Socialism As It Is

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The French and Italian advocates of revolutionary unionism also assign
to the party a very secondary part, though they are by no means, like
the anarchists, opposed to all political action. They do not as a rule
oppose the Socialist parties, but they protest against the view that
Socialist activities should be chiefly political. Their best-known
spokesman in Italy, Arturo Labriola, one of the most brilliant orators
in the country, and a professor in the University of Naples, writes:--

"The Social Democracy will prove to have been the last capitalistic
party to which the defense of capitalistic society will have been
intrusted. The syndicalists [revolutionary unionists] ought to get
that firmly into their heads and draw conclusions from it in their
_necessary_ relations with the official Socialist Party. _The
latter ought to resign itself to being no more than a simple party
of the legal demands of the proletariat [i.e. the unions,] on the
basis of existing society, and not an anti-capitalist party._"[262]

This is strong language and brings up some large questions. Far from
being displeased with the moderate and non-revolutionary character of
the Socialist Party, Labriola, himself a revolutionist, is so
indifferent to the party as a direct means to revolution, as to hope
that it will drop its revolutionary claims altogether and become a
humble and modest but more useful tool of the unions. He even admitted
in conversation with the writer that, attaching no value to political
advance as such, he was not even anxious at this time that the
illiterate South Italians should be given a vote, since they would long
remain under the tutelage of the Catholic Church.

One of the founders of the present French movement, its earliest and
chief theorist, Pelloutier, who has many followers among the present
officials of the French Federation of Labor, went even further, denying
to the government, and therefore to all political parties, any vital
function whatever. To Pelloutier the State is built exclusively upon
"superfluous and obnoxious political interests." The unions are expected
to work towards a Socialist society without much, if any, political
support. They are to use non-political means: "The general strike as a
purely economic means that _excludes the cooeperation_ of parliamentary
Socialists and demands only labor union activity would necessarily suit
the labor union groups."[263]

The leading "syndicalist" writer to-day, Hubert Lagardelle, feels not
only that a Socialist Party is not likely to bring about a Socialist
society, but that any steps that it might try to take in this direction
to-day would necessarily be along the wrong lines, since it would
establish reforms by law rather than as a natural upgrowth out of
economic conditions and the activities of labor unions, with the result
that such reforms would necessarily go no farther than "State
Socialism."[264]

Lagardelle speaks of the "State Socialistic" reform tendency as
synonymous with "modern democracy." Because it supposes that there are
"general problems common to all classes," says Lagardelle, democracy
refuses to take into account the real difference between men, which is
that they are divided into economic classes. Here we see the central
principle of Socialism exaggerated to an absurdity. Few Socialists, even
the most revolutionary, would deny that there are some problems "common
to all classes." Indeed, the existence and importance of such problems
is the very reason why "State Socialism," of benefit to the masses, but
still more to the interest of the capitalists, is being so easily and
rapidly introduced. Lagardelle would be right, from the Socialist
standpoint, if he demanded that it should oppose mere political
democracy, or "State Socialism" in proportion as these forces have
succeeded in reorganizing the capitalist State--or rather after they
have been assimilated by it. But to obstruct their present work is
merely to stand against the normal and necessary course of economic and
political evolution, as recognized by the Socialists themselves, a
similar mistake to that made by the Populists and their successors, who
think they can prevent normal economic evolution by dissolving the new
industrial combinations and returning to competition. Just as Socialists
cannot oppose the formation of trusts under normal circumstances,
neither can they oppose the extension of the modern State into the field
of industry or democratic reform, even though the result is
_temporarily_ to strengthen capitalism and to decrease the economic and
political power of the working people. One of the fundamental
differences between the Socialist and other political philosophies is
that it recognizes ceaseless political evolution and acts accordingly.
It teaches that we shall probably pass on to social democracy through a
period of monopoly rule, "State Socialism," and political reforms that
in themselves promise no relative advance, economic or political, to the
working class.

In a recent congress of the French Party, Jaures protested against a
statement of Lagardelle's that Socialism was opposed to democracy.
"Democracy," Lagardelle answered, "corresponds to an historical movement
which has come to an end; syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement to
the extent that it is post-democratic. Syndicalism comes after
democracy; it perfects the life which democracy was powerless to
organize." It is difficult to understand why Lagardelle persists in
saying that a movement which thus supplements democracy, which does what
democracy was claiming to do, and which is expected to supersede it,
should on this account be considered as "anti-democratic." Socialism
fights the "State Socialists" and opposes those whose democracy is
merely political, but it is attacking not their democracy or their
"State Socialism," but their capitalism.

