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Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) was an American anarchist /
feminist writer and theorist active at the time of the Haymarket
riot. She is the person who, in response to U.S. Senator Joseph
R. Hawley's offer of one thousand dollars to have a shot at an
anarchist, said:
"You may, by merely paying your carfare to my home, shoot at
me for nothing - but if payment of the $1000 is a necessary
part of your proposition, then when I have given you the
shot, I will give the money to the propaganda of the idea of
a free society in which there shall be neither assassins nor
presidents, beggars nor senators."
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DIRECT ACTION
By Voltairine de Cleyre
From the standpoint of one who thinks himself capable of
discerning an undeviating route for human progress to pursue, if
it is to be progress at all, who, having such a route on his
mind's map, has endeavored to point it out to others; to make
them see it as he sees it; who in so doing has chosen what
appeared to him clear and simple expressions to convey his
thoughts to others, -- to such a one it appears matter for regret
and confusion of spirit that the phrase "Direct Action" has
suddenly acquired in the general mind a circumscribed meaning,
not at all implied in the words themselves, and certainly never
attached to it by himself or his co-thinkers.
However, this is one of the common jests which Progress
plays on those who think themselves able to set metes and bounds
for it. Over and over again, names, phrases, mottoes,
watchwords, have been turned inside out, and upside down, and
hindside before, and sideways, by occurrences out of the control
of those who used the expressions in their proper sense; and
still, those who sturdily held their ground, and insisted on
being heard, have in the end found that the period of
misunderstanding and prejudice has been but the prelude to wider
inquiry and understanding.
I rather think this will be the case with the present
misconception of the term Direct Action, which through the
misapprehension, or else the deliberate misrepresentation, of
certain journalists in Los Angeles, at the time the McNamaras
pleaded guilty, suddenly acquired in the popular mind the
interpretation, "Forcible Attacks on Life and Property." This
was either very ignorant or very dishonest of the journalists;
but it has had the effect of making a good many people curious to
know all about Direct Action.
As a matter of fact, those who are so lustily and so
inordinately condemning it, will find on examination that they
themselves have on many occasion practised direct action, and
will do so again.
Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and
went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that
shared his convictions, was a direct actionist. Some thirty
years ago I recall that the Salvation Army was vigorously
practising direct action in the maintenance of the freedom of its
members to speak, assemble, and pray. Over and over they were
arrested, fined, and imprisoned; but they kept right on singing,
praying, and marching, till they finally compelled their
persecutors to let them alone. The Industrial Workers are now
conducting the same fight, and have, in a number of cases,
compelled the officials to let them alone by the same direct
tactics.
Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went
and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their
co-operation to do it with him, without going to external
authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct
actionist. All co-operative experiments are essentially direct
action.
Every person who ever in his life had a difference with
anyone to settle, and went straight to the other persons involved
to settle it, either by a peaceable plan or otherwise, was a
direct actionist. Examples of such action are strikes and
boycotts; many persons will recall the action of the housewives
of New York who boycotted the butchers, and lowered the price of
meat; at the present moment a butter boycott seems looming up, as
a direct reply to the price-makers for butter.
These actions are generally not due to any one's reasoning
overmuch on the respective merits of directness or indirectness,
but are the spontaneous retorts of those who feel oppresses by a
situation. In other words, all people are, most of the time,
believers in the principle of direct action, and practices of it.
However, most people are also indirect or political actionists.
And they are both these things at the same time, without making
much of an analysis of either. There are only a limited number
of persons who eschew political action under any and all
circumstances; but there is nobody, nobody at all, who has ever
been so "impossible" as to eschew direct action altogether.
The majority of thinking people are really opportunist,
leaning, some perhaps more to directness, some more to
indirectness as a general thing, but ready to use either means
when opportunity calls for it. That is to say, there are those
who hold that balloting governors into power is essentially a
wrong and foolish thing; but who nevertheless under stress of
special circumstances, might consider it the wisest thing to do,
to vote some individual into office at that particular time. Or
there are those who believe that in general the wisest way for
people to get what they want is by the indirect method of voting
into power some one who will make what they want legal; yet who
all the same will occasionally under exceptional conditions
advise a strike; and a strike, as I have said, is direct action.
