The Proud Tower (80 page)

Industrial war did not slacken. Labour after 1905 listened increasingly to the Syndicalist teaching of direct action. Its source and influence was strongest in France, where Anarchists had long vigorously denounced the parliamentary method as a sham which diverted the labour movement from revolutionary aims to political issues and favored the leadership of intellectuals. In Syndicalist eyes the Socialist politicians, as members of a national parliament, became essentially part of the bourgeois world, taking on its codes and losing touch with the working class. Syndicalists insisted class war was economic, not political, and should be waged by strike, not debate. With the increasing infiltration of the Anarchists, the trade-union movement adopted revolutionary Syndicalism and direct action as its official doctrine at the CGT Congress of 1906. Direct action against employers consisted of the strike, the slowdown, boycott and sabotage; against the State it included propaganda, mass demonstration, resistance to militarism and to patriotism, a delusion fostered by the capitalists to perpetuate their power. Every gain by the workers was to be considered as strengthening them for the final battle and for the supreme last act of the class war—the general strike, the “revolution of folded arms” which, paralyzing the bourgeois world, would emancipate the working class and win control of the means of production.

In Italy where suppression of the labour movement by police and troops had long been brutal and the gulf of mutual hatred and fear between the classes was deep, the general strike was twice attempted under Syndicalist leadership, in 1904 and 1906, at a cost of savage strife and workers’ lives. In France the defeat of one strike after another during the years of Clemenceau’s Radical Government from 1906 to 1909 revealed the gap between Syndicalist preaching of the general strike and the actual power of the workers. Labour in France was still largely agricultural and a large share of industry was conducted in small non-union enterprises. CGT membership was not a major proportion of all industrial labour and, reflecting the old antagonism between Anarchists and Socialists, was more frequently at odds with the party than united in mutual support.

Employers fought back violently with dismissals and lockouts against CGT efforts to organize new trades and were frequently abetted by the use of troops, which Clemenceau claimed were necessary to prevent violence against non-strikers. In the strikes by miners of the Nord in 1906, by dockers at Nantes and by vineyard workers of the Midi in 1907, by construction workers in 1908, troops were dispatched by the Government in each case with a resulting total of 20 killed and 667 wounded. Strikes by postal workers and teachers were stamped out by threat of permanent dismissal on the ground that civil servants had no right to organize or strike against the government. CGT officials who had organized them were arrested on charge of incitement to rebellion. Against the stubborn resistance of employers a maximum limit of an eleven-hour day had been enacted in 1900, and a Sunday rest law and old-age pensions in 1906, but against the strike wave in the Clemenceau years, the hard hand of the Government behind the employer reflected Clemenceau’s unsentimental dictum, “France is founded on property, property, property.” The state’s intervention nourished anger and disillusion. The Radical Government’s recourse to violence, said Jaurès in 1909, and “its failure to reform society have produced a public lassitude, a muffled grumbling, an undercurrent of discontent.…” In the same year, a similar discontent with the Liberal Government in England was creating the same climate of restiveness.

In the United States the employers’ counter-offensive also gathered force, backed by court decisions which used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to outlaw picketing, boycott and strikes as restraint of trade. Like the hilltop signal fires of ancient times, Syndicalism sent its message across the Atlantic and it flared into existence in America with the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. Created by Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners in strange alliance with De Leon, the IWW was, by European standards, an impossible combination of Syndicalism and Socialism. It preached the doctrine of direct action, while Debs, its hero, campaigned as Socialist candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

