American Syndicalism/Chapter 13
XIII
VIOLENCE
Among some of the ablest expositors of I. W. W. principles, there seems to me very little pretence that violence may not be necessary at certain stages and under certain conditions. They are now but just started on their journey. From political Socialism and craft unions they have cut loose. The ordinary strike best illustrates "direct action."[1] It begins locally in a mine or mill. It then reaches a higher form in "mass action" (the mass strike), which includes the industry. If those working over a whole industrial area go out together, we have the general strike. The "universal strike" arrives when so many workers go out in any country as to disable the main sources of production. At any point along the route, the "irritation strike," quick and mysterious in action, is a sort of gymnastic exercise to train and educate our coming masters. These irritants meantime are admirably calculated to unnerve the employer and prepare him the sooner for his exit.
From first to last this issue between the I. W. W. and existing society is a trial of main strength, an encounter in which moral concepts, as commonly understood, are rigidly and expressly excluded. Anything which protects the present order is for that reason "wrong." Acts which lead to its undoing are therefore "right." They have a most winning candor in stating their case. Rarely is there any taint of the purposed obscurity over alarming proposals which one sometimes finds among more sophisticated Socialists. Mr. Ettor, who is on the Executive Board of the I. W. W., puts it first in general terms but jovially and without concealment: We also hear it said that our efforts are dangerous. Yes, gentle reader, our ideas, our principles and object are certainly dangerous and menacing, applied by a united working class would shake society and certainly those who are now on top sumptuously feeding upon the good things they have not produced would feel the shock. To talk of peace between capital and labor is "stupid or knavish."
It is as if a Christian asked for peace with sin. Judges, attorneys, preachers and politicians are one and all the paid lackeys of capitalism:—the "kept-crew" hiding "under the silk skirts of Mesdames 'Law and Order,'"—"as desperate and brutal a crew as ever scuttled a ship or quartered a man." With this new classification of sinners, the way is plain. Under these shifting, fugitive terms "right and wrong," the appeal must be to power, "cold, unsentimental power." In further words of Mr. Ettor from the standpoint of accepted law, morals, religion, etc., the capitalists are considered right and justified in their control and ownership of industries and exploitation of labor because they have the means to hire, and have organized a gang that skulks under the name of "Law, Order and Authority," that is well paid and well kept to interpret and execute laws in favor of the paymasters of course. The new ethical propaganda thus becomes clear. New conceptions of right and wrong must generate and permeate the workers. We must look on conduct and actions that advance the social and economic position of the working class as right, ethically, legally, religiously, socially and by every other measurement. That conduct and those actions which aid, help to maintain and give comfort to the capitalist class, we must consider as wrong by every standard. If definite contracts with employers have been freely entered into, labor has no obligation to keep them. Mr. Trautmann's words are: (Industrial Union Methods.)
"The industrial unionist, however, holds that there can be no agreement with the employers of labor, which the workers have to consider sacred and inviolable.
"Industrial unionists will therefore sign any pledge, and renounce even their organization, at times when they are not well prepared to give battle, or when market conditions render it advisable to lay low; but they will do just the reverse of what they had to agree to under duress, when occasion arises to gain advantages to the worker." To disobey court injunctions is a "duty."
The general secretary, Mr. St. John, writes in his I. W. W. History: "As a revolutionary organization the Industrial Workers of the World aims to use any and all tactics that will get the results sought with the least expenditure of time and energy. The tactics used are determined solely by the power of the ganization to make good in their use. The question of 'right' and 'wrong' does not concern us." This removes all obscurity as to methods and their justification. Capital now has the power. It is the task of labor to get that power for itself. It is to take it from capitalists by direct action, sabotage, boycott, and the cumulative strike. The I. W. W. organs are now having rare sport over "trade union contortions" to explain the conviction and jailing of so many of its members.
