The weakness of the capitalists in the fight on behalf of private property may be explained in part by their want of allies in the other classes in the community. The Russian peasant, reared in the atmosphere of communal land ownership, was far from being a fanatical defender of private property. No Thiers could have rallied a Russian peasant army for the suppression of a communistic industrial wage-earning class by an appeal to their property instinct. To make matters worse for the capitalists, the peasant's strongest craving was for more land, all the land, without compensation! This the capitalists, being capitalists, were unable to grant. Yet it was the only sort of currency which the peasant would accept in payment for his political support. In November, 1917, when the Bolsheviki seized the government, one of their first acts was to satisfy the peasant's land hunger by turning over to his use all the land. The "proletariat" had then a free hand so far as the most numerous class in Russia was concerned.
Just as the capitalist class reached the threshold of the revolution psychologically below par, so the wage-earning class in developing the will to rule outran all expectations and beat the Marxian time-schedule. Among the important contributing factors was the unity of the industrial laboring class, a unity broken by no rifts between highly paid skilled groups and an inferior unskilled class, or between a well-organized labor aristocracy and an unorganized helot class. The economic and social oppression under the old régime had seen to it that no group of laborers should possess a stake in the existing order or desire to separate from the rest. Moreover, for several decades, and especially since the memorable days of the revolution of 1905, the laboring class has been filled by socialistic agitators and propagandists with ideas of the great historical role of the proletariat. The writer remembers how in 1905 even newspapers of the moderately liberal stamp used to speak of the "heroic proletariat marching in the van of Russia's progress." No wonder then that, when the revolution came, the industrial wage earners had developed such self-confidence as a class that they were tempted to disregard the dictum of their intellectual mentors that this was merely to be a bourgeois revolution—with the social revolution still remote. Instead they listened to the slogan "All power to the Soviets."
The idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" reached maturity in the course of the abortive revolution of 1905-1906. After a victory for the people in October, 1905, the bourgeoisie grew frightened over the aggressiveness of the wage-earning class and sought safety in an understanding with the autocracy. An order by the Soviet of Petrograd workmen in November, 1905, decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of champions of popular liberty against autocracy. If the bourgeoisie itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary socialists, why have such a democracy at all? Have we not seen the democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in Europe and America? Why run at all the risk of corruption of the post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists? Why first admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and effort in preventing them from coming to the top? Therefore, they declined parliamentarism with thanks and would accept nothing less than a government by the representative organ of the workers—the Soviets.
If we are right in laying the emphasis on the relative fighting will and fighting strength of the classes struggling for power rather than on the doctrines which they preach and the methods, fair or foul, which they practice, then the American end of the problem, too, appears in a new light. No longer is it in the main a matter of taking sides for or against the desirability of a Bolshevist rule or a dictatorship by the proletariat, but a matter of ascertaining the relative strength and probable behavior of the classes in a given society. It is as futile to "see red" in America because of Bolshevism in Russia as to yearn for Bolshevism's advent in the United States. Either view misses the all-important point that so far as social structure is concerned America is the antipodes of Russia, where the capitalists have shown little fighting spirit, where the tillers of the soil are only first awakening to a conscious desire for private property and are willing to forego their natural share in government for a gift of land, and where the industrial proletariat is the only class ready and unafraid to fight. Bolshevism is unthinkable in America, because, even if by some imaginable accident the government were overthrown and a labor dictatorship declared, it could never "stay put." No one who knows the American business class will even dream that it would under any circumstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities. A Bolshevist coup d'état in America would mean a civil war to the bitter end, and a war in which the numerous class of farmers would join the capitalists in the defense of the institution of private property.[110]
But it is not only because the preponderance of social power in the United States is so decisively with private property that America is proof against a social upheaval like the Russian one. Another and perhaps as important a guarantee of her social stability is found in her four million organized trade unionists. For, however unjustly they may feel to have been treated by the employers or the government; however slow they may find the realization of their ideals of collective bargaining in industry; their stakes in the existing order, both spiritual and material, are too big to reconcile them to revolution. The truth is that the revolutionary labor movement in America looms up much bigger than it actually is. Though in many strikes since the famous textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1911, the leadership was revolutionary, it does not follow that the rank and file was animated by the same purpose. Given an inarticulate mass of grievously exploited workers speaking many foreign tongues and despised alike by the politician, the policeman, and the native American labor organizer; given a group of energetic revolutionary agitators who make the cause of these workers their own and become their spokesmen and leaders; and a situation will clearly arise where thousands of workmen will be apparently marshalled under the flag of revolution while in reality it is the desire for a higher wage and not for a realization of the syndicalist program that reconciles them to starving their wives and children and to shedding their blood on picket duty. If they follow a Haywood or an Ettor, it is precisely because they have been ignored by a Golden or a Gompers.
