American Syndicalism/Chapter 19
XIX
SOME DUTIES OF OUR OWN
It is true that the I. W. W. can have stable relations neither with the socialist party nor with existing trade unionism. In tumultuous days like those at Lawrence, when labor and capital are at each other's throats, Socialist and Syndicalist will join hands. Money will pour in from the general public, including every class, "idle rich," "intellectuals," and even from active business men far removed from local heats and bias. This miscellaneous response may carry no imaginable approval of I. W. W. tenets or practices. It may be solely from the conviction that local employers and public authorities are using their strength in bad temper or brutally and unjustly against the labor side in the fight. I have pointed to the growth of this vague but powerful sympathy as a new factor no longer to be ignored. If it reach a certain pitch, nothing can keep it out of politics and from the uses to which politicians will put it. Socialist party members will help the I. W. W. at the points of contest precisely as this general public did at Lawrence, but in every month that passes, the logic of all that is clearly distinctive of the I. W. W. will show a deepening gulf between them and all Socialism based upon and committed to political action. W. D. Haywood is now on the National Executive Board of the socialist party. There is as little intellectual consistency, either for him or for the party, that he should be there, as that he should be in the Republican Party or the Catholic church. This is not to defame him, but to define him. He is as much out of place on that Board as an orthodox Single Taxer. In his writings and speeches, he represents with extraordinary fidelity the primitive, undisciplined forces in Syndicalism. With epigrammatic skill, he voices this fast emerging and plaintive aspiration which lowlier and ignored masses of working men and women are coming to feel; those without votes; those that no trade union would have for the asking; those who can be shoved aside and "put upon" because they neither speak our tongue nor know our ways—these half bewildered legions become articulate in this agitator who is to that extent educator. They recognize something in him which feeds hungers that in some way have to be fed. It is a craving which no church, catholic or protestant, can satisfy. Its urgency is untouched by religious appeal because the heart of it is economic. No delayed other-worldly appeal will divert it.
The speech or symbol that can reach and rouse them is not meanly to be thought of, nor should any pharisaical arrogance set such an one wholly at naught. It is because this heart of reality is in the movement as a whole, that our problem with the I. W. W. is so beset by perplexities. There is much in its motive to command our respect. In its active striving, there is much with which society will have to coöperate or suffer from its lack of intelligent sympathy. The proletariat, the "fourth estate," or by whatever name we call it, has in some way to be brought nearer to the sources of economic security. The insistence that this should be done and the belief in its possibilities, if society will use the resources at its disposal, have now become a great and passionate faith. Every higher spiritual movement in the politics and religion of our time reflects this faith. It is a service so great and so difficult that no one who can help it is to be outlawed.
For example, we shall never take one enlightened step in reconstructing the futilities of present criminal procedure, until we learn to coöperate in a new spirit with those who have suffered inside the prison. No man on the outside is good enough or wise enough to "represent" them. They should have their own representatives to instruct and guide us by that experience which no outsider ever knows because he has not lived it.
As little do people, economically secure, know the life of the "fourth estate." Our pretence to know it makes our ignorance the more dangerous. These used and ignored masses should also have their own representatives. All attempts to prevent this are now too late. Very imperfectly, but with its own invincible reality, the syndicalist stirring in the world speaks for the weak and neglected many. This part of the message we must understand. We must "recognize" it, as those eager and willing to coöperate with every climbing desire to equalize opportunity in the world. In no other way shall we either teach ourselves or carry help to those who need it.
It can be most confidently set down, that with the whole list of social "remedies"—profit sharing, arbitration, "welfare work" in all its varieties,—the abiding successes will depend upon the degree and intelligent heartiness with which the representatives of labor are encouraged to coöperate with business management. An authoritative and one-sided ascendency in these things was once possible and in spots may be so still, but their day, for much of our industry, is gone and soon will end for the whole of it. In thirty years we have seen scores of these fine schemes wrecked because of lurking insincerity in the proclaimed objects.
In the larger and more general field of social contact and discussion, it is as clumsily fatal to act in the old absolutist spirit, as to attempt railway management in the "public-be-damned" manner of the earlier magnates of transportation. The old feeling may still be there but it can neither be publicly expressed nor successfully acted upon. They have now to coöperate with government and every day will be forced into completer coöperation. In many countries not a step can now be taken in most social legislation without the assenting coöperation with Socialism.
No considerable force appearing among us seeking social betterment is to be held off and treated like a marauder or an outcast. Invariably these forces bring with them idealisms that no society can afford to lose. Much of the conscious plan and method of Syndicalism is whimsically chimerical. But in it and through it is something as sacred as the best of the great dreamers have ever brought us. In the total of this movement, the deeper, inner fact seems to me to be its nearness to and sympathy with that most heavy laden and long enduring mass of common toilers. Alike to our peril and to our loss, shall we ignore this fact. Steadily to see it and keep it in remembrance is the beginning of such practical wisdom as we may show toward it.
In large numbers, especially in the rank and file, are those who, through some experience, have really wakened to the tragic ugliness of poverty and insecurity.
In the actual facts of working Syndicalism in our very midst, the idea as motive may be seen in any overwrought community where the I. W. W. holds sway. Deeply to convince any ardent and generous nature that our own capitalistic "law and order" is desperately and hopelessly corrupt: that it condemns day by day multitudes of guiltless workers to a life degrading to the individual and perilous to the family, and that their condition steadily grows worse, is in itself an appeal to heroic virtues. What is one utterly gone over to this belief to do? What steps are wise advisers to take with such as these? Several times personally, I have had to face this: once with a lad of twenty who had given himself with complete and tremulous devotion to a cause that seemed to him more sacred than any religion of which he knew. He was moved by an emotion so clean and intense that death on a barricade would have frightened him as little as a girl's smile. Awkwardly, and with stuttering apologies, I could only try to prove how and why I thought he was mistaken. It was easy to see while I talked, that he was listening to other voices that he respected more, and more gladly heard. It was like telling a young twelfth century Crusader, fired and panting for departure, that he was imprudent, that the facts were all against him, that he was spoiling a career, that the holy sepulchre was not after all in any real peril. A young college woman told me that the "new movement" came to her like a great light; that it had given her such a peace in her heart as she had never known. "All that I can give and become," she said, "goes to discredit a society in which one cannot ever have self-respect." Young Christians doubtless spoke like that when to be known as Christian was to be marked for torture. In very considerable numbers, the like of these are there in our I. W. W. crusade. They are practically inseparable from those with coarser ignorances and meaner motives. Unless these idealisms are held rather tenderly in mind, we shall neither see nor estimate the larger movement with either truth, justice, or safety to ourselves.
At the risk of weariness to the reader, it must be repeated that present labor troubles differ from those in the past chiefly in this, that they now develop in a new and changed atmosphere. They attract a wider and more powerful public sympathy which enables the politician to play in them a new and more effective rôle. It does not help us to throw the blame upon the politician, or would-be politician. Every whit of his strength is in the public opinion that he merely reflects. No politician who took a hand in the recent strike on the Boston Elevated had an atom of real influence except what general opinion gave him.
If this had been recognized, many a public service corporation would have been spared humiliation. A dozen towns have been amazed and indignant that they must submit to a prying invasion from the Government, from politicians, and an army of outside investigators. This enlargement and intensifying of popular sympathy is the first capital fact which no wise employer or owner will in future ignore. The spread of this sympathy will compel business management in all conspicuous business to revalue the whole human side of its problem. I do not mean that it should be friendlier or more philanthropic. I mean that the fatal note of arbitrariness and priggish aloofness has got to go. Labor, with its powers of collective bargaining, must be met in a spirit that is strictly coöperative—coöperative in the sense of some recognized equality between the status of labor and that of capital. Business must put as high ability into the human side as into the financial. It has got to drop a good deal of its pride, secrecy, and airs of superiority.
Whether it has to face the trade union, the Socialists, or the more revolutionary I. W. W., they must one and all be met naturally and, above all, humanly. In the strict sense, they have got to be "recognized" and openly dealt with for the sole reason that the human side of business can in no other way be wisely dealt with.
In all that I have been able to ascertain about outbreaks in thirteen Eastern and Western communities, the I. W. W. got its grip where trade unionism had been beaten, or had no existence, or had been so weakened as to offer little resistance. Trade unions as powerful as those in Germany, where they are in closest sympathetic touch with a disciplined socialism, leave syndicalism without a foothold, except for a few harmless eccentrics.
