American Syndicalism/Chapter 11
XI
"DIRECT ACTION"
Neither sabotage nor "direct action" is quite fairly explained apart from certain economic beliefs of those who now adopt them. The struggle of labor against capitalism is consciously directed by Syndicalism to gain control at the centers and sources of economic power. In the most popular literature attention is perpetually called to the "concentration of industrial forces" which is believed to change the whole method of warfare. There is no denial that the older trade unions were fighting intelligently with "contracts" and "agreements" but combination and the modern trust are said to have wrought a revolution which requires other means.
When Monsieur Pataud three years ago found himself at an electric center of such power in Paris, when he realized that he had only to "make a gesture" and the great city was at his mercy, he furnished one of many illustrations of what these new agencies may enable syndicalists to accomplish. "We have," he said, "to teach labor that the lever to lift the world is already in its hand." "Make labor conscious of its place and power and the battle is won." Behind this belief is much reasoned explanation meant to justify "direct action." Capitalism from the beginning has known and practiced every form of "indirect action" over labor. With the help of others in the upper classes, laws have been made to keep economic forces safely in their own keeping. But modern organization so shifts production from one plant to another as to defeat every real purpose of the trade union. By "contracts" of different dates, it can keep one union at work while another is on strike.
"If in a mine, the engineers and pumpmen remain faithful to such a contract, the owners can prevent the flooding of the mines and thus hold out until the other workers are starved back to the job."
All these immense resources of indirect action capital controls. It has besides the exact counterpart of every labor weapon—lockout, blacklist, its own agent or "walking delegate." If its profits are in danger, capitalism can "ca canny," and restrict the product on a scale to make bricklayers mad with envy. But chief of all is capital's stupendous power through law and politics of its own making. Through the delays and subterfuges of legislatures, through the labored technique of court decisions, the claims of the worker are held at bay.
All this is the "indirect action" of those who hold the keys of economic power. Against these shrewd indirections, Syndicalists will now pit their own direct strategy.
Slowly the dulled brain of labor has discovered its helplessness. It has been deceived by a succession of petty concessions in wages, hours and conditions, but the grim fact of its dependence and insecurity has at last grown clear. "Direct action" is labor's weapon against all the astute indirections of capital.
When Mr. Ettor and his friends were released at Salem, he immediately told the thronging crowd met to greet him, that they and such as they, were his real deliverers. He had been rather complimentary to the court and did not think ill of it, but for his freedom, he thanked the enthusiasm and devotion of the workers. These had sent money and lawyers but, more than all, had roused a sustaining pressure of public opinion that was irresistible. In Victor Griffuehle's exposition of syndicalist action is found the same explanation of the freeing of Dreyfus.[1] "This wronged man was not let off by the courts—they would have killed him or banished him fast enough—but by noisy volcanic agitation in the street, press, parlor—even by scenes of rank violence," according to the trade union secretary, this electric atmosphere was behind the timid legalities, forcing them to take account of it. In the light of this reasoning, Syndicalists now go to their new tasks. If it is asked, why labor does not also appeal to politics; why, with its overwhelming numbers, it does not organize to elect its own representatives and thus create a new legal order in its own favor, it has this answer: "We have been watching that fatuous game for a generation. Political democracy and all 'reformist' socialism have tried that so long and in so many parts of the world, that we see its uselessness. The best fellows we send to legislatures, to mayor's chairs, or to ministries, lose their heads. Not one of them who breathes that atmosphere two years but comes back to us a changed man. It is a crooked road that makes crooked men. We have found now a road that leads straight where we want to go."
This road is direct action. With ironical by-play, the writers and speakers tell us that capitalism has been their one great teacher in the ways of direct action and sabotage. "We have many times used chemicals to spoil products, but the private profit-makers taught us everything we know, by making us partners in all the lying processes of adulteration. In trying to defraud the consumer, they have educated us. We have had to connive and help in this whole cheating process,—clothing, candies, building materials, paints, spices, bread, soups, and a hundred others in commonest use—we have been instructed to the last detail, how to cheat the consumer into the belief that he was getting one thing, when he was getting what he never would have touched had he known the truth." "Did the soldiers in Cuba eat Chicago 'embalmed beef' when they found it out?"