Or they may do as the Socialist Party agitators (who are mostly
declaiming now against direct action) did last summer, when the
police were holding up their meetings. They went in force to the
meeting-places, prepared to speak whether-or-no, and they made
the police back down. And while that was not logical on their
part, thus to oppose the legal executors of the majority's will,
it was a fine, successful piece of direct action.
Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed to
Direct Action only are -- just who? Why, the non-resistants;
precisely those who do not believe in violence at all! Now do
not make the mistake of inferring that I say direct action means
non-resistance; not by any means. Direct action may be the
extreme of violence, or it may be as peaceful as the waters of
the Brook of Shiloa that go softly. What I say is, that the real
non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in
political action. For the basis of all political action is
coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests
on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them
through.
Now every school child in the United States has had the
direct action of certain non-resistants brought to his notice by
his school history. The case which everyone instantly recalls is
that of the early Quakers who came to Massachusetts. The
Puritans had accused the Quakers of "troubling the world by
preaching peace to it." They refused to pay church taxes; they
refused to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any
government. (In so doing they were direct actionists, what we
may call negative direct actionists.) So the Puritans, being
political actionists, passed laws to keep them out, to deport, to
fine, to imprison, to mutilate, and finally, to hang them. And
the Quakers just kept on coming (which was positive direct
action); and history records that after the hanging of four
Quakers, and the flogging of Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail
through the streets of Boston, "the Puritans gave up trying to
silence the new missionaries"; that "Quaker persistence and
Quaker non-resistance had won the day."
Another example of direct action in early colonial history,
but this time by no means of the peaceable sort, was the affair
known as Bacon's Rebellion. All our historians certainly defend
the action of the rebels in that matter, for they were right.
And yet it was a case of violent direct action against lawfully
constituted authority. For the benefit of those who have
forgotten the details, let me briefly remind them that the
Virginia planters were in fear of a general attack by the
Indians; with reason. Being political actionists, they asked, or
Bacon as their leader asked, that the governor grant him a
commission to raise volunteers in their own defense. The
governor feared that such a company of armed men would be a
threat to him; also with reason. He refused the commission.
Whereupon the planters resorted to direct action. They raised
volunteers without the commission, and successfully fought off
the Indians. Bacon was pronounced a traitor by the governor; but
the people being with him, the governor was afraid to proceed
against him. In the end, however, it came so far that the rebels
burned Jamestown; and but for the untimely death of Bacon, much
more might have been done. Of course the reaction was very
dreadful, as it usually is where a rebellion collapses or is
crushed. Yet even during the brief period of success, it had
corrected a good many abuses. I am quite sure that the
political-action-at-all-costs advocates of those times, after the
reaction came back into power, must have said: "See to what evils
direct action brings us! Behold, the progress of the colony has
been set back twenty-five years;" forgetting that if the
colonists had not resorted to direct action, their scalps would
have been taken by the Indians a year sooner, instead of a number
of them being hanged by the governor a year later.
In the period of agitation and excitement preceding the
revolution, there were all sorts and kinds of direct action from
the most peaceable to the most violent; and I believe that almost
everybody who studies United States history finds the account of
these performances the most interesting part of the story, the
part which dents into the memory most easily.
Among the peaceable moves made, were the non-importation
agreements, the leagues for wearing homespun clothing and the
"committees of correspondence." As the inevitable growth of
hostility progressed, violent direct action developed; e.g., in
the matter of destroying the revenue stamps, or the action
concerning the tea-ships, either by not permitting the tea to be
landed, or by putting it in damp storage, or by throwing it into
the harbor, as in Boston, or by compelling a tea-ship owner to
set fire to his own ship, as at Annapolis. These are all actions
which our commonest textbooks record, certainly not in a
condemnatory way, not even in an apologetic way, though they are
all cases of direct action against legally constituted authority
and property rights. If I draw attention to them, and others of
like nature, it is to prove to unreflecting repeaters of words
that _direct action has always been used, and has the historical
sanction of the very people now reprobating it_.
