The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
PRICE TEN CENTS
OCTOBER, 1916
I. W. W. PUBLISHING BUREAU
CLEVELAND, O., U. S. A.
Since withdrawn as official union literature
The interest in sabotage in the United States has developed lately on account of
the case of Frederick Sumner Boyd in the state of New Jersey as an aftermath of
the Paterson strike. Before his arrest and conviction for advocating sabotage,
little or nothing was known of this particular form of labor tactic in the
United States. Now there has developed a two-fold necessity to advocate it: not
only to explain what it means to the worker in his fight for better conditions,
but also to justify our fellow-worker Boyd in everything that he said. So I am
desirous primarily to explain sabotage, to explain it in this two-fold
significance, first as to its utility and second as to its legality.
Its Necessity In The Class War
I am not going to attempt to justify sabotage on any moral ground. If the
workers consider that sabotage is necessary, that in itself makes sabotage
moral. Its necessity is its excuse for existence. And for us to discuss the
morality of sabotage would be as absurd as to discuss the morality of the strike
or the morality of the class struggle itself. In order to understand sabotage or
to accept it at all it is necessary to accept the concept of class struggle. If
you believe that between the workers on the one side and their employers on the
other there is peace, there is harmony such as exists between brothers, and that
consequently whatever strikes and lockouts occur are simply family squabbles; if
you believe that a point can be reached whereby the employer can get enough and
the worker can get enough, a point of amicable adjustment of industrial warfare
and economic distribution, then there is no justification and no explanation of
sabotage intelligible to you. Sabotage is one weapon in the arsenal of labor to
fight its side of the class struggle. Labor realizes, as it becomes more
intelligent, that it must have power in order to accomplish anything; that
neither appeals for sympathy nor abstract rights will make for better
conditions. For instance, take an industrial establishment such as a silk mill,
where men and women and little children work ten hours a day for an average wage
of between six and seven dollars a week. Could any one of them, or a committee
representing the whole, hope to induce the employer to give better conditions by
appealing to his sympathy, by telling him of the misery, the hardship and the
poverty of their lives; or could they do it by appealing to his sense of
justice? Suppose that an individual working man or woman went to an employer and
said, “I make, in my capacity as wage worker in this factory, so many dollars’
worth of wealth every day and justice demands that you give me at least half.”
The employer would probably have him removed to the nearest lunatic asylum. He
would consider him too dangerous a criminal to let loose on the community! It is
neither sympathy nor justice that makes an appeal to the employer. But it is
power. If a committee can go to the employer with this ultimatum: “We represent
all the men and women in this shop. They are organized in a union as you are
organized in a manufacturers’ association. They have met and formulated in that
union a demand for better hours and wages and they are not going to work one day
longer unless they get it. In other words, they have withdrawn their power as
wealth producers from your plant and they are going to coerce you by this
withdrawal of their power; into granting their demands,” that sort of ultimatum
served upon an employer usually meets with an entirely different response; and
if the union is strongly enough organized and they are able to make good their
threat they usually accomplish what tears and pleadings never could have
accomplished.
We believe that the class struggle existing in society is expressed in the
economic power of the master on the one side and the growing economic power of
the workers on the other side meeting in open battle now and again, but meeting
in continual daily conflict over which shall have the larger share of labor’s
product and the ultimate ownership of the means of life. The employer wants long
hours, the intelligent workingman wants short hours. The employer is not
concerned with the sanitary conditions in the mill, he is concerned only with
keeping the cost of production at a minimum; the intelligent workingman is
concerned, cost or no cost, with having ventilation, sanitation and lighting
that will be conducive to his physical welfare. Sabotage is to this class
struggle what the guerrilla warfare is to the battle. The strike is the open
battle of the class struggle, sabotage is the guerrilla warfare, the day-by-day
warfare between two opposing classes.
