The new unionism

Front matter

Glass _^__ .

Book__:lV fib

FIFTH PRINTING

Preface To Second Edition

This preface contains a record of the noteworthy events which have occurred since the publication of this book in June, 1913. The text remains identical with that of the first edition.

The first International Syndicalist Congress was held in London from September 27 until October 2, 1913. Delegates had been sent by Syndicalist organizations in Germany, Holland, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Norway and Sweden.

English Syndicalists have been extremely active and committees are at work in almost every industry amalgamating the various craft unions into industrial unions. The protracted strike of the transport workers in Dublin conducted by Jim Larkin was finally lost when the English labor leaders denied Larkin's request to call a sympathetic strike. The men went back to work but refused to sign agreements.

Tom Mann, when in this country, revealed to me the fact until then kept secret that the Open Letter to British Soldiers for which he served a term in jail had been written by Fred Bowers of Liverpool.

A new Syndicalist paper, Solidarity, is being published in London by Jack I. Wills. It is edited by Gaylord Wilshire and Norman Young.

The French C. G. T. scored a victory when eighteen of its leaders arrested early last summer for antimilitarist propaganda and kept 145 days without trial were found not guilty by the Chumbre Correctionelle. The government was forced to abandon

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

plans for increased armaments because of opposition in labor circles to the flotation of a war loan.

The Italian Syndicalists, at their Congress held in Milan in December, 1913, reaffirmed their decision to remain independent of the conservative C. G. L.

Russian workers resorted to " Italian " direct action methods and sabotage in several strikes.

Intellectuals in many countries are swelling the ranks of Syndicalist organizations. A movement is on foot among Scottish teachers to organize an industrial union of teachers. I. W. W. charters have been issued to actors' organizations in several American cities.

I acknowledge my indebtedness to Messrs. Guy Bowman, London ; Christian Cornelissen, Paris ; Justus Ebert, Brooklyn; Joseph Ettor, New York; Arturo Giovanni tti, New York; Sydney Greenbie, New York; William D. Haywood, Denver; Prof. Felix Le Dantec, University of Paris; Tom Mann, Manchester; Emile Pataud, Paris; Emile Pouget, Paris ; Odon Por, Milan ; George G. Reeve, Sydney, Australia; Vincent St. John, Chicago; Dr. E. S. Slosson, New York; Walker C. Smith, Spokane; William E. Trautman, Pittsburgh; B. H. Williams, New Castle ; Jack I. Wills, London, and Gaylord Wilshire, London, who either passed upon such of these chapters as appeared in the New York Sun, the New York Tribune, The Independent, The International, The Industrial Worker, Solidarity, etc. or revised the proof sheets or gave me the benefit of their own observations in this and other countries.

Andre TiaDOisr.

New York, February 1 2 1914 t

Chapter I Page

Thb New Unionism: A Definition. — What it is called in the various countries. — New Unionism versus Anarchism; Edouard Berth, F. Van Eeden, W. T. Trautman on anarchism. — New Unionism versus trade unionism; B. H. Walker on craft organization ; W. D. Haywood on the A. F. of L. ; H. Lagardelle's views; rivalry among English craft unions; E. V. Debs on " union scabs " ; the Owens machine versus the glassblowers union. — The unskilled laborer; hobo labor and the ballot. — Socialism hailed by the capitalist press as a conservative force. — Definition of the New Unionism. — Is industrialism different from syndicalism? — The great change. . . 1

Chapter II

Direct Action: I. The Strike. — Pouget and Vandervelde on Direct Action. — The anti-injunction bill. — The Dreyfus case and the Lawrence case. — What a strike means to the New Unionist. — Folded arms strikes. — Sympathy strikes. — Irritation strikes. — Bumper strikes. — How long should a strike last? — Yvetot on strike funds. — When is a strike successful? The general strike. — Anti-militarism. — The Malthusian strike 24

Chapter III

Direct Action : II, Sabotage. — The meaning of the word. — Balzac's account of the Lyons weaver strike. — The French telegraphists' " mastic." — The Glasgow dockers and Ca Canny methods. — The Toulouse congress and Pouget's motion. — The congress appoints a committee on sabotage. — Active sabotage ; described in the Bulletin of the Montpellier Labor Exchange; the French barbers' " badigeonnage " ; Haywood's observations ; La Voix du Peuple on crippling the machinery before a walk out. — Sabotage of telegraph lines.* — Open

Contents

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mouth sabotage; cooks, subway employees, grocery, drugstore and bank clerks muckrake their employers.