In one of the most recent I. W. W. pamphlets are the following passages meant for instruction. They illustrate "direct action" assuming forms scarcely distinguished from sabotage.[2]
"A glance over the yearly reports of health and poor food commissions and government inspectors will reveal a few facts to the point. Here we see that millions of eggs are condemned in the store houses. The food commissioners discover that there are 'spots' No. 1 and spots No. 2 and 'Roses' in the market. These spots and roses, sorted according to the degree that the rosening or rottening process has reached, are used mostly in bakeries for pies and cakes, and bread. The bakery worker knows it, is aware of it since ever bakeshop slaves had to work in dirty, filthy, vermin-invested workshops. His job is supposed to make him immune against the effects of perfumes and deteriorated flour. He has to mix it in so that everybody will believe and think that the bakeshops, small and large, are operated under the most sanitary conditions. So these millions of 'spots' are backed in and nicely mixed by the worker in the bakeshop. These cakes and pies are mostly sold to the poorer people, their stomach is hardened anyway by the adulterated stuff they consume every day without knowing it. The effects of this slow poisoning process are scarcely noticed."
"But what a howl would go up,—in fact, we heard quite often the furore that these statements of plain facts have created,—if the bakery workers on a nice day, all together, would announce that the 'spots' and 'roses' are all in abundant quantity baked into a certain assortment of baked wares. The consumer is warned of the possibilities,—who ever gets one of these 'rose embalmed' pies is himself only to blame if his stomach gets out of commission."
"Every candy maker knows that 'terra alba,' a white clay, is used in such proportions that it would shock the gumchewers if they knew how much of that indigestible stuff wanders into the stomachs of the fair ladies. Throwing in sugar and other ingredients the candyworker is supposed to let the machines work the mixing to perfection, the worker tends the machine, he is supposed to see nothing when that 'terra alba' is squeezed through the mixer.
"Are the workers supposed to be the capitalists' keepers and help protect them against the effects of their quiet, legitimate business affairs? Terra alba may get into a heap of candy stuff in big chunks, unmixed. The workers turn that instrument against their own oppressors.
"We have only to take a leaf from the employers' own book."
With corrosive irony one of our I. W. W. papers copies opinions from many of our most distinguished citizens on the lawlessness of our various "trusts" and large combinations. "Do we need," he asks, "any other pedagogues? Do they not show us day by day how to get what they want against the law or outside the law?" "The Government, great lawyers, and top-lofty politicians in both houses are all sweating together to keep these giants of industry within the law and can't do it."
"All these moral examples make our way easy." "According to their own account, their indirect action is as lawless as our direct action and not half so successful in the attempts to conceal it."
In the application of this principle, we are never certain whether sabotage or direct action is meant. Under the heading of sabotage, many of the illustrations are the exact counterpart of what others call "direct action." Yvetot's A. B. C. du Syndicalisme is filled with them. He defines "direct action" as any method which drives the employer (à faire céder le patron), either by interest or fear, to yield to labor's demand.
Because it is a war without truce, all "time contracts" are anathema. When a trade union journal twits the I. W. W. with entering into such agreements, the eastern organ, Solidarity admits that in a single instance this was done by a Montana local. When this "violation of the principle and practice of the I. W. W." was discovered, the local was punished by the withdrawal of its charter.
There is little significance in a war policy so extreme, unless our business system is believed to be so near its end that it can be disabled and overcome by guerilla tactics such as these.
