American Syndicalism/Chapter 16

by John Graham Brooks

XVI

CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTION

We have seen that Syndicalists have lost faith in the halting legalities of political and reform action. They move straight upon the enemy. They say bluntly that the capitalist and present business managers are incompetent for their work. In an article by an English Syndicalist, which I have twice seen quoted in our I. W. W. literature, occurs this passage:

"Leave us, you 'captains of industry,' if you cannot manage the industries so as to give us a living wage and security of employment. Go! if you are so short-sighted and so incapable of coming to a common understanding among yourselves, that you rush like a flock of sheep into every new branch of production which promises you the greatest momentary profits, regardless of the usefulness or noxiousness of the goods you produce in that branch! Go, if you are incapable of building your fortunes otherwise than by preparing interminable wars, and squandering a good third of what is produced by every nation in armaments for robbing other robbers. Go! if all that you have learned from the marvelous discoveries of modern science is that you see no other way of obtaining one's well-being but out of that squalid misery to which one-third of the population of the great cities of this extremely wealthy country are condemned. Go! and 'a plague o' both your houses' if that is the only way you can find to manage industry and trade. We, workmen, will know better how to organize production, if we only succeed in getting rid of you, the capitalist pest!"

Capitalists can still make profit for themselves and their friends, but the disenchanted Syndicalist denies that this is "good business." He will call no business "good" that does not enrich the people as a whole. This is his measure of "ability" and there is much to be said for this view. The really able man will so conduct affairs as to help others as much as himself. Capitalism it is said, now in its decadence, makes this inclusive service less and less possible. Labor must therefore itself take over the job.

The actual industry to be chosen is a question of time, place and practical expediency, but the idea becomes plain in the Post Office strike in Paris in 1910, while the practice has actual embodiment in specific coöperative triumphs now among our proved experiences. No one has better stated this idea in its highest expression than the Syndicalist, Odon Por. He seems to assume that years of trade union discipline with a developed "class-conscious" sense, must precede even an intelligent plan of operation. It is assumed that the unions have passed through the guerrilla stage of strikes, learning both their strength and weakness. In his words: "When the workers have attained the highest technical skill and efficiency; when they are able and ready actually to run their industries, ready with their perfected organization and their skilled professional individuality, they will then take them over." When I asked an I. W. W. lecturer what business in the United States would answer to the above condition, he replied that our railroads already had unions, with technical knowledge enough among engineers and in the shops to take over and run the system "within a very few years." He thought the Western Federation of Miners already equipped to run the mines and that the big breweries had a labor organization powerful enough and technical equipment so advanced that they might easily pass from capitalist to labor management. Much of the electrical work he believed to be in the same hopeful stage of transition.

He made much of the familiar suggestion that the general trust development had proved already that the biggest business can be run by those who have developed within the business and are hired by the outside capitalist. "If they will do it for the capitalists, they will do it for all of us." To the redoubtable question as to how these enterprises were to be financed, he replied that a few years more of increasing unrest, strikes becoming more and more general, interspersed with the gaieties of sabotage, would make capitalistic investments so uncertain and insecure that the outside capitalist would tire of the game. "The financier," he said, "does not realize in the least how hard we are going to make it for him to run these things in the old way."

According to Odon Por it is a great step toward the new order that the clerical force in the French Post Office has lost confidence in the official political management. In his own words: "The employees were tired of being directed and dominated by a political department administered by politicians who had no comprehension of the work of the Post Office clerk, nor indeed of the work in general." The department can now be better run "without officials retained at high salaries, holding their positions because of political influence, though destitute of the least expert knowledge of the business." Everything that concerns the Post Office is known by the total body of workers who now carry it on. Why then should the entire management be refused them?