General Forms of Sabotage
Sabotage was adopted by the General Federation of Labor of France in 1897 as a
recognized weapon in their method of conducting fights on their employers. But
sabotage as an instinctive defense existed long before it was ever officially
recognized by any labor organization. Sabotage means primarily: the withdrawal
of efficiency. Sabotage means either to slacken up and interfere with the
quantity, or to botch in your skill and interfere with the quality, of
capitalist production or to give poor service. Sabotage is not physical
violence, sabotage is an internal, industrial process. It is something that is
fought out within the four walls of the shop. And these three forms of sabotage
— to affect the quality, the quantity and the service are aimed at affecting
the profit of the employer. Sabotage is a means of striking at the employer’s
profit for the purpose of forcing him into granting certain conditions, even as
workingmen strike for the same purpose of coercing him. It is simply another
form of coercion.
There are many forms of interfering with efficiency, interfering with quality
and the quantity of production: from varying motives — there is the employer’s
sabotage as well as the worker’s sabotage. Employers interfere with the quality
of production, they interfere with the quantity of production, they interfere
with the supply as well as with the kind of goods for the purpose of increasing
their profit. But this form of sabotage, capitalist sabotage, is antisocial, for
the reason that it is aimed at the good of the few at the expense of the many,
whereas working-class sabotage is distinctly social, it is aimed at the benefit
of the many, at the expense of the few.
Working-class sabotage is aimed directly at “the boss” and at his profits, in
the belief that that is the solar plexus of the employer, that is his heart, his
religion, his sentiment, his patriotism. Everything is centered in his pocket
book, and if you strike that you are striking at the most vulnerable point in
his entire moral and economic system.
Short Pay, Less Work, “Ca Canny”
Sabotage, as it aims at the quantity, is a very old thing, called by the Scotch
“ca canny.” All intelligent workers have tried it at some time or other when
they have been compelled to work too hard and too long. The Scotch dockers had a
strike in 1889 and their strike was lost, but when they went back to work they
sent a circular to every docker in Scotland and in this circular they embodied
their conclusions, their experience from the bitter defeat. It was to this
effect, “The employers like the scabs, they have always praised their work, they
have said how much superior they were to us, they have paid them twice as much
as they have ever paid us; now let us go back to the docks determined that since
those are the kind of workers they like and that is the kind of work they
endorse we will do the same thing. We will let the kegs of wine go over the
docks as the scabs did. We will have great boxes of fragile articles drop in the
midst of the pier as the scabs did. We will do the work just as clumsily, as,
slowly, as destructively, as the scabs did. And we will see how long our
employers can stand that kind of work.” It was very few months until through
this system of sabotage they had won everything they had fought for and not been
able to win through the strike. This was the first open announcement of sabotage
in an English-speaking country.
I have heard of my grandfather telling how an old fellow came to work on the
railroad and the boss said, “Well, what can you do?”
“I can do ‘most anything,” said he — a big husky fellow.
“Well,” said the boss, “can you handle a pick and a shovel?”
“Oh, sure. How much do you pay on this job?”
“A dollar a day.”
“Is that all? Well, — all right. I need the job pretty bad. I guess I will take
it.” So he took his pick and went leisurely to work. Soon the boss came along
and said:
“Say, can’t you work any faster than that?”
“Sure I can.”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“This is my dollar-a-day clip.”
“Well,” said the boss, “let’s see what the $1.25-a-day clip looks like.”
That went a little better. Then the boss said, “Let’s see what the $1.50-a-day
clip looks like.” The man showed him. “That was fine,” said the boss, “well,
maybe we will call it $1.50 a day.” The man volunteered the information that his
$2-a-day clip was “a hummer”. So, through this instinctive sort of sabotage this
poor obscure workingman on a railroad in Maine was able to gain for himself an
advance from $1 to $2 a day. We read of the gangs of Italian workingmen, when
the boss cuts their pay — you know, usually they have an Irish or American boss
and he likes to make a couple of dollars a day on the side for himself, so he
cuts the pay of the men once in a while without consulting the contractor and
pockets the difference. One boss cut them 25 cents a day. The next day he came
on the work, to find that the amount of dirt that was being removed had lessened
considerably. He asked a few questions: “What’s the matter?”
