Violence and the Labor Movement

by Robert Hunter

For the above reason, chiefly, the syndicalists are on safe ground when they declare that parliaments are corrupt. Corruption is a product of the struggle of the classes. To obtain special privilege, class laws, and immunity from punishment, the "big interests" bribe and corrupt parliaments. However, corruption does not stop there. The trade unions themselves suffer. Labor leaders are bought just as labor representatives are bought. Insurrection itself is often controlled and rendered abortive by corruption. Numberless violent uprisings have been betrayed by those who fomented them. The words of Fruneau at Basel in 1869 are memorable. "Bakounin has declared," he said, "that it is necessary to await the Revolution. Ah, well, the Revolution! Away with it! Not that I fear the barricades, but, when one is a Frenchman and has seen the blood of the bravest of the French running in the streets in order to elevate to power the ambitious who, a few months later, sent us to Cayenne, one suspects the same snares, because the Revolution, in view of the ignorance of the proletarians, would take place only at the profit of our adversaries." [(35)] There is no way to escape the corrupting power of capitalism. It has its representatives in every movement that promises to be hostile. It has its spies in the labor unions, its agents provocateurs in insurrections; and its money can always find hands to accept it. One does not escape corruption by abandoning Parliament. And Bordat, the anarchist, was the slave of a mania when he declared: "To send workingmen to a parliament is to act like a mother who would take her daughter to a brothel." [(36)] Parliaments are perhaps more corrupt than trade unions, but that is simply because they have greater power. To no small degree bribery and campaign funds are the tribute that capitalism pays to the power of the State.

The consistent opposition of the syndicalists to the State is leading them desperately far, and we see them developing, as the anarchists did before them, a contempt even for democracy. The literature of syndicalism teems with attacks on democracy. "Syndicalism and Democracy," says Émile Pouget, "are the two opposite poles, which exclude and neutralize each other.... Democracy is a social superfluity, a parasitic and external excrescence, while syndicalism is the logical manifestation of a growth of life, it is a rational cohesion of human beings, and that is why, instead of restraining their individuality, it prolongs and develops it." [(37)] Democracy is, in the view of Sorel, the régime par excellence, in which men are governed "by the magical power of high-sounding words rather than by ideas; by formulas rather than by reasons; by dogmas, the origin of which nobody cares to find out, rather than by doctrines based on observation." [(38)] Lagardelle declares that syndicalism is post-democratic. "Democracy corresponds to a definite historical movement," he says, "which has come to an end. Syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement." [(39)] These are but three out of a number of criticisms of democracy that might be quoted. Although natural enough as a consequence of syndicalist antagonism to the State, these ideas are nevertheless fatal when applied to the actual conduct of a working-class movement. It means that the minority believes that it can drive the majority. We remember that Guérard suggested, in his advocacy of the general strike, that, if the railroad workers struck, many other trades "would be compelled to quit work." "A daring revolutionary minority conscious of its aim can carry away with it the majority." [(40)] Pouget confesses: "The syndicalist has a contempt for the vulgar idea of democracy—the inert, unconscious mass is not to be taken into account when the minority wishes to act so as to benefit it...." [(41)] He refers in another place to the majority, who "may be considered as human zeros. Thus appears the enormous difference in method," concludes Pouget, "which distinguishes syndicalism and democracy: the latter, by the mechanism of universal suffrage, gives direction to the unconscious ... and stifles the minorities who bear within them the hopes of the future." [(42)]

This is anarchism all over again, from Proudhon to Goldman. [(43)] But, while the Bakouninists were forced, as a result of these views, to abandon organized effort, the newest anarchists have attempted to incorporate these ideas into the very constitution of the French Confederation of Labor. And at present they are, in fact, a little clique that rides on the backs of the organized workers, and the majority cannot throw them off so long as a score of members have the same voting power in the Confederation as that of a trade union with ten thousand members. All this must, of course, have very serious consequences. Opposition to majority rule has always been a cardinal principle of the anarchists. It is also a fundamental principle of every American political machine. To defeat democracy is obviously the chief purpose of a Tammany Hall. But, when this idea is actually advocated as an ideal of working-class organization, when it is made to stand as a policy and practice of a trade union, it can only result in suspicion, disruption, and, eventually, in complete ruin. It appears that the militant syndicalist, like the anarchist, realizes that he cannot expect the aid of the people. He turns, then, to the minority, the fighting inner circle, as the sole hope.

