Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/119

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THE WAR OF THE CLASSES
107

tures, 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