EDITOR'S
CHAIR

Industrial Unionism and the General Strike. Last month in our International Notes we explained some of the causes leading up to the strike of the government employees at Paris. The strike was a success; particulars are given on another page. Of the present situation in France the Chicago Tribune's dispatch of April 18 says:

Revolutions do not not announce themselves as a rule, so the wide circulation of the report that general strikes would be ordered by May 1 may be accepted as a guarantee that none will take place then. It takes time to organize a movement as vast as that contemplated by the Confederation Generale de Travail.

But what is preparing for the future? There has grown up in France an authority which looms as large as that of the government itself-labor unions, and their powers, already developed beyond anything known in America, are now immensely augmented by consolidation with civil service unions.

Now we have the spectacle in France of the entire public service down to prison wardens, who publicly promise to open the cells of any brothers committed to their charge, in the hands of organizations which are planning a universal strike and demanding the overthrow of the present parliamentary system. This can be described only as anarchy. At present it is a well behaved anarchy. It is well behaved because the labor leaders believe-so easy has been their success thus far that the revolution will be of little violence when the moment comes.

All this is welcome and inspiring news to American socialists. But if we misunderstand it, we may do a lot of senseless floundering before we get our bearings. And the key to an understanding of the labor situation in France is right here. The Confederation Generale du Travail (General Federation of Labor) is a great combination of local unions of laborers, all drawn together by the economic, practical, every-day conditions, needs and problems that they have had to face. Starting from facts rather than theories, dealing with these facts as necessity rather than ideas of justice and goodness dictated, pushed along by capitalist concentration and the ever-growing intensity of the class struggle, this great labor organization has become the real revolutionary force in France. In its ranks, the socialists are the conservatives, the right wing. Yet the party socialists now stand loyally

INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM AND THE GENERAL STRIKE 899

by the Confederation in its fight against capitalists and the capitalist government. It is particularly gratifying to see that our Paris daily, l'Humanité, edited by Jean Jaurés, an “intellectual," came out squarely for the Confedertaion while the last fight was on. Things may be doing soon in France. But now let us turn to our own country. Local Alameda County, California, of the Socialist Party of America, lately adopted in mass meeting the following recommendations:

FIRST: To start, as soon as expedient, the education and propagation (not only among the organized working class but also among the unorganized) in favor of a complete industrial federation of all separate trade unions into one solid phalanx, for the sole purpose and ultimate aim, to be able to call a general national, and, if expedient, an international strike of all the workers in order to emancipate themselves from wage slavery;

SECONDLY: That such education and propagation shall be carried on alternately and unceasingly by such methods as the issuances of manifestos, pamphlets, street demonstrations and meetings, until the final aim has been achieved;

THIRDLY: Hand in hand in conjunction with the above, a vigorous and well directed anti-military agitation shall be carried on by the same means;

FOURTHLY: These resolutions shall be forwarded to the entire press of the Socialist party, as well as all of the State and National secretaries, with the end in view that the next National convention of the Socialist party shall take the same under consideration for final adoption, as the most expedient means in connection with the ballot of overthrowing capitalism.

The Review is in complete sympathy with the aims of the Alameda County comrades, but we believe their resolutions contain a fatal defect, which we regret, all the more deeply because it gives opportunists and trimmers a chance to sneer at us as "Utopian impossibilists." The defect is here: the "sole purpose and ultimate aim" of a great labor organization composed of millions of men, and including, as such an organization should include, all the laborers in every workshop into which it pentrates, can not in the nature of things be anything so far off as a general strike to abolish wage slavery. One of its purposes, and a very important purpose, must be to do the things that the old trade unions are now trying to do. They try to keep wages up. Sometimes they fail but sometimes they succeed. They try to shorten hours, with some successes and some failures. They are a survival from a generation ago, when they had to deal with small competing employers, whom they sometimes played against each other. Now it is the employers, consolidated into immense corporations, that play the unions against each other. The unions must consolidate in some efficient way, or they will be helpless under the feet of the trusts. If we let the union men alone, their stomachs

will bring them to the correct course of action in time. If we point out the immediate material benefits of consolidation, we may possibly help it along a little. But if we were to go to the average union man and urge him to merge his union, which has been of some practical benefit to him, into a national or international organization whose "sole purpose" should be the calling of a universal strike to abolish wage slavery, he might think we were simply fools, or he might think we were dangerous enemies of unions, but he certainly would not be carried away with enthusiasm for our proposition.

