American Syndicalism/Chapter 10

by John Graham Brooks

X

THE GENERAL STRIKE

As things are felt and lived before any literary skill gives them form, there were plenty of incoherent uprisings with every characteristic of the General Strike, generations before Sorel's sombre genius turned them into a religion for mass-activity. It is the despised "intellectuals," now and in the past, who have furnished the effective formulas for the General Strike; as they adjusted the conception to present proletarian uses; as in the middle of the last century, one of the most brilliant journalists of Europe, Emile de Giradin, conceived of it as the one weapon against the third Napoleon. In Victor Hugo's Histoire d'un Crime, in twenty lines that burn like a flame, the technique of the General Strike is given. He uses the very words "La Grève Universelle." The very term "folding the arms" (croisant les bras), which I have heard from I. W. W. orators, occurs in the passage. The poet appeals to society to create a "great emptiness" round this would-be despot, by cutting him off through the general boycott from every source of help. The picture is the more complete because a man famous in later days, Jules Favre, argued successfully in opposition by setting forth the same practical difficulties that have crippled most subsequent application of the General Strike, except for narrower and less ambitious ends.

Revolutionary spirits for half a century have speculated upon the strike and the logic to which it leads. An Egyptian scholar tells me he could make a book on strikes in Ancient Egypt. It is one of the oldest weapons with which labor has tried to defend itself against demands or conditions no longer felt to be endurable. It still has uses sacred as liberty, but never was this strong-sword so costly or so dangerous; never did it require higher skill and caution to wield it wisely than it does today.

The guild-life of the Middle Ages was filled with strikes. Like a shadow they followed the whole history of the trade union through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nor were they by any means confined to labor organizations. Organization gave them a dreaded power with which employer and the law have to reckon.

The danger of the strike has increased (especially for those who use it) with every tightening of the social and industrial organism.^[1]

Syndicalism revives the strike and seeks a new significance in the logic of this labor agency. If a little strike brings some bit of industry to a standstill and a large sympathetic strike paralyzes a lot of industries, is it not obvious that the "strike-universal" would stop every wheel and every productive activity in the world's workshop? It would be as effective as Tolstoi's cry to the millions of his countrymen—"just stop paying taxes—all of you together—and Government is at an end." If "all together" they would refuse and also refuse to enlist as soldiers, the unwieldy, creaking mechanism of the State grows silent.

The only trouble with the remedy is the "all-together." This has been the perplexity of the general strike: first, to get the ear of labor, and then—harder still—to get common and consenting action. For a third of a century what has been called by Mr. Ettor "the high tribunal of our comrades," "general strikes" have taken place. Especially in our American syndicalist literature, the European risings are given the glamor of "success" partly because they are so far away that almost any assertion may be made about them. For example, Mr. Haywood calls the French Commune of 1871 "the greatest general strike known in modern times." He says the proletariat would have won this "greatest general strike" if it had not been for France and Germany, which is like saying the South would have beaten in the Civil War if it had not been for the North. In the Province of Alicante, Spain, almost forty years ago, a branch of the "international" created a general strike with syndicalist intent, not of raising wages but expressly to "remake a society in which free men could live." This was rather ruthlessly put down by the troops, but Mr. Haywood says it "won" nevertheless.

The Swedish strike and the greater ones in Russia, he puts down among the "successes." In France, he watched the recent syndicalist strike on the railroads and thus describes it:^[2] "This is the way it worked—and I tell it to you in hopes that you will spread the good news to your fellow-workers and apply it yourselves whenever occasion demands—namely, that of making the capitalist suffer. Now there is only one way to do that; that is, to strike him in the place where he carries his heart and soul, his center of feeling—the pocketbook. And that is what those strikers did. They began at once to make the railroads lose money, to make the government lose money, to make transportation a farce so far as France was concerned. Before I left that country, on my first visit—and it was during the time that the strike was on—there were 50,000 tons of freight piled up at Havre, and a proportionately large amount at every other seaport town. This freight the railroaders would not move. They did not move at first, and when they did it was in this way: they would load a trainload of freight for Paris and by some mistake it would be billed through to Lyons, and when the freight was found at Lyons, instead of being sent to the consignee at Paris it was carried straight through the town on to Bayonne or Marseilles or some other place—to any place but where it properly belonged. Perishable freight was taken out by the trainload and sidetracked." This is thought to have added value because of its illustrative details. It offers practical suggestions that may serve as models to the younger pupils of the I. W. W. The event in France was very bracing to Mr. Haywood. "That," he says, "is certainly one splendid example of what the general strike can accomplish for the working class."

