American Syndicalism/Chapter 14

by John Graham Brooks

XIV

ANARCHISM

Syndicalism has much in common with Socialism but the very intensity of its emphasis carries it beyond what is organic in the socialist movement. The student is never sure in whose presence he stands—that of the Anarchist or that of the Socialist.

Syndicalism now comes with a new dialect.^[1] There is much mocking of "reason" and much deification of impulse and feeling. There are the familiar warnings against the "law" and institutions. If these are rigid, violence may offer the only road to "freedom." We are put on our guard against too much reflection. This may lead to submission which is the slave's vice. So easy is it to reason ourselves into smooth acquiescence with ruling economic and social powers—ambition, desire of wealth, all that may place us among the flesh-pots and separate us from the human mass, that the Devil gets easy possession of our souls. But "feling, nobly kindled into enthusiasm saves us from these servilities." Thus the new morality is to be free from all "calculating reflection." Think of a "calculating soldier." Think of his reflecting about his pay in front of the enemy! No, it is spontaneity and enthusiasm he needs. What of the artist who dulls his vision by haggling and reckoning over his pay, or the inventor sinking his fine imagination in calculations over royalties! In figures like these syndicalist metaphysic deals. Thus Sorel dramatizes his "sublime myth" of the general strike. It calls like "unseen music in the night" to the deeper and more unselfish passions of the soul. Its power is that it cannot be proved. Only what is beyond proof moves us greatly. He despises sociology with its goggled pretence of laws and classified data on which reasoned prediction can be based. Far better is a philosophy half articulate with its cavernous depths, its terrors, its silences and its mysteries.^[2] "The unspoiled soul of the proletariat" is to be initiated into these veiled places where "tired and sleeping masses of men" may be roused to a sense of their power. Only through disturbing and dramatic figures speaking to the imagination can they be made to look and listen.

Above all, in this awakening is the proletariat to learn that it is to have no mastery but its own. Such salvation as it wins must be solely through its own initiative and direction. When it says, "No God, no master," there are no reservations. Though Sorel makes much of religion as myth, the Syndicalists generally are not timid and discreet like so many Socialists on the subject of instituted religion. They turn against it because of what it asks. Christian virtues, like reverence, humility and obedience, are all "slave morals" and virile youth should be taught to despise them.

It is because the State stands for organized external force, using for its own ends armies, laws, courts, education, churches, flags, that it too becomes, as it does with the Anarchist, the arch enemy.

Sorel not only strikes at capitalism and at politics that is its handmaid, he strikes also at the high priest of scientific Socialism, Karl Marx. Sorel sees in Marx a fatalistic optimism about the future of capitalism with its industrial units growing ever bigger because they cannot help it. An inexorable evolution is crowding the victors into more compact bodies, until by very over-weight they fall like ripened fruit into collectivist possession. This is all too easy for Monsieur Sorel and he will have none of it. Marxism is already in a state of "decomposition," and to this effect he writes his little book.^[3]

Not so blithely do things go just where we want them in this world. They move toward these desired ends, not of their own impelling, but only as we urge and direct them by our own will and creative energies. Thus the Philosopher Bergson appears upon the scene:—he of the "world that we ourselves create," with la volenté créatrice.

Rousseau is again revived. The real tyrant is the majority rule. To submit even for a year to an elected person is to submit for that year to tyranny, therefore, we will none of it. It is Walt Whitman's "never ending audacity of elected persons." It is Thoreau jailed in Concord for non-payment of taxes. It is Tolstoi with his serene and enduring hatred of the State. The same anarchist protest is in the syndicalist Edouard Berth. He calls the State the supreme parasite—le parasite par excellence. It is the "great unproducer," like a vampire sucking the life blood of the nation^[4] Its armies, navies, police, courts, prisons, are logical forms of this concentration of power in the State. By the same reasoning parliaments and politics are enemies, and even democracy with its universal suffrage comes in for fiery criticism at the hands of many of these pungent expositors. An authoritative Syndicalist like Lagardelle holds that "The duel is on between democracy and a genuine working-class socialism." With hostility to the state, "patriotism" becomes a disease. Everywhere workmen must be taught to "think away" every frontier line that separates the nations. Only thus can the "cosmic brotherhood of man" round itself into completeness. Morality will take no higher flight than in contributing "the soldier's penny" to teach him infidelity to his superiors—to teach him just why and how capitalism is using him and fooling him to do its own dirty work.