Withal, then, trade unionism, despite an occasional revolutionary facet and despite a revolutionary clamor especially on its fringes, is a conservative social force. Trade unionism seems to have the same moderating effect upon society as a wide diffusion of private property. In fact the gains of trade unionism are to the worker on a par with private property to its owner. The owner regards his property as a protective dyke between himself and a ruthless biological struggle for existence; his property means liberty and opportunity to escape dictation by another man, an employer or "boss," or at least a chance to bide his time until a satisfactory alternative has presented itself for his choice. The French peasants in 1871 who flocked to the army of the government of Versailles to suppress the Commune of Paris (the first attempt in history of a proletarian dictatorship), did so because they felt that were the workingmen to triumph and abolish private property, they, the peasants, would lose a support in their daily struggle for life for the preservation of which it was worth endangering life itself. And having acquired relative protection in their private property, small though it might be, they were unwilling to permit something which were it to succeed would lose them their all.
Now with some exceptions every human being is a "protectionist," provided he does possess anything at all which protects him and which is therefore worth being protected by him in turn. The trade unionist, too, is just such a protectionist. When his trade union has had the time and opportunity to win for him decent wages and living conditions, a reasonable security of the job, and at least a partial voice in shop management, he will, on the relatively high and progressive level of material welfare which capitalism has called into being, be chary to raze the existing economic system to the ground on the chance of building up a better one in its place. A reshuffling of the cards, which a revolution means, might conceivably yield him a better card, but then again it might make the entire stack worthless by destroying the stakes for which the game is played. But the revolution might not even succeed in the first round; then the ensuing reaction would probably destroy the trade union and with it would go the chance of a recovery of the original ground, modest though that may have been. In practice, therefore, the trade union movements in nearly all nations[111] have served as brakes upon the respective national socialist movements; and, from the standpoint of society interested in its own preservation against catastrophic change, have played and are playing a role of society's policemen and watch-dogs over the more revolutionary groups in the wage-earning class. These are largely the unorganized and ill-favored groups rendered reckless because, having little to lose from a revolution, whatever the outcome might be, they fear none.
In America, too, there is a revolutionary class which, unlike the striking textile workers in 1911-1913, owes its origin neither to chance nor to neglect by trade union leaders. This is the movement of native American or Americanized workers in the outlying districts of the West or South—the typical I.W.W., the migratory workers, the industrial rebels, and the actors in many labor riots and lumber-field strikes. This type of worker has truly broken with America's spiritual past. He has become a revolutionist either because his personal character and habits unfit him for success under the exacting capitalistic system; or because, starting out with the ambitions and rosy expectations of the early pioneer, he found his hopes thwarted by a capitalistic preemptor of the bounty of nature, who dooms to a wage-earner's position all who came too late. In either case he is animated by a genuine passion for revolution, a passion which admits no compromise. Yet his numbers are too few to threaten the existing order.
In conclusion, American trade unionism, no matter whether the American Federation of Labor keeps its old leaders or replaces them by "progressives" or socialists, seems in a fair way to continue its conservative function—so long as no overpowering open-shop movement or "trustification" will break up the trade unions or render them sterile. The hope of American Bolshevism will, therefore, continue to rest with the will of employers to rule as autocrats.