Socialism As It Is

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[256] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 73.

[257] The _Socialist Review_ (London), October, 1911.

[258] The profound opposition between the "State Socialism" of the
Labour Party and the revolutionary aims and methods of genuine Socialism
and the new labor unionism appeared more clearly in the coal strike of
1912 than it had in the railway strike of the previous year. As Mr.
Lloyd George very truthfully remarked in Parliament, no leaders of the
Labour Party had committed themselves to syndicalism, while syndicalism
and socialism [_i.e._ the socialism of the Labour Party] were mutually
destructive. "We can console ourselves with the fact," said Mr. Lloyd
George, "that the best policeman for the syndicalists is the socialist
[_i.e._ the Labourite]."

The conduct of many of the Labour Party leaders during this strike, as
during the railway strike, fully justified the confidence of the
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. MacDonald, for example, spoke of
syndicalism in much the same terms as those used by Mr. Lloyd George. He
viewed it as evil, to be obviated by greater friendliness and
consideration on the part of employers towards employees, a position
fully endorsed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the other Radicals
of the British Cabinet.

The coal strike throughout was, indeed, almost a repetition of the
railway strike. What I have said of the one applies, with comparatively
slight changes, to the other. Even the so-called Minimum Wage Law is
essentially identical with the methods adopted to determine the wages of
railway employees.

[259] The _New York Call_, April 17, 1910.

[260] The _International Socialist Review_, June, 1911.

[261] The _Industrial Syndicalist_ (London), July and September, 1910.

[262] _Le Mouvement Socialiste_ (Paris), 1909, article entitled,
"Plechanoff contre les Syndicalistes."

[263] "Le Federation des Bourses de Travail de France," p. 67.

[264] Hubert Lagardelle, Le Socialisme Ouvrier (Paris), 1911.

[265] _Le Mouvement Socialiste_, 1909, article entitled, "Classe Sociale
et Parti Politique."

[266] Hubert Lagardelle, "Syndicalisme et Socialisme" (Paris), p. 52.

[267] Hubert Lagardelle, "Syndicalisme et Socialisme" (Paris), p. 50.

[268] Paul Louis, "Le Syndicalisme contre l'Etat," pp. 4-7.

[269] Paul Louis, "Le Syndicalisme contre l'Etat," p. 244.

[270] Karl Kautsky, "Parlamentarismus und Demokratie," pp. 136 and 137.

CHAPTER VI

THE "GENERAL STRIKE"

Nearly all strikes are more or less justified in Socialist eyes. But
those that involve neither a large proportion of the working class nor
any broad social or political question are held to be of secondary
importance. On the other hand, the "sympathetic" and "general" strikes,
which are on such a scale as to become great public issues, and are
decided by the attitude of public opinion and the government rather than
by the employers and employees involved, are viewed as a most essential
part of the class struggle, especially when in their relation to
probable future contingencies.

The social significance of such sympathetic or general strikes is indeed
recognized as clearly by non-Socialists as by Socialists--even in
America, since the great railroad strike of 1894. The general strike of
1910 in Philadelphia, for instance, was seen both in Philadelphia and in
the country at large as being a part of a great social conflict. "The
American nation has been brought face to face for the first time with a
strike," said the _Philadelphia North American_, "not merely against the
control of an industry or a group of allied industries, but _a strike of
class against class, with the lines sharply drawn_.... And it is this
antagonism, this class war, intangible and immeasurable, that
constitutes the largest and most lamentable hurt to the city. It is,
moreover, felt beyond the city and throughout the entire nation." (My
italics). It goes without saying that all organs of non-Socialist
opinion feel that such threatening disturbances are lamentable, for they
certainly may lead towards a revolutionary situation. Both in this
country and Great Britain the great railway strike of 1911 was almost
universally regarded in this light.

The availability of a general strike on a national scale as a means of
assaulting capitalism at some future crisis or as a present means of
defending the ballot or the rights of labor organizations or of
preventing a foreign war, has for the past decade been the center of
discussion at many European Socialist congresses. The recent Prime
Minister of France, Briand, was long one of the leading partisans of
this method of which he said only a few years before he became Premier:
"It has the seductive quality that it is after all the exercise of an
incontestable right. It is a revolution which commences with legality.
In refusing the yoke of misery, the workingman revolts in the fullness
of his rights; illegality is committed by the capitalist class when it
becomes a provocator by trying to violate a right which it has itself
consecrated." That Briand meant what he said is indicated by the advice
he gave to soldiers who might be ordered to fire against the strikers in
such a crisis. "If the order to fire should persist," said Briand, "if
the tenacious officer should wish to constrain the will of the soldiers
in spite of all.... Oh, no doubt the guns might go off, but it might not
be in the direction ordered"--and the universal assumption of all public
opinion at that time and since was that he was advising the soldiers
that under these circumstances they would be justified in shooting their
officers.