“Me no understan’ English” — none of them wished to talk.
Well, he exhausted the day going around trying to find one person who could
speak and tell him what was wrong. Finally he found one man, who said, “Well,
you see, boss, you cutta da pay, we cutta da shob.”
That was the same form of sabotage — to lessen the quantity of production in
proportion to the amount of pay received. There was an Indian preacher who went
to college and eked out an existence on the side by preaching. Somebody said to
him, “John, how much do you get paid?”
“Oh, only get paid $200 a year.”
“Well, that’s damn poor pay, John.”
“Well,” he said, “Damn poor preach!”
That, too, is an illustration of the form of sabotage that I am now describing
to you, the “ca canny” form of sabotage, the “go easy” slogan, the “slacken up,
don’t work so hard” species, and it is a reversal of the motto of the American
Federation of Labor, that most “safe, sane and conservative” organization of
labor in America. They believe in “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”
Sabotage is an unfair day’s work for an unfair day’s wage. It is an attempt on
the part of the worker to limit his production in proportion to his
remuneration. That is one form of sabotage.
Interfering With Quality of Goods
The second form of sabotage is to deliberately interfere with the quality of the
goods. And in this we learn many lessons from our employers, even as we learn
how to limit the quantity. You know that every year in the western part of this
United States there are fruits and grains produced that never find a market;
bananas and oranges rot on the ground, whole skiffs of fruits are dumped into
the ocean. Not because people do not need these foods and couldn’t make good use
of them in the big cities of the east, but because the employing class prefer to
destroy a large percentage of the production in order to keep the price up in
cities like New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Boston. If they sent all the
bananas that they produce into the eastern part of the United States we would be
buying bananas at probably three for a cent. But by destroying a large quantity,
they are able to keep the price up to two for 5c. And this applies to potatoes,
apples, and very many other staple articles required by the majority of people.
Yet if the worker attempts to apply the same principle, the same theory, the
same tactic as his employer we are confronted with all sorts of finespun moral
objections.
Boyd’s Advice to Silk Mill Slaves
So it is with the quality. Take the case of Frederic Sumner Boyd, in which we
should all be deeply interested because it is evident Frederic Sumner Boyd is to
be made “the goat” by the authorities in New Jersey. That is to say, they want
blood, they want one victim. If they can’t get anybody else they are determined
they are going to get Boyd, in order to serve a two-fold purpose to cow the
workers of Paterson, as they believe they can, and to put this thing, sabotage,
into the statutes, to make it an illegal thing to advocate or to practice. Boyd
said this: “If you go back to work and you find scabs working alongside of you,
you should put a little bit of vinegar on the reed of the loom in order to
prevent its operation.” They have arrested him under the statute forbidding the
advocacy of the destruction of property. He advised the dyers to go into the dye
houses and to use certain chemicals in the dyeing of the silk that would tend to
make that silk unweavable. That sounded very terrible in the newspapers and very
terrible in the court of law. But what neither the newspapers nor the courts of
law have taken any cognizance of is that these chemicals are being used already
in the dyeing of the silk. It is not a new thing that Boyd is advocating, it is
something that is being practiced in every dye house in the city of Paterson
already, but it is being practiced for the employer and not for the worker.
