SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP

“Is a railway porter a railway porter first and a man afterwards, or is he a man first and incidentally a railway porter?”

That is the issue between this tawdrification of trade unionism which is called Syndicalism, and the ideals of that Great State, that great commonweal, towards which the constructive forces in our civilisation tend.  Are we to drift on to a disastrous intensification of our present specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to work steadfastly upon a vast social reconstruction which will close this widening breach and rescue our community from its present dependence upon the reluctant and presently insurgent toil of a wages-earning proletariat?  Regarded as a project of social development, Syndicalism is ridiculous; regarded as an illuminating and unintentionally ironical complement to the implicit theories of our present social order, it is worthy of close attention.  The dream of the Syndicalist is an impossible social fragmentation.  The transport service is to be a democratic republic, the mines are to be a democratic republic, every great industry is to be a democratic republic within the State; our community is to become a conflict of inter-woven governments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or of extension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is to lie within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation not made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go on falling....  There the mind halts, blinded by the too dazzling vistas of an unimaginative millennium And the way to this, one gathers, is by striking—­persistent, destructive striking—­until it comes about.

Such is Syndicalism, the cheap Labour Panacea, to which the more passionate and less intelligent portion of the younger workers, impatient of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism, drifts steadily.  It is the direct and logical reaction to our present economic system, which has counted our workers neither as souls nor as heads, but as hands.  They are beginning to accept the suggestions of that method.  It is the culmination in aggression of that, at first, entirely protective trade unionism which the individual selfishness and collective short-sightedness and State blindness of our owning and directing and ruling classes forced upon the working man.  At first trade unionism was essentially defensive; it was the only possible defence of the workers, who were being steadily pressed over the margin of subsistence.  It was a nearly involuntary resistance to class debasement.  Mr. Vernon Hartshorn has expressed it as that in a recent article.  But his paper, if one read it from beginning to end, displayed, compactly and completely, the unavoidable psychological development of the specialised labour case.  He began in the mildest tones with those now respectable words, a “guaranteed minimum” of wages, housing, and so forth, and ended with a very clear intimation of an all-labour community.