American Syndicalism/Chapter 18
XVIII
THE SERVICE OF THE AWAKENER
In most of its present activities in the United States the I. W. W. is pretty exhaustively described by the word "Shocker." It startles the preoccupied by its new and unwonted approach. Like the stroke of a suffragette's hammer upon plate glass, it gets instant attention from every one within hearing.
I heard a man justify himself for personal rudeness on this ground: "I have a weak voice, and if I don't say disagreeable things, nobody will listen to me." The voice of the I. W. W. is not weak, but the society to which it speaks is deaf with a good deal of apathy and indifference. Only the very strident note will reach it. Every step toward larger justice or social protection seems possible only after some shock to the conscience or to the emotions.
We were deaf as adders to the truth about our city politics until a troop of muckrakers shouted the facts in our ears. We have at last begun to deal timidly with the "white slave traffic," though scarcely daring yet to put the deeper facts into words. Such depths of consenting hypocrisy have so long screened it from fearless investigation, that we cannot yet make a regulation that even touches the heart of it. Society has assented to it; found it "necessary" and then used prostitution to protect the virtue of favored classes until the evil has grown into the very structure and tissue of society. The stripped results are now frightening us into some sincerity. The Physician and Man of Science are now the shockers:—the Muckrakers in this new field. They are compelling us to look at some of the physical horrors which this evil inflicts by its cancerous reaction on the race.
As for its social origins and all its darker implications of social guilt and complicity, no one has ever put more needed truth than Bernard Shaw into a passage that most folk who think well of themselves should learn by heart. It concerns the recent attempt in England to pass a law for the flogging of certain persons engaged in this loathsome traffic. In the new organ, The Awakener, published by English women V to deal with this evil (as we have started Vigilance) Mr. Shaw writes:
"And you, humble reader, who are neither a shareholder nor a landlord, do you thank God that you are guiltless in this matter? Take care! The first man flogged under the Act may turn on you and say, 'God shall smite thee, thou whited wall.' The wages of prostitution are stitched into your button-holes and into your blouse, pasted into your match-boxes and your boxes of pins, stuffed into your mattress, mixed with the paint on your walls, and stuck between the joints of your water-pipes. The very glaze on your basin and teacup has in it the lead poison that you offer to the decent woman as the reward of honest labor, whilst the procuress is offering chicken and champagne. Flog other people until you are black in the face and they are red in the back: You will not cheat the Recording Angel into putting down your debts to the wrong account."
It is not the jester who speaks in these words, it is the truthteller. Until the humbling lesson is learned by those addressed, all the gnawing miseries of this social disease will go on as of old.
This special evil is but one of many whose roots have reached such depths in our society that traditional palliatives, like many of our charities, do not even touch them. With all our enormous expenditure against crime, did it ever stalk among us with more effrontery in the United States than at the present moment?
It looks as if suffering or successive shocks alone could compel us to deal greatly and adequately with these evils. We do not even heed industrial and economic wrongs unless stunned and frightened into action. There were evils in Southern lumber camps quite unbelievable until I. W. W. "agitators" called attention to them.
But for these disturbers, we should apparently have looked on unconcerned while textile managers cut wages because the state had wisely lowered the working hours. A progressive social legislation should not be defeated by private decision in that manner. The consequences are far too serious for private determination. If a wage-cut which was so certain to involve social danger is necessary, it should at least have adequate public explanation. The end to these secret and absolute decisions, in which the public is intimately concerned, cannot come too soon. If I. W. W. tactics help to face these issues, their "agitators" then become educators and as such deserve approval.
In many other ways, they startle a too impassive society into some sense of those darker realities in the midst of which we live partly in ignorance, partly by moral torpor.
It has long been half known that in many garish hotels and restaurants—the very ones to which "Easy Street" flocks for its jollities—that the conditions, the pay, and hours of work among certain of the lower serving class were inhumanly bad. For parts of this service, the vulgar briberies of the tipping system invited the abuse of uncertainty, envy, suspicion and exploitation. The weaker help especially among the women were worked far beyond legal limits. There was often an extremely vicious system of fining. Because of our inveterate social preoccupations these abuses might go on for decades. But suddenly from this underworld the smouldering heats burst into a "Waiters Strike." The thronged tables are unserved. Momentarily the fuss and clutter are great fun, except for the proprietors. These have spasms of choler which the public itself shares when the novelty is gone or the dinners too long delayed.