It is inevitable, therefore, that syndicalism and socialism should stand at opposite poles. They are exactly as far apart as anarchism and socialism. And, if we turn to the question of methods, we find an antagonism almost equally great. How are the workers to obtain possession of industry? On this point, as well as upon their conception of socialism, the syndicalists are not advanced beyond Owenism. "One question, and that the most immediately important of all," say the Webbs, speaking of Owen's projects, "was never seriously faced: How was the transfer of the industries from the capitalists to the unions to be effected in the teeth of a hostile and well-armed government? The answer must have been that the overwhelming numbers of 'the trades union' would render conflict impossible. At all events, Owen, like the early Christians, habitually spoke as if the day of judgment of the existing order of society was at hand. The next six months, in his view, were always going to see the 'new moral world' really established. The change from the capitalist system to a complete organization of industry under voluntary associations of producers was to 'come suddenly upon society like a thief in the night.'... It is impossible not to regret that the first introduction of the English Trade Unionist to Socialism should have been effected by a foredoomed scheme which violated every economic principle of collectivism, and left the indispensable political preliminaries to pure chance." [(44)] Little need be added to what the Webbs have said on the utopian features of syndicalism or even upon the haphazard method adopted to achieve them. "No politics in the unions" follows logically enough from an avowed antagonism to the State. If one starts with the assumption that nothing can be done through the State—as Owen, Bakounin, and the syndicalists have done—one is, of course, led irretrievably to oppose parliamentary and other political methods of action.

When the syndicalists throw over democracy and foreswear political action, they are fatally driven to the point where they must abandon the working class. In the meantime, they are sadly misleading it. It is when we touch this phase of the syndicalist movement that we begin to discover real bitterness. Here direct action stands in opposition to political action. The workers must choose the one method or the other. The old clash appears again in all its tempestuous hate. Jules Guesde was early one of the adherents of Bakounin, but in all his later life he has been pitiless in his warfare on the anarchists. As soon, therefore, as the direct-actionists began again to exercise an influence, Guesde entered the field of battle. I happened to be at Limoges in 1906 to hear Guesde speak these memorable words at the French Socialist Congress: "Political action is necessarily revolutionary. It does not address itself to the employer, but to the State, while industrial action addresses itself to the individual employer or to associations of employers. Industrial action does not attack the employer as an institution, because the employer is the effect, the result of capitalist property. As soon as capitalist property will have disappeared, the employer will disappear, and not before. It is in the socialist party—because it is a political party—that one fights against the employer class, and that is why the socialist party is truly an economic party, tending to transform social and political economy. At the present moment words have their importance. And I should like to urge the comrades strongly never to allow it to be believed that trade-union action is economic action. No; this latter action is taken only by the political organization of the working class. It is the party of the working class which leads it—that is to say, the socialist party—because property is a social institution which cannot be transformed except by the exploited class making use of political power for this purpose....

"I realize," he continued, "that the direct-actionists attempt to identify political action with parliamentary action. No; electoral action as well as parliamentary action may be forms; pieces of political action. They are not political action as a whole, which is the effort to seize public powers—the Government. Political action is the people of Paris taking possession of the Hôtel de Ville in 1871. It is the Parisian workers marching upon the National Assembly in 1848.... To those who go about claiming that political action, as extolled by the party, reduces itself to the production of public officials, you will oppose a flat denial. Political action is, moreover, not the production of laws. It is the grasping by the working class of the manufactory of laws; it is the political expropriation of the employer class, which alone permits its economic expropriation.... I wish that someone would explain to me how the breaking of street lights, the disemboweling of soldiers, the burning of factories, can constitute a means of transforming the ownership of property.... Supposing that the strikers were masters of the streets and should seize the factories, would not the factories still remain private property? Instead of being the property of a few employers or stockholders, they would become the property of the 500 or the 5,000 workingmen who had taken them, and that is all. The owners of the property will have changed; the system of ownership will have remained the same. And ought we not to consider it necessary to say that to the workers over and over again? Ought we to allow them to take a path that leads nowhere?... No; the socialists could not, without crime, lend themselves to such trickery. It is our imperative duty to bring back the workers to reality, to remind them always that one can only be revolutionary if one attacks the government and the State." [(45)] "Trade-union action moves within the circle of capitalism without breaking through it, and that is necessarily reformist, in the good sense of the word. In order to ameliorate the conditions of the victims of capitalist society, it does not touch the system. All the revolutionary wrangling can avail nothing against this fact. Even when a strike is triumphant, the day after the strike the wage earners remain wage earners and capitalist exploitation continues. It is a necessity, a fatality, which trade-union action suffers." [(46)]

Any comment of mine would, I think, only serve to mar this masterly logic of Guesde's. There is nothing perhaps in socialist literature which so ably sustains the traditional position of the socialist movement. The battles in France over this question have been bitterly fought for over half a century. The most brilliant of minds have been engaged in the struggle. Proudhon, Bakounin, Briand, Sorel, Lagardelle, Berth, Hervé, are men of undoubted ability. Opposed to them we find the Marxists, led in these latter years by Guesde and Jaurès. And while direct action has always been vigorously supported in France both by the intellectuals and by the masses, it is the policy of Guesde and Jaurès which has made headway. At the time when the general strike was looked upon as a revolutionary panacea, and the French working class seemed on the point of risking everything in one throw of the dice, Jaurès uttered a solemn warning: "Toward this abyss ... the proletariat is feeling itself more and more drawn, at the risk not only of ruining itself should it fall over, but of dragging down with it for years to come either the wealth or the security of the national life." [(47)] "If the proletarians take possession of the mine and the factory, it will be a perfectly fictitious ownership. They will be embracing a corpse, for the mines and factories will be no better than dead bodies while economic circulation is suspended and production is stopped. So long as a class does not own and govern the whole social machine, it can seize a few factories and yards, if it wants to, but it really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hand a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of transportation." [(48)] "The working class would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair for a method of revolution." [(49)]

The struggle, therefore, between the syndicalists and the socialists is, as we see, the same clash over methods that occurred in the seventies and eighties between the anarchists and the socialists. In abandoning democracy, in denying the efficacy of political action, and in resorting to methods which can only end in self-destruction, the syndicalist becomes the logical descendant of the anarchist. He is at this moment undergoing an evolution which appears to be leading him into the same cul-de-sac that thwarted his forefather. His path is blocked by the futility of his own weapons. He is fatally driven, as Plechanoff said, either to serve the bourgeois politicians or to resort to the tactics of Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, and Most. The latter is the more likely, since the masses refuse to be drawn into the general strike as they formerly declined to participate in artificial uprisings.[AE] The daring conscious minority more and more despair, and they turn to the only other weapon in their arsenal, that of sabotage. There is a kind of fatality which overtakes the revolutionist who insists upon an immediate, universal, and violent revolution. He must first despair of the majority. He then loses confidence even in the enlightened minority. And, in the end, like the Bakouninist, he is driven to individual acts of despair. What will doubtless happen at no distant date in France and Italy will be a repetition of the congress at The Hague. When the trade-union movement actually develops into a powerful organization, it will be forced to throw off this incubus of the new anarchism. It is already thought that a majority of the French trade unionists oppose the anarchist tendencies of the clique in control, and certainly a number of the largest and most influential unions frankly class themselves as reformist syndicalists, in order to distinguish themselves from the revolutionary syndicalists. What will come of this division time only can tell.

In any case, it is becoming clear even to the French unionists that direct action is not and cannot be, as Guesde has pointed out, revolutionary action. It cannot transform our social system. It is destined to failure just as insurrection as a policy was destined to failure. Rittinghausen said at Basel in 1869: "Revolution, as a matter of fact, accomplishes nothing. If you are not able to formulate, after the revolution, by legislation, your legitimate demands, the revolution will perish miserably." [(50)] This was true in 1848, in 1871, and even in the great French Revolution itself. Nothing would have seemed easier at the time of the French Revolution than for the peasants to have directly possessed themselves of the land. They were using it. Their houses were planted in the midst of it. Their landlords in many cases had fled. Yet Kropotkin, in his story of "The Great French Revolution," relates that the redistribution of land awaited the action of Parliament. To be sure, some of the peasants had taken the land, but they were not at all sure that it might not again be taken from them by some superior force. Their rights were not defined, and there was such chaos in the entire situation that, in the end, the whole question had to be left to Parliament. It was only after the action of the Convention, June 11, 1793, that the rights of ownership were defined. It was only then, as Kropotkin says, that "everyone had a right to the land. It was a complete revolution." [(51)] That the greatest of living anarchists should be forced to pay this tribute to the action of Parliament is in itself an assurance. For masses in the time of revolution to grab whatever they desire is, after all, to constitute what Jaurès calls a fictitious ownership. Some legality is needed to establish possession and a sense of security, and, up to the present, only the political institutions of society have been able to do that. For this precise reason every social struggle and class struggle of the past has been a political struggle.