The Syndicalist argues against "throwing the railways into politics," as briskly and confidently as the average American business man. He has only contempt for Government ownership as now practiced. To these revolutionaries, the railroad in possession of any present government may be as viciously capitalistic as in private hands, besides being badly managed. Italy has taken over the roads and so badly bungles them as to rouse the same jeers, according to Odon Por, as in the case of the French Post Office. He says a very powerful Industrial Union is now established on government roads. These include practically all except the more highly paid officials. Of the aim of this Union, he says:

"By its method of organizing according to the technical nature of each man's occupation, while the problems of the whole service are kept before the mind of every member and his opinion and vote called for on each, the men are educated to a keen interest in everything that concerns the whole work of the railways. That they have arrived at a considerable degree of success is proved by the fact that, conscious of their increased collective power, they set before themselves the revolutionary aim—'The Railways for the Railwaymen.'

He adds: "The technical incompetence of the bureaucratic administration has demoralized the system and brought about a growing yearly deficit in the returns. Innumerable sinecures and well-paid offices were established; but the State neglected the technical side, and with increased financial burden came greater confusion in the working.

"On the other hand, through their organization the workers have been eagerly learning details of every kind of work necessary for the proper effective managing of the railways, and now they seek to get control over their administration, so as to manage the railways for the nation. They propose to do this as a coöperative society, which would be made up of the members of their union. . . ."

He quotes conservative economists of world-wide reputation and experts such as Professor Vilfredo Pareto who have declared that the one practical solution of the trouble is, since private ownership is a public nuisance, and state ownership a veritable disaster, to entrust the State railways to the coöperative enterprise of the organized railway-men. It is further maintained that the State has taken the first step toward this end in its law of 1911, which opens the way for a partnership with the unions, so far as to give their own elected representatives a voice in management. "The Government," he says, "thus proved its recognition of the fact that it cannot run the railway industry efficiently without the direct coöperation and advice of the employees."

Thus far we have to do with the syndicalist purpose and idea. Through the word "coöperative" we pass from the idea to its proposed applications in practice. This constructive suggestion touches anarchistic and communist ideals long familiar to us. These seek to develop local autonomous groups, federated "as necessity arises," but united in their loathing of a centralized bureaucratic State. These decentralized activities are to preserve for the individual "the utmost freedom consistent with conditions set by these voluntary associations."

This suggestive idealist counts upon the renaissance of democratic coöperation to further this end. He illustrates it by two instances, one in industry and the other upon the land:

"The Bottle Blowers' Industrial Union of Italy has discovered the material, technical, commercial, and moral capacities for getting hold, within a comparatively short period of time, of the biggest share of the Italian bottle industry, and sooner or later it will undoubtedly rim the whole industry through its coöperatives."

"The force which these workers have substituted for individual and associated capitalist initiative, namely, the collective effort and efficiency of their organized class, foreshadows to Syndicalists the future, with its economic progress and continuously growing moral improvement."

In agriculture, the basic industry of Italy, the same factors are at work on a much larger scale. Here he tells us some 200,000 acres have passed into the hands of the farm laborers organized into unions and coöperative societies. Through industrial organizations and Socialist education the agricultural laborers acquired the power, the technical capacity, and the moral energies to fight for, obtain, and run their industry.

These last lines contain the gist of these winged hopes. Through the technical and moral development of the trade union, labor is to enter into possession of one important industry after another. It is to do this by proving its technical and moral superiority over capitalism already dying before our eyes.

We here have the syndicalist view of the laborer as the creating unit that lives and has his being inside the machinery of production. He is in the mine, factory, shop, ship, and bank. Here his skill and faculty develop. On this basis his trade union is to rest. It is the primary industrial cell. It is to be built into federations with delegates that shall represent the whole industrial life. To the minutest part these, and these only, know the process through which foods, stuffs, metals, are made. It is these real creators who also carry all products to the consumer. Here, then, should be the seats of power. What is now called politics will be remade. With the workers once enthroned, politics will express the administrative necessities of the new order in which "none shall live except by work." Youth, age, infirmity, shall be cared for, as under socialism, by direct appropriations from the social product. But investments, interest, profits, rent, and all inheriting of these values, are to be stopped, in order that loafers, rich and poor alike, shall have an end.

In the syndicalist vision coöperative groups furnish the higher efficiencies before which the private profit-maker can no longer hold his own. The capitalist is to be crowded out because of inefficiency and this can be shown through the object lessons which coöperation now offers.

