Part 41 (2/2)
”The great purpose of the Socialist Party is to seize the powers of government and thus prevent them from being used by the capitalists against the workers. With Socialists in political offices the workers can strike and not be shot. They can picket shops and not be arrested and imprisoned.... To win the demands made on the industrial field it is absolutely necessary to control the government, as experience shows strikes to have been lost through the interference of courts and militia. The same functions of government, controlled by a cla.s.s conscious working cla.s.s, will be used to inspire confidence and compel the wheels of industry to move in spite of the devices and stumblingblocks of the capitalists....
”Socialist government will concern itself entirely with the shop.
Socialism can demand nothing of the individual outside the shop....
It has no concern with the numberless social reforms which the capitalists are now preaching in order to save their miserable profit system.
”Old age pensions are not Socialism. The workers had much better fight for higher wages and shorter hours. Old age pensions under the present government are either charity doled out to paupers, or bribes given to voters by politicians. Self-respecting workers despise such means of support. Free meals or cent meals for poverty-stricken school children are not Socialism. Industrial freedom will enable parents to give their children solid food at home. Free food to the workers cuts wages and kills the fighting spirit.”
The American ”syndicalists” are not opposed to political action, but they want to use it _exclusively_ for the purposes of industrial democracy.
While Messrs. Haywood and Bohn by no means take an anarchistic position, they show no enthusiasm for the capitalist-collectivist proposals that _present governments_ should take control of industry. They are not hostile to all government, but they think that democracy applied directly to industry would be all the government required:--
”In the shop there must be government. In the school there must be government. In the conduct of the great public services there must be government. We have shown that Socialism will make government democratic throughout. The basis of this freedom will be the freedom of the individual to develop his powers. People will be educated in freedom. They will work in freedom. They will live in freedom....
”Socialism will establish democracy in the shop. Democracy in the shop will free the working cla.s.s. The working cla.s.s, through securing freedom for itself, will liberate the race.”
Even the American ”syndicalists,” however, attach more importance to economic than to political action. Hitherto revolutionary Socialists have agreed that the only constructive work possible _under capitalism_ was that of education and organization. The ”syndicalists” also agree that nothing peculiarly socialistic can be done to-day by _political_ action, but they are reformists as to the immediate possibilities of _economic_ action. Here they believe revolutionary principles can be applied even under capitalism. Even the conservative and purely businesslike effort to secure a little more wages by organized action, they believe, can be converted here and now into a cla.s.s struggle of working cla.s.s _vs._ capitalists. What is needed is only organization of all the unions and a revolutionary policy. With the possibilities of a revolutionary union policy when capitalism has largely exhausted its program of political reforms and economic betterment and when Socialism has become the political Opposition, I deal in following chapters. But syndicalists, even in America, say revolutionary tactics can be applied now--Mr. Haywood, for instance, feels that the only thing necessary for a successful revolutionary and Socialistic general strike in France or America to-day, is sufficient economic organization.
Mr. Debs admits the need of revolutionary tactics as well as revolutionary principles and even says: ”We could better succeed with reactionary principles and revolutionary tactics than with revolutionary principles and reactionary tactics.” He admits also that Socialists and revolutionary unionists are inspired with an entirely new att.i.tude towards society and government and indorses as _entirely sound_ certain expressions from Haywood and Bohn's pamphlet which had been violently attacked by reformist Socialists and conservative unionists. Mr. Debs agrees with the former writers in their definition of the att.i.tude of the Socialist revolutionist's att.i.tude towards property: ”He retains absolutely no respect for the property 'rights' of the profit takers. He will use any weapon which will win his fight. He knows that the present laws of property are made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them.” But he does not agree that this new spirit offers any positive contribution to Socialist tactics at the present time. Just as Herve has recently admitted that the superior political and economic organization of the Germans were more important than all the ”sabotage” (violence) and ”direct action” of the French though he still favors the latter policies, so the foremost American revolutionary opposes ”direct action” and ”sabotage” altogether under present conditions. Both deny that revolutionary economic action under capitalism is any more promising than revolutionary political action.
Even Herve defends his more or less friendly att.i.tude to ”direct action”
wholly on the ground that it is good _practice_ for revolution, not on Lagardelle's syndicalist ground that it means the beginning of revolution itself (see below).
By much of their language Haywood and several industrial unionists of this country would seem to cla.s.s themselves rather with Lagardelle and Labriola (see below) than with Herve, Debs, and Mann. Haywood, for example, has said that no Socialist can be a law-abiding citizen.
Haywood's very effective and law-abiding leaders.h.i.+p in strikes at Lawrence (1912) and elsewhere would suggest that he meant that Socialists cannot be law-abiding by principle and under all circ.u.mstances. But this statement as it was made, together with many others, justifies the above cla.s.sification. Debs, on the contrary, claims that the American workers are law-abiding and must remain so, on the whole, until the time of the revolution approaches. ”As a revolutionist,” he writes, ”I can have no respect for capitalist property laws, nor the least scruple about violating them,” but Debs does not believe there can be any occasion to put this principle into effect until the workers have been politically and economically organized and educated, and then only if they are opposed by violence (see the _International Socialist Review_, February, 1912).
