Violence and the Labor Movement

by Robert Hunter

"(5) What will be your relations to your federation of trade or of industry after your reorganization?

"(6) On what principle would the distribution of products take place, and how would the productive groups procure the raw material for themselves?

"(7) What part would the Bourses du Travail play in the transformed society, and what would be their task with reference to the statistics and to the distribution of products?" [(6)]

The report dealing with the results of this inquiry contains such a variety of views that it is not easy to summarize it. It seems, however, to have been more or less agreed that each group of producers was to control the industry in which it was engaged. The peasants were to take the land. The miners were to take the mines. The railway workers were to take the railroads. Every trade union was to obtain possession of the tools of its trade, and the new society was to be organized on the basis of a trade-union ownership of industry. In the villages, towns, and cities the various trades were then to be organized into a federation whose duty would be to administer all matters of joint interest in their localities. The local federations were then to be united into a General Confederation, to whose administration were to be left only those public services which were of national importance. The General Confederation was also to serve as an intermediary between the various trades and locals and as an agency for representing the interests of all the unions in international relations.

This is in brief the meaning of syndicalism. It differs from socialism in both aim and methods. The aim of the latter is the control by the community of the means of production. The aim of syndicalism is the control by autonomous trade unions of that production carried on by those trades. It does not seek to refashion the State or to aid in its evolution toward social democracy. It will have nothing to do with political action or with any attempt to improve the machinery of democracy. The masses must arise, take possession of the mines, factories, railroads, fields, and all industrial processes and natural resources, and then, through trade unions or industrial unions, administer the new economic system. Furthermore, the syndicalists differ from the socialists in their conception of the class struggle. To the socialist the capitalist is as much the product of our economic system as the worker. No socialist believes that the capitalist is individually to blame for our economic ills. The syndicalist dissents from this view. To him the capitalist is an individual enemy. He must be fought and destroyed. There is no form of mediation or conciliation possible between the worker and his employer. Conditions must, therefore, be made intolerable for the capitalist. Work must be done badly. Machines must be destroyed. Industrial processes must be subjected to chaos. Every worker must be inspired with the one end and aim of destruction. Without the coöperation of the worker, capitalist production must break down. Therefore, the revolutionary syndicalist will fight, if possible, openly through his union, or, if that is impossible, by stealth, as an individual, to ruin his employer. The world of to-day is to be turned into incessant civil war between capital and labor. Not only the two classes, but the individuals of the two classes, must be constantly engaged in a deadly conflict. There is to be no truce until the fight is ended. The loyal workman is to be considered a traitor. The union that makes contracts or participates in collective bargaining is to be ostracized. And even those who are disinclined to battle will be forced into the ranks by compulsion. "Those who continue to work will be compelled to quit," says Guérard. The strike is not to be merely a peaceable abstention from work. The very machines are to be made to strike by being rendered incapable of production. These are the methods of the militant revolutionary syndicalists.[X]

Toward the end of the nineties another element came to the aid of the anarchists. It is difficult to class this group with any certainty. They are neither socialists nor anarchists. They remind one of those Bakouninists that Marx once referred to as "lawyers without cases, physicians without patients and knowledge, students of billiards, etc." [(7)] "They are good-natured, gentlemanly, cultured people," says Sombart; "people with spotless linen, good manners and fashionably dressed wives; people with whom one holds social intercourse as with one's equals; people who would at first sight hardly be taken as the representatives of a new movement whose object it is to prevent socialism from becoming a mere middle-class belief." [(8)] In a word, they appear to be individuals wearied with the unrealities of life and seeking to overcome their ennui by, at any rate, discussing the making of revolutions. With their "myths," their "reflections on violence," their appeals to physical vigor and to the glory of combat, as well as with their incessant attacks on the socialist movement, they have given very material aid to the anarchist element in the syndicalist movement. For a number of years I have read faithfully Le Mouvement Socialiste, but I confess that I have not understood their dazzling metaphysics, and I am somewhat comforted to see that both Levine [(9)] and Lewis [(10)] find them frequently incomprehensible.

