Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois/Section 3
III.
The new unionism is of necessity a revolutionary manifestation. This appears from an examination of its necessary structure.
It must include all the various kinds of labor required in a specific industry; labor of every kind which contributes to the production of the commodity for the making of which the industry exists; all the various factors which combine to form the marketable object.
By all the kinds of labor we do not mean merely all the crafts, but in addition factors which have been overlooked in the organization of crafts—factors which appear at each end of the productive apparatus—at the one end, clerks, salesmen, stenographers, telephone operators, telegraphers, and all the non-handworking staff which is essential to the practical handling of a great business, and at the other end the unskilled laborers who are equally essential but so far unorganized and unrecognized.
Both of these factors have been neglected by the trade union or rather have failed to come into the realm of operation of the union.
The former the union has so far been practically unable to affect, because, not being hand workers, they have looked down on the unions; the latter, the union has neglected because, not being craftsmen but merely unskilled hands, they have not been considered worthy of the recognition of the union.
Hence each industry has and now consists of a core of organized mechanics and operatives, surrounded by a rind of unorganized, and in the last resort the juice is squeezed out of the organized core through the unorganized rind.
It must be remembered also that even this organized portion is not a homogeneous body, and that even the crafts are not organized in terms of the industry in which they operate, but are separate entities. None can be brought to the assistance of its neighbor without much delay and the solution of involved jurisdictional questions. Consequently, we see the craft, even the highly skilled craft, engaged in a protracted struggle, expending money which it can ill afford and finally yielding to the greater force or even if it is able to secure such a compromise as enables the leaders to advertise a victory it is at such expense as to be a Pyrrhic victory.
The plan generally followed is to determine what amount of strike pay can be given to the men who come out and having settled that this strike pay can be found for at least a time to declare a strike.
Thenceforward the process follows a routine. The strikers picket, the employer imports scabs; physical conflicts arise which necessitate the employment of the police. Both sides engage a corps of lawyers. The scabs start up the industry. The unions keep on paying strike pay. Finally, one of two things happens, either the employer, by reason of the interruption to his business loses valuable customers and his business is attacked by competitors so that he is compelled to make terms, or the strike pay gives out and the striking union men are driven to return to work. It will be observed that the former alternative is less and less likely to occur with the growing concentration and the extinction of competition between employers.
All this time men not belonging to the crafts actually engaged in conflict go on with their work. I have known a building struck by one craft which picketed the building, and all the time the members of other crafts, each man with a union card in his pocket, have walked every morning past the pickets of the striking craft and gone to work on the building which was so picketed.
A more advanced form of trade organization would combine the crafts on that building and then all the crafts would go out on strike. That result has been achieved and so far progress has been made in certain industries. But the unskilled laborers are unorganized. Therefore, the unskilled swarm upon the task and complete it. With the present development of the machine industry it is quite possible to do this; though of course more expensive to the employers and in many ways not so satisfactory. These drawbacks, however, will gradually disappear in face of the machine industry, the further elimination of craft distinctions and the general progress of technique in production. This last consists in the constant subdivision of mechanical processes and a tendency to the repetition of monotonous acts even more easily and quickly learned by the average man without specialized skill.
Everything then combines to place the unskilled laborer in the strategic position in the labor struggle. He becomes the one vital factor without which no victory in the fight between the laborer and the capitalist can be won. He who has the unskilled laborer has the victory. If the employer is able to call to his aid the legions of the unskilled and unorganized his victory in the struggle is practically assured to begin with. If organized labor on its part can secure the unskilled its triumph becomes an assured fact.
The foregoing is simply explanatory of the statement that industrial unionism of necessity predicates the organization of the unskilled.
The organization of the unskilled in the industrial union at once places that class of labor in control of the situation. It can dislocate an industry whenever it chooses to do so. It can practically dictate the terms on which the so-called skilled trades must operate. Since it is largely migratory in character and is used to the ebb and flow of demand lack of employment does not have the same terrors for its members; it can manage without strike pay, and by frequent strikes of short duration can inflict a vast amount of damage upon the enemy without much suffering to itself. Indeed, in France, where the organization of the unskilled is being so effectively carried out by the Syndicalists, the long strike has become almost extinct. To win or lose in two weeks and go back with the organization intact is the aim of the leaders. The superiority of this method over the old fashioned long fought out struggle with the suffering of families and the expenditure of strike pay is obvious. Industrial conflicts tend to become shorter and sharper.