The French and Italian advocates of revolutionary unionism also a.s.sign to the party a very secondary part, though they are by no means, like the anarchists, opposed to all political action. They do not as a rule oppose the Socialist parties, but they protest against the view that Socialist activities should be chiefly political. Their best-known spokesman in Italy, Arturo Labriola, one of the most brilliant orators in the country, and a professor in the University of Naples, writes:--
”The Social Democracy will prove to have been the last capitalistic party to which the defense of capitalistic society will have been intrusted. The syndicalists [revolutionary unionists] ought to get that firmly into their heads and draw conclusions from it in their _necessary_ relations with the official Socialist Party. _The latter ought to resign itself to being no more than a simple party of the legal demands of the proletariat [i.e. the unions,] on the basis of existing society, and not an anti-capitalist party._”[262]
This is strong language and brings up some large questions. Far from being displeased with the moderate and non-revolutionary character of the Socialist Party, Labriola, himself a revolutionist, is so indifferent to the party as a direct means to revolution, as to hope that it will drop its revolutionary claims altogether and become a humble and modest but more useful tool of the unions. He even admitted in conversation with the writer that, attaching no value to political advance as such, he was not even anxious at this time that the illiterate South Italians should be given a vote, since they would long remain under the tutelage of the Catholic Church.
One of the founders of the present French movement, its earliest and chief theorist, Pelloutier, who has many followers among the present officials of the French Federation of Labor, went even further, denying to the government, and therefore to all political parties, any vital function whatever. To Pelloutier the State is built exclusively upon ”superfluous and obnoxious political interests.” The unions are expected to work towards a Socialist society without much, if any, political support. They are to use non-political means: ”The general strike as a purely economic means that _excludes the cooperation_ of parliamentary Socialists and demands only labor union activity would necessarily suit the labor union groups.”[263]
The leading ”syndicalist” writer to-day, Hubert Lagardelle, feels not only that a Socialist Party is not likely to bring about a Socialist society, but that any steps that it might try to take in this direction to-day would necessarily be along the wrong lines, since it would establish reforms by law rather than as a natural upgrowth out of economic conditions and the activities of labor unions, with the result that such reforms would necessarily go no farther than ”State Socialism.”[264]
Lagardelle speaks of the ”State Socialistic” reform tendency as synonymous with ”modern democracy.” Because it supposes that there are ”general problems common to all cla.s.ses,” says Lagardelle, democracy refuses to take into account the real difference between men, which is that they are divided into economic cla.s.ses. Here we see the central principle of Socialism exaggerated to an absurdity. Few Socialists, even the most revolutionary, would deny that there are some problems ”common to all cla.s.ses.” Indeed, the existence and importance of such problems is the very reason why ”State Socialism,” of benefit to the ma.s.ses, but still more to the interest of the capitalists, is being so easily and rapidly introduced. Lagardelle would be right, from the Socialist standpoint, if he demanded that it should oppose mere political democracy, or ”State Socialism” in proportion as these forces have succeeded in reorganizing the capitalist State--or rather after they have been a.s.similated by it. But to obstruct their present work is merely to stand against the normal and necessary course of economic and political evolution, as recognized by the Socialists themselves, a similar mistake to that made by the Populists and their successors, who think they can prevent normal economic evolution by dissolving the new industrial combinations and returning to compet.i.tion. Just as Socialists cannot oppose the formation of trusts under normal circ.u.mstances, neither can they oppose the extension of the modern State into the field of industry or democratic reform, even though the result is _temporarily_ to strengthen capitalism and to decrease the economic and political power of the working people. One of the fundamental differences between the Socialist and other political philosophies is that it recognizes ceaseless political evolution and acts accordingly.
It teaches that we shall probably pa.s.s on to social democracy through a period of monopoly rule, ”State Socialism,” and political reforms that in themselves promise no relative advance, economic or political, to the working cla.s.s.
In a recent congress of the French Party, Jaures protested against a statement of Lagardelle's that Socialism was opposed to democracy.
”Democracy,” Lagardelle answered, ”corresponds to an historical movement which has come to an end; syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement to the extent that it is post-democratic. Syndicalism comes after democracy; it perfects the life which democracy was powerless to organize.” It is difficult to understand why Lagardelle persists in saying that a movement which thus supplements democracy, which does what democracy was claiming to do, and which is expected to supersede it, should on this account be considered as ”anti-democratic.” Socialism fights the ”State Socialists” and opposes those whose democracy is merely political, but it is attacking not their democracy or their ”State Socialism,” but their capitalism.
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