American Socialism, like Russian, since it had no representatives in Congress and no role in government even at the municipal level, was protected from the temptations of collaboration. Debs by now had completely espoused the doctrine of class war to the end. Workers must be revolutionaries, not compromisers with the existing order. Their object was not merely to raise wages but to abolish the wage system. He saw Syndicalism as taking over the revolutionary spirit of original Socialism and as offering the means to achieve the promised goal through the trade-union methods in which he had grown up. In a letter to thirty trade-union leaders in December, 1904, he invited them to join in discussing “ways and means of uniting the working people of America on correct revolutionary principles.” At its opening convention in Chicago on June 27, 1905, attended by miners, lumbermen, railwaymen, brewery workers and other industrial unions and Socialist factions, the IWW declared itself to be “the Continental Congress of the working class” which would unite skilled and unskilled in one great industrial union to overthrow capitalism and establish a Socialist society. Declaring for the ultimate weapon of Syndicalism, its slogan was “One big Union and one big Strike.” According to Haywood—a one-eyed giant and “a bundle of primitive instincts”—the IWW would go down into the gutter to reach the “bums” and migratory workers and bring them up along with the whole mass of labour to a “decent plane of living.” Scorning collective bargaining, agreements and political effort, it would work through propaganda, boycott, sabotage and the strike. Government, politics, elections were the bunk; the country should be run by the unions.

The IWW’s rejection of political action set off a series of schisms and secessions which flew like woodchips from an ax. Debs was violently attacked by some Socialist colleagues for splitting the labour movement. De Leon broke away in 1908 and continued from his diminished outpost to fight for pristine principle. For Debs the goal was everything and any method which led to it, political as well as direct action, acceptable. Despite the Syndicalist principles of the IWW he ran again for President as the candidate of the Socialist party in 1908. In meetings across the country Haywood and others raised money in pennies and nickels to rent a locomotive and sleeping car to carry Debs on his campaign. Passing locomotive engineers tooted their whistles as the Red Special with red banners streaming from its roof and rear platform went by. Debs had a way of making people believe in the attainability of Socialism. Without brass bands or loud-speakers, his voice, smile and outstretched arms were enough. He “actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man,” said a hard-bitten organizer who confessed himself pained when anyone else called him Comrade. “But when Debs says Comrade, it’s all right. He means it.” Families in wagons with red flags stuck in the whip sockets came for miles across the prairies to greet the Red Special at railroad stops. Torchlight parades in the towns, mass meetings, children with bouquets of red roses, created an illusion in which Debs himself began to believe. Socialists, he wrote to a friend, are “thick as grasshoppers out here” and the farmers “are revolutionary to the core and ripe and ready for action.” The “plutes” would get a shock when the votes were counted. But the total vote proved disappointing: 400,000, no more than in 1904.

In 1910 on the wave of the general Reform movement in the United States, Victor Berger, the first Socialist to win a seat in Congress, was elected from Milwaukee together with a Socialist city attorney, Socialist comptroller, two Socialist judges and twenty-one Socialist aldermen out of thirty-five. In 1911 a Socialist mayor was elected in Schenectady and by 1912 the party had elected mayors in fifty-six municipalities. But these were victories of Revision and the successful candidates were intellectuals—lawyers, editors, ministers—not workingmen. The labour movement at both wings, IWW and AF of L, refused to enter politics. In 1912 when the major parties engaged in a three-cornered contest for the Presidency, Debs ran again. Again it seemed, as Victor Berger wrote in the Milwaukee
Leader
, that Socialism was the coming order and “we are speeding toward it with the accelerating velocity of a locomotive.” Touring New York’s Lower East Side, Debs stood on a truck which “slowly plowed its way through a roaring ocean of people as far as the eye could see all up and down dark tenement streets.” The vote was 900,000, double that of the time before, though only 6 per cent of the total. The IWW won its greatest victory that year in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where it organized a strike of textile workers against a pay cut. It fed and maintained an entire town of workers and their dependents for two months and won a wage increase. But the bitter and brutal defeat of the Paterson strike shortly afterwards began the decline of American Syndicalism.