George Washington is said to have been the leader of the
Virginia planters' non-importation league; he would now be
"enjoined," probably by a court, from forming any such league;
and if he persisted, he would be fined for contempt.
When the great quarrel between the North and the South was
waxing hot and hotter, it was again direct action which preceded
and precipitated political action. And I may remark here that
political action is never taken, nor even contemplated, until
slumbering minds have first been aroused by direct acts of
protest against existing conditions.
The history of the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War
is one of the greatest of paradoxes, although history is a chain
of paradoxes. Politically speaking, it was the slave-holding
States that stood for greater political freedom, for the autonomy
of the single State against the interference of the United
States; politically speaking, it was the non-slave-holding States
that stood for a strong centralized government, which,
Secessionists said and said truly, was bound progressively to
develop into more and more tyrannical forms. Which happened.
>From the close of the Civil War one, there has been continual
encroachment of the federal power upon what was formerly the
concern of the States individually. The wage-slavers, in their
struggles of today, are continually thrown into conflict with
that centralized power against which the slave-holder protested
(with liberty on his lips by tyranny in his heart). Ethically
speaking, it was the non-slave-holding States that in a general
way stood for greater human liberty, while the Secessionists
stood for race-slavery. In a general way only; that is, the
majority of northerners, not being accustomed to the actual
presence of negro slavery about them, thought it was probably a
mistake; yet they were in no great ferment of anxiety to have it
abolished. The Abolitionists only, and they were relatively few,
were the genuine ethicals, to whom slavery itself -- not
secession or union -- was the main question. In fact, so
paramount was it with them, that a considerable number of them
were themselves for the dissolution of the union, advocating that
the North take the initiative in the matter of dissolving, in
order that the northern people might shake off the blame of
holding negroes in chains.
Of course, there were all sorts of people with all sorts of
temperaments among those who advocated the abolition of slavery.
There were Quakers like Whittier (indeed it was the peace-at-all-
costs Quakers who had advocated abolition even in early colonial
days); there were moderate political actionists, who were for
buying off the slaves, as the cheapest way; and there were
extremely violent people, who believed and did all sorts of
violent things.
As to what the politicians did, it is one long record of
"hoe-not-to-to-it," a record of thirty years of compromising, and
dickering, and trying to keep what was as it was, and to hand
sops to both sides when new conditions demanded that something be
done, or be pretended to be done. But "the stars in their
courses fought against Sisera;" the system was breaking down from
within, and the direct actionists from without as well were
widening the cracks remorselessly.
Among the various expressions of direct rebellion was the
organization of the "underground railroad." Most of the people
who belonged to it believed in both sorts of action; but however
much they theoretically subscribed to the right of the majority
to enact and enforce laws, they didn't believe in it on that
point. My grandfather was a member of the "underground;" many a
fugitive slave he helped on his way to Canada. He was a very
patient, law-abiding man in most respects, though I have often
thought that he respected it because he didn't have much to do
with it; always leading a pioneer life, law was generally far
from him, and direct action imperative. Be that as it may, and
law-respecting as he was, he had no respect whatever for slave
laws, no matter if made by ten times of a majority; and he
conscientiously broke every one that came in his way to be
broken.
There were times when in the operation of the "underground"
that violence was required, and was used. I recollect one old
friend relating to me how she and her mother kept watch all night
at the door, while a slave for whom a posse was searching hid in
the cellar; and though they were of Quaker descent and
sympathies, there was a shotgun on the table. Fortunately it did
not have to be used that night.
