classes, laws have been made to keep economic forces safely in their own keeping. But modern organization so shifts production from one plant to another as to defeat every real purpose of the trade union. By "contracts" of different dates, it can keep one union at work while another is on strike.
"If in a mine, the engineers and pumpmen remain faithful to such a contract, the owners can prevent the flooding of the mines and thus hold out until the other workers are starved back to the job."
All these immense resources of indirect action capital controls. It has besides the exact counterpart of every labor weapon—lockout, blacklist, its own agent or "walking delegate." If its profits are in danger, capitalism can "ca canny," and restrict the product on a scale to make bricklayers mad with envy. But chief of all is capital's stupendous power through law and politics of its own making. Through the delays and subterfuges of legislatures, through the labored technique of court decisions, the claims of the worker are held at bay.
All this is the "indirect action" of those who hold the keys of economic power. Against these shrewd indirections, Syndicalists will now pit their own direct strategy.
Slowly the dulled brain of labor has discovered its helplessness. It has been deceived by a succession of petty concessions in wages, hours and conditions, but the grim fact of its dependence and insecurity has at last grown clear. "Direct action" is labor's weapon against all the astute indirections of capital.
