Socialism As It Is

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Here we see the public employees, supported by the Socialists,
insisting on industrial and commercial considerations, on the rights of
individuals and on free contract, as against the capitalists and
governing classes, who claim to defend these very principles from
supposed Socialist attacks, but abandon them the moment they threaten
capitalist profits and capitalist rule. This attitude of the French
Socialist shows the very heart of the Socialist situation. In fact, it
is only as private capitalism becomes State capitalism, or "State
Socialism," that Socialists will be able to show what their position
really is. It is only then that the coercive aspect of capitalism, which
is now partly latent and partly obscured by certain functions that it
has still to fill in the development of society, will become visible to
all eyes.

The French railroad strike of October, 1910, brought the question of
organizations of government employees still more into international
prominence. Until the recent British upheaval it was, perhaps, the
greatest and most menacing strike in modern history. It is true that its
apparent object was only a few just, and relatively insignificant
economic concessions--which were granted for the most part immediately
after the struggle. But behind these, as every one realized, lay the
question of the right of government employees to organize and to strike
and the determination of the French Socialists and labor unionists to
use the opportunity to take a step towards the "general strike."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An editorial in the _New York Call_ (October 31, 1911) shows how most
American Socialists expect the general strike to work:--

"The failure of one 'general' strike, or any attempt to carry out a
general strike, does not bankrupt or destroy the working class, for
the reason that it is that class which holds the future in its
hands. Nor does such failure help capitalism--the decaying
system--in any way. On the contrary, it helps disintegrate it, and
the failure itself is merely the necessary prelude to a still
stronger assault by the same method. The general strike seems to be
like what is said of democracy, that the cure for democracy is
still more democracy. In the same way the cure for the general
strike is to make it still more 'general' in character. The less
'general' it is, the less chance has it of success, and the more
'general' it can be made, the more certain is it of success.

"And that success may not, and very likely will not, take the form
hoped for by those who advocate it as a means of immediate or even
ultimate social revolution. But even this, if true, is no argument
against its use. It will, however, bring the social revolution
nearer in other ways.

"We hardly, for instance, expect to see the capitalists, paralyzed
by the most 'general' of general strikes surrender their property
offhand to the victorious proletariat in despair of being able to
operate it themselves. Much as we would like to see the working
class march in and take possession of the abandoned factories and
workshops in this manner, and commence operations under their
collective ownership, the vision can only remain while other
factors are disregarded. There is possibly much more flexibility
and elasticity in the capitalist system than is usually imagined by
Socialists. As William Morris tells old John Ball, the 'rascal
hedge-priest,' 'Mastership hath many shifts' before it finally goes
down and out.

"If we were to venture an opinion, the course and procedure of the
general strike, with special reference to the railroads and allied
industries, will follow something in this order.

"General strikes will succeed one another intermittently, each
becoming more 'general,' the method finally establishing itself as
a settled policy of the workers in enforcing their demands. Some
may fail, but from time to time they will grow more 'general' and
more powerful, and will wrest more concessions from the owners,
until the point is reached where the railroad business will return
practically no private profits to its owners. And when this point
is reached, or the certainty of its being reached is plainly seen,
then mastership will make its next shift. There will be two
alternatives.

"The first is literal, physical suppression, by the armed forces of
the nation still under control of the capitalists, and greatly
augmented for the purpose. This, however, for a multitude of
reasons, is a most dangerous policy and much more 'impossible' than
the general strike. Instead of postponing social revolution, it
rather accelerates its approach.

"The other alternative, and the one by all means most likely to be
adopted, is government ownership of the railroads, with the
capitalists, of course, as owners of the government. This will
undoubtedly be ushered in as 'State Socialism.' Laws will be passed
constituting the railroad workers as direct servants of the State,
and forbidding the general strike or any other kind of strike.

"The prohibition will not have the desired effect. If attempted to
be enforced, it merely throws capitalist society back on the first
dangerous alternative policy we have mentioned. But it will give
capitalism a breathing spell, and a chance to 'spar for wind' for a
while, which is the best it can expect. The general strike will
still be utilized to assail the capitalist State and its property.

"The final struggle will be a political one, for the capture of the
State from the hands of the capitalists, and such capture will mean
the transfer of capitalist State-owned property to collective
property and the establishment of industrial democracy, or
Socialism."

FOOTNOTES:

[271] The following quotations are taken from the brochure, "Der
Generalstreik," by Henriette Roland-Holst (Dresden, 1905).

[272] From a private letter published editorially in the _New York Sun_.

[273] The _Outlook_, Nov. 25, 1911.

[274] _Collier's Weekly_, Sept. 2, 1911.

