Part 43 (1/2)
[268] Paul Louis, ”Le Syndicalisme contre l'etat,” pp. 4-7.
[269] Paul Louis, ”Le Syndicalisme contre l'etat,” p. 244.
[270] Karl Kautsky, ”Parlamentarismus und Demokratie,” pp. 136 and 137.
CHAPTER VI
THE ”GENERAL STRIKE”
Nearly all strikes are more or less justified in Socialist eyes. But those that involve neither a large proportion of the working cla.s.s nor any broad social or political question are held to be of secondary importance. On the other hand, the ”sympathetic” and ”general” strikes, which are on such a scale as to become great public issues, and are decided by the att.i.tude of public opinion and the government rather than by the employers and employees involved, are viewed as a most essential part of the cla.s.s struggle, especially when in their relation to probable future contingencies.
The social significance of such sympathetic or general strikes is indeed recognized as clearly by non-Socialists as by Socialists--even in America, since the great railroad strike of 1894. The general strike of 1910 in Philadelphia, for instance, was seen both in Philadelphia and in the country at large as being a part of a great social conflict. ”The American nation has been brought face to face for the first time with a strike,” said the _Philadelphia North American_, ”not merely against the control of an industry or a group of allied industries, but _a strike of cla.s.s against cla.s.s, with the lines sharply drawn_.... And it is this antagonism, this cla.s.s war, intangible and immeasurable, that const.i.tutes the largest and most lamentable hurt to the city. It is, moreover, felt beyond the city and throughout the entire nation.” (My italics). It goes without saying that all organs of non-Socialist opinion feel that such threatening disturbances are lamentable, for they certainly may lead towards a revolutionary situation. Both in this country and Great Britain the great railway strike of 1911 was almost universally regarded in this light.
The availability of a general strike on a national scale as a means of a.s.saulting capitalism at some future crisis or as a present means of defending the ballot or the rights of labor organizations or of preventing a foreign war, has for the past decade been the center of discussion at many European Socialist congresses. The recent Prime Minister of France, Briand, was long one of the leading partisans of this method of which he said only a few years before he became Premier: ”It has the seductive quality that it is after all the exercise of an incontestable right. It is a revolution which commences with legality.
In refusing the yoke of misery, the workingman revolts in the fullness of his rights; illegality is committed by the capitalist cla.s.s when it becomes a provocator by trying to violate a right which it has itself consecrated.” That Briand meant what he said is indicated by the advice he gave to soldiers who might be ordered to fire against the strikers in such a crisis. ”If the order to fire should persist,” said Briand, ”if the tenacious officer should wish to constrain the will of the soldiers in spite of all.... Oh, no doubt the guns might go off, but it might not be in the direction ordered”--and the universal a.s.sumption of all public opinion at that time and since was that he was advising the soldiers that under these circ.u.mstances they would be justified in shooting their officers.
The Federation of Labor of France has long adopted the idea of the general strike as appropriate for certain future contingencies, as has also the French Socialist Party--”To realize the proposed plan,” the Federation declares, ”it will be necessary first of all to put the locomotives in a condition where they can do no harm, to stop the circulation of the railways, to encourage the soldiers to ground their arms.”