The Federation of Labor of France has long adopted the idea of the
general strike as appropriate for certain future contingencies, as has
also the French Socialist Party--"To realize the proposed plan," the
Federation declares, "it will be necessary first of all to put the
locomotives in a condition where they can do no harm, to stop the
circulation of the railways, to encourage the soldiers to ground their
arms."

As thus conceived by Briand and the Federation, few will question the
revolutionary character of the proposed general strike. But in what
circumstances do the Socialists expect to be able to make use of this
weapon? The Socialists of many countries have given the question careful
consideration in hundreds of writings and thousands of meetings,
including national and international congresses. Through the gradual
evolution of the plans of action developed in all these conferences and
discussions, they have come to distinguish sharply between a really
general strike, _e.g._ a nation-wide railroad strike, when used for
revolutionary purposes, and other species of widespread strikes which
have merely a tendency in a revolutionary direction, such as the
Philadelphia trouble I have mentioned, and they have decided from these
deliberations, as well as considerable actual experience, just what
forms of general strike are most promising and under what contingencies
each form is most appropriate. Henriette Roland-Holst has summed up the
whole discussion and its conclusions in an able monograph (indorsed by
Kautsky and others) from which I shall resume a few of the leading
points.[271] She concludes that railroad strikes for higher wages,
unless for some modest advance approved by a large part of the public,
like the recent British strike (which, in view of the rising cost of
living, was literally to maintain "a living wage"), can only lead to a
ferocious repression. For a nation-wide railroad strike is paid for by
the whole nation, and its benefits must be nation-wide if it is to
secure the support of that part of the public without which it is
foredoomed to failure. Otherwise, says Roland-Holst, "the greater has
been the success of the working people at the beginning, the greater has
been the terror of the middle classes," and as a consequence the
measures of repression in the end have been proportionately desperate.
But this applies only when such strikes are for aggressive ends, like
that of 1910 in France, and promise nothing to any element of society
except the employees immediately involved.

If a nation-wide railroad strike or a prolonged coal strike is
aggressive, it will inevitably be lost unless it has a definite public
object. And the only aggressive political aim that would justify, in the
minds of any but those immediately involved, all the suffering and
disorder a railroad strike of any duration would entail, would be a
social revolution to effect the capture of government and industry. The
only other circumstances in which such a strike might be employed with
that support of a part at least of the public which is essential to its
success would be as a last resort, when some great social injustice was
about to be perpetrated, like a declaration of war, or an effort to
destroy the Socialist Party or the labor unions. Jaures says rightly,
that even then it would be "a last and desperate means less suited to
save one's self than to injure the enemy."

These conclusions as to the possibilities and limitations of the general
strike are based on a careful study of the military and other powers of
the existing governments. "The power of the modern State," says
Roland-Holst, "is superior to that of the working class in all its
_material_ bases either of a political or of an economic character. The
fact of political strikes can change this in no way. The working class
can no more conquer economically, through starvation, than it can
through the use of powers of the same kind which the State employs,
that is, through force. In only one point is the working class
altogether superior to the ruling class--in purpose.... Governmental and
working class organizations are of entirely different dimensions. The
first is a coercive, the second a voluntary, organization. The power of
the first rests primarily on its means of physical force; that of the
latter, which lacks these means, can break the physical superiority of
the State only by its moral superiority." It is almost needless to add
that by "moral superiority" Roland-Holst means something quite concrete,
the willingness of the working people to perform tasks and make
sacrifices for the Socialist cause that they would not make for the
State even under compulsion. It is only through advantages of this kind,
which it is expected will greatly increase with the future growth of the
movement, that Socialists believe that, supported by an overwhelming
majority of the people, a time may arrive when they can make a
successful use of the nation-wide general strike. It is hoped that the
support of the masses of the population will then make it impossible for
governments to operate the railroads by military means, as they have
hitherto done in Russia, Hungary, France, and other countries. It is
thought by many that the general strike of 1905 in Russia, for example,
might have attained far greater and more lasting results if the peasants
had been sufficiently aroused and intelligent to destroy the bridges and
tracks, and it is not doubted that a Socialist agricultural population
consisting largely of laborers (see Chapter II) would do this in such a
crisis.

Here, then, are the two conditions under which it is thought by
Roland-Holst and the majority of Socialists that the general strike may
some day prove the chief means of bringing about a revolution: the
active support of the majority of the people, and the superior
organization and methods and the revolutionary purpose of the working
classes.