[275] The _Outlook_, Aug. 26, 1911.

[276] _Die Neue Zeit_, Oct. 27, 1911.

CHAPTER VII

REVOLUTION IN DEFENSE OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT

"The workers do not yet understand," says Debs, "that they are engaged
in a class struggle, and must unite their class and get on the right
side of that struggle economically, politically, and in every other
way--strike together, vote together, and, if necessary, fight
together."[277] Socialists are prepared to use force when governments
resort to arbitrary violence--for example, to martial "law." In the
Socialist view no occasion whatever justifies the suspension of the
regular government the people has instituted--and even if such an
occasion could arise there is no authority to which they would consent
to give arbitrary power. Military "government" is not government, but
organized violence.

Tolstoi's masterly language on this matter will scarcely be improved
upon:--

"The slavery of the working people is due to this, that there are
governments. But if the slavery of the laborers is due to the
government, the emancipation is naturally conditioned by the
abolition of the existing governments and the establishment of new
governments,--such as will make possible the liberation of the land
from ownership, the abolition of taxes, and the transference of the
capital and the factories into the power and control of the working
people.

"There are men who recognize this issue as possible, and who are
preparing themselves for it.... So long as the soldiers are in the
hands of the government, which lives on taxes and is connected with
the owners of land and of capital, a revolution is impossible. And
so long as the soldiers are in the hands of the government, the
structure of life will be such as those who have the soldiers in
their hands want it to be.

"The governments, who are already in possession of a disciplined
force, will never permit the formation of another disciplined
force. All the attempts of the past century have shown how vain
such attempts are. Nor is there a way out, as the Socialists
believe, by means of forming a great economic force which would be
able to fight successfully against the consolidated and ever more
consolidating force of the capitalists. Never will the labor
unions, who may be in possession of a few miserable millions, be
able to fight against the economic power of the multimillionaires,
who are always supported by the military force. Just as little is
there a way out as is proposed by other Socialists, by getting
possession of the majority of the Parliament. Such a majority in
the Parliament will not attain anything, so long as the army is in
the hands of the governments. The moment the decrees of the
Parliament are opposed to the interests of the ruling classes, the
government will close and disperse such a parliament, as has been
so frequently done and as will be done so long as the army is in
the hands of the government."

Tolstoi, in spite of his contrary impression, here reaches conclusions
which are the same as those of the Socialists; for they are well aware
that armies are likely to be used to dissolve Parliaments and labor
unions.

"The introduction of socialistic principles into the army will not
accomplish anything," Tolstoi continues. "The hypnotism of the army
is so artfully applied that the most free-thinking and rational
person will, _so long as he is in the army_, always do what is
demanded of him. Thus there is no way out by means of revolution or
in Socialism."

Here Tolstoi is again mistaken, for at this point also Socialists agree
with him completely. The soldier, they agree, must be reached, and some
think must even be led to act, _before_ he reaches the barracks--whether
he is about to enter them for military training in times of peace or for
service in times of war.

"If there is a way out," concludes Tolstoi, "it is the one which
has not been used yet, and which alone incontestably destroys the
whole consolidated, artful, and long-established governmental
machine for the enslavement of the masses. This way out consists in
refusing to enter into the army, before one is subjected to the
stupefying and corrupting influence of discipline.

"This way out is the only one which is possible and which at the
same time is inevitably obligatory for every individual
person."[278]

Socialists differ from the great Russian, not in their analysis of the
situation, but in their more practical remedy. They would _organize_ the
campaign against military service instead of leaving it to the
individual, and _after_ they had converted a sufficient majority to
their views they would not hesitate to use any kind of force that seemed
necessary to put an end to government by force. But they would not
proceed to such lengths until their political and economic modes of
action were forcefully prevented from further development. If civil
government is suspended to combat the great general strike towards which
Socialists believe society is moving they will undertake to restore it
or to set up a new one to replace that which the authorities have
"legally" destroyed. I say _legally_ because all capitalist governments
have provided for this contingency by giving their executives the right
to suspend government when they please--on the pretext that its
existence is threatened by internal disorder. It has been generally and
publicly agreed among capitalist authorities that this power shall be
used in the case of a general strike--as the British government
declared, at the time of the recent railway strike, _whether there is
extensive popular violence or not_.

