Just here lies the chief danger of the craft form of organization as a final objective.  If the trade-union movement is ever to be wholly effective and adequate to fulfill its lofty aims, it must cease to look upon craft organization as a final aim.  The present forms of craft organization are useful, only so long as they are thought of as a step to something higher, only in so far as the craft is regarded as a part of the whole.  Were this end ever borne in mind, we should hear less of jurisdictional fights, and there would be more of sincere endeavor and more of active effort among the better organized workers to share the benefits of organization with all of the laboring world.  The more helpless and exploited the group, the keener would be the campaign, the more unsparing the effort on the part of the more fortunate sons of toil.

Against such a narrow conservatism, however, there are other forces at work, both within and without the regularly organized labor movement, one of them aiming at such reorganization of the present unions as shall gradually merge the many craft unions into fewer and larger bodies.[A] This process is evolutionary, and constructive, but slow, and meanwhile the exploited workers cry in their many tongues, “O Lord, how long!” or else submit in voiceless despair.

[Footnote A:  The United Mine Workers are essentially on an industrial basis; they take in all men and boys working in and about the mine.]

Is it any wonder that under these conditions of industrial anarchy and imperfect organization of labor power a new voice is heard in the land, a voice which will not be stilled, revolutionary, imperious, aiming frankly at the speedy abolition of organized governments, and of the present industrial system?  This is the movement known in Europe as syndicalism, and on this continent represented by the Industrial Workers of the World, usually termed the I.W.W.

Their program stands for the one big union of all the workers, the general strike and the gaining possession and the conducting of the industries by the workers engaged in them.  They deprecate the making of agreements with employers, and acknowledge no duty in the keeping of agreements.

The year 1911 will be remembered among word-historians as the year when the word “syndicalism” became an everyday English word.  It had its origin in the French word “syndicalisme,” which is French for trade unionism, just as French and Belgian trade unions are “syndicats.”  But because for reasons that cannot be gone into here so many of the French trade unionists profess this peculiarly revolutionary philosophy, there has grown up out of and around the word “syndicalisme” a whole literature with writers like George Sorel and Gustave Herve as the prophets and exponents of the new movement.  So the word “syndicalism,” thus anglicized, has come to signify this latest form of trade-union organization and action.