The unskilled laborer of today is the pure Marxian proletarian; he has nothing but his labor power to sell, and his labor power cannot by any possibility become property in any sense. He closely approximates to the definition in the Communist Manifesto.
"The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with bourgeois family relations, modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests."
It is, of course, impossible in the course of a short paper to examine the testimony from which the above conclusions are reached. It may be noted in passing, however, that the unskilled laborer is not as a rule a voter; he can seldom stay long enough in one place to acquire residence. He is still more seldom a property owner, as so many of the craftsmen are, whose property represents so much impedimenta in the event of a strike, for it usually consists of a partly paid-up contract for the purchase of a house and lot. Owing to the present restrictions upon citizenship an ever increasing number of the unskilled must remain aliens, for it is very difficult even for a craftsman to find witnesses covering a period of five years and it is next to impossible for an unskilled laborer to do this.
The separation between the rest of the community and the unskilled laborer is therefore practically complete. His class stands as a permanently outlawed class. He has no part or lot in the existing social system. The occasions when he is interested in the present system are when he comes into collision with it and the officers of the law inflict every indignity upon him and render his necessary migration through the land as difficult and as dangerous as possible.
It will be noted that we are not speaking here of tramps or derelicts, of the social detritus which is continually being thrown off into the fetid pools of professional trampdom and of crime. This derelict or slum element is quite another factor with which we have no present concern. The unskilled laborers referred to are those who do the rough work of the world; who work hard where opportunity for work is afforded; who fill the contract camps and mines, harvest the grain and perform the thousand and one tasks upon which we are dependent, and who form the definite and indispensable substratum of every industry.
The theory in the United States at least is that such employment is permanent only for the unfit; that the best elements graduate out of it into more remunerative toil. The former history of the country goes far to establish that belief. But it is no longer tenable in face of the facts. The appropriation of the public lands, the practical closing of opportunity, the degradation of the crafts in face of the consolidation of industry, all tend not only to shut the avenue of escape for the unskilled laborer but to greatly increase his numbers.
This mass is already beginning to show signs of independent life. It is not waiting to be organized from above, it is trying to organize itself. Slowly and painfully it is trying its limbs and exercising hitherto unused functions. Within a few months that portion of the population which has been regarded with scorn and which has been considered unworthy of recognition by the regular organized trades has made McKees Rocks, Spokane, Lawrence, Little Falls, Canadian Northern, Paterson, Mesaba Iron Range, Fresno and Everett historic names in the American labor movement. The Industrial Workers of the World may be regarded as the first definite step in the organization of the real proletariat.
With the advent of the unskilled into the ranks of organized labor there can be no further blinking or obscuring of the real point at issue between the capitalist and the laborer.
The unskilled laborer knows without any telling that he is exploited at the point of production. No question of taxes can help him, municipalization or nationalization is no remedy for his ills, no scheme of municipal or other reforms can meet the circumstances of his case.
He challenges the whole structure of modern society at its base, the contract of employment. He matches his no-property against all the property of the dominant class, his no-law against the law of the industrial and commercial masters, his ability to starve against all the resources of civilization.
When the unskilled laborer enters the fight he drags the rest of the crafts after him. They must take up his fight. Even the respectable petit-bourgeois socialist must dance to his tune, as is seen in the French chamber where the Socialist representatives vigorously took up the cudgels for Durand, the syndicalist, unjustly sentenced for the killing of a scab.
What is still more remarkable he, by means of the industrial union, builds up a society within society, an "imperium in imperio." He consolidates and harmonizes every branch of wage labor in the industry, until should he declare the present owners expropriated the industry would go along its accustomed course in the hands of the industrial organization without any shock or jar to the rest of us.
So the fullness of time and capitalistic development have at last brought about the Marxian proletariat.
Time, however, the great dispeller of illusions, has wrought its effect upon the mind of that proletariat. No longer will it satisfy itself with the belief that parliamentary action will bring the relief which it so earnestly deserves. On the contrary it grows more and more distrustful of mere parliamentarism. It has learned the lesson that political power is merely the reflex of economic power, and that political advantage can only be had through economic superiority; that there is no road to power save through the "will to power" and all that that implies.
The proletarian, which is just entering the ring as a contestant for the mastery of the modern world, comes equipped with the knowledge that its victories are not to be won by the babblings of public men and the intrigues of political place-hunters, but by stern conflict on the industrial field and by ceaseless and relentless war upon those whom it must expropriate.