Violence and the Labor Movement

by Robert Hunter

Still another factor forces the French trade unions to rely upon violence, and that is their poverty. The trade-unionists in the Latin countries dislike to pay dues, and the whole organized labor movement as a result lives constantly from hand to mouth. "The fundamental condition which determines the policy of direct action," says Dr. Louis Levine in his excellent monograph on "The Labor Movement in France," "is the poverty of French syndicalism. Except for the Fédération du Livre, only a very few federations pay a more or less regular strike benefit; the rest have barely means enough to provide for their administrative and organizing expenses and cannot collect any strike funds worth mentioning.... The French workingmen, therefore, are forced to fall back on other means during strikes. Quick action, intimidation, sabotage, are then suggested to them by their very situation and by their desire to win." [(16)] That this is an accurate analysis is, I think, proved by the fact that the biggest strikes and the most unruly are invariably to be found at the very beginning of the attempts to organize trade unions. That is certainly true of England, and in our own country the great strikes of the seventies were the birth-signs of trade unionism. In France, Italy, and Spain, where trade unionism is still in its infancy, we find that strikes are more unruly and violent than in other countries. It is a mistake to believe that riots, sabotage, and crime are the result of organization, or the product of a philosophy of action. They are the acts of the weak and the desperate; the product of a mob psychology that seems to be roused to action whenever and wherever the workers first begin to realize the faintest glimmering of solidarity. History clearly proves that turbulence in strikes tends to disappear as the workers develop organized strength. In most countries violence has been frankly recognized as a weakness, and tremendous efforts have been made by the workers themselves to render violence unnecessary by developing power through organization. But in France the very acts that result from weakness and despair have been greeted with enthusiasm by the anarchists and the effete intellectuals as the beginning of new and improved revolutionary methods.

Both, then, in their philosophy and in their methods, anarchism and syndicalism have much in common, but there also exist certain differences which cannot be overlooked. Anarchism is a doctrine of individualism; syndicalism is a doctrine of working-class action. Anarchism appeals only to the individual; syndicalism appeals also to a class. Furthermore, anarchism is a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while syndicalism is a product of an immature factory system. Marx and Engels frequently spoke of anarchism as a petty-bourgeois philosophy, but in the early syndicalism of Robert Owen they saw more than that, considering it as the forerunner of an actual working-class movement. When these differences have been stated, there is little more to be said, and, on the whole, Yvetot was justified in saying at the congress of Toulouse (1910): "I am reproached with confusing syndicalism and anarchism. It is not my fault if anarchism and syndicalism have the same ends in view. The former pursues the integral emancipation of the individual; the latter the integral emancipation of the workingman. I find the whole of syndicalism in anarchism." [(17)] When we leave the theories of syndicalism to study its methods, we find them identical with those of the anarchists. The general strike is, after all, exactly the same method that Bakounin was constantly advocating in the days of the old International. The only difference is this, that Bakounin sought the aid of "the people," while the syndicalists rely upon the working class. Furthermore, when one places the statement of Guérard on the general strike[Y] alongside of the statement of Kropotkin on the revolution,[Z] one can observe no important difference.

While it is true that some syndicalists believe that the general strike may be solely a peaceable abstention from work, most of them are convinced that such a strike would surely meet with defeat. As Buisson says: "If the general strike remains the revolution of folded arms, if it does not degenerate into a violent insurrection, one cannot see how a cessation of work of fifteen, thirty, or even sixty days could bring into the industrial régime and into the present social system changes great enough to determine their fall." [(18)] To be sure, the syndicalists do not lay so much emphasis on the abolition of government as do the anarchists, but their plan leads to nothing less than that. If "the capitalist class is to be locked out"—whatever that may mean—one must conclude that the workers intend in some manner without the use of public powers to gain control of the tools of production. In any case, they will be forced, in order to achieve any possible success, to take the factories, the mines, and the mills and to put the work of production into the hands of the masses. If the State interferes, as it undoubtedly will in the most vigorous manner, the strikers will be forced to fight the State. In other words, the general strike will necessarily become an insurrection, and the people without arms will be forced to carry on a civil war against the military powers of the Government.