Much use is made of the strike on the Italian railways as specially informing because the employes had but one union card,—stenographers, train dispatchers, freight handlers, train crews, and the section crews. "Every one who works on the railroad is a member of the organization." Here, no separate union can be kept at work while others go out. No employer's contract with one union can be enforced while other unions are on strike. Though there are "thirty-seven trades," they can all act as a single unit.

It was this precaution that gave such advantage to his own Western Federation of Miners in its armed tilts with capital. He says of it: "Everyone employed in and around the mines belongs to the same organization; where, when we went on strike, the mine closed down. They thought that was a very excellent system. So the strike was declared. They at once notified the engine winders, who had a separate contract with the mine owners, that they would not be allowed to work. The engine winders passed a resolution saying that they would not work. The haulers took the same position. No one was allowed to approach the mines to run the machinery. Well, the mine manager, like mine managers everywhere, taking unto himself the idea that the mines belonged to him, said, 'Certainly the men won't interfere with us. We will go up and run the machinery.' And they took along the office force. But the miners had a different notion and they said, 'You can work in the office, but you can't run this machinery. That isn't your work. If you run that you will be scabbing; and we don't permit you to scab—not in this section of the country, now.'" He then states his ideal—"One great organization—big enough to take in the black man, the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities—an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries, and one that will become the great industrial force of the working class of the world."

This is the ritualistic formula from which Syndicalism draws its highest moral allegiance and it is not to be met by scoffing or by stalwart platitudes. It has brought to the movement an eager host of disciples aching to give themselves utterly to some ennobling human service.

If this together-impulse were wisely nurtured; if it could be freed from reckless and destructive suggestion; if it could be given organic restraint, its service would be great.

I have watched for hours throngs of men and women under the spell of this appeal to strike together. Packed close were a dozen nationalities requiring five or six interpreters. Stentorially, the thing had to be said and resaid until the message was a common possession. It was always a message which for the hour obliterated every distinction of race. "There are no Poles, no Greeks, neither Jew nor Italian here, but only brothers" is the unwearying exhortation.

There is in this fusion an immediate ethical power over generous spirits, the results of which one meets everywhere in the United States. I have many times asked young men and women what first caught their interest. From the best of them, it is invariably this—"Nothing has yet done for labor at the bottom. Where it is helpless, ignorant, without speech, it has been neglected and abused. It is pushed into every back alley and into all work that is hardest and most dangerous. Society forgets it. The trade unions that should befriend it forget it too. Now comes the I. W. W. with the first bold and brotherly cry which these ignored masses have ever heard."

With no fussy qualifications, this must be granted to the I. W. W. No violence of speech or deed can honorably deprive them of this stirring element in their entreaty. As will be shown later, it is with this that we must learn to coöperate or fail miserably in social duty, and in the best uses of our social experience.

It is again only when we recognize this saving element in the propaganda that we can understand why leaders succeed in making a kind of religion of the general strike. It is because they connect it by intimate association with this over-arching thought of a world brotherhood. As intimately, too, they connect it with the world's waking desire to stop the consenting butcheries of war. Nowhere can we read more uplifting passages against these inhumanities than in syndicalist literature and in the possibility that international brotherhoods of labor may sometime so universally lay down their tools before the threat of war, as to startle the world into some great action against the war infamy.

All this is beyond and above criticism, but these fair dreams are not peculiar to I. W. W. They are shared by millions who bear other names.

Our practical concern is also and largely with things prosaic: with the ways and means through which we are to get possession of the new and regenerated world. Hundreds of differing methods are thrust upon us for choice and therefore for criticism. It is not merely the general strike, it is even more the manner and spirit of its application.

At a socialist congress in 1891, great enthusiasm was roused by a resolution against the criminal stupidity of war as a means of settling disputes. A Dutch clergyman of great influence was the proposer. "Let us meet the first declaration of war by a general strike," was its purport. Let the workers of the world answer to a man by quietly laying down their tools. Let them reply to the great malefactors, "We work no longer to waste labor and human life, we will only work to save labor and to lengthen and enrich life."

