Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/124

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AMERICAN SYNDICALISM
labor movement. If the aristocracy of labor will give them no consideration, they are ready, if necessary, to fight the aristocracy. It is this warfare between the skilled and the unskilled and not any other difference of principle, that constitutes the essence of all the labor union and socialist attacks on the I. W. W."

From the first meeting between Sorel and Pelloutier to the present day, "intellectuals" have been of such indispensable service to the cause, that no intelligible account of it could be given without them. It is one of the signs of democratic and revolutionary change that men of rare intellectual gift show, like Tolstoi, a passion to identify themselves with the humblest of their kind. Some of the most scorching passages against intellectuals, masquerading as genuine folk of the fourth estate, are by men who are themselves nothing if not "intellectuals." No one can surpass M. Sorel himself in this. Bernard Shaw could not do it better. In his L'avenir Socialiste des Syndicats, Sorel has only a withering contempt for the educated interlopers in the movement. Their superiorities, he says, are among the superstitions of the proletariat. Like mountebanks, the intellectuals exploit this superstition, flaunt their degrees and "professional humbug" before simple men not yet free from illusions on which pedants have always fattened. To get simple minded working people free from this strutting despotism and from all the benumbing "authority" for which it stands, is one of the greater aims of Syndicalism. Among the emblazonries borne in the recent I. W. W. parade at Lawrence one read, "No God, no Master." These words are a perfect echo of Sorel's thought. There should be no "mastery," but self-