If the general strike, therefore, is only insurrection in disguise, sabotage is but another name for the Propaganda of the Deed. Only, in this case, the deed is to be committed against the capitalist, while with the older anarchists a crowned head, a general, or a police official was the one to be destroyed. To-day property is to be assailed, machines broken and smashed, mines flooded, telegraph wires cut, and any other methods used that will render the tools of production unusable. This deed may be committed en masse, or it may be committed by an individual. It is when Pouget grows enthusiastic over sabotage that we find in him the same spirit that actuated Brousse and Kropotkin when they despaired of education and sought to arouse the people by committing dramatic acts of violence. In other words, the saboteur abandons mass action in favor of ineffective and futile assaults upon men or property.

This brief survey of the meaning of syndicalism, whence it came, and why, explains the antagonism that had to arise between it and socialism.[AA] Not only was it frankly intended to displace the socialist political parties of Europe, but every step it has taken was accompanied with an attack upon the doctrines and the methods of modern socialism. And, in fact, the syndicalists are most interesting when they leave their own theories and turn their guns upon the socialist parties of the present day. In reading the now extensive literature on syndicalism, one finds endless chapters devoted to pointing out the weaknesses and faults of political socialism. Like the Bakouninists, the chief strength of the revolutionary unionists lies in criticism rather than in any constructive thought or action of their own. The battle of to-day is, however, a very unequal one. In the International, two groups—comparatively alike in size—fought over certain theories that, up to that time, were not embodied in a movement. They quarreled over tactics that were yet untried and over theories that were then purely speculative. To-day the syndicalists face a foe that embraces millions of loyal adherents. At the international gatherings of trade-union officials, as well as at the immense international congresses of the socialist parties, the syndicalists find themselves in a hopeless minority.[AB] Socialism is no longer an unembodied project of Marx. It is a throbbing, moving, struggling force. It is in a daily fight with the evils of capitalism. It is at work in every strike, in every great agitation, in every parliament, in every council. It is a thing of incessant action, whose mistakes are many and whose failures stand out in relief. Those who have betrayed it can be pointed out. Those who have lost all revolutionary fervor and all notion of class can be held up as a tendency. Those who have fallen into the traps of the bureaucrats and have given way to the flattery or to the corruption of the bourgeoisie can be listed and put upon the index. Even working-class political action can be assailed as never before, because it now exists for the first time in history, and its every weakness is known. Moreover, there are the slowness of movement and the seemingly increasing tameness of the multitude. All these incidents in the growth of a vast movement—the rapidity of whose development has never been equaled in the history of the world—irritate beyond measure the impatient and ultra-revolutionary exponents of the new anarchism.

Naturally enough, the criticisms of the syndicalists are leveled chiefly against political action, parliamentarism, and Statism. It is Professor Arturo Labriola, the brilliant leader of the Italian syndicalists, who has voiced perhaps most concretely these strictures against socialism, although they abound in all syndicalist writings. According to Labriola, the socialist parties have abandoned Marx. They have left the field of the class struggle, foresworn revolution, and degenerated into weaklings and ineffectuals who dare openly neither to advocate "State socialism" nor to oppose it. In the last chapter of his "Karl Marx" Labriola traces some of the tendencies to State socialism. He observes that the State is gradually taking over all the great public utilities and that cities and towns are increasingly municipalizing public services. In the more liberal and democratic countries "the tendency to State property was greeted," he says, "as the beginning of the socialist transformation. To-day, in France, in Italy, and in Austria socialism is being confounded with Statism (l'étatisme).... The socialist party, almost everywhere, has become the party of State capitalism." It is "no more the representative of a movement which ranges itself against existing institutions, but rather of an evolution which is taking place now in the midst of present-day society, and by means of the State itself. The socialist party, by the very force of circumstances, is becoming a conservative party which is declaring for a transformation, the agent of which is no longer the proletariat itself, but the new economic organism which is the State.... Even the desire of the workingmen themselves to pass into the service of the State is eager and spontaneous. We have a proof of it in Italy with the railway workers, who, however, represent one of the best-informed and most advanced sections of the working class.