A specified list of complaints was given me at the meeting place of the cooks and waiters. I have submitted it to hotel managers and to stewards as well as to waiters in no way connected with the strike. These witnesses agree that some of the complaints are absurd; that some of the charges are groundless. They agree that much is demanded which is impossible to grant. They agree that the complaints do not apply to all hotels and restaurants. But they also agree in the only thing which concerns us, that very widely and where one should least expect it are utterly inexcusable abuses against the weaker and more obscure "help." An old steward with experience in many resorts put it—"these strikers are acting like lunatics but in a lot of the places where they work there is so much outrageous ill-treatment and so much besides which would disgust the public if they only knew about it, that any sort of an uproar if it brings out the facts is a good thing."
No investigator will ask more than that. Socially, we seem thus far to have developed no willingness or capacity to know about abuses or to acknowledge them, except through a catastrophe or the waste and noisy rumpus like that of a strike. These do definitely call attention to ignored evils. It required a devastating strike in England to show an astonished public that 100,000 men upon their railways were receiving scarcely one dollar a day—large numbers of them with families, and at a time when that dollar was shrinking to eighty cents because of rising prices. No one could be made to believe the miseries of the Pas-de-calais mines in the north of France until the long horrors of a strike compelled the public to look and to listen. It is the same dreary tale with our garment industries and with our textile mills down to the Lawrence strike. The Commissioner of Labor very calmly tells his story in a lengthy Report, and, because of the strike, people all over the country send greedy appeals for a copy. Hard by is Lowell made the object of a Survey under the auspices of a department of Harvard University. This study by one long resident in the city develops into a goodly book, without a bitter line from cover to cover. In the spirit of good will, the author tries to spare that most sensitive thing in the world—community pride, but the truth comes out and is hungrily sought and widely quoted because the drama at Lawrence had startled the public. The volume has many passages of which these are samples:—[1]
"One tenement had a record of six deaths in five successive families in this tuberculosis incubator. This showed the absolute necessity of protecting people against themselves. It became necessary at once to inspect the tenements, and the Board soon found itself opposed by the greed of certain landlords. Dirt, darkness and dampness, the three worst features to fight, are fostered by such conditions. . . . One landlord said in cold blood that property of this sort had paid for itself within five years. But the price of such a profit was the health of his tenants."
". . . the head nurse employed by the District Nursing Department of the Middlesex Women's Club, expressed herself forcibly upon the conditions she found in her visits during the past year among the sick poor. 'I have been amazed,' she said, 'literally stunned, by the conditions under which many people live in Lowell. It is confined to no particular locality; there are bad conditions, in spots, scattered all over the city.'"
"Cellars are allowed to go unpurified by whitewash, until the odor from them is discernible from the outside of the building. Then there are rotten timbers, casements falling with decay, and a general atmosphere of dampness and mouldiness that is unwholesome. Moreover, the sanitary provisions are often in wretched condition. Outside water-closets, sometimes windowless, connect with the houses; and for purposes of practical economy, the owner of the property occasionally has an arrangement by which he attends to the flushing himself, once or twice a day, as happens to be convenient. This keeps down the water bill, but it can scarcely be expected to lower the tenement house death-rate."
"The hapless condition of the unskilled labor is apparent. Our earlier view is confirmed, that, when the husband is the only wage-earner, he can rarely support a wife and two small children. In his young manhood, he and his little ones are in constant distress from lack of nourishing food, clothing and simple comforts. He is fairly comfortable for a few brief years in middle life, when his children, between fourteen and eighteen years of age, become wage-earners and help to increase the family fund. Often, when his earning capacity has diminished or ended, he is found in a pitiable condition, with his family scattered, and with nothing saved from his scanty wages. All along the way he has met with accident, sickness and unemployment caused by slack work, shut-downs, strikes and lock-outs."