— Obstructionism; its origin; as applied by Italian railroaders. — The ethics of sabotage 37

Chapter IV

The New Unionism and the Intellectuals. — Intellectuals managing the world's affairs. — An antiparliamentary deputy. — Radical lawyers and their fees. — The French International tried to exclude intellectuals. — Sorel, Edouard Berth and Leone on intellectuals.— The art of to-morrow. — Pouget and Pataud on art in the syndicalist commonwealth. — Radical art and its vagaries 56

Chapter V

The New Unionism in France: Revolutionary Syndi* CALISM. — Syndicalist tendencies and the French International.— The Commune. — The law of 1884. — The first Labor Exchange. — Aristide Briand, a partisan of the general strike. — Fernand Pelloutier and the anarchists. — The first C. G. T. — The second C. G. T. — Parties within the C. G. T. — Its organization; the two Federations and their work; the National Syndicates; growing spirit of industrialism. — The resources of the C. G. T. — La Voix du Peuple. — The writers' syndicate. — Government employees join the C. G. T. — The teachers' fight for the right to affiliate with the C. G. T.— The Soldier's Penny fund.— The C. G. T. and the socialist party. — The leaders: Pouget, Griffuehles, Yvetot, Luquet, Pataud, etc. — The management of the syndicalist commonwealth of the future 67

Chapter VI

The New Unionism in the United States : Industrialism. — Pioneer industrialist organizations; the National Labor Union; the Knights of Labor; The International Working People's Association; The International Workingmen's Association; the American Railway Union; the Western Federation of Miners.

— The Chicago conference. — The first I. W. W. preamble. Internal dissensions. — The second preamble. — The I. W. W., its history and methods. — The strikes of the I. W. W. — Its leaders St. John, Hay*

CONTENTS

PAGE wood, Ettor, Giovannitti, Trautman, Elizabeth Flynn. — The industrialist idea and the A. F. of L. — The Chicago newspaper strike and its consequences. — The new policy of the A. F. of L.; organizing unskilled workers. — The New Unionism and the I. W. W.; The Haywood case 92

Chapter VII

The New Unionism in England: Syndicalism. The chartist movement. — The labor unrest of 1910. — The Ben Tillett resolution. — Tom Mann's activity; his pamphlets; Tom Mann on parliamentary action. — The " open letter to British Soldiers." — The call for amalgamation. — Railroaders now united in one big union with 200,000 members. — The socialist party disapproves of syndicalism 124

Chapter VIII

The New Unionism in Italy: Syndicalism. The revolt of the Sicilian peasants. — The year 1900. — The Central Secretariat of Resistance. — The organization of the C. G. L. — The conservative policy of the C. G. L. ; its attitude to strikers. — The cooperatives and their plight; the glassblowers and their financial difficulties. — The Italian Syndical Union. — Labriola and Leone on Italian syndicalism 148

Chapter IX

The New Unionism in Germany: Localism. The trade union congress of 1900. — The independent congress of 1907. — The Freie Vereinigung; its press. — The aims of the localists. — Localists expelled from the socialist party 160

Chapter X

The New Unionism in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. — Tom Mann and Dora Montefiore on "labor governments." — Workers jailed for striking and for refusing to serve under the flag. — The growth of the industrialist idea 165

Chapter XI

The New Unionism in other Countries. — Argentina; Austria; Chile; British Columbia; Holland; Japan; Scandinavia; Switzerland. . . . 173

CONTENTS

PAGE

Chapter XII

International Relations. — The C. G. T. and the International Secretariate. — Le Bulletin International, . 181

