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His weapon is organized opportunism, wielding an unexpected blow, and keeping the employer in a frenzy of fearful anticipation. Finally, sabotage is a word that expresses the whole philosophy and practice of revolutionary labor. John Spargo, in his "Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism," traces the origin of the word to the dockers' union in London.
Workers who had "struck" before for definite objects, for wages or hours, or reformed workshop conditions, now seem to be seeking after something vaster a fundamental alteration in industrial conditions or the total abolition of the present system. Syndicalism is undoubtedly revolutionary.
He will, therefore, tolerate willingly neither the interference of a centralized State nor favor a centralized syndicalism. Industry must be given into the hands of the workers, and, when he speaks of industry, he has in mind workshops, which, in the socialism of the Germans, the English, and the Americans, might be left for a long time to come in private hands.
But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism.
"The new revolution which Syndicalism and its advocates of the Industrial Workers of the World contemplate has avoided none of the errors or the pitfalls of the old, but it has added to them a whole series of its own. It has never considered the problems which it has to meet. It is, as expressed in the Outlook of this month, a mere escapade of the nursery mind.
"Democracy corresponds to a definite historical movement," he says, "which has come to an end. Syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement." These are but three out of a number of criticisms of democracy that might be quoted.
This merit is so great that, in view of it, all minor defects become insignificant, and this merit Syndicalism will continue to possess even if, as a definite movement, it should be found to have passed away with the war. THE man who seeks to create a better order of society has two resistances to contend with: one that of Nature, the other that of his fellow-men.
A desire for self-justification impelled her to exclaim: "You don't believe in Syndicalism and yet you've come here to feed these children!" "Oh, I think I understand the strike," he said. "How? Have you seen it? Have you heard the arguments?" "No. I've seen you. You've explained it." "To Mrs. Brocklehurst?"
We may even see Germany mobilised as one gigantic trust for capturing markets and regulating prices. A combination so formidable would compel other nations, and our own certainly among the number, to adopt a similar organisation. This would, of course, mean a complete victory for bureaucratic state-socialism, and the defeat of democracy and trade-union syndicalism.
This, the "industrial unionism" of Debs and Haywood and Mann, is to be sharply distinguished from French "syndicalism" which undermines all Socialist political action and all revolutionary economic action as well, by teaching that even to-day by direct industrial organization without a political program or political support, and without a revolution "a partial expropriation of capital is taking place."
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