In its theoretic statement, this is the "higher anarchy."

To associate the I. W. W. with a ruffian clutching a smoking bomb, is a silliness that need not detain us. It is true that no revolutionary movement is without its criminals. They were ubiquitous in our War of the Revolution. They followed the wake of Garibaldi, and Mazzini was never free from them. They were among the English Chartists, and never have been absent from Ireland's long struggle for self-rule. The I. W. W. will not escape this common destiny. It will attract to itself many extremely frail human creatures, but the movement as a whole is not to be condemned by these adherents or by the shabby device of using panicky terms like anarchist. To say that Syndicalism has strong anarchist tendencies is nevertheless strictly accurate. A rank, exuberant and rather wanton individualism has characterized our own variety of Syndicalism from the start.

In Europe intelligent Anarchists of the most pronounced type have been a part of the movement. In Spain (1908) they followed their leader Malatesta into the trade unions. Many of the French Syndicalists, like Pelloutier the founder, Delesalle, Pouget and Yvetot, glory in the anarchist name. Sorel, whom the academician, Paul Bourget, says is the most penetrating intelligence among Syndicalists, has neither hesitations nor concealments about this. He tells us plainly how great an event it was when Anarchists gained admission to the trade unions. "Historians," he tells us, "will one day recognize that this entrance was one of the greatest events which has happened in our time." In an eloquent passage he praises the work of the anarchist in the trade union, ending with the words. "They instructed labor that it need not blush for deeds of violence." I am fully aware how easy it is to take advantage of this scare word in order to make cheap points against the I. W. W. This pettiness may be avoided if we first state the truth. Anarchism, in its eviler aspects, is not in the least confined to the "lower classes." To flout and circumvent the law is anarchy, and none among our people have done this thing oftener, or on a larger scale, or with more effrontery, than many powerful business interests of the land. The Governor of California appointed a successful and highly respected business man to investigate and report upon the "disturbances in the city and county of San Diego," where the I. W. W. had become active as speakers on the street. On page 18 of this report, published by the state, may be seen editorial utterances of the two leading papers of San Diego, more wildly anarchistic than anything quoted from I. W. W. literature in this book. After very plain statements against the I. W. W., Colonel Weinstock reads the lesson (page 20) to the "good citizens" of San Diego:

"But it cannot now be said, nor will its good citizens say, when a normal condition shall be restored and sanity returns to the community, that there was any justification whatever on the part of men professing to be law-abiding citizens themselves to become lawbreakers and to violate the most sacred provisions of the constitution; to preach with their mouths the sacredness of the constitution and its inviolability, and to break with their hands the most sacred provision of this same constitution by robbing men of their liberty; by assaulting them with weapons, by degrading and humiliating them, by endeavoring to thrust patriotism down their throats in compelling them with a weapon held over their heads to kiss the American flag, to sing the American national anthem and then to deport them."

From a citizen in lower California, I heard the defense of the "best men in San Diego." He was himself a prosperous man, of college training and of unusual public spirit; but the I. W. W. were "rats carrying a disease and were to be treated as such." They were to be treated as such "law or no law." "We could not," he said, "defend ourselves legally, and were morally justified in taking the law into our own hands." A college professor who was with me, tried to argue with him, saying, "But you, too, are defending the theory and practice of anarchy in its lowest form. You have at your back the whole accumulated machinery of laws and police powers that have been built up for the very purpose of putting an ordered and impersonal justice in the place of the old private codes. At the first strain, you fly to the old barbarisms." The gentleman was as unruffled as if a child had upbraided him. Through and behind his calm exterior one saw in darkened outlines too many probable conflicts between the anarchy of those who have and the anarchy of those who have not.

As far as I can learn, this caustic admonition is even more richly deserved by corresponding citizens in southern lumber camps. There have been dangerous approaches to the same fundamental lawlessness in recent dealing with this movement in many other communities.

It will be said, and rightly said, that this does not excuse a single outrage of I. W. W. origin. It does, however, put us in a frame of mind in which with some intelligent impartiality, we can judge the general spirit of anarchy in our midst. This may guard us from the moral poltroonery of forcing a standard upon the weak which the strong will not recognize or obey.

