Socialist Groups In The United States

What syndicalism really is we shall see best in the French picture. 16 Before attempting to do so we shall briefly note a few things about French socialism in general.

First, its ideological history goes further back and is perhaps more distinguished than that of any other. But no single variety of it ever crystallized so completely and commanded allegiance so widely as did the socialism of, say, the Fabian type on the one hand and of the Marxian on the other.

Fabian socialism requires English political society, and nothing like that developed in France—the great revolution and the subsequent failure of the aristocratic and the bourgeois elements to coalesce prevented it. Marxian socialism requires a broad and unified labor movement; or, as a rallying creed for intellectuals, it requires cultural traditions quite uncongenial to French limpidité. But all the other socialist creeds that have so far emerged appeal only to particular mentalities and social locations and are sectarian by nature.

Second, France was typically the country of the peasant, the artisan, the clerk and the small rentier. Capitalist evolution proceeded by measured steps and large-scale industry was confined to a few centers. Whatever the issues that divided these classes, they were economically conservative at first— nowhere else did conservatism rest on so broad a basis—and later on lent 16 Italian and Spanish syndicalism would do almost equally well. Only, in proportion to the number of illiterates, the anarchist element increases so much as to distort what I believe to be the true traits. This element has its place. But it should not be overemphasized.

From 1875 to 1914 337 increasing support to groups that sponsored middle-class reform, among them the radicaux-socialistes, a party that can be best described by saying that it was neither radical nor socialist. Many workmen were of the same sociological type and of the same mind. Many professionals and intellectuals adapted themselves to it, which accounts for the fact that over-production and under-employment of intellectuals, though it existed, failed to assert itself as we should otherwise expect.

Unrest there was. But among the malcontents, the Catholics, who disapproved of the anti-clerical tendencies that various circumstances brought to the fore in the Third Republic, were more important than the people who were displeased with the capitalist order of things. It was from the former and not from the latter that the real danger to the bourgeois republic arose at the time of the affaire Dreyfus. Third, it follows that, though again for different reasons, there was not much more scope for serious socialism in France than there was in Russia or the United States.

Hence she had a variety of socialisms and quasi- socialisms that were not serious. The Blanquist party whose hope was the action of “a few resolute men” may serve as an example: a small band of intellectuals with a bent for conspiracy and professional revolutionists together with the mob of Paris and two or three other big towns was all that ever came within the horizon of groups like that. Eventually however a Marxist parti ouvrier was founded by Guesde and Lafargue with a class- war program (1883) that had received the sanction of Marx himself. It developed on orthodox lines, fighting putschism of the Hervé type and anarchism on the one front and Jaurès’ reformism on the other, much as its German counterpart did. But it never acquired similar importance and never meant nearly as much either to the masses or to the intellectuals, in spite of the merger of socialist groups in the chambre which was achieved in 1893 (48 seats as compared with the 300 occupied by governmental republicans) and eventually led to the formation of the Unified Socialist party (1905).

Fourth, I will simply state the fact, without attempting to go behind it, that the social pattern glanced at above precluded the emergence of great and disciplined parties of the English type. Instead, as every one knows, parliamentary politics became a cotillon of small and unstable groups that combined and dissolved in response to momentary situations and individual interests and intrigues, setting up and pulling down cabinets according to the principles, as I put it before, of a parlor game. One of the consequences of this was governmental inefficiency. Another was that cabinet office came within the sight of socialist and quasi-socialist groups sooner than it did in countries whose socialist parties were much more powerful but whose politics were run according to somewhat more rational methods.

Until the national emergency of 1914, Guesde and his group proved impervious to the temptation and consistently refused cooperation with bourgeois parties in the best orthodox style. But the reformist group which in any case shaded off into bourgeois radicalism and whose principles—reform without revolution—did not condemn such cooperation had really no reason to do likewise. Jaurès accordingly felt no compunction at the time of the Dreyfus crisis (1898) in lending support to a bourgeois government in order to defend the Republic. Thus an old problem of socialist principle and tactics, which was no problem at all in England or Sweden but a fundamental one everywhere else, suddenly burst upon the socialist world in a most practical form.

It acquired its particular sting by an additional circumstance:

supporting a bourgeois government was one thing, though bad enough from the standpoint of rigid orthodoxy, but sharing its responsibilities by actually entering it was quite another thing. M.Millerand did precisely this. In 1899 he entered the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet—together with M.de Galliffet, a conservative general who was best known to the public for his vigorous participation in the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. Two patriots sacrificing personal views in order to join forces in a national emergency—what of it? This, I suppose, will express the reaction of most of my readers. I need hardly assure them that personally I have no wish to hold that the two gentlemen disgraced themselves. Moreover, it may well be questioned whether even then M.Millerand should have been called a socialist at all. 17

The French working class has every reason to remember with gratitude what, legislatively and administratively, he did for it while in cabinet office.