I have dealt at length with this writer, because no one known to me has put the case with more coherence or on the same high level. If we can accept him as authoritative spokesman, there is no more danger in his proposals than in a new kind of Sunday school or a new breakfast food. We have only to watch and satisfy ourselves that his trade unions "functioning through coöperation," really display the superiorities claimed for them. If they should perform their various services with higher social benefit they are surely not to be feared.

It is true that many European cities have found distinct advantages in letting out various kinds of work—like paving, drainage, printing—to coöperative groups. Italy has produced a type of self-organizing gang electing its own foreman and doing job-work (in which the labor cost is high) coöperatively. Hundreds of these have proved so successful that Government and cities give them preferential advantages. The Societies are registered and work in small gangs. As elsewhere, experiment has shown that discipline becomes too difficult with larger numbers. One often finds the coöperative store affiliated with this working plan. The profits of each gang go to no outsider, but automatically to themselves when the job is done. They have built city slaughter houses and made whole streets in Parma. The Minister Luzzatti gave them his active sympathy and helped them to the uses of the coöperative banks, of which he was founder.

Is there here the germ from which the future Commonwealth may spring? Taken together with many thousands of other coöperative forms in agriculture, banking, distribution and production, it offers the fairest hopes for the democratic management of business that actual experience can show. Ordinary "State Socialism" is much less democratic than the free activities of workingmen's coöperation.

What charms "the higher syndicalism" in coöperation is that it eliminates the master. The Italian "braccianti" and "muratori" have no boss except of their own electing. If they need a technical engineer, he comes as their fellow counsellor and peer, never as a "boss." The gang substitutes its own supervision for that of an employer and also takes the risks. If one can imagine the world's chief business done through such voluntary groups, they would displace the bureaucratic State hated by all Syndicalists.

In this manner, Kropotkin's shining dream would be fulfilled. In loosely federated groups, men and women would do their work like artists and men of science. There would be no enslaving trusts, but "small factories and upon the land, such intensive culture as science now makes possible." This thought has long hovered in the minds of Anarchists of the Kropotkin type.^[1]

Even in our country, as early as 1883, it appeared in anarchist "Principles," the second, third, and sixth articles of which read as follows:

"Establishment of a free society based upon coöperative organization of production.

"Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.

"Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations resting on a federalistic basis."

Neither in the literature nor in many conversations, have I ever got the slightest convincing intimation as to how these "loosely federated unions" are to work in the indispensable exchange of products in the world market, The highly trained expert, we are told, is to play a great part. These skilled persons in the various industries are to "represent" such social organization as exists. This revives an idea on which publicists have speculated for a half century—"representation by interests,"—schoolmasters, manufacturers, farmers, miners, etc., each to choose its own representative. It is a conception, if largely conceived, which points to a possible political structure of far higher order, but nothing could so surely defeat it as the fighting methods of Syndicalism based on the "class war" as conceived by American Syndicalists. The harsh aggressiveness with which our I. W. W. insist upon this leaves every constructive feature almost a burlesque.

For example, on the basis of Trautmann's pamphlet, One Big Union, a chart has been drawn of the future industrial system. It generously includes the entire globe, thus opening new floodgates for more merciless competition. It will have nothing to do with lines that separate states or nations. The plan has four great departments:

• (1) Agriculture and Fisheries.
• (2) Manufacture and Production.
• (3) Mines.
• (4) Construction.

Each of these is subdivided—the first into stock and farming, horticulture, forestry, and fisheries; mining into those who work in coal and coke, oil and gas, metals, salt, sulphur, stone, and gems; the two others likewise with more minute sub-divisions. At the center is the seat of Administration and Communication from which radiate to the circumference the divisions of Public Service and Transportation, with all the activities, including electric, gas, and water supplies; education, health, marine and air navigation. Here we have the basis of labor organization which will "correctly represent the working class." It combines all wage-workers "in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect the interests of the working people of today in their struggle for fewer hours, more wages and better conditions." It also offers "a final solution of the labor problem—an emancipation from strikes, injunctions, bull-pens and scabbing of one against the other."