Chapter XIII

The Influence of the New Unionism on Modern Thought. — Cornelissen's warning. — The Bergson case. — Paulhan, Chide, Le Roy. — Is Sorel a syndicalist? Sorel's lack of understanding of the C. G. T.'s spirit; Sorel's conservatism ; his theory of myths ; his " apology for violence " ; his puritanical views. — Felix Le Dan tec and his theory of rights; cynicism and revolution; parliaments and majorities; the unreasonable compensation of merit. .«••«•••• 186

Chapter I The New Unionism: A Definition

New Unionism. At the present day the New Unionism, that is labor's endeavor to free itself from the existing forms of organization and improve upon them, goes by a different name in almost every country. In the United States, Industrialism, in England, Syndicalism, in France, Revolutionary Syndicalism, in Germany, Localism or Anarcho- Socialism. Robert Rives La Monte even attempted to call it New Socialism.

Before attempting to tell what it is, we consider it imperative to tell what it is not. It is neither anarchism, nor trade unionism, nor reformism, nor political socialism, nor Marxian socialism.

Radical papers and pamphlets are fond of displaying the Marxian motto : " The emancipation of the workers must be accomplished by the workingmen themselves." Thus far, however, the worker has always been prone to believe that someone else was going to emancipate him and could emancipate him quicker than he himself could. Certain theorists hold out a millennium to the workers on one apparently simple and fair condition : that the workers give the theorists a formal warrant to go forth and conquer it in their behalf.

Other theorists also hold out a millennium to the workers but without pointing out any practical means to bring about the great change : this is why anarchism has never appealed to more than a handful of intellectuals with bucolic tastes. It has no modern solution to offer for any of to-day's problems. The criticisms formulated by anarchists against modern society are generally sound but purely negative. Kousseau, Proudhon, Tolstoy, Stirner have no message for the practical man who knows that the complexity of our civilization cannot be abolished by a mere act of negation.

In Les Nouveaux Aspects dw Socialisme Edouard Berth, a French syndicalist writer expressed himself as follows on the differences between the syndicalist and the anarchist viewpoint :

Syndicalists are grateful to the capitalist system not only for the material wealth it has created but also and particularly for the moral and intellectual transformation it has brought about within the masses of the workers, who, owing to capitalism's iron discipline, have been lifted out of their original sluggishness and anarchistic individualism, and rendered capable of more and more perfect collective labor.

Syndicalists admit that civilization began and had to begin with some form of coercion and furthermore, that such coercion was beneficial and creative, and that if we can look forward to a system of liberty without the tyranny of the employers or the tyranny of the state it is owing to the capitalist system of coercion which has disciplined mankind and made it gradually capable of rising to labor freely and voluntarily performed. Against that system of coercion, anarchism has constantly protested; it curses civilization which demands so much effort and gives us so little happiness in return; we might say that this protest of the anarchist merely voices the revolt of the lazy individual, of the primitive savage, of the mature man against a system which tried to break him to the discipline of labor. . . . Such a protest is purely negative, nay, reactionary. . . . For society is a coordination of efforts, not a juxtaposition of egos seeking mere enjoyment. . . . Anarchism is merely exaggerated bourgeoisism. An anarchist is often a decadent bourgeois; his eagerness for a return to nature is very similar to the tired bourgeois' craving for a fresh air cure in the country.

A recent convert who has come to syndicalism after much social experimenting along the reformist and cooperative lines, Frederick Van Eeden, writes in the (London) Syndicalist:

Anarchism neglected the immense importance of organization, and supposed the workers to be capable without leadership, without discipline, of achieving the tremendous task of creating a well-organized commonwealth. This was indeed Utopia in its worst sense. It jumped long periods of slow and difficult education. It did not teach the workers the terrible strength of their opponents, the exploiters. It did not realize how the intricate structure of modern society demanded great organizing capacities, scientific knowledge, economical insight, first-rate leadership, and strict discipline, in order to replace the old order by a new and a better one. So anarchism was soon paralyzed and left behind in the struggle. It could strike, but not .conquer. It proved to be destructive, not constructive. It withered for want of successful deeds.