In France many of the unions are notoriously so unstable and unbuttressed by funds as to give every advantage to syndicalist experiments. To hold office in a "pure and simple" trade union, is to be excluded from I. W. W. membership. There are no editors admitted except those on their own journals. Though their entire conception is based upon trained skill within the shops and everywhere "at the point of production," they glory in their appeal to the unskilled—to those hitherto unreached by labor associations.
But a few months after their first convention in 1905, they attacked the hotels and restaurants in Goldfield, Nevada, In rapid succession follow Youngstown, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; and again Goldfield in 1907, where they claim to have secured eight hours and $4.50 per day. We have throughout the same story of enfeebled unionism or none at all. If the American Federation has some partial hold, that of itself brings war with the I. W. W., as at Skowhegan Mills in 1907, Youngstown and Bridgeport. To the I. W. W. any unionist of the American Federation of Labor is a scab and an outlaw.
In the desperate eleven weeks' strike in 1909 at McKees Rocks, Pa., unionism had been crippled.[1]
At Lawrence, by express purpose, unionism had been stifled. "This was great luck for us," as one expressed it. "Gompers' fakirs had been kept out and we had our chance."
New Bedford followed. I met one hurrying to this new field. "We will put New Bedford on the map, too," he said. But it did not then get on to the map. With bad generalship, the invaders fell upon a mill long organized. These men felt so competent to manage their own affairs that the failure of the I. W. W. was immediate and complete.
There is but one fair inference from this wide experience. If capitalist management, itself endowed with every advantage of organization, deliberately refuses it to labor, capital will suffer. It will suffer because public opinion and the political action which that opinion reflects, will more and more take sides with labor in every struggle that becomes conspicuous. This wider public will side even with turbulent and disorganized masses like the I. W. W. It will be said, and justly said, "The fight is too grossly unfair." The public will say this and act upon it, in spite of all atrocities by McNamaras caught and uncaught. It will so act because it has learned that point for point, capital has its own ugly record of lawless misdemeanor that is at least as threatening to social peace and welfare as all the ill-bred violence of labor.
Such resources has great capital, that it has been able to cloak its evil doing in veiled, legal decencies, while labor must go to its sinning naked and exposed. This too the public has learned. It has learned it so well that conspicuous business can no longer act in the spirit of "I'll manage my business as I like." This public has also come to feel that all the gilded welfare schemes which only screen secret and arbitrary power over labor have probably had their day. The great and healing resources left us are those of "social insurance," meant primarily to secure labor against those dire fatalities—sickness, accident, unemployment, and death. The best of them are far more generous and more efficient for those insured than any government insurance in the world. They are open to the freest investigation by every employee. Whether capitalism has yet a long life or a short one, these private schemes are of very highest value. They are educating the race in the great art of self-protection. If Socialism were to come to-morrow, it would use these institutions as models. With all their excellence, there is one drawback. More and more labor suspects them. As they depend utterly upon the willing coöperation of labor, this gangrene of suspicion sets too narrow limits to their widest efficiency as "remedies."
We are thus driven to one further step. This can have no statement except as a general principle, but it is one in the light of which every special welfare plan may be safely tested. It is this—In these larger concerns wage earners from now on must be made to understand that the business is in some sense theirs; that they shall have their own genuine representation in the management. The beginnings will be very modest, but they must be so open and free from dissembling, as to give labor faith enough to warrant its own coöperation. It is because these beginnings must be so modest, that the door should be fearlessly open to as much increased labor representation as results justify.
This principle of a progressive participation of labor in management, forces the frankest "recognition" that every party concerned must be taken (through its representatives) into the inner councils. This involves a publicity of business method and conditions which labor and the public now demand. The suspicions of the public are nearly as aggressive as those of labor. Not a month passes that this suspicion does not deepen.