In the preparation of the working people to bring about a general strike
when the proper time arrives, lies a limitless field for immediate
Socialist activity. Both Jaures and Bebel feel that it is even likely
that the general strike will also have to be used on a somewhat smaller
scale even before the supreme crisis comes. Jaures thinks that it will
be needed to bring about essential reforms or to prevent war, and Bebel
believes that it will very likely have to be used to defend existing
political and economic rights of the working class; in other words, to
protect the Party and the unions from destruction. At the Congress at
Jena in 1905 the conservative trade union official, von Elm, together
with a majority of the speakers, argued that it was possible that an
attempt would be made to take away from the German working people the
right of suffrage, the freedom of the press and assemblage and the right
of organization. In such a case he and others advocate a general strike,
though he said he fully realized it would be a bloody one. "We must
reckon with this," he said. "As a matter of course, we wish to shed no
blood, but our enemies drive us into the situation.... The moment comes
when you must be ready to give up your blood and your property [here he
was interrupted by stormy applause]. Prepare yourselves for this
possibility. Our youths must be brought up so that among the soldiers
here and there will be a man who will think twice before he shoots at
his father and mother [as Kaiser Wilhelm publicly insists he must], and
at the same time at freedom." The reception of von Elm's speech showed
that his words represented the feeling of the whole German movement.
Bebel spoke with the same decision, advocating the use of the general
strike under the same conditions as did von Elm, while at the next
congress at Mannheim he declared that it would also be justified, under
certain circumstances, not only for protecting existing rights, but for
extending them, _e.g._ for the purpose of obtaining universal and equal
suffrage in Prussia. Bebel did not think that the party or the unions
were strong enough at that moment to use the general strike for other
than defensive purposes, but he said that, if they were able to double
their strength,--and it now seems they will have accomplished this
within a very few years,--then the time would doubtless arrive when it
would be worth while to risk the employment of this rather desperate
measure for aggressive purposes also.

While Socialism is thus traveling steadily in the direction of a
revolutionary general strike, capitalist governments are coming to
regard every strike of the first importance as a sort of rebellion. In
discussing the Socialist possibilities of a national railroad strike,
Roland-Holst, representing the usual Socialist view, says that it makes
very little difference whether the roads are nationally or privately
owned; in either case such a strike is likely to be considered by
capitalistic governments as something like rebellion.

But while this applies only to the employees of the most important
services like railroads, when privately operated, it applies practically
to _all_ government employees; there is an almost universal tendency to
regard strikes against the government as being mutiny--an evidence of
the profoundly capitalistic character of government ownership and "State
Socialism" which propose to multiply the number of such employees. Here,
too, the probable governmental attitude towards a future general strike
is daily indicated.

President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, has written
that any strike of "servants of the State, in any capacity--military,
naval, or civil," should be considered both treason and mutiny.

"In my judgment loyalty and _treason_," he writes, "ought to mean
the same thing in the civil service that they do in military and
naval services. The door to get out is always open if one does not
wish to serve the public on these terms. Indeed, I am not sure that
as civilization progresses loyalty and _treason_ in the civil
services will not become more important and more vital than loyalty
and _treason_ in the military and naval services. The happiness and
the prosperity of a community might be more easily wrecked by the
paralysis of its postal and telegraph services, for example, than
by a mutiny on shipboard.... President Roosevelt's attitude on all
this was at times very sound, but he wabbled a good deal in dealing
with specific cases. In the celebrated Miller Case at the
Government Printing Office he laid down in his published letter
what I conceive to be the sound doctrine in regard to this matter.
It was then made plain to the printers that to leave their work
under pretense of striking was to resign, in effect, the places
which they held in the public service, and that if those places
were vacated they would be filled in accordance with the provisions
of the civil service act, and not by reappointment of the old
employees after parley and compromise.... To me the situation which
this problem presents is, beyond comparison, the most serious and
the most far-reaching which the modern democracies have to face."
Dr. Butler concludes that this question "will wreck every
democratic government in the world unless it is faced sturdily and
bravely now, and settled on righteous lines." (My italics.)[272]

Our Ex-President, however, has ceased apparently to "wabble." In Mr.
Roosevelt's medium, the _Outlook_, an editorial on the strike of the
municipal street cleaners of New York City reads in part as follows:--

_Men who are employed by the public cannot strike. They can, and
sometimes they do, mutiny. When they should be treated not as
strikers but as mutineers._

This issue was presented by the refusal of the men to do what they
were ordered to do. _When soldiers do that in warfare they are
given short shrift._ Of course, in combating accumulating dirt and
its potent ally, disease, an army of street cleaners is not face to
face with any such acute public dangers as those confronting a
military force; and therefore insubordination among street cleaners
does not call for any such severity as that which is absolutely
necessary in war times; _but the principle in the one case is the
same as that in the other--those who disrupt the forces of public
defense range themselves on the side of the public enemy_. They are
not in any respect on the same basis as the employees of a private
employer. _They are wage earners only in the sense that soldiers
are wage earners._[273]

When Senator La Follette indorsed the right of railway mail clerks to
organize, President Taft said (May 14, 1911):--

"This presents a very serious question, and one which, if decided
in favor of the right of government employees to strike and use the
boycott, will be full of danger to the government and to the
republic.