We are told finally to "observe how this organization will give recognition to control of shop affairs, provide perfect Industrial Unionism, and converge the strength of all organized workers to a common center, from which any weak point can be strengthened and protected.

"Observe, also, how the growth and development of this organization will build up within itself the structure of an Industrial Democracy—a Workers' Coöperative Republic—which must finally burst the shell of capitalist government, and be the agency by which the workers will operate the industries, and appropriate the products to themselves.

"One obligation for all.

"A union man once and in one industry, a union man always and in all industries.

"Universal transfers.

"Universal emblem.

"All workers of one industry in one union; all unions of workers in one big labor alliance the world over."

All this is to be done by creating a sense of solidarity among all the labor units. Every selfish trade union is to lose itself in a larger whole. Because men work in glass or leather, they are not to call their unions after the tools or products used. "Agriculture, for example, would gather into one union."

"All farm workers, in plowing, planting, reaping, and fertilizing operations—which would, of course, include all engineers, firemen, blacksmiths, repair-workers, carpenters, etc., working on farms and engaged in farm-product work. All workers on cotton and sugar plantations would come into this group, also all irrigation-workers, that is, all working at the operation of irrigation-systems as engineers, pumpmen, lockmen, pipe and repairmen, etc. On cattle and live stock farms: ranchmen, herders, sheep shearers, general utility men, all workers on fowl and bird farms; on dairy farms, etc."

Again the Department of Civil Service and Public Conveniences contains:

• (A) Hospitals and sanitariums.
• (B) Sanitary protective division.
• (C) Educational institutions.
• (D) Water, gas and electricity supply service.
• (E) Amusement service.
• (F) General distribution.

This would merge scores of craft unions that had been built up on sectional interests. Against this "curse of sectionalism" the Syndicalist acts.

It is a curse because it cultivates a selfish monopoly spirit. "One Big Union" in each industry, ever ready to unite with those in other industries, is the remedy. With this perfected solidarity once attained, labor has only to stop, and the catastrophe of capitalism is at hand. This may be done playfully with smiling lips and hands in pockets.

What Mr. Trautmann's pamphlet has done is to give us a blurred caricature of present commercial activities in the world.^[2] This is done apparently to show pictorially how easily the "world brotherhood of labor" may be instructed to oust the present possessors.

From Sir Thomas More to William Morris, we have nothing more soaringly utopian than that which this chart furnishes. It implies heights and depths of organization of which our present despised "state bureaucracy" scarcely gives us a hint. It implies a system of representation and a politics on a scale far beyond anything which now exists. If this charted dream were to be Utopia (that is, "Nowhere"), one would greet it on its own terms, but the I. W. W. are above all bent on things practical. All circuitous ways, as through politics and parliaments, are not for them. It is "action" that educates and action that frees labor from its chains. Capitalism is now so far gone that its dissolution needs only to be hastened by "direct action," sabotage, the strike in every phase,—local, short, and quick, sympathetic,—and finally the general uprising.^[3]

The childlike simplicity of this proposal astonishes us the more because it seems to be here recognized, that as the world is bound closer and closer together, exchange of products must go on; that kinds, amounts, terms of exchange, have in some way to be determined, and that all this can only be through boards chosen by the various trades. As "the Globe itself is to be one brotherhood," international affiliations are to be more fluid and intimate than ever.

That the "point of production" and the product are to be made the new basis of reconstruction, does not free us an atom from red-tape complications involved in the amount of organization absolutely necessary to the administrative toil incident to the management of a world market by the "Grand Assembly composed of delegates from National Unions."

It is unthinkable that these bodies can work except through committees entrusted with large powers. It is as unthinkable that these powers can be exercised without large authority and a good deal of permanence of tenure in office.

In distant industries, will those restless minorities, which appear wherever human beings congregate, submit to such authority without the factional resistance which even now plagues the I. W. W. to the point of breaking? There is even less warrant for such hope because Syndicalism rests so confidently and so exclusively on economic and business interests. These are not primarily the harmonizing, brother-making forces in the world.