The most impelling purpose in the movement called Syndicalism is its powerful, half-blind urgency toward the democratizing of economic power in the world. From now on politics will more and more be used to this end. As the old enemies, Democrat and Republican, in Milwaukee fall into each other's arms in order to drive Socialists from the City Hall, we shall elsewhere see the larger interests of property oblivious of old party lines, uniting in their defense against the general socialist encroachment. This encroachment is impulsive: it is not sagacious but it rises higher and higher among the people against the whole inner kingdom of hedged and secret privilege, out of which inequalities spring which rational men no longer justify. There will be infinite variation of opinion as to ways and means through which these too absolute economic powers are to be brought under social control. That in some way this has to be done, few men of detached and disinterested intelligence any longer doubt. To do this work legally and in the spirit of a social legislation which at last enrolls in its service the very best that science, education and a cleaner politics have to offer, is the ennobling hope now before us.
Within a quarter of a century in a dozen countries, the actual work in establishing new and permanent standards of health, education and opportunity are the supreme achievements of our time, because they lie at the foundation of any and every attempt at social reconstruction which has the slightest promise of performing that hardest of all tasks—democratizing economic power and privilege. Of the time required for this task; of the difficulties involved; of the long educational and disciplinary needs, the wisest among us have but shadowy knowledge.
As for constructive suggestion, our I. W. W. have so little as to embarrass the most indulgent critic. In their convulsive and incendiary appeal to the forgotten masses, there is, nevertheless, a saving utility that should bring the movement within our sympathetic acceptance. To the utmost, we should work with it as those determined to learn, from whatever source the message come.
Of this total rising protest against sources of unnatural inequalities in wealth and opportunity, the I. W. W. is at most a very tiny part. It is yet enough that they are in it, and that they are fully aware of the fact. For the first time they are so consciously related to this spirit of revolt and to the delicate industrial mechanism which gives them power, that only a captious temper will refuse them hearing. Not by any churlish aloofness are they to be educated, nor are we ourselves to be educated. In all our efforts to penetrate these mysteries of social reformation, a common darkness is over us all.
Not in the least are those who most materially profit by the present system to be held in awe as possessors of special and exclusive enlightenment. There is also a "wisdom of the humble" endowed with the high authority of age-long suffering and experience. It is even to such as these that a new power is now passing. It will not be taken from them. It will be used in folly and cruelty, if society is also foolish and cruel.
It is the final condemnation of the old lone-hand, fighting spirit in industry, that it at once creates new and deadlier sources of antagonism. It revives on the spot, not public, but private warfare, with all its contagious treacheries.
The sole cure for these barbaric survivals is the coöperative intention developed into habits of thought and action. This intention need no longer expend itself in vague benevolence. New organs are at hand in which it may be embodied.
If we add to this the final best step of all—the open, declared purpose to admit labor to management first at safe and possible points with all that this means of banished secrets; to admit it fearlessly and with no reserves as far as labor proves its fitness; we then and there connect ourselves with the coöperative régime. This does not close the fist, it opens the arms. It is the essence of this coöperative intention—not to exclude, but to include labor in the control of business; courageously to give it every opportunity of training to this end. It will require the severe schooling of a century—but every strong man who openly sets his face that way, who tries consentingly and forbearingly to prove the policy wise is the helper to whom we look.
With this spirit and purpose we merely meet Syndicalism at its highest and best, rather than at its lowest and worst. At its ideal level, we take it at its own word. This ideal is also coöperation with the long educational drill which that implies. To unite with that ideal, to bear with the defeats incident to its slow unfolding, is to work securely with order and progress, and not against them. It is to work as securely with the ever wider and more intelligent good will of every class and condition of men on which the stability of social welfare must forever depend.
- ↑ It was at this strike that the I. W. W. met the most efficient State Constabulary yet evolved in the States. Between seven and eight thousand men with 14 or 15 nationalities met this body. On the killing of the first striker, the war was on. The General Secretary of the I. W. W. thus comments on it:
"The strike committee then served notice upon the commander of the Cossacks that for every striker killed or injured by the cossacks the life of a cossack would be exacted in return. And that they were not at all concerned as to which cossack paid the penalty, but that a life for a life would be exacted. The strikers kept their word. On the next assault by the cossacks, several of the constabulary were killed and a number wounded. The cossacks were driven from the streets and into the plants of the company. An equal number of strikers were killed and about 50 wounded in the battle. This ended the killing on both sides during the remainder of the strike. For the first time in their existence the cossacks were 'tamed.' The McKees Rocks strike resulted in a complete victory for the strikers."