seventies and eighties between the anarchists and the socialists. In abandoning democracy, in denying the efficacy of political action, and in resorting to methods which can only end in self-destruction, the syndicalist becomes the logical descendant of the anarchist. He is at this moment undergoing an evolution which appears to be leading him into the same _cul-de-sac_ that thwarted his forefather. His path is blocked by the futility of his own weapons. He is fatally driven, as Plechanoff said, either to serve the bourgeois politicians or to resort to the tactics of Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, and Most. The latter is the more likely, since the ma.s.ses refuse to be drawn into the general strike as they formerly declined to partic.i.p.ate in artificial uprisings.[AE] The daring conscious minority more and more despair, and they turn to the only other weapon in their a.r.s.enal, that of sabotage. There is a kind of fatality which overtakes the revolutionist who insists upon an immediate, universal, and violent revolution. He must first despair of the majority. He then loses confidence even in the enlightened minority.

And, in the end, like the Bakouninist, he is driven to individual acts of despair. What will doubtless happen at no distant date in France and Italy will be a repet.i.tion of the congress at The Hague. When the trade-union movement actually develops into a powerful organization, it will be forced to throw off this incubus of the new anarchism. It is already thought that a majority of the French trade unionists oppose the anarchist tendencies of the clique in control, and certainly a number of the largest and most influential unions frankly cla.s.s themselves as reformist syndicalists, in order to distinguish themselves from the revolutionary syndicalists. What will come of this division time only can tell.

In any case, it is becoming clear even to the French unionists that direct action is not and cannot be, as Guesde has pointed out, revolutionary action. It cannot transform our social system. It is destined to failure just as insurrection as a policy was destined to failure. Rittinghausen said at Basel in 1869: "Revolution, as a matter of fact, accomplishes nothing. If you are not able to formulate, after the revolution, by legislation, your legitimate demands, the revolution will perish miserably."[50] This was true in 1848, in 1871, and even in the great French Revolution itself. Nothing would have seemed easier at the time of the French Revolution than for the peasants to have directly possessed themselves of the land. They were using it. Their houses were planted in the midst of it. Their landlords in many cases had fled. Yet Kropotkin, in his story of "The Great French Revolution," relates that the redistribution of land awaited the action of Parliament. To be sure, some of the peasants had taken the land, but they were not at all sure that it might not again be taken from them by some superior force. Their rights were not defined, and there was such chaos in the entire situation that, in the end, the whole question had to be left to Parliament. It was only after the action of the Convention, June 11, 1793, that the rights of ownership were defined. It was only then, as Kropotkin says, that "everyone had a right to the land. It was a complete revolution."[51] That the greatest of living anarchists should be forced to pay this tribute to the action of Parliament is in itself an a.s.surance. For ma.s.ses in the time of revolution to grab whatever they desire is, after all, to const.i.tute what Jaures calls a fict.i.tious ownership. Some legality is needed to establish possession and a sense of security, and, up to the present, only the political inst.i.tutions of society have been able to do that. For this precise reason every social struggle and cla.s.s struggle of the past has been a political struggle.

There remains but one other fundamental question, which must be briefly examined. The syndicalists do not go back to Owen as the founder of their philosophy. They constantly reiterate the claim that they alone to-day are Marxists and that it is given to them to keep "pure and undefiled" the theories of that giant mind. They base their claim on the ground of Marx's economic interpretation of history and especially upon his oft-repeated doctrine that upon the economic structure of society rises the juridical and political superstructure. They maintain that the political inst.i.tutions are merely the reflex of economic conditions.

Alter the economic basis of society, and the political structure must adjust itself to the new conditions. As a result of this truly Marxian reasoning, they a.s.sert that the revolutionary movement must pursue solely economic aims and disregard totally the existing and, to their minds, superfluous political relations. They accuse the socialists of a contradiction. Claiming to be Marxists and basing their program upon the economic interpretation of history, the socialists waste their energies in trying to modify the results instead of obliterating the causes.

Political inst.i.tutions are parasitical. Why, therefore, ignore economic foundations and waste effort remodeling the parasitical superstructure?

There _is_ a contradiction here, but not on the part of the socialists.

Proudhon was entirely consistent when he asked: "Can we not administer our goods, keep our accounts, arrange our differences, look after our common interests?"[52] And, moreover, he was consistent when he declared: "I want you to make the very inst.i.tutions which I charge you to abolish, ... so that the new society shall appear as the spontaneous, natural, and necessary development of the old."[53] If that were once done the dissolution of government would follow, as he says, in a way about which one can at present make only guesses. But Proudhon urged his followers to establish cooperative banks, cooperative industries, and a variety of voluntary industrial enterprises, in order eventually to possess themselves of the means of production. If the working cla.s.s, through its own cooperative efforts, could once acquire the ownership of industry, if they could thus expropriate the present owners and gradually come into the ownership of all natural resources and all means of production--in a word, of all social capital--they would not need to bother themselves with the State. If, in possessing themselves thus of all economic power, they were also to neglect the State, its machinery would, of course, tumble into uselessness and eventually disappear. As the great capitalists to-day make laws through the stock exchange, through their chambers of commerce, through their pools and combinations, so the working cla.s.s could do likewise if they were in possession of industry. But the working cla.s.s to-day has no real economic power. It has no partic.i.p.ation in the ownership of industry. It is claimed that it might withdraw its labor power and in this manner break down the entire economic system. It is urged that labor alone is absolutely necessary to production and that if, in a great general strike, it should cease production, the whole of society would be forced to capitulate. And in theory this seems una.s.sailable, but actually it has no force whatever. In the first place, this economic power does not exist unless the workers are organized and are practically unanimous in their action. Furthermore, the economic position of the workers is one of utter helplessness at the time of a universal strike, in that they cannot feed themselves. As they are the nearest of all cla.s.ses to starvation, they will be the first to suffer by a stoppage of work. There is still another vital weakness in this so-called economic theory. The battles that result from a general strike will not be on the industrial field. They will be battles between the armed agents of the State and unarmed ma.s.ses of hungry men. Whatever economic power the workers are said to possess would, in that case, avail them little, for the results of their struggles would depend upon the military power which they would be able to manifest. The individual worker has no economic power, nor has the minority, and it may even be questioned if the withdrawal of all the organized workers could bring society to its knees. Mult.i.tudes of the small propertied cla.s.ses, of farmers, of police, of militiamen, and of others would immediately rush to the defense of society in the time of such peril. It is only the working cla.s.s theoretically conceived of as a conscious unit and as practically unanimous in its revolutionary aims, in its methods, and in its revolt which can be considered as the ultimate economic power of modern society. The day of such a conscious and enlightened solidarity is, however, so far distant that the syndicalism which is based upon it falls of itself into a fantastic dream.

FOOTNOTES: