Violence and the Labor Movement

by Robert Hunter

Although Marx was, as I think I have made clear, and still is, the guiding spirit of modern socialism, the huge structure of the present labor movement has not been erected by any great architect who saw it all in advance, nor has any great leader molded its varied and wonderful lines. It is the work of a multitude, who have quarreled among themselves at every stage of its building. They differed as to the purpose of the structure, as to the materials to be used, and, indeed, upon every detail, big and little, that has had to do with it. At times all building has been stopped in order that the different views might be harmonized or the quarrels fought to a finish. Again and again portions have been built only to be torn down and thrown aside. Some have seen more clearly than others the work to be done, and one, at least, of the architects must be recognized as a kind of prophet who, in the main, outlined the structure. But the architects were not the builders, and among the multitude engaged in that work there have been years of quarrels and decades of strife. The story of terrorism, as told, is that of a group who had no conception of the structure to be erected. They were a band of dissidents, without patience to build. They and their kind have never been absent from the labor movement, and, in fact, for nearly one hundred years a battle has raged in one form or another between those few of the workers who were urging, with passionate fire, what they called "action" and that multitude of others who day and night were laying stone upon stone.

No individual—in fact, nothing but a force as strong and compelling as a natural law—could have brought into existence such a vast solidarity as now exists in the world of labor. Like food and drink, the organization of labor satisfies an inherent necessity. The workers crave its protection, seek its guidance, and possess a sense of security only when supported by its solidarity. Only something as intuitively impelling as the desire for life could have called forth the labor and love and sacrifice that have been lavishly expended in the disheartening and incredibly tedious work of labor organization. The upbuilding of the labor movement has seemed at times like constructing a house of cards: often it was hardly begun before some ill wind cast it down. It has cost many of its creators exile, imprisonment, starvation, and death. With one mighty assault its opponents have often razed to the ground the work of years. Yet, as soon as the eyes of its destroyers were turned, a multitude of loving hands and broken hearts set to work to patch up its scattered fragments and build it anew. The labor movement is unconquerable.

Unlike many other aggregations, associations, and benevolent orders, unlike the Church, to which it is frequently compared, the labor movement is not a purely voluntary union. No doubt there is a camaraderie in that movement, and unquestionably the warmest spirit of fellowship often prevails, but the really effective cause for working-class unity is economic necessity. The workers have been driven together. The unions subsist not because of leaders and agitators, but because of the compelling economic interests of their members. They are efforts to allay the deadly strife among workers, as organizations of capital are efforts to allay the deadly strife among capitalists. The coöperative movement has grown into a vast commerce wholly because it served the self-interest of the workers. The trade unions have grown big in all countries because of the protection, they offer and the insurance they provide against low wages, long hours, and poverty. The socialist parties have grown great because they express the highest social aspirations of the workers and their antagonism toward the present régime. Moreover, they offer an opportunity to put forward, in the most authoritative places, the demands of the workers for political, social, and economic reform. The whole is a struggle for democracy, both political and industrial, that is by no means founded merely on whim or caprice. It has gradually become a religion, an imperative religion, of millions of workingmen and women. Chiefly because of their economic subjection, they are striving in the most heroic manner to make their voice heard in those places where the rules of the game of life are decided. Thus, every phase of the labor movement has arisen in response to actual material needs.

And, if the labor movement has arisen in response to actual material needs, it is now a very great and material actuality. The workingmen of the world are, as we have seen, uniting at a pace so rapid as to be almost unbelievable. There are to-day not only great national organizations of labor in nearly every country, but these national movements are bound closely together into one unified international power. The great world-wide movement of labor, which Marx and Engels prophesied would come, is now here. And, if they were living to-day, they could not but be astonished at the real and mighty manifestation of their early dreams. To be sure, Engels lived long enough to be jubilant over the massing of labor's forces, but Marx saw little of it, and even the German socialists, who started out so brilliantly, were at the time of his death fighting desperately for existence under the anti-socialist law. Indeed, in 1883, the year of his death, the labor movement was still torn by quarrels and dissensions over problems of tactics, and in America, France, and Austria the terrorists were more active than at any time in their history. It was still a question whether the German movement could survive, while in the other countries the socialists were still little more than sects. That was just thirty years ago, while to-day, as we have seen, over ten millions of workingmen, scattered throughout the entire world, fight every one of their battles on the lines laid down by Marx. The tactics and principles he outlined are now theirs. The unity of the workers he pleaded for is rapidly being achieved throughout the entire world, and everywhere these armies are marching toward the goal made clear by his life and labor. "Although I have seen him to-night," writes Engels to Liebknecht, March 14, 1883, "stretched out on his bed, the face rigid in death, I cannot grasp the thought that this genius should have ceased to fertilize with his powerful thoughts the proletarian movement of both worlds. Whatever we all are, we are through him; and whatever the movement of to-day is, it is through his theoretical and practical work; without him we should still be stuck in the mire of confusion." [(2)]

What was this mire? If we will cast our eyes back to the middle of last century we cannot but realize that the ideas of the world have undergone a complete revolution. When Marx began his work with the labor movement there was absolute ignorance among both masters and men concerning the nature of capitalism. It was a great and terrible enigma which no one understood. The working class itself was broken up into innumerable guerilla bands fighting hopelessly, aimlessly, with the most antiquated and ineffectual weapons. They were in misery; but why, they knew not. They left their work to riot for days and weeks, without aim and without purpose. They were bitter and sullen. They smashed machines and burned factories, chiefly because they were totally ignorant of the causes of their misery or of the nature of their real antagonist. Not seldom in those days there were meetings of hundreds of thousands of laborers, and not infrequently mysterious epidemics of fires and of machine-breaking occurred throughout all the factory districts. Again and again the soldiers were brought out to massacre the laborers. In all England—then the most advanced industrially—there were few who understood capitalism, and among masters or men there was hardly one who knew the real source of all the immense, intolerable economic evils.

The class struggle was there, and it was being fought more furiously and violently than ever before or since. The most striking rebels of the time were those that Marx called the "bourgeois democrats." They were forever preaching open and violent revolution. They were dreaming of the glorious day when, amid insurrection and riot, they should stand at the barricades, fighting the battle for freedom. In their little circles they "were laying plans for the overthrow of the world and intoxicating themselves day by day, evening by evening, with the hasheesh-drink of: 'To-morrow it will start;'" [(3)] Before and after the revolutionary period of '48 there were innumerable thousands of these fugitives, exiles, and men of action obsessed with the dream that a great revolutionary cataclysm was soon to occur which would lay in ruins the old society. That a crisis was impending everyone believed, including even Marx and Engels. In fact, for over twenty years, from 1847 to 1871, the "extemporizers of revolutions" fretfully awaited the supreme hour. Toward the end of the period appeared Bakounin and Nechayeff with their robber worship, conspiratory secret societies, and international network of revolutionists. Wherever capitalism made headway the workers grew more and more rebellious, but neither they nor those who sought to lead them, and often did, in fact, lead them, had much of any program beyond destruction. Bakounin was not far wrong, at the time, in thinking that he was "spreading among the masses ideas corresponding to the instincts of the masses," [(4)] when he advocated the destruction of the Government, the Church, the mills, the factories, and the palaces, to the end that "not a stone should be left upon a stone."

This was the mire of confusion that Engels speaks of. There was not one with any program at all adequate to meet the problem. The aim of the rebels went little beyond retaliation and destruction. What were the weapons employed by the warriors of this period? Street riots and barricades were those of the "bourgeois democrats"; strikes, machine-breaking, and incendiarism were those of the workers; and later the terrorists came with their robber worship and Propaganda of the Deed. In the midst of this veritable passion for destruction Marx and Engels found themselves. Here was a period when direct action was supreme. There was nothing else, and no one dreamed of anything else. The enemies of the existing order were employing exactly the same means and methods used by the upholders of that order. Among the workers, for instance, the only weapons used were general strikes, boycotts, and what is now called sabotage. These were wholly imitative and retaliative. It is clear that the strike is, after all, only an inverted lockout; and as early as 1833 a general strike was parried by a general lockout. The boycott is identical with the blacklist. The employer boycotts union leaders and union men. The employees boycott the non-union products of the employer; while sabotage, the most ancient weapon of labor, answers poor pay with poor work, and broken machines for broken lives. And, if the working class was striking back with the same weapons that were being used against it, so, too, were the "pan-destroyers," except that for the most part their weapons were incredibly inadequate and ridiculous. Sticks and stones and barricades were their method of combating rifles and trained armies. All this again is more evidence of the mire of confusion.

However, if the weapons of the rebellious were utterly futile and ineffectual, there were no others, for every move the workers or their friends made was considered lawless. All political and trades associations were against the law. Peaceable assembly was sedition. Strikes were treason. Picketing was intimidation; and the boycott was conspiracy in restraint of trade. Such associations as existed were forced to become secret societies, and, even if a working-class newspaper appeared, it was almost immediately suppressed. And, if all forms of trade-union activity were criminal, political activity was impossible where the vast majority of toilers had no votes. With methods mainly imitative, retaliative, and revengeful; with no program of what was wanted; in total ignorance of the causes of their misery; and with little appreciation that in unity there is strength, the workers and their friends, in the middle of the last century, were stuck in the mire—of ignorance, helplessness, and confusion.

This was the world in which Marx and Engels began their labor. Direct action was at its zenith, and the struggle of the classes was ferocious. Indeed, all Europe was soon to see barricades in every city, and thrones and governments tumbling into apparent ruin. Yet in the midst of all this wild confusion, and even touching elbows with the leaders of these revolutionary storms, Marx and Engels outlined in clear, simple, and powerful language the nature of capitalism—what it was, how it came into being, and what it was yet destined to become. They pointed out that it was not individual employers or individual statesmen or the Government or even kings and princes who were responsible for the evils of society, but that unemployment, misery, and oppression were due to an economic system, and that so long as capitalism existed the mass of humanity would be sunk in poverty. They called attention to the long evolutionary processes that had been necessary to change the entire world from a state of feudalism into a state of capitalism; and how it was not due to man's will-power that the great industrial revolution occurred, but to the growth of machines, of steam, and of electrical power; and that it was these that have made the modern world, with its intense and terrible contrasts of riches and of poverty. They also pointed out that little individual owners of property were giving way to joint-stock companies, and that these would in turn give way to even greater aggregations of capital. An economic law was driving the big capitalists to eat up the little capitalists. It was forcing them to take from the workers their hand tools and to drive them out of their home workshops; it was forcing them also to take from the small property owners their little properties and to appropriate the wealth of the world into their own hands. As a result of this economic process, "private property," they said, "is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population." [(5)] But they also pointed out that capitalism had within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, that it was creating a new class, made up of the overwhelming majority, that was destined in time to overthrow capitalism. "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers." [(6)] In the interest of society the nine-tenths would force the one-tenth to yield up its private property, that is to say, its "power to subjugate the labor of others." [(7)]

Taking their stand on this careful analysis of historic progress and of economic evolution, they viewed with contempt the older fighting methods of the revolutionists, and turned their vials of satire and wrath upon Herwegh, Willich, Schapper, Kinkel, Ledru-Rollin, Bakounin, and all kinds and species of revolution-makers. They deplored incendiarism, machine destruction, and all the purely retaliative acts of the laborers. They even ridiculed the general strike.[AI] And, while for thirty years they assailed anarchists, terrorists, and direct-actionists, they never lost an opportunity to impress upon the workers of Europe the only possible method of effectually combating capitalism. There must first be unity—world-wide, international unity—among all the forces of labor. And, secondly, all the energies of a united labor movement must be centered upon the all-important contest for control of political power. They fought incessantly with their pens to bring home the great truth that every class struggle is a political struggle; and, while they were working to emphasize that fact, they began in 1864 actually to organize the workers of Europe to fight that struggle. The first great practical work of the International was to get votes for workingmen. It was the chief thought and labor of Marx during the first years of that organization to win for the English workers the suffrage, while in Germany all his followers—including Lassalle as well as Bebel and Liebknecht—labored throughout the sixties to that end. Up to the present the main work of the socialist movement throughout the world has been to fight for, and its main achievement to obtain, the legal weapons essential for its battles.