As thus conceived by Briand and the Federation, few will question the revolutionary character of the proposed general strike. But in what circ.u.mstances do the Socialists expect to be able to make use of this weapon? The Socialists of many countries have given the question careful consideration in hundreds of writings and thousands of meetings, including national and international congresses. Through the gradual evolution of the plans of action developed in all these conferences and discussions, they have come to distinguish sharply between a really general strike, _e.g._ a nation-wide railroad strike, when used for revolutionary purposes, and other species of widespread strikes which have merely a tendency in a revolutionary direction, such as the Philadelphia trouble I have mentioned, and they have decided from these deliberations, as well as considerable actual experience, just what forms of general strike are most promising and under what contingencies each form is most appropriate. Henriette Roland-Holst has summed up the whole discussion and its conclusions in an able monograph (indorsed by Kautsky and others) from which I shall resume a few of the leading points.[271] She concludes that railroad strikes for higher wages, unless for some modest advance approved by a large part of the public, like the recent British strike (which, in view of the rising cost of living, was literally to maintain ”a living wage”), can only lead to a ferocious repression. For a nation-wide railroad strike is paid for by the whole nation, and its benefits must be nation-wide if it is to secure the support of that part of the public without which it is foredoomed to failure. Otherwise, says Roland-Holst, ”the greater has been the success of the working people at the beginning, the greater has been the terror of the middle cla.s.ses,” and as a consequence the measures of repression in the end have been proportionately desperate.
But this applies only when such strikes are for aggressive ends, like that of 1910 in France, and promise nothing to any element of society except the employees immediately involved.
If a nation-wide railroad strike or a prolonged coal strike is aggressive, it will inevitably be lost unless it has a definite public object. And the only aggressive political aim that would justify, in the minds of any but those immediately involved, all the suffering and disorder a railroad strike of any duration would entail, would be a social revolution to effect the capture of government and industry. The only other circ.u.mstances in which such a strike might be employed with that support of a part at least of the public which is essential to its success would be as a last resort, when some great social injustice was about to be perpetrated, like a declaration of war, or an effort to destroy the Socialist Party or the labor unions. Jaures says rightly, that even then it would be ”a last and desperate means less suited to save one's self than to injure the enemy.”
These conclusions as to the possibilities and limitations of the general strike are based on a careful study of the military and other powers of the existing governments. ”The power of the modern State,” says Roland-Holst, ”is superior to that of the working cla.s.s in all its _material_ bases either of a political or of an economic character. The fact of political strikes can change this in no way. The working cla.s.s can no more conquer economically, through starvation, than it can through the use of powers of the same kind which the State employs, that is, through force. In only one point is the working cla.s.s altogether superior to the ruling cla.s.s--in purpose.... Governmental and working cla.s.s organizations are of entirely different dimensions. The first is a coercive, the second a voluntary, organization. The power of the first rests primarily on its means of physical force; that of the latter, which lacks these means, can break the physical superiority of the State only by its moral superiority.” It is almost needless to add that by ”moral superiority” Roland-Holst means something quite concrete, the willingness of the working people to perform tasks and make sacrifices for the Socialist cause that they would not make for the State even under compulsion. It is only through advantages of this kind, which it is expected will greatly increase with the future growth of the movement, that Socialists believe that, supported by an overwhelming majority of the people, a time may arrive when they can make a successful use of the nation-wide general strike. It is hoped that the support of the ma.s.ses of the population will then make it impossible for governments to operate the railroads by military means, as they have hitherto done in Russia, Hungary, France, and other countries. It is thought by many that the general strike of 1905 in Russia, for example, might have attained far greater and more lasting results if the peasants had been sufficiently aroused and intelligent to destroy the bridges and tracks, and it is not doubted that a Socialist agricultural population consisting largely of laborers (see Chapter II) would do this in such a crisis.
Here, then, are the two conditions under which it is thought by Roland-Holst and the majority of Socialists that the general strike may some day prove the chief means of bringing about a revolution: the active support of the majority of the people, and the superior organization and methods and the revolutionary purpose of the working cla.s.ses.