“Dynamiting” Silk
Let me give you a specific illustration of what I mean. Seventy-five years ago
when silk was woven into cloth the silk skein was taken in the pure, dyed and
woven, and when that piece of silk was made it would last for 50 years. Your
grandmother could wear it as a wedding dress. Your mother could wear it as a
wedding dress. And then you, if you, woman reader, were fortunate enough to have
a chance to get married, could wear it as a wedding dress also. But the silk
that you buy today is not dyed in the pure and woven into a strong and durable
product. One pound of silk goes into the dye house and usually as many as three
to fifteen pounds come out. That is to say, along with the dyeing there is an
extraneous and an unnecessary process of what is very picturesquely called
“dynamiting.” They weight the silk. They have solutions of tin, solutions of
zinc, solutions of lead. If you will read the journals of the Silk Association
of America you will find in there advice to master dyers as to which salts are
the most appropriate for weighting purposes. You will read advertisements —
possibly you saw it reprinted in “The Masses” for December, 1913 — of silk
mills, Ashley & Bailey’s in Paterson, for instance, advertised by an auctioneer
as having a plant for weighting, for dynamiting silk par excellence. And so when
you buy a nice piece of silk today and have a dress made for festive occasions,
you hang it away in the wardrobe and when you take it out it is cracked down the
pleats and along the waist and arms. And you believe that you have been terribly
cheated by a clerk. What is actually wrong is that you have paid for silk where
you have received old tin cans and zinc and lead and things of that sort. You
have a dress that is garnished with silk, seasoned with silk, but a dress that
is adulterated to the point where, if it was adulterated just the slightest
degree more, it would fall to pieces entirely.
Now, what Frederic Sumner Boyd advocated to the silk workers was in effect this:
“You do for yourselves what you are already doing for your employers. Put these
same things into the silk for yourself and your own purposes as you are putting
in for the employer’s purposes.” And I can’t imagine — even in a court of law
— where they can find the fine thread of deviation — where the master dyers’
sabotage is legal and the worker’s sabotage illegal, where the consist of
identically the same thing and where the silk remains intact. The silk is there.
The loom is there. There is no property destroyed by the process. The one thing
that is eliminated is the efficiency of the worker to cover up this adulteration
of the silk, to carry it just to the point where it will weave and not be
detected. That efficiency is withdrawn. The veil is torn from off production in
the silk-dyeing houses and silk mills and the worker simply says, “Here, I will
take my hands off and I will show you what it is. I will show you how rotten,
how absolutely unusable the silk actually is that they are passing off on the
public at two and three dollars a yard.”
Non-Adulteration and Over-Adulteration
Now, Boyd’s form of sabotage was not the most dangerous form of sabotage at
that. If the judges had any imagination they would know that Boyd’s form of
sabotage was pretty mild compared with this: Suppose that he had said to the
dyers in Paterson, to a sufficient number of them that they could do it as a
whole, so that it would affect every dye house in Paterson: “Instead of
introducing these chemicals for adulteration, don’t introduce them at all. Take
the lead, the zinc, and the tin and throw it down the sewer and weave the silk,
beautiful, pure, durable silk, just as it is. Dye it pound for pound, hundred
pound for hundred pound.” The employers would have been more hurt by that form
of sabotage than by what Boyd advocated. And they would probably have wanted him
put in jail for life instead of for seven years. In other words, to advocate
non-adulteration is a lot more dangerous to capitalist interests than to
advocate adulteration. And non-adulteration is the highest form of sabotage in
an establishment like the dye houses of Paterson, bakeries, confectioners, meat
packing houses, restaurants, etc.
Interfering with quality, or durability, or the utility of a product, might be
illustrated as follows: Suppose a milkman comes to your house every day and
delivers a quart of milk and this quart of milk is half water and they put some
chalk in it and some glue to thicken it. Then a milk driver goes on that round
who belongs to a union. The union strikes. And they don’t win any better
conditions. Then they turn on the water faucet and they let it run so that the
mixture is four-fifths water and one-fifth milk. You will send the “milk” back
and make a complaint. At the same time that you are making that complaint and
refusing to use the milk, hundreds and thousands of others will do the same
thing, and through striking at the interests of the consumer once they are able
to effect better conditions for thgemselves and also they are able to compel the
employers to give the pure product. That form of sabotage is distinctly
beneficial to the consumer. Any exposure of adulteration, any over-adulteration
that makes the product unconsumable is a lot more beneficial to the consumer
than to have it tinctured and doctored so that you can use it but so that it is
destructive to your physical condition at the same time.