In Germany Syndicalist doctrine of the general strike took little hold. Like other German institutions the unions were too orderly to be attracted by a measure which was the negation of all order and duty. The working class, whom Kuno Francke in 1905 lauded as so “well-behaved,” shared the attachment to authority and obedience which in Germany seemed overdeveloped, as if, without its protection, some old Teutonic savagery, some inner Hun, might break out. The German Socialists were realistic about the general strike. Bebel opposed its use for political purposes because, he said, it could only be organized under extraordinary conditions to the accompaniment of a revolutionary state of mind among the workers. Among his countrymen, as he was only too aware, this was missing. When the Radicals of the party at its Mannheim Congress in 1906 proposed a
Massenstreik
in case of war, Bebel rejected it as futile. In the event of war, he said, the military would take over law and order, resistance would be folly and chauvinist fever in any event would grip the masses. Bebel, at least, never fed on, or encouraged, illusions.

At Mannheim a crucial if quiet struggle for power took place with results decisive for German and, through it, for world Socialism. Kautsky offered a resolution intended to subordinate the trade unions to the party in matters of policy. Their task, as Kautsky defined it, was to defend and improve the lot of the worker until the final advent of Socialism. Since the task of the party was achievement of the long-term maximum goal, its decisions must predominate.

During the past decade membership in the German unions had increased from 250,000 to 2,500,000, with funds in proportion. Unlike the French, they were in close communion with the party and its chief source of votes. Sam Gompers on his tour of Europe in 1909 was impressed by the cash benefits the unions paid in strikes and lockouts, by their organization and discipline, and by the improved conditions and increased wages they had won. Day labourers earned three marks and skilled labour six marks a day, or about thirty-six shillings or eight or nine dollars a week. Mealtimes were regulated, fines and penalties posted on the bulletin board, the right to organize was recognized by the government except for servants and farm labour; child labour under thirteen was outlawed and between the ages of thirteen and fourteen was restricted to six hours a day. Gratified that such progress disproved the Marxist theory of “increasing misery,” Gompers was inspired to a paean of optimism by the status of the German worker, who appeared to him to live in an age of “the greatest production, the most wealth, the highest general intelligence and the best reasons for hope for his class that the history of the world has recorded.” Even if, in his anti-Marxist enthusiasm, Gompers overstated the case, the German worker was clearly acquiring a stake in the existing order. The effect was not conducive to revolutionary ardor in the unions. The fear that they were becoming too embedded in the existing order inspired Kautsky’s resolution to subordinate them to the political control of the party.

His motion was firmly defeated by the majority at Mannheim for fear of offending the trade unions. It was all very well to let Kautsky formulate theory, but when it came to practical matters the General Council of the party was nothing if not realistic. Defeat of the resolution meant, in effect, a victory for the trade unions. Since Kautsky’s analysis had been correct, it also meant, in the country of dominant Socialist influence, preference for the existing order over the final goal. Bernstein’s onetime heresy “I care nothing for the final goal …” was now canonical. After Mannheim, day-to-day activity became increasingly practical and revisionist, even while party declarations at Congresses and ceremonial occasions continued to reiterate the Marxist formulas.

Nationalism came in with the rising Revisionist tide. In the Reichstag on April 25, 1907, shortly before the opening of the Hague Conference, a Socialist deputy, Gustav Noske, made the trend explicit in a speech which caused a sensation. It was a “bourgeois illusion,” he announced, to suppose that all Socialists believed in disarmament. While they looked forward to peace in the future, international economic conflicts at present were too strong to permit disarming. Socialists would resist just as vigorously as the gentlemen on the right any attempt by another nation to press Germany to the wall. “We have always demanded an armed nation,” he said to the astonished gasps of his colleagues and the equally astonished delight and applause of the Right. Indignantly repudiated by Kautsky, who with considerable courage said that in the event of war, German Social-Democrats would regard themselves as proletarians first and Germans second, Noske nevertheless found many followers.

In Germany as in England the topic of coming conflict between the two countries was fashionable, fomented by the Navy League’s slogans, “The Coming War!” “England the Foe!” “England’s Plan to Fall on Us in 1911!” and the Pan-German accompaniment, “To Germany belongs the world!” In every country as the air thickened with talk of war, the instinct of patriotism swelled. Older, deeper, more instinctive than any class solidarity, it was not something easily eradicated on the say-so of the
Communist Manifesto
. Unhappily for world brotherhood, the worker felt he had a fatherland like anybody else.