William E. Trautmtan, a practical industrialist organizer, is emphatic in his defense of modern civilization, much maligned by anarchists ; he writes :

No destruction, no waste, no return to barbarism. A higher plane of civilization is to be achieved. When the workers understand how the industrial system of to-day has developed, how one industrial pursuit dovetails into another, and all constitute an indivisible whole, they will not wantonly destroy what generations of industrial and social forces have brought forth.

Trade unionism offered a seemingly more practical solution of labor problems and, what is more important to the masses, immediate advantages. Every craft was to organize its members in local unions demanding high entrance fees and monthly dues, practicing collective bargaining with employers and parliamentarians or electing their own representatives to parliament. Thus shorter hours and higher wages could be obtained at least for the organized minority, the aristocracy of labor, at the cost, it is true, of an increase in the cost of living for unionized and nonunionized workers alike.

Craft organization is as exclusive as guild organization and aims at benefiting not labor but the chosen few who succeed in saving the required fee and also in being admitted to membership (which is not always secured by the mere payment of a fee and perfect eligibility). The spirit of craft unions is well illustrated by a quotation from an address delivered by John H. Walker, President of the Illinois Miners before the Illinois convention of 1912 :

I would also favor the discussion and consideration of the question of compelling new members to serve apprenticeships and minimize the number of apprenticeships as much as possible, thus preventing an influx of new members.

William D. Haywood said in a speech on the General Strike, delivered on August 20 ; 1911 ;

Remember that there are 35,000,000 workers in the United States who cannot join the American Federation of Labor. It isn't a working class organization. It realizes that by improving the labor power of a few individuals and keeping them on the inside of a corral, keeping others out by raising initiation fees or by closing the books, the favored few are made valuable to the capitalists; it is simply a combination of job trusts.

In Why strikes are lost, William E. Trautman shows us the consequences of such a selfish policy on the part of craft unions :

Because craft unions charge arbitrary initiation fees, some of them as the green bottle blowers, five hundred dollars, and others from fifty to two hundred dollars, it follows that men and women who have not the means are debarred and driven to become strike breakers. In the craft unions if a man loses his job and finds employment in another industry, and wants to remain a union member, he is charged another initiation fee. Some workers have to carry cards of four or five different unions in their pocket and pay dues to as many. Do you wonder that strike breakers are bred out of such conditions?

The same and other charges are brought up against French, English and German craft unions by the French syndicalist, Hubert Lagardelle:

Unions are applying to their own members the autocratic rules laid down by capitalists. They have organized a workers' government as harsh as the bourgeois government, a workers' bureaucracy as heavy footed as the bourgeois bureaucracy, a central office which tells the workers what they can do or cannot do, a thing which destroys in the unions and in their members all spirit of independence and initiative and frequently leads its victims to wish for a return of capitalist autocracy.

English and German unions have also observed that the most valuable thing in bourgeois society was money. . . . Hence their miserly practices, their habit of hoarding, their enormous reserve funds, the transformation of unions into mutualist enterprises, into provident and savings institutions, into financial agencies. What freedom have they conquered, these workers who beside their employers have given themselves other workers as masters; in what respect are they revolutionary, those proletarians who are hoarding money in the belief that they can beat capitalists at the capitalistic game?

'Not only does craft organization preclude all solidarity between union laborers and non-union laborers but the history of craft unionism is a continuous record of fights between closely allied crafts, one craft trying to prevent another craft from doing certain work or scabbing (as the English say, black legging), on another craft union strike.

We quote from the journal of the (English) A. S. E. (Amalgamated Society of Engineers) the following items :

The question has again come under consideration, in consequence of the boilermakers having threatened a stoppage of work, the demand made being that the whole of the studding of armor plates, apart from the protection of ammunition hoists, was the work of the boilermakers. . . . Evidence was produced by the firm showing that since the introduction of this studded armor that studs had been put in by engineers, and we therefore, restated our full claim to put in all studs on machine-faced, scarphed joints.

Encroachments upon our work by pipe fitters have been put right. These pipe fitters have now been taken under the wing of the Plumbers' Society. ... At another firm a question of demarcation as between ourselves and plumbers was settled in our favor.

A DEFINITION ?