"Political society," says Lagardelle, "being the organization of the
coercive power of the State, that is to say, of authority and the
hierarchy, corresponds to an economic regime which has authority and the
hierarchy as its base."[265] This proposition (the truth of which all
Socialists would recognize in so far as it applies to political society
in its present form) seems sufficient to Lagardelle to justify his
conclusion that we can no more expect Socialist results through the
State, than we could by association with capitalism. He does not agree
with the Socialist majority that, while capitalism embodies a ruling
class whose services may be dispensed with, the State is rather a
machine or a system which corresponds not so much to capitalism, as to
the system and machinery of industry which capitalism controls.

Another and closely related idea of the syndicalists is that all
political parties, as well as governments, necessarily become the tools
of their leaders, that they always become "machines," bureaucratically
organized like governments. Lagardelle adopts Rousseau's view that the
essence of representative government (all existing governments that are
not autocratic being representative) is "the inactivity of the citizen"
and urges that political parties, like society in general, are divided
between the governing and the governed. While there is much truth in
this analysis,--this being the situation which it is sought to correct
both in government and within political parties by such means as direct
legislation and the recall,--Lagardelle does not seem to see that
exactly the same problem exists also in the labor unions. For among the
most revolutionary as among the most conservative of labor organizations
the leaders tend to acquire the same relative and irresponsible power as
they do in political parties. The difficulty of making democracy work
inheres in all organizations. It must be met and overcome; it cannot be
avoided.

Lagardelle's distrust of political democracy goes even further than a
mere criticism of representative government. He thinks the citizen
to-day unable to judge general political questions at all,--so that in
his view even direct democracy would be useless. It is for this reason,
he says, that parties have it as an aim to act and to think in the
citizen's place. Lagardelle's remedy is not the establishment of direct
democracy in government or in parties, but the organization of the
people to act together on "the concrete things of life"; that is, on
questions of hours, wages, and other conditions closely associated with
their daily life and in his view adapted to their understanding. He does
not seem to see that such questions lead almost immediately, not only to
such larger issues as are already presented by the leading political
parties, but also to the still larger ones proposed by the Socialists.

Others of the syndicalists' criticisms, if taken literally, would
undoubtedly bring them in the end to the position occupied by
non-Socialist and anti-Socialist labor unionists. Lagardelle frankly
places labor union action not only above political action, which
Socialists, under many circumstances, may justify, but above Socialism
itself. "Even if the dreams of the future of syndicalistic Socialism
should never be realized,--none of us has the secret of history,--it
would suffice for me to give it my full support, to know that it is at
the moment I am speaking the essential agent of civilization in the
world." Here is a labor union partisanship which is certainly not
equaled by the average conservative labor leader, who has the modesty to
realize that there are other powerful forces making for progress aside
from the movement to which he happens to belong.

The syndicalists, or those who act along similar lines in other
countries, have brought new life into the Socialist movement; their
criticism has forced it to consider some neglected questions, and has
contributed new ideas which are winning acceptance. The basis of their
view is that the working people cannot win by mere numbers or
intelligence, but must have a practical power to organize along
radically new lines and an ability to create new social institutions
independently of capitalist opposition or aid.

Lagardelle writes: "There is nothing in syndicalism which can
recall the dogmatism of orthodox Socialism. The latter has summed
up its wisdom in certain abstract immovable formulas which it
intends willy-nilly to impose on life.... Syndicalism, on the
contrary, depends on the continually renewed and spontaneous
creations of life itself, on the perpetual renewing of ideas, which
cannot become fixed into dogmas as long as they are not detached
from their trunk. We are not dealing with a body of intellectuals,
with a Socialist clergy charged to think for the working class, but
with the working class itself, which through its own experience is
incessantly discovering new horizons, unseen perspectives,
unsuspected methods,--in a word, new sources of rejuvenation."[266]

Here, at least, is a valuable warning to Socialism against what its most
revolutionary and enthusiastic adherents have always felt is its chief
danger.

The fact that lends force to Lagardelle's argument is that the average
workingman has a much more important, necessary, and continuous function
to fill as a member of the labor unions than as a member of the
Socialist parties. It still remains a problem of the first magnitude to
every Socialist party to give to its members an equally powerful daily
interest in that work. On the other hand, it must be said in all
fairness that the lack of active participation by the rank and file is
very common in the labor unions also, a handful of men often governing
and directing, sometimes even at the most critical moments.

It is the boast of the syndicalists that in their plan of revolutionary
unionism, practice and theory become one, that actions become
revolutionary as well as words--"Men are classed," says Lagardelle,
"according to their acts and not according to their labels. The
revolutionary spirit comes down from heaven onto the earth, becomes
flesh, manifests itself by institutions, and identifies itself with
life. The daily act takes on a revolutionary value, and social
transformation, if it comes some day, will only be the generalization of
this act." It is true that Lagardelle's "direct action" tends towards
revolution, but does it tend towards Socialism? His answer is that it
does. But his answer itself indicates the tendency of syndicalism to
drift back into conservative unionism and the mere demand for somewhat
more wages. Socialist organizations, he says, "must necessarily be
trained in _actions_ of no great revolutionary moment, since these are
the only kind of _actions_ now possible, and in agitation; that is, the
conversion or the wakening of the will of the working people to desire
and to demand an entirely different life, which their intelligence has
shown them to be possible, and which they feel they are able to obtain
through their organizations."[267] (My italics.)

