American Syndicalism/Chapter 09
IX
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES
Among syndicalist "fundamentals" is the clear division of our society into the tool-owning capitalist class, on the one side, and the wage receiving class on the other. These confront each other as enemies. The employing class is entrenched behind citadels of private property; behind the whole stupendous mechanism of production, behind the Constitution, the courts, and all that "law and order" mean when interpreted and enforced by the possessing classes. Here, massed in fancied security, is the foe of labor. Without, is the vast, ill-organized multitude of the workers, stupefied and confused by religious and secular instruction guided in the interest of those behind the fortress. The task of Syndicalism is to wake this formless mob of dupes out of its stupor; to make them see the enemy as he is, and to see himself the victim, purposely shut out and excluded from the feasting trenchers behind the walls. Between this guarded minority and the huge, straggling multitude on the outside there is as little in common as between the robber and the robbed. With these beliefs, Syndicalists ask, how is this formless multitude to be brought to its senses? How make it see the ugly facts of its own enslavement?
For this, the propaganda of the I. W. W. exists. Its teeming literature bristles with metaphors, caricatures, exhortations,—all with the single aim of forcing this overtopping majority to look searchingly into the gulf that yawns between it and the enemy. Syndicalism marks its progress by the number of its conversions. Trautmann's pamphlet, Industrial Unionism, opens with the words:
"A portion of the workers, in ever-increasing numbers, recognize the fact that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common, and that the struggle must go on until all the toilers come together and take and hold that which they produce by their labor. The workers begin to see that they must not only prepare themselves to hold their own against the aggressions of their oppressors, but also destroy the fortifications behind which the enemy has entrenched himself in his possessions of land, mills, mines and factories. What is of benefit to the employers must, self-evidently, be detrimental to the employes."
This doctrine is not peculiar to Syndicalism. The general socialist movement knows it of old and has laid upon it all manner of emphasis.
A very powerful section of Socialism, however, has learned some restraint in the uses of class antagonism as embodied in this doctrine. Many of the ablest advocates of Socialism have declared themselves wholly against it. A dozen able men could be quoted to this effect. H. G. Wells writes sentences like these: "Modern Socialism has cleared itself of that jealous hatred of prosperity that was once a part of class-war Socialism." "It refuses no one who will serve it. It is no narrow doctrinaire cult. It does not seek the best of an argument, but the best of a world. Its worst enemies are those foolish and litigious advocates who antagonize and estrange every development of human Good Will and does not pay tribute to their vanity in open acquiescence. Its most loyal servants, its most effectual helpers on the side of art, invention and public organization and political reconstruction, may be men who will never adopt the Socialist name."[1] It is from a leader of the English Parliamentary Socialists that we have this opinion: "It is the whole of society and not merely a part of society that is developing toward Socialism. The consistent exponent of the class struggle must, of course, repudiate these doctrines, but then the class struggle is far more akin to Radicalism than to Socialism." "Socialists should, therefore, think of the State and of political authority not as the expression of majority rule or of the will of any section, but as the embodiment of the life of the whole community."[2]
A clear-headed Socialist like Mr. W. J. Ghent stands stiffly for the class struggle which he rightly derives from the "economic interpretation of history," but he sounds a warning to those who overdo it. He admits that the "intellectuals" outside the proletariat devised and gave this very doctrine, "the philosophy of it and the reasons for it," to the manual workers. He then adds,[3] "It needs to be said plainly that there is no more shameless misleader of the Socialist proletariat than the demagogue who tries to create antagonism against the educated men in the movement."
This same attack on "intellectuals" is incessant in the I. W. W. It appears in more popular form in the Italian Syndicalist, Enrico Leone; so too, the German Syndicalist, "Der Pionier," taunts the socialist members of the Reichstag with being anything and everything except wage earners. "How, it asks, can they lead those of whose lives they know nothing?"
It is wholly true that this class conscious appeal has in it most indispensable utilities. The workers must be made conscious of every whit of common interest which is genuinely their own. This consciousness of "unified labor interests" has in it great educational value. Its value is all the more precious because the limits of its actual realization are so narrow. It should be encouraged and tolerated because the little it can do has such merit. The more labor feels its brotherhood, the more power it possesses to enlarge its strategic opportunities. Socialism does well to make the most of it. It has great kindling and arousing power. It is true too that the main struggle has to be their own. In this, they are now prepared to take advice so long dealt out to them. It is a classic illustration of "bourgeois morals" to encourage self-reliance; to teach the poor and the humble to "help themselves;" to trust to their own inner resources rather than yield in flabby acquiescence to their more fortunate brothers.
Upon reflection, the wage earners conclude that this well-meant counsel is excellent in spite of its suspicious origin. They propose now to "help themselves." In order to make the advice serviceable, they are to take it not as individuals, but all together. They are to have "collective efficiency, in helping themselves." To be sure, this mass-method does not lend itself to the convenience of the superior class as in the older ways of charity, but self-reliance may be the gainer.