At the same time, we must try to understand how “Millerandism” was bound to strike the Guesdists in France and orthodox socialists all over Europe. For them it spelled lapse and sin, betrayal of the goal, pollution of the faith. This was very natural and so was the anathema hurled at it by the international congress of Amsterdam (1904). But beyond and behind the doctrinal anathema there was a piece of simple common sense. If the proletariat was not to lend its back for ambitious politicians to use for climbing into power, every deviation from approved practice had to be most jealously watched.

The trick of talking about national emergencies whenever it suits careerists to make a bid for power—after all, was there ever a situation that politicians did not consider an emergency?—was too well known and too discredited to impress anyone, particularly the French proletariat that had learned to rate political phrases at their true value. There was danger that the masses might turn away from political socialism in contempt. 18 In fact, there was more than a mere danger. They were actually turning away from it. Beholding, as the whole nation did, the sorry spectacle of political inefficiency, incompetence and frivolity that was the product of the sociological pattern imperfectly sketched above, they placed no trust in the state, the political world, the scribblers, and had no respect for any of them or indeed for anything or anybody except the memory of some great figures of the past. Part of the industrial proletariat had conserved its Catholic faith. The rest was adrift. And to those who had overcome their bourgeois propensities, syndicalism was much more attractive than any of the available species of straight socialism the sponsors of which bade fair to reproduce, on a smaller scale, the games of the bourgeois parties. Revolutionary tradition of the French type of which syndicalism was the principal heir, of course greatly helped.

For syndicalism is not merely revolutionary trade unionism. This may mean many things which have little to do with it. Syndicalism is apolitical and anti-political in the sense that it despises action on or through the organs of traditional politics in general and parliaments in particular. It is anti- intellectual both in the sense that it despises constructive programs with theories behind them and in the sense that it despises the intellectual’s leadership. It really appeals to the workman’s instincts—and not, like Marxism, to the intellectual’s idea of what the workman’s instincts ought to be—by promising him what he can understand, viz., the conquest of the shop he works in, conquest by physical violence, ultimately by the general strike. Now, unlike Marxism or Fabianism, syndicalism cannot be espoused by anyone afflicted by any trace of economic or sociological training. There is no rationale for it. Writers who, acting on the hypothesis that everything must be amenable to rationalization, try to construct a theory for it inevitably emasculate it. Some linked it to anarchism which, as a social philosophy, is completely alien to it in roots, aims and ideology—however similar the behavior of Bakunin’s workingclass following (1872–1876) may look to us. Others attempted to subsume it, as a special case characterized by a special tactical bent, under Marxism, which involves discarding all that is most essential to both. Still others have constructed a new socialist species to 18 The Italian socialists actually declined the invitation to join the cabinet that was three times extended to them by Giolitti (1903, 1906, 1911).

function as the Platonic idea of it—guild socialism—but in doing so they had to commit the movement to a definite schema of ultimate values the absence of which is one of its salient features. The men who organized and led the Confédération Générale du Travail during its syndicalist stage (1895–1914) were mostly genuine proletarians or trade-union officers, or both. They were brimming over with resentment and with the will to fight. They did not bother about what they would do with the wreckage in case of success. Is that not enough? Why should we refuse to recognize the truth which life teaches us every day—that there is such a thing as pugnacity in the abstract that neither needs nor heeds any argument and cares for nothing except for victory as such?

But any intellectual can fill the void behind that brute violence in the way that suits his taste. And the violence itself, combined with the anti- intellectualism and the anti-democratic slant, acquires a significant connotation if viewed in the setting of a disintegrating civilization that so many people hate for all kinds of reasons. Those who at the time felt like that but hated not so much the economic arrangements of capitalist society as its democratic rationalism were not free to fall back on orthodox socialism which promises still more rationalism. To their intellectual anti-intellectualism—whether Nietzschean or Bergsonian—the syndicalist anti-intellectualism of the fist may well have appealed as the complement—in the world of the masses—of their own creed. Thus a very strange alliance actually came to pass, and syndicalism found its philosopher after all in Georges Sorel.

Of course all revolutionary movements and ideologies that coexist at any time always have a lot in common. They are the products of the same social process and must in many respects react in similar ways to similar necessities. Also, they cannot avoid borrowing from each other or splashing each other with their colors in their very squabbles. Finally, individuals as well as groups often do not know where, if anywhere, they belong and, sometimes from ignorance, at other times from a correct perception of advantage, they mix up contradictory principles into mongrel creeds of their own. All this confuses observers and accounts for the wide variety of current interpretations. It is particularly confusing in the case of syndicalism which flourished only so short a time and was soon to be deserted by its intellectual exponents. Nevertheless, however we may appraise what syndicalism meant to Sorel and what Sorel meant to syndicalism, his Reflexions sur la Violence and his Illusions du Progrès do help us toward a diagnosis. That his economics and his sociology completely differed from those of Marx may in itself not mean much. But standing as it does right in the midst of the anti- intellectualist torrent, Sorel’s social philosophy sheds a flood of light on the first practical manifestation of a social force that was and is revolutionary in a sense in which Marxism was not.