There is a sentence in some early Christian writer that reads: "We believe because it is impossible." Of this portion of the I. W. W. belief we can say no less. It is a naïve faith which restores again an almost forgotten theology. It awaits a Day of Judgment (for capitalism) as breathlessly as its predecessors. "Predestination" never had a more perfervid utterance in spite of clamorous approval of Mr. Bergson. Never was the poor old world more sharply divided into black and white, sheep and goats, God and Devil, Heaven and Hell than in this philosophy.

We are offered here a conception of economic relations which necessarily raises impossible questions and still more impossible "solutions."

The disciplined and soberest element in the socialist movement, as well as in the older trade unions, already sets problems and presses them for solution, which will tax to the limit all the strength and intelligence at our command. Trade unions, for example, are generally thought to be ridiculous in assuming some sort of "right to the job" that has been deliberately abandoned in a strike. The absurdity of this "right" is so clear in the case of the individual who leaves his employer, that we think it safe to apply the principle to collective action. Yet recent years have shown in several countries that mass-action in strikes may assume proportions and at the same time get strategic control over the sources of social safety, that raise problems on which the individual instance throws no ray of light.

This illustration shows by comparison, the intrepid lengths to which I. W. W. claims are pressed. "Of course the job is ours! Whose is it if not ours?" says one of them. "It is ours as much when we are out as when we are in."

But this is simplicity itself compared to the next step. Not only does the job belong to them, but the tools, machinery, mill and industry itself. "All these are ours because we laborers made them." Scores of times I have heard this preached with placid innocence, the depths of which no doubting appeal to the speaker could in the least disturb.

After a lecture on some phase of labor troubles, a young lady, who had been nettled by some remark, made tart objections. "My father," she said, "employs hundreds of men. They make no end of trouble for him, though he gives every one of them a living." She had at her tongue's end the exact amounts which went each week to "support," as she said, these troublesome employees. When I ventured to ask if it was really so onesided as that: if the men in the factory did not also help "support" her father: if they gave him nothing in return for all his favors, I found, though she had college training, that the question had no meaning for her. She was going about in her little world carrying in her pretty head this dense illusion that her father was a kind of patron saint dispensing favors to ungrateful and little deserving mill hands.

Years after, at a strike against another kind of mill, I met a youth to whom Syndicalism was a religion. With glowing sincerity he was telling the packed hearers about him that the employers were "shirkers and not workers." "They did not make that mill or anything in it. From cellar to roof labor made it; and what labor makes, labor should have."

Here again was the young lady. As with her, I tried to draw from him some further statement about the employer's obvious part in the creation and maintenance of the mills in question. But this meant nothing to him. There was no further question in his mind. "The mill is ours and we shall take our own."

Since then, these two have hung in my memory as companion pictures. In point of density, one illusion is as pernicious as the other. There are views so wildly unrelated to any possible social change, that we rightly set them down among the antics of a disordered or undisciplined mind. An I. W. W. writer has complained in one of their journals that too many of the membership enter upon oratorical instruction before they are in the least prepared for it. He then adds: "These new converts are too much 'in advance' to be of any help to the cause," but how can one ignorant of his own business be "in advance" of anything? Why not state it as it is. "They are so far behind that they are unfit to teach." A nimble vanity is not confined to certain criminal and degenerate types. It has the thriftiest growths in that immaturity which first peeps in upon some vast human problem and is at once fired to suffocation with desire to lift the burden of the world's ignorance. It is always the mark of this immaturity to assume that its light burns far in advance of the dull and lagging multitude. If these old fogy survivals mock or turn deaf ears, the neophyte finds easy solace in the thought that other great light-bearers of the race have met the same hard fate. I once heard the ironic pleasantry, "Don't try to reform the world until you are perfectly certain that the world can't reform you. Such reproof as the rebuke carries has a far wider application than to I. W. W. neophytes. It applies to every shade of crude impatience from which few of us are wholly free.

On a far higher plane is the constructive suggestion of Odon Por. It is full of speculative charms but, at every point, fatal to the benumbing practices of our I. W. W.