When the fugitive slave law was passed with the help of the
political actionists of the North who wanted to offer a new sop
to the slave-holders, the direct actionists took to rescuing
recaptured fugitives. There was the "rescue of Shadrach," and
the "rescue of Jerry," the latter rescuers being led by the
famous Gerrit Smith; and a good many more successful and
unsuccessful attempts. Still the politicals kept on pottering
and trying to smooth things over, and the Abolitionists were
denounced and decried by the ultra-law-abiding pacificators,
pretty much as Wm. D. Haywood and Frank Bohn are being denounced
by their own party now.
The other day I read a communication in the Chicago _Daily
Socialist_ from the secretary of the Louisville local Socialist
Party to the national secretary, requesting that some safe and
sane speaker be substituted for Bohn, who had been announced to
speak there. In explaining why, Mr. Dobbs makes this quotation
from Bohn's lecture: "Had the McNamaras been successful in
defending the interests of the working class, they would have
been right, just as John Brown would have been right, had he been
successful in freeing the slaves. Ignorance was the only crime
of John Brown, and ignorance was the only crime of the
McNamaras."
Upon this Mr. Dobbs comments as follows: "We dispute
emphatically the statements here made. The attempt to draw a
parallel between the open -- if mistaken -- revolt of John Brown
on the one hand, and the secret and murderous methods of the
McNamaras on the other, is not only indicative of shallow
reasoning, but highly mischievous in the logical conclusions
which may be drawn from such statements."
Evidently Mr.Dobbs is very ignorant of the life and work of
John Brown. John Brown was a man of violence; he would have
scorned anybody's attempt to make him out anything else. And
once a person is a believer in violence, it is with him only a
question of the most effective way of applying it, which can be
determined only by a knowledge of conditions and means at his
disposal. John Brown did not shrink at all from conspiratorial
methods. Those who have read the autobiography of Frederick
Douglas and the Reminiscences of Lucy Colman, will recall that
one of the plans laid by John Brown was to organize a chain of
armed camps in the mountains of West Virginia, North Carolina,
and Tennessee, send secret emissaries among the slaves inciting
them to flee to these camps, and there concert such measures as
times and conditions made possible for further arousing revolt
among the negroes. That this plan failed was due to the weakness
of the desire for liberty among the slaves themselves, more than
anything else.
Later on, when the politicians in their infinite deviousness
contrived a fresh proposition of how-not-to-do-it, known as the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the question of slavery to be
determined by the settlers, the direct actionists on both sides
sent bogus settlers into the territory, who proceeded to fight it
out. The pro-slavery men, who got in first, made a constitution
recognizing slavery and a law punishing with death any one who
aided a slave to escape; but the Free Soilers, who were a little
longer in arriving since they came from more distant States, made
a second constitution, and refused to recognize the other party's
laws at all. And John Brown was there, mixing in all the
violence, conspiratorial or open; he was "a horse-thief and a
murderer," in the eyes of decent, peaceable, political
actionists. And there is no doubt that he stole horses, sending
no notice in advance of his intention to steal them, and that he
killed pro-slavery men. He struck and got away a good many times
before his final attempt on Harper's Ferry. If he did not use
dynamite, it was because dynamite had not yet appeared as a
practical weapon. He made a great many more intentional attacks
on life than the two brothers Secretary Dobbs condemns for their
"murderous methods." And yet history has not failed to
understand John Brown. Mankind knows that though he was a
violent man, with human blood upon his hands, who was guilty of
high treason and hanged for it, yet his soul was a great, strong,
unselfish soul, unable to bear the frightful crime which kept
4,000,000 people like dumb beasts, and thought that making war
against it was a sacred, a God-called duty, (for John Brown was a
very religious man -- a Presbyterian).
It is by and because of the direct acts of the forerunners
of social change, whether they be of peaceful or warlike nature,
that the Human Conscience, the conscience of the mass, becomes
aroused to the need for change. It would be very stupid to say
that no good results are ever brought about by political action;
sometimes good things do come about that way. But never until
individual rebellion, followed by mass rebellion, has forced it.
