SYNDICALISM 2I 



collective bargaining, but directly for the purpose of hurting Capital and making the 

 control of industry by anyone but the workers impossible. The "irritation strike," as 

 may be read in the Miners' Next Step, " depends for its successful adoption on these men 

 holding clearly the point of view that their interests and the employer's are necessarily 

 hostile. If the men wish to bring effective pressure to bear, they must use methods 

 which tend to reduce profits. One way of doing this is to decrease production while 

 continuing at work." The French form of " irritation " is what is known as sabotage, 

 concerning which M. Pouget blandly writes as follows: 



" If you are a mechanic, it is-very easy for you, with a pennyworth of some sort of powder, 

 or even with sand, to score lines on your rollers, to cause loss of time, or even costly repairs. 

 If you are a carpenter or cabinet-maker, what is easier than to injure a piece of furniture, so 

 that the employer will not notice it, nor at first the customer, but so that customers will 

 presently be lost? A tailor can quite easily ruin a garment or a piece of stuff; a shopman 

 with some stains will make it necessary to sell off damaged goods at a low price; a grocer's 

 assistant causes breakages by faulty packing. No matter who may be to blame, the master 

 loses his customers. ... As the employer is an enemy, it is no more disloyal for the 

 workman to entrap him into ambuscades than to fight him face to face." 



But the fullest form of " direct action " is the general or national strike, by which 

 the continuance of industry is to be paralysed altogether, and by which the syndicalist 

 aims at consummating the transfer of all industries from control by the capitalist class 

 to control by the operatives: 



"The general body of wage-earners, by deliberately suspending all labour on a given day, 

 by tearing themselves away from the exploitation to which they are subjected and by which 

 the existing social order is maintained, cut away that social order at its very base. If they 

 cease to work for the employing class, and for the great joint stock companies, they destroy 

 at one blow the economic dominion exercised upon them. And as this economic dominion 

 is translated in the region of politics by the authority of the State government, the State 

 government itself will crumple to pieces simultaneously with what is but its other side, the 

 system by which millions of men are used for the profit of a minority. From this paralysis 

 of the machinery of the State,, and of all its services, public and private, to the socialisation 

 of the means of production is but a step." (P. Louis.) 



The complete " general strike " is, of course, the final Revolution, but, as M. Griffuelhes 

 says, " the industrial or localised general strikes which precede it really constitute a 

 necessary gymnastics, just as the army manoeuvres are the gymnastics of war." 



And what next ? On that point Syndicalism is decidedly vague. " Directly we 

 think of definite aims," says M. Griffuelhes, " endless disputes arise. Some will say 

 that their aims will be realised in a society without government, others that they will be 

 realised in a society elaborately governed and directed. Which is right? I do not take 

 the responsibility of deciding. I wait to decide whither I am going until I shall have re- 

 turned from the journey which will itself have revealed whither I am actually going." 

 " No more dogmas or formulas," writes Hubert Lagardelle, " no more futile discussions 

 as to the future of society; but a feeling of the fight, quickened by practice, a philosophy 

 of action which accords preeminence to intuition, and which declares that the simplest 

 workman in the heat of combat knows more about the matter than the most abstract 

 doctrinaires of all the schools." 



These then are the general ideas behind the Syndicalist movement, and their con- 

 nection with much that has recently happened and is happening in Europe and America 

 is not far to seek. From a different point of view, and a different point of feeling, from 

 that of the wage-earner, with his limited outlook, it is not difficult to criticise them. 

 Mr. and Mrs. Webb do so, alike on ethical and on practical grounds; the methods 

 advocated are, they say, wrong in themselves, and would not result in achieving their 

 object. But meanwhile society has to realise the sort of passionate feeling that animates 

 the movement, and to consider on what lines, of education on the one hand and of wise 

 social reform and industrial regulation on the other, its militant propaganda can best 

 be met. The problem is most acute in Great Britain and the United States. In 

 France syndicalism is already on the wane, and one of its French originators recently 

 described it as now only an "article d'exportation." (HUGH CHISHOLM.) 



