Let us suppose that one hundred men have an agreement with the boss that they should work eight hours a day and get $4.00 in return for a certain amount of work. The American Federation of Labor is very particular—and wisely so that the amount of work to be done during a day be clearly stipulated and agreed upon by the two contracting parties-the workers and their employers, this for the purpose of preventing any "speeding up."

Now, to exemplify, let us suppose that these one hundred workers are bricklayers, get fifty cents an hour, work eight hours a day and, as agreed, lay fourteen hundred bricks a day. Now, one good day the boss comes up and tells them he can't pay them $4.00 a day, but they must be satisfied with $3.50. It is a slack season, there are plenty of idle men and, moreover, the job is in the country where the workers cannot very well quit and return home. A strike, for some reason or another, is out of the question. Such things do happen. What are they to do? Yield to the boss sheepishly and supinely? But here comes the Syndicalist who tells them, "Boys, the boss reduced fifty cents on your pay-why not do the same and reduce two hundred bricks on your day's work? And if the boss notices it and remonstrates, well, lay the usual number of bricks, but see that the mortar does not stick so well, so that the top part of the wall will have to be made over again in the morning; or else after laying the real number of bricks you are actually paid for, build up the rest out of the plumb line or use broken bricks or recur to any of the many tricks of the trade. The important thing is not what you do, but simply that it be of no danger or detriment to the third parties and that the boss gets exactly his money's worth and not one whit more."

The same may be said of the other trades. Sweatshop girls when their wages are reduced, instead of sewing one hundred pairs. of pants, can sew, say, seventy; or, if they must return the same number, sew the other thirty imperfectly-with crooked seams-or use bad thread or doctor the thread with cheap chemicals so that the seams rip a few hours after the sewing, or be not so careful about the oil on the machines, and so on.

c) Put Salt in the Sugars

If you are an engineer you can, with two cents worth of powdered stone or a pinch of sand, stall your machine, and cause a loss of time or make expensive repairs necessary. If you are a joiner or

Quoted from the Montpelier Labor Exchange for 1900, in Tridon, The New Unionism, 43-46 (1913).

woodworker, what is simpler than to ruin furniture without your boss noticing it, and thereby drive his customers away? A garment worker can easily spoil a suit or a bolt of cloth; if you are working in a department store a few spots on a fabric cause it to be sold for next to nothing; a grocery clerk, by packing up goods carelessly, brings about a smashup; in the woolen or the haberdashery trade a few drops of acid on the goods you are wrapping will make a customer furious; an agricultural laborer may sow bad

seed in wheat fields, etc.

d) The Effectiveness of Sabotage3

BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI

Now that the bosses have succeeded in dealing an almost mortal blow to the boycott, now that picket duty is practically outlawed, free speech throttled, free assemblage prohibited, and injunctions against labor are becoming epidemic; sabotage, this dark, invincible, terrible Damocles' sword that hangs over the head of the master class, will replace all the confiscated weapons and ammunition of the army of the toilers. And it will win, for it is the most redoubtable of all, except the general strike. In vain may the bosses get an injunction against the strikers' funds-sabotage will get a more powerful one against their machinery. In vain may they invoke old laws and make new ones against it-they will never discover it, never track it to its lair, never run it to the ground, for no laws will ever make a crime of the “clumsiness and lack of skill” of a "scab" who bungles his work or "puts on the bum" a machine he “does not know how to run."

There can be no injunction against it. No policeman's club. No rifle diet. No prison bars. It cannot be starved into submission. It cannot be discharged. It cannot be black-listed. It is present everywhere and everywhere invisible, like the airship that soars high above the clouds in the dead of night, beyond the reach of the cannon and the searchlight, and drops the dealiest bombs into the enemy's own encampment.

Sabotage is the most formidable weapon of economic warfare, which will eventually open to the workers the great iron gate of capitalist exploitation and lead them out of the house of bondage into the free land of the future.

36 Adapted from the Introduction to Pouget's Sabotage, 35-36. Copyright by Charles H. Kerr & Co. (1913).

e) The Universality of Sabotage

Actions which might be classed as sabotage are used by the different exploiting and professional classes.

The truck farmer packs his largest fruits and vegetables upon the top layer. The merchant sells inferior articles as "something just as good." The doctor gives "bread pills" or other harmless concoctions in cases where the symptoms are puzzling. The builder uses poorer materials than demanded in the specifications. The manufacturer adulterates foodstuffs and clothing. All these are for the purpose of gaining more profits.

Carloads of potatoes were destroyed in Illinois recently; cotton was burned in the southern states; coffee was destroyed by the Brazilian planters; barge loads of onions were dumped overboard in California; apples were left to rot on the trees of whole orchards in Washington; and hundreds of tons of foodstuffs are held in cold storage until rendered unfit for consumption. All to raise prices.