Direct action is always the clamorer, the initiator, through
which the great sum of indifferentists become aware that
oppression is getting intolerable.
We have now and oppression in the land -- and not only in
this land, but throughout all those parts of the world which
enjoy the very mixed blessings of Civilization. And just as in
the question of chattel slavery, so this form of slavery has been
begetting both direct action and political action. A certain
percent of our population (probably a much smaller percent than
politicians are in the habit of assigning at mass meetings) is
producing the material wealth upon which all the rest of us live;
just as it was 4,000,000 chattel Blacks who supported all the
crowd of parasites above them. These are the _land workers_ and
the _industrial workers_.
Through the unprophesied and unprophesiable operation of
institutions which no individual of us created, but found in
existence when he came here, these workers, the most absolutely
necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose
services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are
just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed
withal -- to say nothing of their share of the other social
benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as
education and artistic gratification.
These workers have, in one form or another, mutually joined
their forces to see what betterment of their condition they could
get; primarily by direct action, secondarily by political action.
We have had the Grange, the Farmer's Alliance, Co-operative
Associations, Colonization Experiments, Knights of Labor, Trade
Unions, and Industrial Workers of the World. All of them have
been organized for the purpose of wringing from the masters in
the economic field a little better price, a little better
conditions, a little shorter hours; or on the other hand to
resist a reduction in price, worse conditions, or longer hours.
None of them has attempted a final solution of the social war.
None of them, except the Industrial Workers, has recognized that
there is a social war, inevitable so long as present legal-
social conditions endure. They accepted property institutions as
they found them. They were made up of average men, with average
desires, and they undertook to do what appeared to them possible
and very reasonable things. They were not committed to any
particular political policy when they were organized, but were
associated for direct action of their own initiation, either
positive or defensive.
Undoubtably there were and are among all these
organizations, members who looked beyond immediate demands; who
did see that the continuous development of forces now in
operation was bound to bring about conditions to which it is
impossible that life continue to submit, and against which,
therefore, it will protest, and violently protest; that it will
have no choice but to do so; that it must do so or tamely die;
and since it is not the nature of life to surrender without
struggle, it will not tamely die. Twenty-two years ago I met
Farmer's Alliance people who said so, Knights of Labor who said
so, Trade Unionists who said so. They wanted larger aims than
those to which their organizations were looking; but they had to
accept their fellow members as they were, and try to stir them to
work for such things as it was possible to make them see. And
what they could see was better prices, better wages, less
dangerous or tyrannical conditions, shorter hours. At the stage
of development when these movements were initiated, the land
workers could not see that their struggle had anything to do with
the struggle of those engaged in the manufacturing or
transporting service; nor could these latter see that theirs had
anything to do with the movement of the farmers. For that matter
very few of them see it yet. They have yet to learn that there
is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the
earth, the money, and the machines.
Unfortunately the great organizations of the farmers
frittered itself away in a stupid chase after political power.
It was quite successful in getting the power in certain States;
but the courts pronounced its laws unconstitutional, and there
was the burial hole of all its political conquests. Its original
program was to build its own elevators, and store the products
therein, holding these from the market till they could escape the
speculator. Also, to organize labor exchanges, issuing credit
notes upon products deposited for exchange. Had it adhered to
this program of direct mutual aid, it would, to some extent, for
a time at least, have afforded an illustration of how mankind may
free itself from the parasitism of the bankers and the middlemen.
Of course, it would have been overthrown in the end, unless it
had so revolutionized men's minds by the example as to force the
overthrow of the legal monopoly of land and money; but at least
it would have served a great educational purpose. As it was, it
"went after the red herring" and disintegrated merely from its
futility.
The Knights of Labor subsided into comparative
insignificance, not because of failure to use direct action, nor
because of its tampering with politics, which was small, but
chiefly because it was a heterogenous mass of workers who could
not associate their efforts effectively.