Editorially Solidarity[2] thus comments:
"Doubtless all the owls of capitalism and 'political socialism,' (and especially the latter,) will labor and bring forth tedious dissertations on the 'folly of violence in conflicts between capital and labor.' We opine, however, that the I. W. W. will decline to join in this unholy medley of condemnation. Assuming that these men were really guilty of the 'jobs' charged against them, we may question the expediency of their methods, but we cannot question the sincerity of men who will stake their lives and liberty in behalf of their union. Indeed, we can only view the actions of these men as another incident in the class struggle—not perhaps as that struggle appears to fifth-story editors, lawyers and other saviours of the working class; but as it is viewed by the sturdy men who risk their lives daily that gigantic structures necessary to civilization may be put in place."
To those who fear only that the cause of labor may come into disrepute because of dynamite methods, the editor continues:
"Nonsense! One year of capitalist violence will outweigh a thousand years of labor's 'peaceful' history. Must we meekly apologize for those of our kind who occasionally strike back under great provocation? The capitalist sowed the wind and reaped a little zephyr of a cyclone in this case under consideration. Let the blood be upon the heads of our masters!"
One of the editors of the International Socialist Review, Mr. Frank Bohn, writes (in the Call, Jan. 6th) on the thirty-three "Dynamiters" just imprisoned at Leavenworth. Like the McNamaras their colleagues, they are "the John Browns of the social revolution," they are "the soldiers of the working class." Today, he says, they are passing through the doors of the Leavenworth Prison. "Let every revolutionary worker in the land stand with bowed head as they pass. They are fighters of the working class. That is enough for us now."
"May everyone of you thirty-three live to come out of the jail so that we may grasp you by the hand and welcome you as comrades into the ranks of an army which can never know defeat."
There seems but one intelligent inference to be drawn from these opinions. In no case in this volume have they been "torn from their context." I have excluded far more violent opinions than any which are quoted because, like sparks from a flint, they were struck out in the heat of excitement or had a wholly irresponsible origin. From the coolest statement of aim, of purpose and of method, intimidating and destructive action is as unavoidable as in any other form of warfare.[3]
I asked a writer in this propaganda what he meant by telling the public that violence was entirely excluded in their principles. He said that it was both unnecessary and unintelligent. "When we have the power," he added, "we have only to stand off. We need not take our hands out of our pockets or utter a threat." This worthy sentiment might be true if capitalism were really at the end of its tether; if labor were ready to assume its functions and had reached that degree of mastery essential to its control of the world's business. If we imagine this end to be attained, violence would be, in his words, "unnecessary and unintelligent." The trifling obstacle here is that none of these things have yet happened. It will be marvel enough if they happen in several generations.
Our solicitude about violence does not concern the far end of achieved power, when the conquerors could afford to "fold their arms," our concern is with the long intervening spaces between the now and the then. Can labor use its approved weapons—the five-fold strike, its ingenuities of sabotage—in the long tug before it brings capitalism to its knees, without violence? There is not a page in the history of our I. W. W., or of Syndicalism generally, to give this hope the slightest warrant and most Syndicalists are perfectly aware of the fact. The main battle is all before them, and both their weapons and their primary doctrine of the "class warfare" makes this issue of probable violence hardly worth discussion.[4]
It is a damaging objection to any body of principles which carries with it as practical necessities so much approved destruction as "direct action" and sabotage imply. Economic and cultural benefits which the race has thus far garnered are not to be dealt with after the jaunty manner of the I. W. W. It may have the frankest admission, that these social accumulations have grown up through every imperfection known to human cunning. Private appropriation has assumed excesses of inequality that now threaten us as insidiously as any other disease. We have learned that a large part of this inequality is artificial and unnecessary. There is no higher statesmanship in the world than that which now sees this, admits it, and aims constructively to correct it. But the crude simplicity of methods which assume violence is childishly incompetent for the task put upon it. No section of society would suffer from it as the weak would suffer. Whatever place Syndicalism makes for itself in the coöperative service of reform, its ways must be supplemented and controlled by those to whom experience has brought some enlightened sense of what society is and what social life is as expressed in industry. These have heights, depths, and complications of which the objects of our study have at least as much to learn as others.