In the preparation of the working people to bring about a general strike when the proper time arrives, lies a limitless field for immediate Socialist activity. Both Jaures and Bebel feel that it is even likely that the general strike will also have to be used on a somewhat smaller scale even before the supreme crisis comes. Jaures thinks that it will be needed to bring about essential reforms or to prevent war, and Bebel believes that it will very likely have to be used to defend existing political and economic rights of the working cla.s.s; in other words, to protect the Party and the unions from destruction. At the Congress at Jena in 1905 the conservative trade union official, von Elm, together with a majority of the speakers, argued that it was possible that an attempt would be made to take away from the German working people the right of suffrage, the freedom of the press and a.s.semblage and the right of organization. In such a case he and others advocate a general strike, though he said he fully realized it would be a b.l.o.o.d.y one. ”We must reckon with this,” he said. ”As a matter of course, we wish to shed no blood, but our enemies drive us into the situation.... The moment comes when you must be ready to give up your blood and your property [here he was interrupted by stormy applause]. Prepare yourselves for this possibility. Our youths must be brought up so that among the soldiers here and there will be a man who will think twice before he shoots at his father and mother [as Kaiser Wilhelm publicly insists he must], and at the same time at freedom.” The reception of von Elm's speech showed that his words represented the feeling of the whole German movement.
Bebel spoke with the same decision, advocating the use of the general strike under the same conditions as did von Elm, while at the next congress at Mannheim he declared that it would also be justified, under certain circ.u.mstances, not only for protecting existing rights, but for extending them, _e.g._ for the purpose of obtaining universal and equal suffrage in Prussia. Bebel did not think that the party or the unions were strong enough at that moment to use the general strike for other than defensive purposes, but he said that, if they were able to double their strength,--and it now seems they will have accomplished this within a very few years,--then the time would doubtless arrive when it would be worth while to risk the employment of this rather desperate measure for aggressive purposes also.
While Socialism is thus traveling steadily in the direction of a revolutionary general strike, capitalist governments are coming to regard every strike of the first importance as a sort of rebellion. In discussing the Socialist possibilities of a national railroad strike, Roland-Holst, representing the usual Socialist view, says that it makes very little difference whether the roads are nationally or privately owned; in either case such a strike is likely to be considered by capitalistic governments as something like rebellion.
But while this applies only to the employees of the most important services like railroads, when privately operated, it applies practically to _all_ government employees; there is an almost universal tendency to regard strikes against the government as being mutiny--an evidence of the profoundly capitalistic character of government owners.h.i.+p and ”State Socialism” which propose to multiply the number of such employees. Here, too, the probable governmental att.i.tude towards a future general strike is daily indicated.
President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, has written that any strike of ”servants of the State, in any capacity--military, naval, or civil,” should be considered both treason and mutiny.
”In my judgment loyalty and _treason_,” he writes, ”ought to mean the same thing in the civil service that they do in military and naval services. The door to get out is always open if one does not wish to serve the public on these terms. Indeed, I am not sure that as civilization progresses loyalty and _treason_ in the civil services will not become more important and more vital than loyalty and _treason_ in the military and naval services. The happiness and the prosperity of a community might be more easily wrecked by the paralysis of its postal and telegraph services, for example, than by a mutiny on s.h.i.+pboard.... President Roosevelt's att.i.tude on all this was at times very sound, but he wabbled a good deal in dealing with specific cases. In the celebrated Miller Case at the Government Printing Office he laid down in his published letter what I conceive to be the sound doctrine in regard to this matter.
It was then made plain to the printers that to leave their work under pretense of striking was to resign, in effect, the places which they held in the public service, and that if those places were vacated they would be filled in accordance with the provisions of the civil service act, and not by reappointment of the old employees after parley and compromise.... To me the situation which this problem presents is, beyond comparison, the most serious and the most far-reaching which the modern democracies have to face.”
Dr. Butler concludes that this question ”will wreck every democratic government in the world unless it is faced st.u.r.dily and bravely now, and settled on righteous lines.” (My italics.)[272]
Our Ex-President, however, has ceased apparently to ”wabble.” In Mr.
Roosevelt's medium, the _Outlook_, an editorial on the strike of the munic.i.p.al street cleaners of New York City reads in part as follows:--
_Men who are employed by the public cannot strike. They can, and sometimes they do, mutiny. When they should be treated not as strikers but as mutineers._