Not all members of the French "syndicats" (labor unions) are theoretical
syndicalists of the dogmatic kind, like Lagardelle. Yet even men like
Guerard, recently head of the railway union, and Niel of the printers,
recently secretary of the Federation of Labor, both belonging to the
less radical faction, are in favor of the use of the general strike
under several contingencies, and stand for a union policy directed
towards the ultimate abolition of employers. But this does not mean that
they believe the unions can succeed in either of these efforts if acting
alone, or even if assisted in Parliament by a party which represents
only the unions, acts as their tool, and therefore brings them no
outside assistance. Such men, together with others more radical, like
Andre and the Guesdists in the Federation, realize that a larger and
more democratic movement is needed in connection with the unions before
there is any possibility of accomplishing the great social changes at
which, as Socialists, they aim. (As evidence, see the proceedings of any
recent convention of the Confederation Generale de Travail.)

Lagardelle, however, is a member of the Socialist Party and was recently
even a candidate for the French Chamber of Deputies. Other prominent
members of the Party as revolutionary as he and as enthusiastic
partisans of the Confederation de Travail (Federation of Labor) are
stronger in their allegiance to the Party. And there are signs that even
in France syndicalism is losing its anti-political tendency. Herve, who
demanded at the beginning of 1909 that the "directors of the Socialist
Party cure themselves of 'Parliamentary idiocy'" (his New Year's wish),
expressed at the beginning of 1910 the wish that "certain of the
dignitaries of the Federation of Labor should cure themselves of a
syndicalist and laborite idiocy, a form of idiocy not less dangerous or
clownish than the other."

In fact, it may soon be necessary to distinguish a new school of
political syndicalism, which is well represented by Paul Louis in his
"Syndicalism against the State" (Le Syndicalisme contre l'Etat).

"Syndicalism is at the bottom," says Louis, "only a powerful
expression of that destructive and constructive effort which for
years has been shaking the old political and social regime, and is
undermining slowly the ancient system of property. It points
necessarily to collectivism and communism. It represents Socialism
in action, in daily and continuous action....

"Now the abolition of the State ... is the object of modern
Socialism. What distinguishes this modern Socialism from Utopian
Socialism which culminated towards 1848, whose best-known
publicists were Cabet, Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, Vidal, is precisely
that it no longer attributes to the State the power to transform,
the capacity to revolutionize, the role of magic regeneration,
which the writers in this dangerous phase of enthusiasm assigned to
it. For the Utopians all the machinery of a bureaucracy could be
put at the service of all the classes, fraternally reconciled in
view of the coming social regeneration. For contemporary Socialists
since Karl Marx ... this bureaucratic machinery, whose function is
to protect the existing system and to maintain an administrative,
economic, financial, political, and military guardianship must
finally be disintegrated. The new society can only be born at this
price.

"There still exist in all countries groups of men or isolated
individuals who stand for collectivism, who claim to want the
complete emancipation of all workers, but who nevertheless adhere
to paternalism. These are called revisionists in Germany,
reformists in France, Italy, and Switzerland.... They go back,
without knowing it, to those theories of enlightened despotism
which flourished at the end of the eighteenth century in the courts
of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Madrid and Lisbon, the ridiculous
inanity of which was sufficiently well demonstrated by events....

"But these Utopians of the present moment, these champions of a
limitless adaptation to circumstances, are destined to lose ground
more and more, according as Syndicalism expresses better and better
the independent action of the organized proletariat.

"In its totality the Socialism of the world is as anti-governmental
as Syndicalism, and in this is shown the identity of the two
movements, for it is difficult to distinguish the field of action
of the one from that of the other."[268]

We see here that the central idea of syndicalism, which is undoubtedly,
as Louis says, a revolutionary action against existing governments, is
not on this account anti-political; the foundation of this point of view
is that labor union action is bound sooner or later to evolve into
syndicalism, which in its essence is an effort to put industry in the
immediate control of the non-propertied working classes, without regard
to the attitude taken towards this movement by governments;--

"Those who have long imagined that some kind of cooerdination would
be brought about between old economic and social institutions and
the union organizations which would then be tolerated, those who
thought they could incorporate these industrial groups in the
mechanism of production and political society, were guilty of the
most stupefying of errors. They were ignorant both of the nature of
the State and of the essence of unionism; they were attempting the
squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; they had not analyzed
the process of disintegration which humanity is undergoing, which,
accelerated by the stream of industrialism, has given origin to
hostile classes subordinated to one another, incapable of
coexisting in a lasting equilibrium."[269]