"The government employees of France resorted to it and took the
government by the throat. The executive was entirely dependent upon
these employees for its continuance.

"When those in executive authority refused to acquiesce in the
demands, the government employees struck, and then with the
helplessness of the government and the destruction of all authority
and the choking of government activities it was seen that to allow
government employees the use of such an instrument was to recognize
revolution as a lawful means of securing an increase in
compensation for one class, and that a _privileged class_, at the
expense of all the public....

"The government employees are a privileged class whose work is
necessary to carry on the government and upon whose entry into the
government service it is entirely reasonable to impose conditions
that should not be and ought not to be imposed upon those who serve
private employers."

Here the Socialists join issue squarely with the almost universally
prevalent non-Socialist opinion. They do not consider government
employment a "privilege" nor any strike whatever as "mutiny," "treason,"
or "rebellion." Socialists believe that the only possible means of
maintaining democracy at all in this age when government employees are
beginning to increase in numbers more rapidly than those of private
industry, is that they should be allowed to maintain their right to
organize _and to strike_--no matter how great difficulties it may
involve. To decide the question as President Butler wishes, or as
President Taft implies it should be decided, Socialists believe, would
mean to turn every government into a military organization. The time is
not far distant when in all the leading nations a very large part and in
some cases a majority of the population will be in government
employment. If even the present limited rights of organization are done
away with, and the military laws of subordination are applied,
Socialists ask, shall we not have exactly that military and autocratic
bureaucracy, that "State Socialism" which Spencer so rightly feared? The
fact that these perfectly legal and necessary strikes may some day lead
to revolution is capitalism's misfortune, which society will not permit
it to cure by turning the clock back to absolutism. The question of the
organization of government employees, one of the most important to-day,
will, as President Butler says, be the crucial question of the near
future.

It is in France that the question has come to the first test, not
because the French bureaucracy is more numerous than that of Prussia and
some other Continental countries, but because of the powerful democratic
and Socialist tendency that has grown up along with this bureaucracy and
is now directed against it. Especially interesting is the fact that
Briand, who not long ago advocated the Socialist general strike and
certainly realized its danger to present government as well as its
possibilities for Socialism, has, as Premier, evolved measures of
repression against organizations of State employees more stringent than
have been introduced in any country making the slightest pretension to
democratic or semi-democratic government.

The world first became aware of the importance of this issue at the time
of the organization and the strike of the French telegraphers and post
office employees in the early part of 1909, and again in the railway
strike in 1910. As early as 1906 the organized postal employees had been
definitely refused the right to strike, and it became manifest that if
they attempted to use this weapon to correct the very serious grievances
under which they suffered, it would be looked upon as "a kind of treason
against the State." At the end of 1908, however, after having discussed
the matter for many years, a congress of all the employees of the State
was held. More than twenty different associations participated and
decided unanimously to claim the full rights of other labor
organizations. Finally, when these organizations appealed to the
General Federation of Labor to help them, there came the strike of 1909.
Unfortunately for the postmen, the French railway and miners' unions
were at the moment still in relatively conservative hands, and the
majority of their members were as yet by no means anxious to aid in the
general strike movement. After a brilliant success in their first
effort, a second strike a few weeks later proved a total failure.

The government then began to make it clear that public employees were to
be allowed no right to strike, and Jaures pointed out that it was trying
to carry this new repressive legislation by accompanying it by new
pension laws and other concessions to the State employees,--a repetition
of the old policy of more bread and less power, which is likely to play
a more and more important role every year as we enter into the State
capitalistic period.

The character of the organizations allowed for government employees,
under the new laws, would remind one of Prussia or Russia rather than
France. While certain forms of association are permitted, the right to
strike is precluded, and the various associations of government
employees are forbidden either to form any kind of federation or to
unite with other unions outside of government employments. "Councils of
discipline are created where the employees are represented," but "in the
case of a collected or concerted cessation of work all disciplinary
penalties may be inflicted without the intervention of the councils of
discipline; courts may order the dissolution of any union at the request
of the ministry," which means that at any moment a police war may be
instituted against these organizations, in the true Russian style.

The reply of the postmen's organization to this kind of legislation is,
that the administration of the post office is an industrial and
commercial administration; that it is a vast enterprise of general
utility; that the notion of loyalty or treason is entirely misplaced in
this field. They have declared that the new legislation is wrong
"because it perpetuates the bureaucratic tradition; because with a
contempt for all the necessities of modern life it discountenances
organization of labor; because it has constituted a repressive legal
condition for wage earners; and because it is an act of authority which
has nothing in common with free contract."