I was told of a Pennsylvania farmer with keen intellectual interests who was led to study the I. W. W. propaganda. Having read a good deal about Socialism, he became so absorbed in this new and bolder variation, as to go a long distance to hear a lecturer. In the questions which followed, the speaker had said of a steel mill near Pittsburg, "We shall take it if we can get it. Everything in it that labor didn't make was stolen out of labor. We can't get it 'politically.' We shall take it directly just as soon as we have the power to do it. The capitalists have stolen from us since the mill was started, and we don't propose to pay 'em just because they've been robbing us."
The farmer was not satisfied with this easy account of things. Among other questions, he insisted upon knowing by what right the special set of laborers, who happened just then to be in the mill, proposed to take to themselves all that others before them had earned. "You who are now there didn't make the mill nor very much of the machinery. I've got a big well-stocked farm, but I made only part of it. My grandfather and his boys, my father and my brothers—all of us helped get it where it now is. Shall the hired men that I have now, come in and take it?" This farm had expensive machinery and was worked under the wage system as "capitalistically" as the mill, and the question was perfectly fair. Its greater simplicity brings out the fantastic impossibilities of remedying our industrial wrongs by any such rough and ready methods.
If "power" represented by the I. W. W. is to be used, as they warn us, "to any extent necessary to its purpose" and if capitalism still possesses a fraction of the strength which these adventurers ascribe to it, nothing short of violence in some form can deprive it of its possessions. Legal and political reforms and all the resources of taxation are excluded. To subdue capitalism by the strike, direct action and sabotage can have no meaning apart from the strategic uses which violence and intimidation offer.
Among the reasons why these vigors will fail, is that a most powerful section of the working classes will oppose them to a man. So obvious a fact seems not yet to have the least recognition.
It is true that among prosperous folk, there is much specious canting about the stupendous treasures which labor has stored in savings banks and such like institutions, but the cant of those who insist that labor has nothing, or nothing worth speaking about, is quite as offensive in its distortion.
The truth is that the accumulated savings of very humble people have helped to build every shop and mill and railroad in the land. Hundreds of millions of savings bank deposits and insurance funds are invested in the "machinery of production." It is a small part compared to ownership by the richer classes, but the man with a hundred dollars in the bank is as tenacious of his small savings as the rich are of their greater savings. Our revolutionists think this argument funny and preposterous, but it stands for a fact with which they will have to reckon in every first and last attempt "to take over" the productive and distributive machinery of this country.
All the fertile and stagey analogies of the French Revolution; the unwearying assertion that "capital has everything and labor nothing," are so grossly misleading that we can await results with perfect confidence. Small as they are, wage earners' savings in this country are altogether sufficient to create multitudinous centers of resistance against any paralyzing onslaught against these producing properties.
In a garment workers' strike in New York City, I stood on the street with the man who led it. Hundreds of Jews were pouring out of a public building in which the strike was under discussion. My companion pointed to them and said, "You would not think it, but there are not ten men in that crowd who haven't money in the bank. It isn't much, but it is enough to make every one of them a sort of conservative." I am not making the inane suggestion that these people have enough, or that the whole bulk of wage earners' savings in the land justifies a single iniquity in our system. Our present economic distribution is criminally unfair because so much of it is unnecessary and avoidable.
These evils, however, are not to be met by the popular I. W. W. methods. Some millions of wage earners and farmers have just enough interest in ways that are wiser and fairer to take good care of themselves against noisy minorities that have learned so little about the business world and of the ways through which it is to be reformed.
- ↑ The strike illustrates but does not accurately enough define "direct action" which assumes an unremitting and truceless war on capitalism. The old-fashioned strike with accessories of arbitration, "agreements" recognize the wage system. That recognition is unforgivable to direct actionists.
- ↑ Jan. 4, 1912.
- ↑ In the article quoted from The Independent, Mr. Tridon says, in this fight Syndicalists do not even pretend to observe the rules of civilized warfare. The flag of truce does not protect emissaries.
- ↑ In the New Review, Jan. 18, Mr. English Walling says: "Violence also is usually condoned on the unconsciously humorous ground that if the police and militia were not present, there would be little violence. No unions advocate violence, but none surrender to the law those among their members who succumb to temptation under critical or exceptional circumstances, and it is rarely that they do not furnish defense funds. Even the I. W. W. does not advocate violence, but it is more frank in its attitude towards it than the older unions."