Without injustice to this group of intellectuals, I think it may be truthfully said that they have contributed nothing essential to the doctrines of syndicalism as developed by the trades unionists themselves; and Edward Berth, in Les Nouveaux Aspects du Socialisme, has partially explained why, without meaning to do so. "It has often been observed," he says, "that the anarchists are by origin artisan, peasant, or aristocrat. Rousseau represents, obviously, the anarchism of the artisan. His republic is a little republic of free and independent craftsmen.... Proudhon is a peasant in his heart ... and, if we finally take Tolstoi, we find here an anarchism of worldly or aristocratic origin. Tolstoi is a blasé aristocrat, disgusted with civilization by having too much eaten of it." [(11)] Whether or not this characterization of Tolstoi is justified, there can be no question that many of this type rushed to the aid of syndicalism. Its savage vigor appeals to some artists, decadents, and déclassés. Neurotic as a rule, they seem to hunger for the stimulus which comes by association with the merely physical power and vigor of the working class. The navvy, the coalheaver, or "yon rower ... the muscles all a-ripple on his back," [(12)] awakens in them a worshipful admiration, even as it did in the effete Cleon. Such a theory as syndicalism, declares Sombart, "could only have grown up in a country possessing so high a culture as France; that it could have been thought out only by minds of the nicest perception, by people who have become quite blasé, whose feelings require a very strong stimulus before they can be stirred; people who have something of the artistic temperament, and, consequently, look disdainfully on what has been called 'Philistinism'—on business, on middle-class ideals, and so forth. They are, as it were, the fine silk as contrasted with the plain wool of ordinary people. They detest the common, everyday round as much as they hate what is natural; they might be called 'Social Sybarites.' Such are the people who have created the syndicalist system." [(13)] On one point Sombart is wrong. All the essential doctrines of revolutionary syndicalism, as a matter of fact, originated with the anarchists in the unions, and the most that can be said for the "Sybarites" is that they elaborated and mystified these doctrines.

There are those, of course, who maintain that syndicalism is wholly a natural and inevitable product of economic forces, and, so far as the actual syndicalist movement is concerned, that is unquestionably true. But in all the maze of philosophy and doctrine that has been thrown about the actual French movement, we find the traces of two extraneous forces—the anarchists who availed themselves of the opportunity that an awakening trade unionism gave them, and those intellectuals of leisure, culture, and refinement who found the methods of political socialism too tame to satisfy their violent revolt against things bourgeois. And the philosophical syndicalism that was born of this union combines utopianism and anarchism. The yearning esthetes found satisfaction in the rugged energy and physical daring of the men of action, while the latter were astonished and flattered to find their simple war measures adorned with metaphysical abstractions and arousing an immense furore among the most learned and fashionable circles of Europe.

However, something in addition to personality is needed to explain the rise of syndicalist socialism in France. Like anarchism, syndicalism is a natural product of certain French and Italian conditions. It is not strange that the Latin peoples have in the past harbored the ideas of anarchism, or that now they harbor the ideas of syndicalism. The enormous proportion of small property owners in the French nation is the economic basis for a powerful individualism. Anything which interferes with the liberty of the individual is abhorred, and nothing awakens a more lively hatred than centralization and State power. The vast extent of small industry, with the apprentice, journeyman, and master-workman, has wielded an influence over the mentality of the French workers. Berth, for instance, follows Proudhon in conceiving of the future commonwealth as a federation of innumerable little workshops. Gigantic industries, such as are known in Germany, England, and America, seem to be problems quite foreign to the mind of the typical Latin worker. He believes that, if he can be left alone in his little industry, and freed from exploitation, he, like the peasant, will be supreme, possessing both liberty and abundance. He will, therefore, tolerate willingly neither the interference of a centralized State nor favor a centralized syndicalism. Industry must be given into the hands of the workers, and, when he speaks of industry, he has in mind workshops, which, in the socialism of the Germans, the English, and the Americans, might be left for a long time to come in private hands.

In harmony with the above facts, we find that the strongest centers of syndicalism in France, Italy, and Spain are in those districts where the factory system is very backward. Where syndicalism and anarchism prevail most strongly, we find conditions of economic immaturity which strikingly resemble those of England in the time of Owen. In all these districts trade unionism is undeveloped. When it exists at all, it is more a feeling out for solidarity than the actual existence of solidarity. It is the first groping toward unity that so often brings riots and violence, because organization is absent and the feeling of power does not exist. Carl Legien, the leader of the great German unions, said at the international socialist congress at Stuttgart (1907): "As soon as the French have an actual trade-union organization, they will cease discussing blindly the general strike, direct action, and sabotage." [(14)] Vliegen, the Dutch leader, went even further when he declared at the previous congress, at Amsterdam (1904), that it is not the representatives of the strong organizations of England, Germany, and Denmark who wish the general strike; it is the representatives of France, Russia, and Holland, where the trade-union organization is feeble or does not exist. [(15)]