A question of demarcation has arisen between the Boilermakers' Society at the L. C. C, Generating Station, Greenwich. Apparently the management has not deemed it necessary to employ a boilermaker on the staff, and our members have been working on the tubes in some of the boilers, the scurfers doing the remainder. On attention being called to it, we have intimated that our members have no desire to continue on this work, and would be pleased to see a boilermaker employed; but the management have so far declined to accede to the request of the Boilermakers' Society by employing one, and it is now under consideration as to whether our members should refuse to do any such work, and thereby assist the boilermakers in obtaining the employment of one of their members on the work.

What such a spirit may lead to in time of strike was told graphically in a speech by Eugene V. Debs :

While we are upon this question, let us consult industrial history a moment. We will begin with the craft union railroad strike of 1888. The Brotherhood of Engineers and the Brotherhood of Firemen on the C. B. & Q. system went out on strike. Some 2000 engineers and firemen vacated their posts and went out on one of the most bitterly contested railroad strikes in the history of the country. When they went out, the rest of the employes, especially the conductors, who were organized in craft unions of their own, remained at their posts, and the union conductors piloted the scab engineers over the line. I know whereof I speak. I was there. I took an active part in that strike.

I saw craft union pitted against craft union, and I saw the Brotherhood of Engineers and the Brotherhood of Firemen completely wiped from the C. B. & Q. system. And now you find these men, seventeen years later, scattered all over the United States. They had to pay the penalty of their ignorance in organizing a craft instead of organizing as a whole.

In 1892 a strike occurred on the Lehigh Valley; the same result. Another on the Toledo, Ann Arbor & North Michigan. Same result. The engineers have had no strike from that time to this. Every time they have had a strike they have been defeated.

The railroad corporations are shrewd enough to recognize the fact that if they can keep certain departments in their employ in a time of emergency they can defeat all the rest. A manager of a railroad who can keep control of fifteen per cent, of the old men can allow eighty-five per cent, to go out on strike and defeat them every time. That is why they have made some concessions to the engineers and conductors and brakemen, and now and then to the switchmen, the most militant labor union of them all.

A year and a half ago the telegraph operators on the Missouri, Kansas & Texas went out on strike. The engineer remained at his post ; so did the fireman ; the conductor at his ; and the brakeman at his. And they hauled the scabs that flocked from all parts of the country to the several points along the line, and delivered them in good order to take the places vacated by the strikers; worked all around them and with them until they had mastered the details of their several duties ; and having done this, the strike was at an end, and the 1300 craft unionists out of jobs. You will find them scattered all over the country.

Whatever apparent advantages were secured by the craft union system for an organized minority are now in danger of being totally obliterated by recent developments in the industrial field. The skilled worker entrenched in his union occupied a well nigh impregnable position when the mastery of one craft presupposed years of schooling and practice. Nowadays two factors are conspiring to reduce skilled labor to a rank of insignificance. The ever increasing specialization characteristic of industrial progress divides up jobs into almost every one of their com-

A DEFINITION a

ponent motions so that any individual of average intelligence may learn in a day or a week how to run any mechanical appliance used in shop or mill.

Besides specialized machinery, inventors have been at work producing apparatus which reduce not only the number of unskilled laborers necessary to accomplish a given task (we are not alluding to steamshovels or grain elevators and the like), but the number of highly skilled artisans, accomplishing the least mechanical type of work.

For instance the organization of the glass blowers was so perfect that entrance fees had been raised to $500 and that it was contemplated to raise them to $1000 in the case of foreign workers.

Of a sudden the Owens machine, at first considered as unpractical, threatens to wipe off entirely the craft of glassblowing. The Owens machine invented in 1903 can now be used to blow any glass receptacle from a half-ounce bottle to a twelve gallon demijohn. In the year 1909, forty-nine Owens machines with a producing capacity per machine of about 111 gross in twenty-four hours, produced about 1,700,824 gross. It would have required 1320 skilled blowers to produce the same number of bottles. The union had 2395 men idle. Up to January, 1913, the advance of the machine was slow owing to the fact that the output of the Owens Company's machine shop was limited to fifty machines a year. The new shop which is now open will be able to turn out over one hundred automatic blowers a year. Furthermore the new machine having ten arms instead of six can turn out 200 gross ai day instead of 111. In less than two years the trade of glass blower will have entirely disappeared. This is of course an extreme case but statistics prove that many other crafts are threatened with extinction in a very near future.