"The standard requirement of 400 cubic feet for each adult for twenty-fours a day, exclusive of the kitchen, is violated on every side in the congested districts named."
"The largest wooden tenement blocks in 'Little Canada,' 'The Harris,' has two shops and forty-eight tenements of four rooms each, and often contains about three hundred inhabitants. It has thirty rooms without windows."
Elementary sanitary protection is imperilled because "it is almost impossible for them to keep clean and healthy in the miserable, over-crowded tenements which they occupy here."
This far pulsing strike in a neighboring town makes men read this indictment. It opens the mind to evidence that otherwise would have no hearing. It is pitiful enough that such wrecking disturbances should be required even to make us look these evils in the face. But until we learn a new solicitude for things that shame us, this sharp surgery of revolt is to be welcomed.
It is directly to a threatening and rebuking Socialism that Europe owes much of its most effective social legislation. It literally scared society into some of its most elementary duties. Until we can act without threats, threats are our salvation—yes, even the threats of the I. W. W. This service they render, and it is not a mean one. They are telling plain truths to many sections of our community. They are challenging some of our old trade unions,—telling them of their lust for monopoly power: of their tendency to exclusiveness and snobbery toward the unskilled and less fortunate among the laborers. A trade union like some in the glass industry may develop every monopoly vice that capitalism shows at its worst. It may have the same hard complacency, the same indifference, the same need to be convicted of sin that is socially true of us all. I asked one of the oldest and best of our social settlement workers what, in order of demerit, was our chief sin. She said, "The sleep of indifference among the comfortable, headed the list."
The rebelling spirit of the I. W. W. is at least a wholesome disquieter of this sleep. If we add to this, its own awakening appeal to the more unfavored labor in which its propaganda is carried on, we are merely recognizing forces that are useful until a wiser way is found to do their work. This we have not yet found, neither have we greatly and searchingly tried to find it. So many are our social inhumanities that the rudest upsetting will do us good if the shock of it forces us to our duties.
With much of the purposed motive of the I. W. W. we may also sympathize. The goal at which they aim is one from which every parasitic and unfair privilege shall be cut out. I asked one of the best of them, "What ultimately do you want?" "I want a world," he said, "in which every man shall get exactly what he earns and all he earns;—a world in which no man can live on the labor of another."
It is not conceivable that any rational person should deny the justice and the reasonableness of that ideal. Every step toward it is a step nearer a decent and more self-respecting society. But progress toward those larger equalities is very little helped by stating far off ends. To play imaginatively with ideal perfections is easy to the laziest of our faculties. We are, however, not here in the sphere of poetry, but in the sphere of suggested social reconstruction. Never till we reach the question of means, measures, methods, is there the slightest test of wisdom among those entering upon tasks so formidable. Customs, institutions, and, above all, the habits and thoughts of men have to be changed before one faltering step can be taken toward ultimate goals.
Admitting that as shockers they do the hard, self-sacrificing work of necessary agitation and awakening, they bring no promise of constructive purpose. The heated energies of "direct action" should be held in real restraint by some great aim like that which coöperation offers. This "together-movement" is now permanently at home in several countries. It assumes many forms that offer immediate foothold for further growths. It is also a movement of future ideal promise, far more powerful to the imagination than all the mythical incantations of Mr. George Sorel.
If any man may be said to be the founder of Syndicalism, it is probably Fernand Pelloutier. He seems to have inspired profound respect in every man who knew him. He was first to show the real power of the united unions in getting things directly for themselves, rather than by appeal to shifty politicians, even of the socialist groups. His work was among the Labor Exchanges (Bourses du Travail),[2] some of which had, like their Italian brothers, tested coöperation. His faith and hope in the future of this "democratized industry" sustained him like a religion. Knowing well that his life was to be cut short by fatal disease, he worked with serene passion for the coming triumph of coöperation until the end. Now it is the supreme value of this ideal, that those who hold it are influenced in their choice of means and methods. If we are to be trained to work with each other, rather than competitively against each other; if we are to substitute "democratic for aristocratic management;" if labor groups are to assume the heavy risks of direction as well as possible losses, then the one fatal thing is not to educate labor for its coming duties. In the light of this imperative need, all practices will be tested. Strikes, boycott and sabotage will be curbed and made severely incidental to something greater than themselves. These negations will have no insane and indiscriminate recommendation, as our I. W. W. now give them in the United States. Positive virtues will be kept at the front. From Pelloutier to Odon Por this imperious necessity of training and education seems to have been felt by a few leading spirits.