The Trade Unions grew strong as the Knights of Labor
subsided, and have continued slowly but persistently to increase
in power. It is true the increase has fluctuated; that there
have been set-backs; that great single organizations have been
formed and again dispersed. But on the whole trade unions have
been a growing power. They have been so because, poor as they
are, they have been a means whereby a certain section of the
workers have been able to bring their united force to bear
directly upon their masters, and so get for themselves some
portion of what they wanted -- of what their conditions dictated
to them they must try to get. The strike is their natural
weapon, that which they themselves have forged. It is the direct
blow of the strike which nine times out of ten the boss is afraid
of. (Of course there are occasions when he is glad of one, but
that's unusual.) And the reason he dreads a strike is not so
much because he thinks he cannot win out against it, but simply
and solely because he does not want an interruption of his
business. The ordinary boss isn't in much dread of a "class-
conscious vote;" there are plenty of shops where you can talk
Socialism or any other political program all day long; but if you
begin to talk Unionism you may forthwith expect to be discharged
or at best warned to shut up. Why? Not because the boss is so
wise as to know that political action is a swamp in which the
workingman gets mired, or because he understands that political
Socialism is fast becoming a middle-class movement; not at all.
He thinks Socialism is a very bad thing; but it's a good way off!
But he knows that if his shop is unionized, he will have trouble
right away. His hands will be rebellious, he will be put to
expense to improve his factory conditions, he will have to keep
workingmen that he doesn't like, and in case of strike he may
expect injury to his machinery or his buildings.
It is often said, and parrot-like repeated, that the bosses
are "class-conscious," that they stick together for their class
interest, and are willing to undergo any sort of personal loss
rather than be false to those interests. It isn't so at all.
The majority of business people are just like the majority of
workingmen; they care a whole lot more about their individual
loss or gain than about the gain or loss of their class. And it
is his individual loss the boss sees, when threatened by a union.
Now everybody knows that a strike of any size means
violence. No matter what any one's ethical preference for peace
may be, he knows it will not be peaceful. If it's a telegraph
strike, it means cutting wires and poles, and getting fake scabs
in to spoil the instruments. If it is a steel rolling mill
strike, it means beating up the scabs, breaking the windows,
setting the gauges wrong, and ruining the expensive rollers
together with tons and tons of material. IF it's a miners'
strike, it means destroying tracks and bridges, and blowing up
mills. If it is a garment workers' strike, it means having an
unaccountable fire, getting a volley of stones through an
apparently inaccessible window, or possibly a brickbat on the
manufacturer's own head. If it's a street-car strike, it means
tracks torn up or barricaded with the contents of ash-carts and
slop-carts, with overturned wagons or stolen fences, it means
smashed or incinerated cars and turned switches. If it is a
system federation strike, it means "dead" engines, wild engines,
derailed freights, and stalled trains. If it is a building
trades strike, it means dynamited structures. And always,
everywhere, all the time, fights between strike-breakers and
scabs against strikers and strike-sympathizers, between People
and Police.
On the side of the bosses, it means search-lights, electric
wires, stockades, bull-pens, detectives and provocative agents,
violent kidnapping and deportation, and every device they can
conceive for direct protection, besides the ultimate invocation
of police, militia, State constabulary, and federal troops.
Everybody knows this; everybody smiles when union officials
protest their organizations to be peaceable and law-abiding,
because everybody knows they are lying. They know that violence
is used, both secretly and openly; and they know it is used
because the strikers cannot do any other way, without giving up
the fight at once. Nor to they mistake those who thus resort to
violence under stress for destructive miscreants who do what
they do out of innate cussedness. The people in general
understand that they do these things through the harsh logic of a
situation which they did not create, but which forces them to
these attacks in order to make good in their struggle to live or
else go down the bottomless descent into poverty, that lets Death
find them in the poorhouse hospital, the city street, or the
river-slime. This is the awful alternative that the workers are
facing; and this is what makes the most kindly disposed human
beings -- men who would go out of their way to help a wounded
dog, or bring home a stray kitten and nurse it, or step aside to
avoid walking on a worm -- resort to violence against their
fellow men. They know, for the facts have taught them, that this
is the only way to win, if they can win at all. And it has
always appeared to me one of the most utterly ludicrous,
absolutely irrelevant things that a person can do or say, when
approached for relief or assistance by a striker who is dealing
with an immediate situation, to respond with "Vote yourself into
power!" when the next election is six months, a year, or two
years away.
