- dicalist movement of Italy—only, of course, Capitalist Journalism
has not allowed you to know anything about the Syndicalist movement of Italy! The glass-workers were beaten in a terrific strike, and they realized that they had to find a new weapon; they contributed their funds and bought a glass-factory, which they started upon a co-operative basis. When this factory had its product ready for sale, strikes were called on the other factories. By applying this method again and again, the union broke its rivals, and bought them out at a low price, and so before the war practically the entire glass-industry of Italy was in the hands of co-operative unions, and the glass-workers were getting the full value of their product.
The same thing was being done before the war by the agricultural workers in Sicily. The strikers had been shot down by the soldiery, their own brothers and sons; they bought several estates and worked them co-operatively, and when harvest-time came there was labor for the co-operative estates, and there were strikes against the absentee landlords, who were spending their time in Paris and on the Riviera. So the landlords made haste to sell out, and the agricultural unions were rapidly taking possession of the land of Sicily.
The same methods were recently tried out in the newspaper field by strikers in the Argentine Republic; I quote from an account in the "Christian Science Monitor," a Boston newspaper which gives fair accounts of radical happenings abroad, and which may some day give fair accounts of radical happenings in America. The "Christian Science Monitor" is interviewing a United States embassy official, just returned from Buenos Aires:
An incident of the latter strike shows the unique control, as
Mr. Barrett puts it, that they exercise over the newspapers. During
the seventy-three days the port was closed, the only goods handled
were shipments of newsprint. The newspapers represent the workers.
If a paper dares to send to its composing-room an item opposed to
the interest of the labor element, the compositors probably will refuse
to put it in type. If they do set it up and it appears, the paper
can expect no more newsprint from the docks.
I hear the reader says: "These strikers don't represent
the public; they represent themselves. You are only substituting
one kind of class-interest for another." Ah, yes—dear
reader of capitalist opinion!