Interfering with quality means, can be instanced in the hotel and restaurant
kitchens. I remember during the hotel workers strike they used to tell us about
the great cauldrons of soup that stood there month in and month out without ever
being cleaned, that were covered with verdigris and with various other forms of
animal growth, and that very many times into this soup would fall a mouse or a
rat and he would be fished out and thrown aside and the soup would be used just
the same. Now, can anyone say that if the workers in those restaurants, as a
means of striking at their employers, would take half a pound of salt and throw
it into that soup cauldron, you as a diner, or consumer, wouldn’t be a lot
better off? It would be far better to have that soup made unfit for consumption
that to have it left in a state where it can be consumed but where it is
continually poisonous to a greater or less degree. Destroying the utility of the
goods sometimes means a distinct benefit to the person who might otherwise use
the goods.
Interfering With Service. “Open Mouth” Sabotage
But that form of sabotage is not the final form of sabotage. Service can be
destroyed as well as quality. And this is accomplished in Europe by what is
known as “the open mouth sabotage.” In the hotel and restaurant industry, for
instance — I wonder if this judge who sentenced Boyd to seven years in state’s
prison, would believe in this form of sabotage or not? Suppose he went into a
restaurant and ordered a lobster salad, and he said to the spic and span waiter
standing behind the chair, “Is the lobster salad good?” “Oh, yes, sir,” said the
waiter. “It is the very best in the city.” That would be acting the good wage
slave and looking out for the employer’s interest. But if the waiter should say,
“No, sir, it’s rotten lobster salad. It’s made from the pieces that have been
gathered together here for the last six weeks,” that would be the waiter who
believed in sabotage, that would be the waiter who had no interest in his boss’
profits, the waiter who didn’t give a continental whether the boss sold lobster
salad or not. And the judge would probably believe in sabotage in that
particular instance. The waiters in the city of New York were only about 5,000
strong. Of these, about a thousand were militant, were the kind that could be
depended on in a strike. And yet that little strike made more sensation in New
York City than 200,000 garment workers who were out at the same time. They
didn’t win very much for themselves, because of their small numbers, but they
did win a good deal in demonstrating their power to the employer to hurt his
business. For instance, they drew up affidavits and they told about every hotel
and restaurant in New York, the kitchen and the pantry conditions. They told
about how the butter on the little butter plates was sent back to the kitchen
and somebody with their fingers picked out cigar ashes and the cigarette butts
and the matches and threw the butter back into the general supply. They told how
the napkins that had been on the table, used possibly by a man who had
consumption or syphillis, were used to wipe the dishes in the pantry. They told
stories that would make your stomach sick and your hair almost turn white, of
conditions in the Waldorf, the Astor, the Belmont, all the great restaurants and
hotels in New York. And I found that that was one of the most effective ways of
reaching the public, because the “dear public” are never reached through
sympathy. I was taken by a lady up to a West Side aristocratic club of women who
had nothing else to do, so they organized this club. You know — the
white-gloved aristocracy! And I was asked to talk about the hotel workers’
strike. I knew that wasn’t what they wanted at all. They just wanted to look at
what kind of person a “labor agitator” was. But I saw a chance for publicity for
the strikers. I told them about the long hours in the hot kitchens; about
steaming, smoking ranges. I told them about the overwork and the underpay of the
waiters and how these waiters had to depend upon the generosity or the
drunkenness of some patron to give them a big tip; all that sort of thing. And
they were stony-faced. It affected them as much as an arrow would Gibraltar. And
then I started to tell them about what the waiters and the cooks had told me of
the kitchen conditions and I saw a look of frozen horror on their faces
immediately. They were interested when I began to talk about something that
affected their own stomachs, where I never could have reached them through any
appeal for humanitarian purposes. Immediately they began to draw up resolutions
and to cancel engagements at these big hotels and decided that their clubs must
not meet there again. They caused quite a commotion around some of the big
hotels in New York. When the workers went back to work after learning that this
was a way of getting at the boss via the public stomach they did not hesitate at
sabotage in the kitchens. If any of you have ever got soup that was not fit to
eat, that was too salty or peppery, maybe there were some boys in the kitchen
that wanted shorter hours, and that was one way they notified the boss. In the
Hotel McAlpin the head waiter called the men up before him after the strike was
over and lost and said, “Boys, you can have what you want, we will give you the
hours, we will give you the wages, we will give you everything, but, for God’s
sake, stop this sabotage business in the kitchen!” In other words, what they had
not been able to win through the strike they were able to win by striking at the
taste of the public, by making the food non-consumable and therefore compelling
the boss to take cognizance of their efficiency and their power in the kitchen.