I have shown that the Socialists contemplate the use of the general
strike whenever, in vital matters, governments refuse to bow to the
clearly expressed will of the majority, and that they recognize the
difficulties to be overcome before such a measure can be used
successfully. Of course the overwhelming majority of the population will
have to be against the government. But the military aspect of the
question may possibly make it necessary that the majority to be secured
will have to be even greater than was at first contemplated, and that an
even more intense struggle will have to be carried on. The Bismarcks of
the world are already using armies as strike breakers and training them
especially for this purpose, while even the more democratic and peaceful
States, like England and France, are rapidly following in the same
direction. Of course, as Bismarck said, not all of a large army can be
so used, but there is a strong tendency in Russia and Germany, which may
be imitated elsewhere, for the military leaders to concentrate their
efforts and attention on the picked and more or less professional part
of their armies, and it is this part that is being used for
strike-breaking purposes.

No one has dealt more ably with this struggle between the working people
and coercive government than Karl Liebknecht, recently elected to the
Reichstag from the Kaiser's own district of Potsdam, who spent a year as
a political prisoner in Germany for his "Militarismus und
Anti-Militarismus." Liebknecht opens his pamphlet by quoting a statement
of Bismarck to Professor Dr. Otto Kamaell, in October, 1892:--

"In Rome water and fire were forbidden to him who put himself
outside of the legal order. In the middle ages that was called to
outlaw. It was necessary to treat the Social-Democracy in the same
way, to take away its political rights and its right to vote. So
far I have gone. The Social-Democratic question is a military
question. The Social-Democracy is being handled now in an
extraordinarily superficial way. The Social-Democracy is striving
now--and with success--to win the noncommissioned officers. In
Hamburg already a good part of the troops consist of
Social-Democrats, since the people there have the right to enter
exclusively into their own battalion. What now if these troops
should refuse to shoot their fathers and brothers as the Kaiser has
demanded? Shall we send the regiments of Hanover and Mecklenburg
against Hamburg? Then we have something there like the Commune in
Paris. The Kaiser was frightened. He said to me he wouldn't exactly
care about being called a cardboard prince like his grandfather,
nor at the very beginning of his reign to wade up to the knees in
blood. Then I said to him, 'Your Majesty will have to go deeper if
you give way now.'"

Here we have it from the lips of Bismarck that the Social-Democratic
question was already a military question in his time, and his view is
supported by the present Kaiser. This is high authority. Similar views
and threats have been common among the statesmen of our time in nearly
every country.

As early as 1903 the government of Holland broke a large general strike
by the use of the army to operate the railroads, and the same thing was
done in Hungary in the following year. Indeed, these measures had such a
great success that the Hungarian government went farther two years
later, and took away the right of organization from the agricultural
laborers; while at the same time it used the army as strike breakers in
harvest time and made permanent arrangements for doing this in a similar
contingency in the future. In the matter of breaking railway strikes by
soldiers, Bulgaria and other countries are following Holland and
Hungary. The latest and most extraordinary example is undoubtedly the
use of soldiers by the "Socialist" Briand to break the recent railroad
strike in democratic France.[279]

Even peaceful countries like Belgium and Switzerland, Great Britain,
and the United States, are developing and changing their military
systems so rapidly as to make it almost certain that they would take
similar measures if occasion should arise.

The agitation for universal conscription in England may succeed before
many years, and the plans for reorganizing the militia in the United
States will also make of it a force that can be far more useful in
breaking strikes than the present one, and more ready to be used in case
of a nation-wide strike crisis. Indeed, the Dick military law made every
possible provision for the use of the military in internal disturbances,
up to the point of enlisting every citizen and making a dictator of the
President.

Similar tendencies exist on the Continent of Europe. Formerly the
militia of Switzerland was quite democratically organized, and each man
kept his gun and ammunition at home, but the government is gradually
doing away with this system and modeling the army every year more
closely on that of the larger and less democratic European powers. In
Belgium a similar movement can be seen in the creation of a Citizens'
Guard, entirely for use at home and especially against strikers.

Here, then, is a situation to which every Socialist is forced to give
constant thought, no matter how peace-loving and law-abiding he may be.
What is there in modern systems of government to prevent these large
military forces already employed so successfully for the ominous
function of strike breaking, from being used for other reactionary and
tyrannical purposes--for putting an end to democratic government, when
it is attempted to apply it to property and industry? So everywhere
Socialists and labor unions are giving special attention to agitation
against militarism. Years ago even the most conservative unions began
forbidding their members to join the militia, and the practice has
become general, while the Boy Scout movement is everywhere denounced and
repudiated. Not only is every effort being made by the Socialists, in
connection with other democratic elements, to cut off the financial
supplies for the army and navy, but they also sought to inspire all the
youth, and particularly the children of the workers, with a spirit of
revolt against armies, war, and aggressive patriotism, as well as the
spirit of servile obedience, the ignorance, and the brutality that
invariably accompany them.[280]