We see here a complete agreement with the position of the revolutionary
majority among the Socialists. If syndicalism differs in any way from
other tendencies in the Socialist movement, it does so through a
difference of emphasis rather than a difference of kind. It undoubtedly
exaggerates the possibilities of economic action, and underestimates
those of political action. Louis, for example, says that the working
people are the subjects of capital, but the masters of production, that
they cannot live without suffering in the factory, but that society
cannot live without their labor. This, of course, is only true if stated
in the most unqualified form. Society is able to dispense with all labor
for a short time, and with very many classes of labor for long periods.
Moreover, the forcing of labor at the point of the rifle is by no means
so impracticable during brief emergencies as is sometimes supposed.

Syndicalism may, perhaps, be most usefully viewed as a reaction against
the tendency towards "parliamentarism" or undue emphasis on political
action, which has existed even among revolutionary Socialists in Germany
and elsewhere (see Part II, Chapter V). Among the "revisionist"
Socialists of that country a great friendliness to labor union action
existed, in view of the comparative conservatism of the unions. For this
same reason the revolutionaries became rather cold, though never
hostile, towards this form of action, and concentrated their attention
on politics. In a word, syndicalism is only to be understood in the
light of the criticisms of revolutionary Socialism as presented by
Kautsky, just as the standpoint of the latter can only be comprehended
after it is subjected to the syndicalist criticism--and doubtless both
positions, however one-sided they appear elsewhere, were fairly
justified by the economic and political situations in France and Germany
respectively. "Only as a _political_ party," says Kautsky, "can the
working class as a whole come to a firm and lasting union." He then
proceeds to argue that purely economic struggles are always limited
either to a locality, a town, or a province, or else to a given trade or
industry--the directly opposite view to that of the syndicalists, whose
one object is also, undeniably, to bring about a unity of the working
class, though they claim that this can be accomplished _only by economic
action_, while from their point of view it is political action that
always divides the working class by nation, section, and class.

"The pure and simple unionist," says Kautsky, "is conservative, even
when he behaves in a radical manner; on the other hand, every true and
independent political party [Kautsky is speaking here of workingmen's
organizations exclusively] is always revolutionary by its very nature,
even when, according to its action, or even according to the
consciousness of its members, it is still moderate." This again is the
exact opposite of the syndicalists' position. They would say that a
labor party unconnected with revolutionary economic action would
necessarily be conservative, no matter how revolutionary it seemed. The
truth from the broader revolutionary standpoint is doubtless that
neither political nor economic action in isolation can long continue to
be revolutionary. Exclusively economic action soon leads to exclusive
emphasis on material and immediate gains, without reference to the
relative position of the working class or its future; exclusively
political action leads inevitably to concentration on securing
democratic political machinery and reforms which by no means guarantee
that labor is gaining on capital in the race for power.

To Kautsky a labor party, it would seem, might be sufficient in itself,
even if economic action should, for any reason, become temporarily
impossible:--

"The formation and the activity of a special labor party which
wants to win political power for the working class already
presupposes in a part of the laboring class a highly developed
class consciousness. But the activity of this labor party is the
most powerful means to awaken and to further class consciousness in
the masses of labor, also. It knows only objects and tasks which
have to do with the whole proletariat; the trade narrowness, the
jealousies of single and separate organizations, find no place in
it."[270]

It is easy to see how an equally strong case might be made out for the
educative, unifying, and revolutionary effect of an aggressive labor
union movement without any political features. The truth would seem to
be that any form of organization that honestly represents the working
class and is at the same time militant--and no other--advances
Socialism. The objections to action exclusively political hold also
against action exclusively economic. Both trade union action as such,
which inevitably spends a large part of its energies in trying to
improve economic conditions in our _present_ society by trade agreements
and other combinations with the capitalists, and political action as
such, which is always drawn more or less into capitalistic efforts to
improve present society by political means is fundamentally
conservative. What Socialism requires is not a political party in the
ordinary sense, but political organization and a political program; not
labor unions, as the term has been understood, but aggressive and
effective economic organization, available also for the most
far-reaching economic and political ends.

It seems probable that the anti-political element in the new
revolutionary unionism will soon be outgrown. When this happens, it will
meet the revolutionary majority of the Socialists on an identical
platform. For this revolutionary majority is steadily laying on more
weight on economic organization.

FOOTNOTES:

[253] The _New York Call_, Nov. 13, 1911.

[254] Edmond Kelly, "Twentieth-Century Socialism," p. 152.

[255] The _Socialist Review_ (London), September, 1910.