It is at this point that Sorel himself forgets his "saving pessimism," his "Illusions of Progress" on which he writes a book, his "Myths" and "fighting virtues," for calm discussion of the possibilities of coöperative credit in Raiffeisen banks that has freed an army of small farmers from the clutch of the usurer.
As economic instructor, it is the one commanding service of working coöperation, that it teaches labor the functions of business. It not only brings out the nature of market risks and the need of managers' ability, but it puts every active member instantly to school on the fundamental questions of property. No profitable moment can be spent in discussing Socialism apart from the nature and function of interest, rent and profits.
Wherever Socialism has created its own coöperative business in distribution, production, banking, it has at once to deal practically with all these vital issues.
A coöperative village is quick to learn that all its inhabitants create their ground rent and therefore rent should go to their community and not to any speculating individual. They are as quick to learn that private interest on money is quite another matter. They learn that, at least under capitalism, it has its uses. They learn that if ever interest is to pass away, it cannot be until capital is far more widely diffused than now.
They learn to drop empty and barren formulas like "money cannot breed money" and face the plain fact. "Shall I lend my savings of 100 francs to the Coöperative? Our manager needs it and asks me for it. If I lend it to him to carry on the work of the store, I meantime cannot use it; neither can I get anything from it in the bank where I now get three per cent."
In exactly these terms, I have heard Belgian and Danish Socialists talk about interest. They learned thus intimately to face one of the great questions on which the future of Socialism will turn. Even if interest and profits are now necessary evils under the perversions of capitalism—can they be altogether dispensed with under Socialism? Or will interest and profits, stripped of present abuses, still have such utilities in so stimulating savings as to justify their continued use, even when the monopolies have been socialized? That Syndicalism at its highest should have recognized an ideal so admirable puts it safely beyond cheap and sniffy criticism. That such ideal should have developed where the movement is oldest, may warrant the hope that time and experience may give it sanity elsewhere.
This, however, raises an awkward difficulty. Syndicalism is in no way distinguished from other movements by this ideal expression of the coöperative brotherhood. At whatever point its main energies pass into constructive coöperation, it is at one with many other daring hopes and efforts that for two generations have looked toward the "democratizing of life and opportunity by democratizing industry." Let it be said again, there is no proper or final estimate of any new social movement by the ideal end it sets before us. Far more is it to be judged by its practical and intermediate measures. It is these chiefly that set Syndicalism apart from others in the field and by these is it mainly to be judged.
I listened in Seattle to an orator in the street flaying capitalism and trade unions with an impartial lash. When he stepped panting from his perch, I asked him what he was really after in the special strike for which he was pleading. "What are we after? Why, we are after that mill. We have made it and every machine in it. It is a product of our labor and it belongs to us."
As if driving spikes, he had told his audience how this was to be brought about. He made no mystery of "direct action" and sabotage. To and fro among the crowd men passed, selling literature in which these measures were set forth with authoritative detail, quite in the manner of the orator.
To my suggestion that deep behind the mill in question were centuries of socially sanctioned forms of property—that plans, organization, purchase of machinery, creating a market, with all the risks involved, and that these also were a part of his problem,—the only answer I could get was that they were not engaged in splitting hairs. "Capitalism," he said, "has us by the throat, and we shall act accordingly."
It is wholly safe to say that no body of workingmen in the world, who for two years had achieved even modest success in productive-coöperation, would have seen so little of the real problem or attempted its solution by methods that, for the most part, merely wasted hard-earned wealth created by employer, boss, and "labor" alike.
- ↑ The Record of a City, G. F. Kenngott; Macmillan & Co., 1912.
- ↑ His Histoire des bourses du travail, was published in Paris, in 1902.