Some forms of capitalist sabotage are legalized, others are not. But whether or not the various practices are sanctioned by law, it is evident that they are more harmful to society as a whole than is the sabotage of the workers.

Capitalists cause imperfect dams to be constructed, and devastating floods sweep whole sections of the country. They have faulty bridges erected, and wrecks cause great loss of life. They sell steamer tickets, promising absolute security, and sabotage the lifesaving equipment to the point where hundreds are murdered, as witness the "Titanic."

The "General Slocum" disaster is an example of capitalist sabotage on the life preservers. The Iroquois Theater fire is an example of sabotage by exploiters who assured the public that the fire-curtain was made of asbestos. The cases could be multiplied indefinitely.

Capitalist sabotage aims to benefit a small group of non-producers. Working-class sabotage seeks to help the wage-working class at the expense of parasites.

The frank position of the class-conscious worker is that capitalist sabotage is wrong because it harms the workers; working-class sabotage is right because it aids the workers.

Sabotage is a direct application of the idea that property has no rights that its creators are bound to respect. Especially is this true when the creators of the wealth of the world are in hunger and want amid the abundance they have produced, while the idle few have all the good things of life.

37 Quoted from an editorial in the Industrial Worker, of Spokane, Washington, in Tridon, The New Unionism, 53–55 (1913).

The open advocacy of sabotage and its widespread use is a true reflection of economic conditions. The current ethical code, with all existing laws and institutions, is based upon private property in production. Why expect those who have no stake in society, as it is now constituted, to continue to contribute to its support?

313. Industrial Versus Trade Unionism 38

BY MARY K. O'SULLIVAN

"We were drowning men ready to grasp at a straw when the Industrial Workers of the World appeared to save us," said more than one striker in Lawrence. Up to the present the Textile Workers of the American Federation of Labor have failed to organize the unskilled and underpaid workers. They have ignored their capacity for strength and failed to win them to their cause or to better their condition. In the past foreigners have been the element through which strikes in the textile industry have been lost. This is the first time in the history of our labor struggles that the foreigners have stood to a man to better their condition as underpaid workers.

The textile workers had only one permanent organization at Lawrence at the beginning of the strike. John Golden, the official head of the Textile Workers of the World, instead of remaining in Lawrence and fighting for the interests of the workers, went to Boston and was reported to have denounced the strike as being led by a band of revolutionists.

Members of the Industrial Workers of the World sent for Joe Ettor and in four days he organized a fighting force such as had never existed in New England before.

Nothing was so conducive to organization by the Industrial Workers of the World as the methods used by the three branches of the American Federation of Labor. These were the Lawrence Central Labor Union, the Boston Women's Trade Union League, and the Textile Workers of America. Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and unbelievers-men and women of many races and languages, -were working together as human beings with a common cause. The American Federation of Labor alone refused to coöperate. As a consequence, the strikers came to look upon the federation as a force almost as dangerous to their success as the force of the employers themselves, and I violate no confidence in saying that the operatives represented in the strike committee have more respect for the mill owners than for the leaders of this antagonistic element

38 Adapted from an article in The Survey, XXVIII, 72-74. Copyright (1912).

within their own ranks. A striker who went to the federation for relief was looked upon as recreant to his cause and before the strike ended the American Federation of Labor organizations, by openly refusing to give any one help who refused to return to work, came to be looked upon as a trap designed in the interests of the mills to catch any workers who could be induced to desert their cause.

314. The Standpoint of Syndicalism"

BY LOUIS LEVINE

The fact which is untiringly emphasized in the Syndicalist analysis is the objective antagonistic position of those engaged in modern industry. The owners of the means of production directly or indirectly running their business for their private ends are interested in ever-increasing profits and in higher returns. The workingmen, on the other hand, who passively carry on productive operations are anxious to obtain the highest possible price for their labor-power which is their only source of livelihood. Between these two economic categories friction is inevitable, because profits ever feed on wages, while wages incessantly encroach upon profits.

From this twofold antagonism, rooted in the structure of modern economic society, struggle must ever spring anew, and this is the reason why all schemes and plans to avoid industrial conflicts fail so lamentably. Even the conservative trades unions, based on the idea that the interests of labor and capital are identical, are forced by circumstances to act contrary to their own profession of faith. Organizations like the Civic Federation are doomed to impotency. Boards of conciliation and arbitration work most unsatisfactorily and can show but few and insignificant results.

All efforts, therefore, to establish industrial peace under existing conditions result at best in the most miserable kind of social patchwork which but reveals in more striking nudity the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in modern economic organization.

There is but one logical conclusion from the point of view of Syndicalism. If industrial peace is made impossible by modern economic institutions, the latter must be done away with and industrial peace must be secured by a fundamental change in social organization. At the root of the struggle between capital and labor is the private ownership of the means of production which results in the autocratic or oligarchic direction of industry and in inequality of

Adapted from an article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, XLIV, 114–118. Copyright (1912).