The element of anarchy peculiar to the I. W. W. is its inherent dislike of organic restraint. No one uses the word "organization" oftener or practices it less. All organization to be effective puts a curb upon its members. It standardizes conduct and sets definite limits to individual eccentricity, but the essence of anarchy is to reject group constraints. A century of trade unionism has brought about in its better membership a degree of organization that acts with great power upon individual whim and waywardness. Socialism has already acquired a great deal of organization that submits the individual to severe and continuous schooling. There are bickerings and wrangling enough in the socialist camps, but, at its best, it has established the fact of group-training which ranks it among the conserving social forces. Of the I. W. W. this cannot be said. It is held together by the yeasty dramatic commotions in which it is engaged. From its first convention eight years ago, it has been rent by temperamental dissensions. Such "organization" as it has, is a fitful and fluctuating quantity, ever ready to escape from the slightest real and steadying constraint which organization implies. Only by desperate efforts has the General Confederation in France held a minority membership that is always threatened by withdrawal of unions that have gained the least real stability.

To state the facts of this anarchistic tendency is not wholly to condemn the movement. It only defines its guerrilla character and its limitations. It only makes clearer to us what it is likely to do and what not to do.

There is not a spot where the Syndicalist fight has been waged in which the persisting and unavoidable conflict between the anarchistic and the social principle does not appear. An impetuous individualism cannot endure organic relationships.

In Italy if the tenant farm hands (mezzadria) wish to enter co-partnership with landlords and share the gains, the anarchist type in the movement wars against this, precisely as our I. W. W. attack all "labor contracts" or agreements with employers; precisely as they now fight the admirable "protocol" in the New York garment industry. These alliances with capitalism are an impediment to anarchist activity. With labor often less than thirty cents a day^[5] and with the direct sympathy of small métayer farmers, the condition is perfect for Syndicalism, if it has developed the social as distinct from the anarchist feeling. Nowhere better than in Italy can we watch this conflict between the two types.

As the twentieth century came in, there were hundreds of strikes each year among these people. At the great agricultural strike in Italy with the help of Consul Jarvis at Milan, I saw the effects of this uprising. It was waged with incredible bitterness. On the industrial side, as in Milan, more than one hundred were shot and between two and three thousand imprisoned. As in our own western country, the authorities were paralyzed by numbers. Two years later King Humbert was murdered and it is a sinister comment that Syndicalists have made upon that event. The government relaxed its severities against "organizations," prompting such utterances as these: "Violence is said to be very wicked by the praying bourgeois, but we all now see that it is the only language to which the watch dogs of private property will listen. Let us not forget the lesson." Here is poverty with conscious discontent "that can be organized" into fighting trade unions. In northern industrial centers, the unions were federated into "Labor Bureaus." It was these latter (Bourses du Travail) in France that gave Pelloutier his chance to turn internal political feuds to his advantage and guide these federated bodies into the gathering current of revolutionary, anti-political Syndicalism with anarchist tendencies.

In Italy Anarchists proud of the title were prominent in the Labor Party at its formation in 1885. From this beginning, there never was a day's peace until six years later when Anarchists and Socialists separate because of incurable dissensions. The socialist is now the conservative; the "anarchist-syndicalist" is the revolutionary radical, shouting his contempt at every measure of "reform."

It seems to me to have the utmost significance that in this conflict, we see socialists in Italy within five or six years, shift their activities to the creation and strengthening of coöperative banks and distributive associations for the help of small farmers and wage earners. This was due in part to the growing conviction that small farming was not after all to be swallowed up, in any known time, by the big capitalistic culture. It was due still more, perhaps, to clearer understanding of the real issue between the logic of the Anarchist and that of the Socialist.

There is no chapter in the history of the labor struggle so luminously clear as that in which the practical Anarchist fights social organization. Where-ever Socialism reaches the organic state, enabling it to coöperate with other social forces, the Anarchist attacks it as Bakounine attacked Marx, as Anarchists raised havoc with the Chartists and as W. D. Haywood is at this moment raising equal havoc with the socialist party.

This brings us to two rigorous tests to which Syndicalism must submit, if it is to pass out of activities primarily destructive. (1) How are the means of production to be taken over? (2) What proposals are given us for positive, constructive action?

1. This dialect is strikingly like much in that powerful anarchist book Stirners' Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, especially in that part of the volume dealing with the "power" of the individual.
2. Even from a scholar showing much sympathy with Professor Bergson—I have heard the phrase, "He is the Philosopher of the Unutterable."
3. La Decomposition du Marxism.
4. Edouard Berth: Les Nouveaux Aspects du Socialisme.
5. In 1898 I found men at work in the fields for 20 cents a day.