No movement commits itself to coöperation without at the same time committing itself to the peaceful and creative methods of reform. Workmen's coöperation has a growth of two generations. There is not a spot where it has won the least real power that it has not affiliated with politics and with reforms. This is both its hope and its strength. It grows only by creative action. Sabotage and strikes alike are an abomination to the coöperator. His success is measured by his achievements in substituting an efficiency superior to that of private profit-making employers. He deliberately enters into competition with them to prove that certain middlemen are useless and therefore parasitic.

This high and strenuous task leaves no time for the "organized delays of sabotage." So far as Syndicalism turns to coöperation, it falls into line with the world's best and safest reform work.

No one assures of this with more impressiveness than the "intellectual father" of the movement, George Sorel. It is not merely that he rejects sabotage, he rejects even more all attempts to chart off the future of society. His interest is in the obscure, unconscious forces which underlie this mass-movement. He sees the middle class in a state of decay. All the commanding energies through which, for centuries, it came to power have sickened. It is to him a thing for pity and contempt. If a spark of hope is left for the bourgeois, it can only be kindled by the breath of revolution.^[4] This leads him to exalt the possibilities of violence. It has the serpent's charm to fix the eye upon its object. Militant English women drop their pruderies, attack persons and property. The nation gasps, but sits up and pays attention. The cause gets a hearing. To Sorel no great social uprising is possible without drama. The imagination must be shocked and fascinated. The Reformation, the Revolution of 1789, the Italian revolt against Austria, owed their successes to this spectacle of daring and uncalculating action.

It is neither important nor relevant to ask if this violence is "good" or "moral." It is justified if it is efficient; if it works toward its end in getting things done. Wherever these forces gain such headway as to shift power from one class to another, we have the essence of a "Revolution," the soul of which is religion. This religion of social insurgency is Myth, but to him that lessens neither its power nor its sanctity. It has not the slightest consequence that the myth is not "true." It is true in the sense that Napoleon's victories were won by aid of myths with which his soldiers clothed their leader.

These metaphysical rhapsodies are not from the pen of a literary trifler. They are the serious reflections of a highly trained engineer whose intellectual gifts have left their impress upon some of the best minds of our time. They are ideas, however, very awkward for all those who make charts of any society built on the ruins of the present order. The disgust which the socialist poet Morris felt for Bellamy's Utopia would be as nothing to Sorel's repulsion for the whole constructive mechanism within which Mr. Trautmann and others frame their future society.

In the critical objections of this chapter there is no word of denial that our I. W. W. may upon other grounds justify their existence. They may be honestly accounted for because of things intolerable in our present disorders. Syndicalism, with its excesses of statement and of action, with all the fantasm of its working method will continue, and should continue as one among other prodding annoyances that leave society without peace until it dedicates far more unselfish thought and strength to avoidable diseases like unmerited poverty, unemployment, grotesque inequalities in wealth possession, the forced prostitution of underpaid women, and our fatuous brutalities in dealing with crime.

To accept these and kindred social sicknesses as fatalities is as excuseless as to accept tuberculosis or hookworm as permanent and unavoidable ills.

1. As this goes to press, G. P. Putnam's Sons publish a cheap up-to-date edition of Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops in which this faith in the "decentralization of industries;" the "combination of industry and agriculture" has the most intelligent and inspiring expression yet given it.
2. I am told that in the Sixth Convention this chart has now been "entirely made over." In the I. W. W. Solidarity, Nov. 30, 1912, is a long and critical article on necessary changes.
3. The most recent statement by the general secretary of the order reads:

   "All power vests in the general membership through the initiative and referendum and the right of repeal and recall.

   "Universal transfer system and recognition of cards of union workers of all countries; one initiation fee to be all that is required, and this is to be placed at such a figure that no worker will be prevented from becoming a union man or woman because of its amount.

   "A universal label, badge, button and membership card, thus promoting the idea of solidarity and unity amongst the workers.—Solidarity, Jan. 18, 1913."

4. See the brilliant and impartial analysis in the first chapters of La Philosophie Syndicaliste, by George Guy-Grand.