In the Westinghouse Electric Company's works in Pittsburg 19,000 men were employed in 1907. In 1911 the output was the same as in 1907 but the number of men employed was only 10,000. Improved machinery had reduced the working force by almost fifty per cent, in four years.

The same tendency is observable in the iron, steel, cement and other basic industries. The high-priced stereotypers are being displaced very fast by the auto machine which even in its imperfect state, enables now one man and a boy to do the work of four men.

Thus far " labor " in every country had meant organized skilled labor, the one force capital had to contend with. At present " everything combines to place the unskilled laborer in a strategic position in the labor struggle" as Austin Lewis writes in Proletarian and Petit Bourgeois:

He has become the one vital factor without which no victory in the fight between the laborer and the capitalist can be had. . . . The unskilled laborer is not as a rule a voter; he can seldom stay long enough in one place to acquire residence. . . . The theory in the United States at least is that such employment is permanent only for the unfit ... it is no longer tenable. . . . The appropriation of public lands, the practical closing of opportunity, the degradation of the crafts in face of the consolidation of industry, all tend not only to shut the avenues of escape for the unskilled laborer but to greatly increase his numbers.

Although New Unionists are not concerned with the opinions of dead theorists who could in no way foretell the gigantic industrial advance of the present day we may remind the reader that Marx always disparaged the role which trade unions were to play in the social revolution. He said, in an address delivered before the Workingmen's International :

Trade unions are efficient as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail to a certain extent, however, from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally because they confine themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system instead of trying to change it in its entirety, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wage system.

Reformist and revolutionary socialists tell the workers that if socialists can only capture the State through propaganda leading, either to an overwhelming victory at the polls or to a successful revolution, the socialist state or the socialist government will run the nation and its industries for the benefit of the workers.

Only it is not evident that the tyranny of a socialist state would be more easily borne than that of a capitalist state. Furthermore the process may consume a great many years. Finally the failure of several socialist ministers and of one socialist premier in France to accord to the workers a treatment different from what they would have expected at the hands of a radical or reformist, is unlikely to spur the workers to renewed efforts to secure representation in parliament.

The ballot has magnificent theoretical possibilities ; practically, its results are slow and doubtful ; besides the ballot is restricted to a certain class of the population and at least in every country to a certain race, while all classes and races work side by side in every country of the world.

Hubert Lagardelle, at the socialist congress held in Nancy on August 14, 1907, said:

The two tendencies of modern socialism (reformed and revolutionary) are equally Utopian, for they attribute to the coercive power of the state a creative value it lacks entirely. . • . You cannot conjure overnight out of nothing an organized system of society. Whatever authority you may dispose of, you will not impart to the workers who elected socialist candidates, to the voters, who for frequently futile and abstract motives are following you, the ability to regulate production and distribution. You will be the masters of the hour, you will hold all the power which yesterday was vested in the middle classes, you will pile up decree upon decree, law upon law, but you will not work any miracle, you will not at a stroke enable the workers to replace the capitalists.

Why should the coming into power of a few socialist politicians transform the psychology of the masses, modify their feelings, increase their ability, create new life habits and enable a society of free men to take the place of a society of masters and slaves? No, it is not upon a mere change in the governmental personnel that the transformation of the world depends. That would be too simple, and progress demands much more. A social system is not born without a long preparation and in this connection, syndicalism, with a more practical view of things pits against your theories, what I have called institutional socialism. We wish to remind the workers that no change will be possible until they have created with their own hands a system of institutions destined to replace the bourgeois system.

The state, in its present form, is necessarily and essentially national. It was created to defend and bring prosperity to a definite area of land, and with a tendency to enrich itself at the cost of all other national groups. This means simply capitalism — the gospel of exploitation — transferred to groups or states instead of individuals. The state is capitalistic in its deepest essence. It was started for the sake of exploitation, and the best governed state must always remain capitalistic, because its attitude to other states is either hostile or indifferent.