Following The “Book of Rules”
Interfering with service may be done in another way. It may be done, strange to
say, sometimes by abiding by the rules, living up to the law absolutely.
Sometimes the law is almost as inconvenient a thing for the capitalist as for a
labor agitator. For instance, on every railroad they have a book of rules, a
nice little book that they give to every employee, and in that book of rules it
tells how the engineer and the fireman must examine every part of the engine
before they take it out of the round house. It tells how the brakeman should go
the length and the width of the train and examine every bit of machinery to be
sure it’s in good shape. It tells how the stationmaster should do this and the
telegraph operator that, and so forth, and it all sounds very nice in the little
book. But now take the book of rules and compare it with the timetable and you
will realize how absolutely impossible the whole thing is. What is it written
for? An accident happens. An engineer who has been working 36 hours does not see
a signal on the track, and many people are killed. The coroner’s jury meets to
fix the responsibility. And upon whom is it fixed? This poor engineer who didn’t
abide by the book of rules! He is the man upon whom the responsibility falls.
The company wipe their hands and say, “We are not responsible. Our employee was
negligent. Here are our rules.” And through this book of rules they are able to
fix the responsibility of every accident on some poor devil like that engineer,
who said the other day, after a frightful accident, when he was arrested, “Yes,
but if I didn’t get the train in at a certain time I might have lost my job
under the new management on the New Haven road.” That book rules exists in
Europe as well. In one station in France there was an accident and the station
master was held responsible. The station masters were organized in the
Railwaymen’s Union. And they went to the union and asked for some action. The
union said, “The best thing for you men to do is to go back on the job and obey
that book of rules letter for letter. If that is the only reason why accidents
happen we will have no accidents hereafter.” So they went back and when a man
came up to the ticket office and asked for a ticket to such-and-such a place,
the charge being so much, and would hand in more than the amount, he would be
told, “Can’t give you any change. It says in the book of rules a passenger must
have the exact fare.” This was the first one. Well, after a lot of fuss they
chased around and got the exact change, were given their tickets and got aboard
the train. Then when the train was supposedly ready to start the engineer
climbed down, the fireman followed and they began to examine every bolt and
piece of mechanism on the engine. The brakeman got off and began to examine
everything he was supposed to examine. The passengers grew very restless. The
train stood there about an hour and a half. They proceeded to leave the train.
They were met at the door by an employee who said, “No, it’s against the rules
for you to leave the train once you get into it, until you arrive at your
destination.” And within three days the railroad system of France was so
completely demoralized that they had to exonerate this particular station
master, and the absurdity of the book of rules had been so demonstated to the
public that they had to make over their system of operation before the public
would trust themselves to the railroad any further.