" ... Where the Marxian tradition has no stability, as in Italy, the socialist party refused to admit that the State was an exclusively capitalist organism and that it was necessary to challenge its action. And with this pro-State attitude of the socialist party all its ideas have unconsciously changed. The principles of State enterprise (order, discipline, hierarchy, subordination, maximum productivity, etc.) are the same as those of private enterprise. Wherever the socialist party openly takes its stand on the side of the State—contrary even to its intentions—it acquires an entirely capitalist viewpoint. Its embarrassed attitude in regard to the insubordination of the workers in private manufacture becomes each day more evident, and, if it were not afraid of losing its electoral support, it would oppose still more the spirit of revolt among the workers. It is thus that the socialist party—the conservative party of the future transformed State—is becoming the conservative party of the present social organization. But even where, as in Germany, the Marxian tradition still assumes the form of a creed to all outward appearance, the party is very far from keeping within the limits of pure Marxian theory. Its anti-State attitude is not one of inclination. It is imposed by the State itself, ... the adversary, through its military and feudal vanity, of every concession to working-class democracy." [(19)]

All this sounds most familiar, and I cannot resist quoting here our old friend Bakounin in order to show how much this criticism resembles that of the anarchists. If we turn to "Statism and Anarchy" we find that Bakounin concluded this work with the following words: "Upon the Pangermanic banner" (i. e., also upon the banner of German social democracy, and, consequently, upon the socialist banner of the whole civilized world) "is inscribed: The conservation and strengthening of the State at all costs; on the socialist-revolutionary banner" (read Bakouninist banner) "is inscribed in characters of blood, in letters of fire: the abolition of all States, the destruction of bourgeois civilization; free organization from the bottom to the top, by the help of free associations; the organization of the working populace (sic!) freed from all the trammels, the organization of the whole of emancipated humanity, the creation of a new human world."[AC] Thus frantically Bakounin exposed the antagonism between his philosophy and that of the Marxists. It would seem, therefore, that if Labriola knew his Marx, he would hardly undertake at this late date to save socialism from a tendency that Marx himself gave it. The State, it appears, is the same bugaboo to the syndicalists that it is to the anarchists. It is almost something personal, a kind of monster that, in all ages and times, must be oppressive. It cannot evolve or change its being. It cannot serve the working class as it has previously served feudalism, or as it now serves capitalism. It is an unchangeable thing, that, regardless of economic and social conditions, must remain eternally the enemy of the people.

Evidently, the syndicalist identifies the revolutionist with the anti-Statist—apparently forgetting that hatred of the State is often as strong among the bourgeoisie as among the workers. The determination to limit the power of the Government was not only a powerful factor in the French and American Revolutions, but since then the slaveholders of the Southern States in America, the factory owners of all countries, and the trusts have exhausted every means, fair and foul, to limit and to weaken the power of the State. What difference is there between the theory of laissez-faire and the antagonism of the anarchists and the syndicalists to every activity of the State? However, it is noteworthy that antagonism to the State disappears on the part of any group or class as soon as it becomes an agency for advancing their material well-being; they not only then forsake their anti-Statism, they even become the most ardent defenders of the State. Evidently, then, it is not the State that has to be overcome, but the interests that control the State.

It must be admitted that Labriola sketches accurately enough the prevailing tendency toward State ownership, but he misunderstands or willfully misinterprets, as Bakounin did before him, the attitude of the avowed socialist parties toward such evolution. When he declares that they confuse their socialism with Statism, he might equally well argue that socialists confuse their socialism with monopoly or with the aggregation of capital in the hands of the few. Because socialists recognize the inevitable evolution toward monopoly is no reason for believing that they advocate monopoly. Nowhere have the socialists ever advised the destruction of trusts, nor have they anywhere opposed the taking over of great industries by the State. They realize that, as monopoly is an inevitable outcome of capitalism, so State capitalism, more or less extended, is an inevitable result of monopoly. That the workers remain wage earners and are exploited in the same manner as before has been pointed out again and again by all the chief socialists. However, if socialists prefer monopoly to the chaos of competition and to the reactionary tendencies of small property, and if they lend themselves, as they do everywhere, to the promotion of the State ownership of monopoly, it is not because they confuse monopoly, whether private or public, with socialism. It is of little consequence whether the workers are exploited by the trusts or by the Government. As long as capitalism exists they will be exploited by the one or the other. If they themselves prefer to be exploited by the Government, as Labriola admits, and if that exploitation is less ruinous to the body and mind of the worker, the socialist who opposed State capitalism in favor of private capitalism would be nothing less than a reactionary.