There remains but one other fundamental question, which must be briefly examined. The syndicalists do not go back to Owen as the founder of their philosophy. They constantly reiterate the claim that they alone to-day are Marxists and that it is given to them to keep "pure and undefiled" the theories of that giant mind. They base their claim on the ground of Marx's economic interpretation of history and especially upon his oft-repeated doctrine that upon the economic structure of society rises the juridical and political superstructure. They maintain that the political institutions are merely the reflex of economic conditions. Alter the economic basis of society, and the political structure must adjust itself to the new conditions. As a result of this truly Marxian reasoning, they assert that the revolutionary movement must pursue solely economic aims and disregard totally the existing and, to their minds, superfluous political relations. They accuse the socialists of a contradiction. Claiming to be Marxists and basing their program upon the economic interpretation of history, the socialists waste their energies in trying to modify the results instead of obliterating the causes. Political institutions are parasitical. Why, therefore, ignore economic foundations and waste effort remodeling the parasitical superstructure? There is a contradiction here, but not on the part of the socialists. Proudhon was entirely consistent when he asked: "Can we not administer our goods, keep our accounts, arrange our differences, look after our common interests?" [(52)] And, moreover, he was consistent when he declared: "I want you to make the very institutions which I charge you to abolish, ... so that the new society shall appear as the spontaneous, natural, and necessary development of the old." [(53)] If that were once done the dissolution of government would follow, as he says, in a way about which one can at present make only guesses. But Proudhon urged his followers to establish coöperative banks, coöperative industries, and a variety of voluntary industrial enterprises, in order eventually to possess themselves of the means of production. If the working class, through its own coöperative efforts, could once acquire the ownership of industry, if they could thus expropriate the present owners and gradually come into the ownership of all natural resources and all means of production—in a word, of all social capital—they would not need to bother themselves with the State. If, in possessing themselves thus of all economic power, they were also to neglect the State, its machinery would, of course, tumble into uselessness and eventually disappear. As the great capitalists to-day make laws through the stock exchange, through their chambers of commerce, through their pools and combinations, so the working class could do likewise if they were in possession of industry. But the working class to-day has no real economic power. It has no participation in the ownership of industry. It is claimed that it might withdraw its labor power and in this manner break down the entire economic system. It is urged that labor alone is absolutely necessary to production and that if, in a great general strike, it should cease production, the whole of society would be forced to capitulate. And in theory this seems unassailable, but actually it has no force whatever. In the first place, this economic power does not exist unless the workers are organized and are practically unanimous in their action. Furthermore, the economic position of the workers is one of utter helplessness at the time of a universal strike, in that they cannot feed themselves. As they are the nearest of all classes to starvation, they will be the first to suffer by a stoppage of work. There is still another vital weakness in this so-called economic theory. The battles that result from a general strike will not be on the industrial field. They will be battles between the armed agents of the State and unarmed masses of hungry men. Whatever economic power the workers are said to possess would, in that case, avail them little, for the results of their struggles would depend upon the military power which they would be able to manifest. The individual worker has no economic power, nor has the minority, and it may even be questioned if the withdrawal of all the organized workers could bring society to its knees. Multitudes of the small propertied classes, of farmers, of police, of militiamen, and of others would immediately rush to the defense of society in the time of such peril. It is only the working class theoretically conceived of as a conscious unit and as practically unanimous in its revolutionary aims, in its methods, and in its revolt which can be considered as the ultimate economic power of modern society. The day of such a conscious and enlightened solidarity is, however, so far distant that the syndicalism which is based upon it falls of itself into a fantastic dream.