When a leader like Tom Mann in England warns his followers against making any agreement except of the most temporary nature with the managers of capital; when he tells them that every provision for peace between the two parties is a perpetrated wrong on labor, we see the whole relation set squarely on a war footing, and its chosen weapons are those of war. Old-fashioned strikes are to go on, but with a new purpose. They are to be quick and sharp in order to save ammunition. The men, even when striking, are "to keep at work, but spoil the product." They are "suddenly to return to their jobs before strikebreakers appear, but to drop work again until the boss is tired out." The short strike is not only to pester the employer; it is, like army drill, to become the school of practice in preparation for the coming general or universal strike. French syndicalists actually use the word grèviculture (strike culture) as if strikes could be nursed and grown like plants in a garden.[3]
Behind all this is the assumption that the business man representing capitalism, can be worried into submission by losses in the shop and mill. This again takes for granted two things: first, the decrepitude of our business system and, secondly, the ability and preparedness of labor (as defined by Syndicalists) to take over and administer capitalist production. The saner among them do not claim that this can be done "at once," but only as capitalist management is worn out by the unremitting plague which labor can inflict on capital by refusing any longer to play the capitalist game. "From now on," says Tom Mann, "we know the enemy and how to deal with him."
It is flatly impossible to take with much seriousness either of these claims. With whatever brutalities and vices the present business system is infected; whatever the measure of its wrongs to labor, it is not yet in a state of decrepitude, neither are wage earners, without many decades of training, within sight of power or fitness to manage the main enginery of capitalism, finance, transportation, and the great industries.
It is among things conceivable that two or three generations of discipline, especially in productive coöperation, may give labor essential mastery over this enginery. But it must be said with a certainty that needs no revision, that this discipline and capacity will not be acquired through habits and modes of thought made by the practiced negations of strikes, boycotts, and sabotage.
As this volume goes to press, an Article on Direct Action appears in The Independent, Jan. 9th, by a writer for the French La Bataille Syndicaliste. It has the more value, as it was "passed upon" by Haywood, Bohn and Ettor—the two former associate editors on the International Socialist Review. The writer, Mr. André Tridon, shows at once how difficult it is to distinguish direct action from sabotage. Both alike are schools of solemn and vigorous instruction for the destruction of capitalism. Syndicalists, he assures us, "do not recognize the employer's right to live any more than a physican recognizes the right of typhoid bacilli to thrive at the expense of a patient, the patient merely keeping alive." He shows the importance of studying market conditions so that the blow may fall when the employer is "rushed with orders." Two syndicalist veterans, Pouget and Faure, have recently dealt with "technical instruction as revolution's handmaid" which Mr. Tridon offers us for up-to-date suggestiveness.
"The electrical industry is one of the most important industries, as an interruption in the current means a lack of light and power in factories; it also means a reduction in the means of transportation and a stoppage of the telegraph and telephone systems.
"How can the power be cut off? By curtailing in the mine the output of the coal necessary for feeding the machinery or stopping the coal cars on their way to the electrical plants. If the fuel reaches its destination what is simpler than to set the pockets on fire and have the coal burn in the yards instead of the furnaces? It is child's play to put out of work the elevators and other automatic devices which carry coal to the fireroom.
"To put boilers out of order use explosives or silicates or a plain glass bottle which thrown on the glowing coals hinders the combustion and clogs up the smoke exhausts. You can also use acids to corrode boiler tubes; acid fumes will ruin cylinders and piston rods. A small quantity of some corrosive substance, a handful of emery will be the end of oil cups. When it comes to dynamos or transformers, short circuits and inversions of poles can be easily managed. Underground cables can be destroyed by fire, water, plyers or explosives, etc., etc."
Here we see the "saving power of the revolution" transferred from the field of politics and reform to the nerve centers of production. Here the "system" is to be paralyzed by the daring of "small, energetic minorities" through direct action. Never a satisfying word is given us as to what these daring minorities are to do with the majorities after the system is smitten. How are the beaten majorities to be convinced and managed? In the familiar patois of the Anarchist, we are reminded that "minorities are always in the right." This is not Frederick Douglas, "One with God is a majority" but "A minority with God is a majority."[4]
- ↑ L'Action Syndicaliste, p. 23.
- ↑ Direct Action and Sabotage, W. E. Trautmann, p. 23.
- ↑ Griffuehles in L'Action Syndicaliste uses another figure, that of the gymnasium in which all practice is like that of army manœuvers.
- ↑ Pouget defines this minority privilege with great precision. It is to be vividly conscious of its purpose, because the dull masses of the majority have to be spurred and whipped into line. So dull is this majority that it must be treated as so many "nullities."