This book of rules has been tried not only for the purpose of exoneration; it
has been tried for the purpose of strikes. Where men fail in the open battle
they go back and with this system they win. Railroad men can sabotage for others
as well as for themselves. In a case like the miners of Colorado where we read
there that militiamen were sent in against the miners. We know that they are
sent against the miners because the first act of the militia was to disarm the
miners and leave the mine guards, the thugs, in possession of their arms. Ludlow
followed! The good judge O’Brien went into Calumet, Mich., and said to the
miners — and the president of the union, Mr. Moyer, sits at the table as
chairman while he said it — “Boys, give up your guns. It is better for you to
be shot than it is to shoot anybody.” Now, sabotage is not violence, but that
does not mean that I am deprecating all forms of violence. I believe for
instance in the case of Michigan, in the case of Colorado, in the case of
Roosevelt, N. J., the miners should have held onto their guns, exercised their
“constitutional right” to bear arms, and, militia or no militia, absolutely
refused to gfive them up until they saw the guns of the thugs and the guns of
the mine guards on the other side of the road first. And even then it might be a
good precaution to hold on to them in case of danger! Well, when this militia
was being sent from Denver up into the mining district one little train crew did
what has never been done in America before; something that caused a thrill to go
through the humblest toiler. If I could have worked for twenty years just to see
one little torch of hope like that, I believe it worth while. The train was full
of soldiers. The engineer, the fireman, all the train crew stepped out of the
train and they said, “We are not going to run this train to carry soldiers in
against our brother strikers.” So they deserted the train, but it was then
operated by a Baldwin detective and a deputy sheriff. Can you say that wasn’t a
case where sabotage was absolutely necessary?
Putting The Machine on Strike
Suppose that when the engineer had gone on strike he had taken a vital part of
the engine on strike with him, without which it would have been impossible for
anyone to run that engine. Then there might have been a different story.
Railroad men have a mighty power in refusing to transport soldiers,
strike-breakers and ammunition for soldiers and strike-breakers into strike
districts. They did it in Italy. The soldiers went on the train. The train
guards refused to run the trains. The soldiers thought they could run the train
themselves. They started and the first signal they came to was “Danger.” They
went along very slowly and cautiously, and the next signal was at “Danger.” And
they found before they had gone very far that some of the switches had been
turned and they were run off on to a siding in the woods somewhere. Laboriously
they got back onto the main track. They came to a drawbridge and the bridge was
turned open. They had to go across in boats and abandon the train. That meant
walking the rest of the way. By the time they got into strike district the
strike was over. Soldiers who have had to walk aren’t so full of vim and vigor
and so anxious to shoot “dagoes” down when they get into a strike district as
when they ride in a train manned by union men.
The railroad men have mighty power in refusing to run these trains and putting
them in such a condition that they can’t be run by others. However, to
anticipate a question that is going to be asked about the possible disregard for
human life, remember that when they put all the signals at danger there is very
little risk for human life, because the train usually has to stop dead still.
Where they take a vital part of the engine away the train does not run at all.
So human life is not in danger. They make it a practice to strike such a vital
blow that the service is paralyzed thereafter.
With freight of course they do different things. In the strike of the railroad
workers in France they transported the freight in such a way that a great
trainload of fine fresh fruit could be run off into a siding in one of the
poorest districts of France. It was left to decay. But it never reached the
point of either decay or destruction. It was usually taken care of by the poor
people of that district. Something that was supposed to be sent in a rush from
Paris to Havre was sent to Marseilles. And so within a very short time the whole
system was so clogged and demoralized that they had to say to the railroad
workers, “You are the only efficient ones. Come back. Take your demands. But run
our railroads.”
“Print The Truth or You Don’t Print at All”
Now, what is true of the railroad workers is also true of the newspaper workers.