One may gladly believe that somewhere beyond us, a strike may become holy in such a cause. But it is not this with which our average I. W. W. proposals have to do. The strike energy is urged to exercise itself at the heart of our economic activity for a specific purpose. It is not first for political advantages. It is the exclusive economic emphasis which makes the general strike a club for Anarchists rather than for Socialists. Many older Socialists favored the general strike for political ends, while they considered the general economic strike ridiculous. In the pamphlet just quoted the whole idea is that of the Syndicalist. Labor, it says, has now actually got the machinery of production in its own hands. It has only to educate itself to take it and run it. "Only make labor conscious of its possession and the battle is ours." There is a collection of syndicalist opinions on the general strike that appeared in their most important organ, the "Mouvement Socialiste."^[3] The entire object is to make labor clearly conscious of its relation to economic power. Wage earners are to be made first to believe it has this power and then to act upon the belief. "The revolution is to be first in the thought, and then in act." To popularize these conceptions is the work of their propaganda. Throughout is the "catastrophic idea."

As many of the revolutionary spirits in Europe and among English Chartists in the days before 1848 were inflamed with hopes of some impending political change, those of this temper are now caught up by beliefs that an economic revolution is at hand. The centralizing forces of present day industry open a new vista to these believers. "We have not now," they tell us, "to worry over the practical difficulties of the 'strike-universal.' We can turn a partial strike into one that has unusual results. To stop transportation alone is to stop a thousand other industries." "With a motion of the hand," says Pataud, "I can make Paris dark as night." It is these mechanical possibilities which have transformed the tactics of "this last great remedy," as a little knowledge of chemistry may give new terrors to sabotage.

This has been the strategy of recent strikes of this character. But—what the believers do not tell us, it has also been the source of their failure. Like Mr. Haywood, Arnold Roller's study of the General Strike turns an indiscriminate mass of historic revolts into instructive material from which labor is to learn its lessons. The Spanish strike in Alcoy in 1874 was not for any added pittance to the wage, but for "the construction of a free society." To be sure, it was at once put down by the troops but it is a part of the great pageant of reconstruction.^[4]

Our American strike for eight hours in 1886 is noticed because politics was ignored and "direct action" substituted. Oddly enough, Roller couples with this a general strike in Belgium in 1893, which met with some success, but it was political in its aim. Nine years later, Belgian socialists rose again, but leaders like Vandervelde and Anseele are blamed by this writer because they call off the use of revolvers. The strike of the Amsterdam dockers in 1903 is called "a brilliant victory," because it began with such high hopes. Its final "failure" was owing to "social parasites," a term he fixes upon socialists who "posted proclamations which declared the strike off," and thus prevented it "from spreading over the whole country and becoming general and consequently was lost." The truth is that a very reckless anarchist leadership frightened the socialist party into a use of its strength to save a situation that had become impossible. It was necessary to reach the farm laborer, who proved to be beyond the reach of the anarchist appeal, though Mr. Roller tells us in the following words how they should have proceeded: "Nothing is as contagious and suggestive as rebellion. The farm workers and the poor farmers might imitate the workers of the cities and seize the possessions of great land owners. In recent years it has happened quite frequently that the striking workingmen marched out into the country, in the villages near the cities, enlightened the farmers and won them by saying to them: 'You don't need to pay any more taxes to the state, nor more rents to the landlord, nor more interest to the loan sharks, and to the owners of your mortgages—we just burn up all those papers.'"

These writers have not even told us a half truth on this subject. As exhibitions of discontent and organized protest, several of them have led to concessions, but their influence in this has been precisely that of any old-fashioned strike. The dramatic event of which so much has been written (the post office strike in France), compelled attention to undeniable grievances, but now that the facts of the "second strike" are known, it is a queer judgment that can see in them "great successes."^[5]

Apart from its political uses, the "general strike" has been found to be a weapon so dangerous to labor that no instance can be shown of its economic triumph. No one has seen this so clearly as the socialist leaders in every country. If Jaurès, Kautsky, Vandevelde flirt with it, they make it clear that its uses are political. Able studies like that by Henriette Roland-Holst,^[6] are not lacking in radical exposition, but it is the political possibilities that are given weight. These leaders feared the very thing that has happened in Sweden, France, and England since the Swedish "general strike" in 1909—namely, its increasing uncontrollable economic disorders.^[7] Never was a great strike conducted with less lawlessness than that in Stockholm: never one with more restraint on the part of the State. So careful were the strikers, that they kept their men at work at many points (as lighting and water works) where the public would too keenly suffer. The men coöperated with the police and against open saloon traffic. With more than a quarter of a million men on strike, the opportunity was never fairer for a real trial of this device. When from every source "the rich, the half-rich and their hangers-on" went heartily to work at every sort of job, the leaders said this was to be expected. But this "social uprising" against the strike spread rapidly beyond the capitalist and bourgeois classes; it appeared sullenly in the labor ranks. Several thousand agriculturists had been organized, but they could not be kept from furnishing food to the public, because they saw the greater number of their neighbors (who were not organized) making good money. The man on the land would not recognize his interests as one with city labor.