By all means let us carry on a propaganda for industrial unionism, but let it be on practical grounds. Let us keep our feet on solid earth and cross no bridges till we come to them. The general strike may be the method by which capitalism is to be overthrown, but the first condition for a general strike is a thoroughly organized working class. First let us do what France has done; then we shall be in a position to talk intelligently about a general strike.

Workingmen and the Police. In this month's Review we start a brief series of brief sketches by Arthur Scales, telling of facts that are perfectly familiar to workingmen who have been "down and out,” perfectly familiar likewise to city editors. Some of these horrors creep into the capitalist papers nearly every day; there are so many that it would be hard to suppress them all; besides they make good reading and they can be and are skillfully doctored so that their real meaning. is not apparent. But the truth is that the man without money is at the mercy of the police, brutality on the part of a policeman is a help rather than a bar to his advancement, and many of the police stations, jails and prisons of the United States are chambers of horrors. All this is to the advantage of the capitalist. The more thoroughly workingmen are terrorized, the readier they will be to accept a job at starvation wages, and the greater will be their respect for injunctions. Policemen, jailers, legislators and judges naturally act for the interests of the capitalists from whom their salaries come. Meanwhile the workingmen, except such of them as have had personal experience with the police, have been apparently indifferent on the subject. But the increasing flood of injunctions against unions is one clear sign that the workingman who is proud of never having been arrested may soon develop a personal interest in the way the police department is run. We organized socialists thus far have displayed little more intelligence on the subject than other laborers, and when we have it has been because, as in Los Angeles, our meetings were suppressed. But it is time we did something. And the weak spot in the armor of this system of oppression is the jury. In some states (Illinois is one) no

one can be legally sent to prison without a jury trial unless he waives. it in writing. Hundreds of workingmen every week sign these waivers at the request of officials without knowing what they are signing. The socialist party and the labor unions should stand back of the man who is "down and out," at least to the extent of keeping him informed that he is entitled to a jury trial if he wants one. Then any workingman who is drawn on a jury should bear in mind that under the constitution of the United States he is the judge of the law as well as of the facts. Juries were an important weapon of defense for the rising capitalist class in England against the feudal lords. They may prove qually valuable to the modern working class.

"Unions Protect Wealth." This heading is given by the Chronicle, apparently the organ of the Central Labor Council of Cincinnati, to its report of a speech recently delivered by Warren E. Stone, President of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, at a banquet of the Economic Club of New York. A few gems of thought from this speech deserve a wider reading, and we reproduce them:

"There is no necessary strife between capital and labor; neither is there any fundamental strife between the capitalist and the laborer."

"I recognize the fact that capital has rights as well as labor."

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"But,' some cry, 'the laboring man wants all our money.' Nothing further from the truth."

"Many have the idea that Organized Labor is opposed to the injunction law. This is not correct. It is the abuse of the injunction law that we are opposed to. If properly used, the injunction law is useful and perhaps necessary.

"Gentlemen, all that stands between you and your wealth and the wave of anarchy that would sweep over you is the conservative labor unions. Destroy them and the days of the commune will be lived over again."

Every locomotive engineer is in a position to preserve or to wreck so much valuable property that it would be an act of crazy folly for a railroad manager to put any but a well equipped and well paid man in charge. It is therefore not surprising that Mr. Stone should have uttered these sentiments, but it does seem a trifle surprising that the Chronicle should have reproduced them approvingly. There are plenty of union men wholly unfamiliar with socialism to whom each of Mr. Stone's sentences is a joke. Under present conditions, a working man whose head is in a healthy condition wants all the money he can get. His conscience. does not trouble him in the least about the "rights" of the capitalist. He is opposed to injunctions for the very good reason that they are an obstacle to his getting lower wages and shorter hours. Such men are on the increase, for the fatuous capitalists, regardless of Mr. Stone's really intelligent advice, continue in their onslaught on the conservative labor unions. Meanwhile let us push the work of organization, that when the Commune comes it may come to stay.