Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

Never has the issue between capitalism and Socialism been more sharply defined than in Premier Briand's impulsively frank declaration after the strike (though it was later retracted): "I say emphatically, if the laws have not given the government the means of keeping the country master of its railways and the national defense, it would not have hesitated to take recourse to illegality."

This is almost the exact declaration of Ex-President Roosevelt in his Decoration Day speech in 1911, when he said that really revolutionary men dreaded and hated him because they knew that he wouldn't let the Constitution stand in the way of punishing them if they did wrong.

Milder but no less positive expressions of an intention to use illegal means to coerce labor, if it does not act as present authorities dictate, were to be heard from responsible sources both in England and America after the recent British railway strike. The non-Socialist press then came almost unanimously to the conclusion that an attempt must be made to take away the sole weapon by which labor is able to protect itself or advance its position as soon as "the public" is damaged by its use—which amounts to reducing wage earners to the status of children, soldiers, or other wards of the community. "If railroad and telegraph strikes are many and violent," said Collier's Weekly, "they will encourage government ownership without unionization."[274]

The Outlook stopped short of government ownership, but announced a similar principle: "The railways are public highways; they must be controlled by the nation for the public good; the operation of the railways must not be stopped because of disputes; and, as a corollary to this last law of necessity, the government must furnish an adequate and just method of settling railway disputes."[275] Every step in government control is to be accompanied by a step in the control of labor, and restriction of the power of labor unions. The right of employees to protect themselves by leaving their work in a body is to be taken away completely, while the right to discharge or punish is to remain intact in persons over whom the employees can have little or no control.

Governments are evidently ready to proceed to illegality for the sake of self-preservation—even from a perfectly legal attack, if it threatens to destroy them or to transfer the government into the hands of the non-capitalist classes. Of course a capitalist government can pass "laws," e.g. martial law, under which anything it chooses to do against its opponents becomes "legal" and anything effective its opponents do becomes illegal. In the present age of general enlightenment, however, this method does not even deceive Russian peasants. But the French government is now turning to this device. Briand explained away his sensational declaration above quoted, and then proposed a law by which striking on a railway becomes a crime and almost a felony. This met universal approval in the capitalistic press and universal denunciation in that of the Socialists and labor unions. The Boston Herald, for example, said: "The Executive must be armed with greater authority than he now possesses. No Premier must be forced to say, as M. Briand did recently, that, with or without law, national supremacy will be preserved in case it is challenged by allied workers for the State, as well as by other toilers." Here there is no effort to disguise the fact that the new legal form is the exact equivalent of the illegal force formerly proposed.

Now the peasants and the lower middle classes of France, as well as the working people (land and opportunities being more and more difficult to obtain), are becoming extremely radical. Though they do not send Socialist deputies to the Chamber, they send representatives who are very suspicious of arbitrary, undemocratic, and centralized authority. Only 215 members of the Chamber could be induced to approve of the government's conduct during the strike of 1910, while more than 200 abstained from voting on this point, and 166 voted in the negative. The proposed measures of repression were carried by a small majority, but it is not likely that they can be enforced many years without bringing about another and far more revolutionary crisis. Briand and his associates, Millerand and Viviani, were forced to resign, partly on account of their conduct in this strike, and it is possible that after another election or two the Chamber will no longer give its consent to this relegation of workingmen to the status of common soldiers. Only six months after the strike, Briand's successor, Monis, with the consent of the Chamber, was bringing governmental pressure to bear on the privately owned railways to force them to take back dismissed strikers. In the next ministry, that of Caillaux, the Minister of Labor, Augagneur, the former Socialist, pursued the same policy of pressing for the reinstatement of a large part of the discharged employees of the private railroads while insisting that the employees of government railroads could not be allowed to strike. And again, at the end of 1911, the government secured only 286 votes in favor of this policy, to 193 against it.[276]

France is by no means the only country where the question of strikes of government employees has become all-important. When the railways were nationalized in Italy there was considerable Socialist opposition on the ground that the employees were likely to lose a part of such rights as they had had when in private employment, and it turned out just as was feared. The position of the Italian Socialists on the subject is as interesting as that of the French. The Congress at Florence in 1908 resolved that "considering the fact that a strike of municipalized or nationalized services represents, not the struggle of the proletariat against a private capitalistic enterprise, but the conflict of a class against the collectivity, whence the difficulty of its success, the employees in public service ought to be advised not to proclaim a strike unless urged on by the most compelling motives and when every other means have failed;" but "taking it into consideration at the same time that in the present condition of society the working people in public service have no other means to guarantee the defense of their rights, and that in critical moments of history the suspension of public services is among the most efficacious arms of which the proletariat can avail itself to disorganize the defense of the government, any disposition to bring into legislation the principle of the abolition of the right to strike is dangerous" and "any attempt in that direction" must be defeated.

The gulf between those who consider the collective refusal of the organizations of government employees to work under conditions they do not accept, as being "treason" and "mutiny," and those who feel that such an organization is the very basis of industrial democracy of the future and the sole possible guarantee of liberty, is surely unbridgeable.

The clash between the classes on this question of livelihood and liberty is already momentous, but its full significance can only be realized when the Socialist aim is recalled. As employees of railroads, of governments, and of industries become Socialists, they will not only be ready to strike to raise their wages, or to protect the unions and the Socialist Party, or to prevent military reaction, but also—when they have the majority with them—to take possession of government.