Unfortunately the people who know best how violence is used
in union warfare cannot come forward and say: "On such a day, at
such a place, such and such specific action was done, and as a
result such and such concession was made, or such and such boss
capitulated." To do so would imperil their liberty and their
power to go on fighting. Therefore those that know best must
keep silent and sneer in their sleeves, while those that know
little prate. Events, not tongues, must make their position
clear.
And there has been a very great deal of prating these last
few weeks. Speakers and writers, honestly convinced I believe
that political action and political action only can win the
workers' battle, have been denouncing what they are pleased to
call "direct action" (what they really mean is conspiratorial
violence) as the author of mischief incalculable. One Oscar
Ameringer, as an example, recently said at a meeting in Chicago
that the Haymarket bomb of '86 had set back the eight-hour
movement twenty-five years, arguing that the movement would have
succeeded but for the bomb. It's a great mistake. No one can
exactly measure in years or months the effect of a forward push
or a reaction. No one can demonstrate that the eight-hour
movement could have been won twenty-five years ago. We know that
the eight-hour day was put on the statute books of Illinois in
1871 by political action, and has remained a dead letter. That
the direct action of the workers could have won it, then, cannot
be proved; but it can be shown that many more potent factors than
the Haymarket bomb worked against it. On the other hand, if the
reactive influence of the bomb was really so powerful, we should
naturally expect labor and union conditions to be worse in
Chicago than in the cities where no such thing happened. On the
contrary, bad as they are, the general conditions of labor are
better in Chicago than in most other large cities, and the power
of the unions is more developed there than in any other American
city except San Francisco. So if we are to conclude anything for
the influence of the Haymarket bomb, keep these facts in mind.
Personally I do not think its influence on the labor movement, as
such, was so very great.
It will be the same with the present furore about violence.
Nothing fundamental has been altered. Two men have been
imprisoned for what they did (twenty-four years ago they were
hanged for what they did not do); some few more may yet be
imprisoned. But the forces of life will continue to revolt
against their economic chains. There will be no cessation in
that revolt, no matter what ticket men vote or fail to vote,
until the chains are broken.
How will the chains be broken?
Political actionists tell us it will be only by means of
working-class party action at the polls; by voting themselves
into possession of the sources of life and the tools; by voting
that those who now command forests, mines, ranches, waterways,
mills, and factories, and likewise command the military power to
defend them, shall hand over their dominion to the people.
And meanwhile?
Meanwhile, be peaceable, industrious, law-abiding, patient,
and frugal (as Madero told the Mexican peons to be, after he sold
them to Wall Street)! Even if some of you are disenfranchised,
don't rise up even against that, for it might "set back the
party."
Well, I have already stated that some good is occasionally
accomplished by political action -- not necessarily working-class
party action either. But I am abundantly convinced that the
occasional good accomplished is more than counterbalanced by the
evil; just as I am convinced that though there are occasional
evils resulting through direct action, they are more than
counterbalanced by the good.
Nearly all the laws which were originally framed with the
intention of benefitting the workers, have either turned into
weapons in their enemies' hands, or become dead letters unless
the workers through their organizations have directly enforced
their observance. So that in the end, it is direct action that
has to be relied on anyway. As an example of getting the tarred
end of a law, glance at the anti-trust law, which was supposed to
benefit the people in general and the working class in
particular. About two weeks since, some 250 union leaders were
cited to answer to the charge of being trust formers, as the
answer of the Illinois Central to its strikers.