The fervors that bring great masses of labor together, quenching for the time all pettiness and bickering, consuming mean enmities among leaders, are priceless. By the help of this deepened "class consciousness" trade unionism in the world has built itself into a tower of strength. It has made "collective bargaining" possible. It is this enlarged and quickened sense of brotherhood that has won every memorable strike in history, like that of the London dockers of 1886, and that of our miners in 1903. It is the same uplifting that has won the political triumphs of completer suffrage (as in Austria and Belgium) against the "vote of property."
It is difficult to state too strongly the strategic and informing value of the class-conscious appeal, for immediate and practical purposes. But this is not all the story. To pass from these conceded uses to the idea of a "class struggle," over-stimulated and enforced as an unflinching principle, in the manner of the I. W. W., has in it the logic of social dissolution. From long and hard experience, some of the ablest men that Socialism has produced no longer make this mistake. They have learned a far larger thought of interests that infold not "labor" alone, but the whole stumbling, yet climbing race of men and women in the world. They have learned that "interests" bind us up and down, perpendicularly as well as horizontally. The claim that interests unite the wage earners alone and apart from all others, leads to the most treacherous morass through which they stagger to their goal. Labor has depths of interests that are in common, but far greater depths of interest that are human and all-inclusive.
Socialism has half learned this lesson. Syndicalism apparently has it yet to learn. From the beginnings, Socialism has had its spasms of working-class exclusiveness, but its strength and progress can be definitely marked by its hospitable working fellowship with men of other and larger training or at least different training. Syndicalism if it lives can have no other history.[4]
This sharpening of antagonisms leads not only to warfare against "intellectuals but just as inevitably to warfare of the unskilled against the more skilled worker thus bringing on the conflict within the wage-earning group.
In ominous words with his italics Mr. Walling writes:[5]
From the first meeting between Sorel and Pelloutier to the present day, "intellectuals" have been of such indispensable service to the cause, that no intelligible account of it could be given without them. It is one of the signs of democratic and revolutionary change that men of rare intellectual gift show, like Tolstoi, a passion to identify themselves with the humblest of their kind. Some of the most scorching passages against intellectuals, masquerading as genuine folk of the fourth estate, are by men who are themselves nothing if not "intellectuals." No one can surpass M. Sorel himself in this. Bernard Shaw could not do it better. In his L'avenir Socialiste des Syndicats, Sorel has only a withering contempt for the educated interlopers in the movement. Their superiorities, he says, are among the superstitions of the proletariat. Like mountebanks, the intellectuals exploit this superstition, flaunt their degrees and "professional humbug" before simple men not yet free from illusions on which pedants have always fattened. To get simple minded working people free from this strutting despotism and from all the benumbing "authority" for which it stands, is one of the greater aims of Syndicalism. Among the emblazonries borne in the recent I. W. W. parade at Lawrence one read, "No God, no Master." These words are a perfect echo of Sorel's thought. There should be no "mastery," but self-mastery. Neither God nor man should supervise, order, or interfere. This is the fight also against those who claim more enlightenment than their fellows.
Sorel's dudgeon against the "intellectual" is that (as intellectual) he is always on the hunt for power over men. This leads the superior person to the political field where, among the suavities of parliamentary etiquette, his slow but certain corruption begins. In order to climb higher still he sells out to the next higher stratum of respectability. The politician, as Sorel portrays him, is the exact counterpart of the prostitute:—a creature for sale. He is forever trying to persuade labor that its real interests are the same as his own, or of the party to which he adds luster. The whole mercenary pack is "avide de posseder les profits des emplois public."[6]
The reply to this smart persiflage, is that it skips all the facts. In every advanced nation labor has made its own solid and incontestable gains in alliance with political intellectuals who have given every proof of sincerity that disinterested life-long service carries.
It must be conceded that the most sacred struggle in the world is that in which labor may be said to lead;—the struggle toward a regenerated and reorganized society in which at last every rotten shred of unfair privilege shall be cut out. But this highest and hardest task is not to be performed by one class alone. Not one in the great total of us all who has good will shall be shut out of it. All who can and will, must play their part. Yes, even the defamed possessor of over-weighted millions, if he is led to look out on the great scene from some higher place, shall have a welcome. As the "Noble Knights" grew uneasy and ashamed because physicians were excluded from their own elect, so our revolutionary brothers, the I. W. W., will learn the shallowness of railing as they now do against the "intellectuals" because they "are not of us."
The struggle toward the larger life to which the world's good will is committed is a task too heavy and too sacred to be borne and shared alone by any "class." It will forever remain a human task, from which no soul shall be shut out who wills to help.
- ↑ New Worlds for Old, pp. 321–307.
- ↑ Macdonald's Socialism and Government, Vol. I, p. 91.
- ↑ Socialism and Success, p. 164.
- ↑ The following is a recent "field note."
"St. Louis Industrialists have organized branches 'prohibiting lawyers, preachers and professional parasites and grafters from membership.' We believe there are several such branches, but Branch 1 will not accept a member who is not industrially employed. Branch 2 is non-dues paying. Evidently these comrades want to make it as easy as possible for actual workers to join. The purpose of these Industrialist Branches is to teach Socialism and industrial organization at one and the same time. Branch 1 does not use dues stamps."
- ↑ New Review, Jan. 18, 1912.
- ↑ See La Decomposition du Marxism.