Even within the city, as the little shops stopped credit and the promised funds from foreign trade unions proved pitiably inadequate, a large labor contingent began to grumble. Their families were already on the verge of suffering.

It is known that the industrial world generally lives from hand to mouth; that all our available food supplies would vanish in a few weeks if production were actually to stop. Every trade union, no matter how imposing a figure its funds have reached, sees these accumulations disappear with shocking rapidity when its main membership lays down its tools. This lesson came with gloomy surprise in the Swedish city.

Seven years before, a purely political strike against gross irregularities in the suffrage had left a tradition of hope in favor of the "general economic strike." The analogy proved deceptive. The "strike," moreover, became largely a lockout against claims set up by the younger and more radical "socialist league." Syndicalists may get this crumb of comfort from the failure of this strike. It seems to have produced a considerable anti-trade union and anti-political movement, because it failed. They now have their daily paper and a fighting organization.

There is not a practical use to which one of these syndicalist weapons can be put that does not raise the question of violence and its relation to the propaganda. In a publication just from the press^[8] one reads (p. 26): "If the ruling class of today decide as its prototypes of the past have decided, that violence will be the arbiter of the question, then we will cheerfully accept their decision and meet them to the best of our ability and we do not fear the result." "The I. W. W.," it says, has now "come to the knowledge that justice, liberty, rights, &c. are but empty words, and power alone is real. Refusing to even try to delegate its power, it stands committed to the policy of direct action."

In the following chapter we shall see that its culmination is in the general strike which French anarchists define as identical with the social revolution. We shall see the theoretic justification of any unpleasantness which might follow direct action, namely, that "the property owners who own all of us," safe behind the mask of laws made in their own defense, practice indirect action to keep power from the people. Because of this exclusion labor, it is said, has no choice but in action that is "direct." The general strike thus becomes in Griffuehle's words, "the conscious explosion of labor's efforts to free itself."^[9] In its last expression it is the taking possession of the world's machinery for the good of all—au profit de tous.

This is the revolution. Is violence to be expected? This, he says, depends wholly upon the attitude of the possessors. The general strike will be violent or pacific according to the amount of resistance to be overcome.

1. Some one should do for industrial warfare what Norman Angel has done for war between nations, in "The Great Illusion."
2. The General Strike, W. A. Haywood, p. 9.
3. These opinions are now found in a small volume, La Grève Générale et le Socialisme. See also L'Action Syndicaliste, Griffuelhes, pp. 27–37.
4. Another general strike to which Syndicalists point is that which silenced scores of industries in Australia and New Zealand in the summer of 1890. Few strikes have been followed by consequences so momentous. It was revolutionary in the strictest sense because it shifted the political powers of the state. It has one advantage over Russian, Spanish, and other obscure strikes which serve as syndicalist patterns, because the facts are much more clearly before us.
5. In a contribution just made to the New York Call is a wiser judgment. "Our friends of the I. W. W. have a great deal to say about the general strike. Now, I have seen one general strike in operation. That was in Holland in 1902, and I must say that it somewhat reminds me of the story of the man who was night after night disturbed by a dog howling in front of his house. One night, no longer being able to stand the racket, he ran out in his nightshirt, in spite of the fact that it was bitterly cold, to silence the dog. When he failed to return after an hour his wife went out to look for him. She found him lying full length upon the snow, stiff with the cold, holding on to the dog's tail. 'What in the world are you trying to do?' she asked him. And he answered in a weak voice: 'I am trying to freeze the dog to death.' (Laughter.) Now, when we try to starve the capitalists into submission they are very likely to beat us at the game. They are able to lay up provisions and to buy up what provisions there are on the market, while we are not." The writer expresses the hope that workingmen's coöperation may develop an economic strength on which labor may at last rely for its own support.
6. See also General-Streik und Sozialdemokratie, Dresden, 1906.
7. See also Der Politische Massenstreik, by Eduard Bernstein, Breslau, 1905.
8. On the Firing Line, P. O. Box 2129, Spokane, Wash.
9. L'Action Syndicaliste, p. 32.