But the evil of pinning faith to indirect action is far
greater than any such minor results. The main evil is that it
destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit,
teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they
should do for themselves; finally renders organic the anomalous
idea that by massing supineness together until a majority is
acquired, then through the peculiar magic of that majority, this
supineness is to be transformed into energy. That is, people who
have lost the habit of striking for themselves as individuals,
who have submitted to every injustice while waiting for the
majority to grow, are going to become metamorphosed into human
high-explosives by a mere process of packing!
I quite agree that the sources of life, and all the natural
wealth of the earth, and the tools necessary to co-operative
production, must become freely accessible to all. It is a
positive certainty to me that unionism must widen and deepen its
purposes, or it will go under; and I feel sure that the logic of
the situation will gradually force them to see it. They must
learn that the workers' problem can never be solved by beating up
scabs, so long as their own policy of limiting their membership
by high initiation fees and other restrictions helps to make
scabs. They must learn that the course of growth is not so much
along the line of higher wages, but shorter hours, which will
enable them to increase membership, to take in everybody who is
willing to come into the union. They must learn that if they
want to win battles, all allied workers must act together, act
quickly (serving no notice on bosses), and retain their freedom
to do so at all times. And finally they must learn that even
then (when they have a complete organization) they can win
nothing permanent unless they strike for everything -- not for a
wage, not for a minor improvement, but for the whole natural
wealth of the earth. And proceed to the direct expropriation of
it all!
They must learn that their power does not lie in their
voting strength, that their power lies in their ability to stop
production. It is a great mistake to suppose that the wage-
earners constitute a majority of the voters. Wage-earners are
here today and there tomorrow, and that hinders a large number
from voting; a great percentage of them in this country are
foreigners without a voting right. The most patent proof that
Socialist leaders know this is so, is that they are compromising
their propaganda at every point to win the support of the
business class, the small investor. Their campaign papers
proclaimed that their interviewers had been assured by Wall
Street bond purchasers that they would be just as ready to buy
Los Angeles bonds from a socialist as a capitalist administrator;
that the present Milwaukee administration has been a boon to the
small investor; their reading notices assure their readers in
this city that we need not go to the great department stores to
buy -- buy rather of So-and-so on Milwaukee Avenue, who will
satisfy us quite as well as a "big business" institution. In
short, they are making every desperate effort to win the support
and to prolong the life of that middle-class which socialist
economy says must be ground to pieces, because they know they
cannot get a majority without them.
The most that a working-class party could do, even if its
politicians remained honest, would be to form a strong faction in
the legislatures which might, by combining its vote with one side
or another, win certain political or economic palliatives.
But what the working-class can do, when once they grow into
a solidified organization, is to show the possessing class,
through a sudden cessation of all work, that the whole social
structure rests on them; that the possessions of the others are
absolutely worthless to them without the workers' activity; that
such protests, such strikes, are inherent in the system of
property and will continually recur until the whole thing is
abolished -- and having shown that effectively, proceed to
expropriate.
"But the military power," says the political actionist; "we
must get political power, or the military will be used against
us!"
Against a real General Strike, the military can do nothing.
Oh, true, if you have a Socialist Briand in power, he may declare
the workers "public officials" and try to make them serve against
themselves! But against the solid wall of an immobile working-
mass, even a Briand would be broken.
Meanwhile, until this international awakening, the war will
go on as it had been going, in spite of all the hysteria which
well-meaning people who do not understand life and its
necessities may manifest; in spite of all the shivering that
timid leaders have done; in spite of all the reactionary revenges
that may be taken; in spite of all the capital that politicians
make out of the situation. It will go on because Life cries to
live, and Property denies its freedom to live; and Life will not
submit.
And should not submit.
It will go on until that day when a self-freed Humanity is
able to chant Swinburne's Hymn of Man"
"Glory to Man in the highest,
For Man is the master of Things."
-end-