Of course one can hardly imagine any more conservative element to deal with than
the railroad workers and the newspaper workers. Sometimes you will read a story
in the paper that is so palpably false, a story about strikers that planted
dynamite in Lawrence for instance (and it came out in a Boston paper before the
dynamite was found), a story of how the Erie trains were “dynamited” by strikers
in Paterson; but do you realize that the man who writes that story, the man who
pays for that story, the owners and editors are not the ones that put the story
into actual print? It is put in print by printers, compositors, typesetters, men
who belong to the working class and are members of unions. During the Swedish
general strike these workers who belonged to the unions and were operating the
papers rebelled against printing lies against their fellow strikers. They sent
an ultimatum to the newspaper managers: “Either you print the truth or you’ll
print no papers at all.” The newspaper owners decided they would rather print no
paper at all than tell the truth. Most of them would probably so decide in this
country, too. The men went on strike and the paper came out a little bit of a
sheet, two by four, until eventually they realized that the printers had them by
the throat, that they could not print any papers without the printers. They sent
for them to come back and told them, “So much of the paper will belong to the
strikers and they can print what they please in it.”
But other printers have accomplished the same results by sabotage. In Copenhagen
once there was a peace conference and a circus going on at the same time. The
printers asked for more wages and they didn’t get them. They were very sore.
Bitterness in the heart is a very good stimulus for sabotage. So they said, “All
right, we will stay right at work, boys, but we will do some funny business with
this paper, so they won’t want to print it tomorrow under the same
circumstances.” They took the peace conference, where some high and mighty
person was going to make an address on international peace and they put that
man’s speech in the circus news; they reported the lion and the monkey as making
speeches in the peace conference and the Honorable Mr. So-and-so doing trapeze
acts in the circus. There was great consternation and indignation in the city.
Advertisers, the peace conference, the circus protested. The circus would not
pay their bill for advertising. It cost the paper as much, eventually, as the
increased wages would have cost them, so that they came to the men figuratively
on their bended knees and asked them, “Please be good and we will give you
whatever you ask.” That is the power of interfering with industrial efficiency
by bad service. It is not the inefficiency of a poor workman, but the deliberate
withdrawal of efficiency by a competent worker.
“Used Sabotage, But Didn’t Know What You Called It”
Sabotage is for the workingman an absolute necessity. Therefore it is almost
useless to argue about its effectiveness. When men do a thing instinctively
continually, year after year and generation after generation, it means that that
weapon has some value to them. When the Boyd speech was made in Paterson,
immediately some of the socialists rushed to the newspapers to protest. They
called the attention of the authorities to the fact that the speech was made.
The secretary of the socialist party and the organizer of the socialist party
repudiated Boyd. That precipitated the discussion into the strike committee as
to whether speeches on sabotage were to be permitted. We had tried to instill
into the strikers the idea that any kind of speech was to be permitted; that a
socialist or a minister or a priest, a union, organizer, an A. F. of L. man, a
politician, an I. W. W. man, an anarchist, anybody should have the platform. And
we tried to make the strikers realize. “You have sufficient intelligence to
select for yourselves. If you haven’t got that, then no censorship over your
meetings is going to do you any good.” So they had a rather tolerant spirit and
they were not inclined to accept this socialist denunciation of sabotage right
off the reel. They had an executive session and threshed it out and this is what
occurred.
One worker said, “I never heard of this thing called sabotage before Mr. Boyd
spoke about it on the platform. I know once in a while when I want a half-day
off and they won’t give it to me I slip the belt off the machine so it won’t run
and I get my half day. I don’t know whether you call that sabotage, but that’s
what I do.”
Another said, “I was in the strike of the dyers eleven years ago and we lost. We
went back to work and we had these scabs that had broken our strike working side
by side with us. We were pretty sore. So whenever they were supposed to be
mixing green we saw to it that they put in red, or when they were supposed to be
mixing blue we saw to it that they put in green. And soon they realized that
scabbing was a very unprofitable business. And the next strike we had, they
lined up with us. I don’t know whether you call that sabotage, but it works.”
As we went down the line, one member of the executive committee after another
admitted they had used this thing but they “didn’t know that was what you called
it!” And so in the end democrats, republicans, socialists, all I. W. W.’s in the
committee voted that speeches on sabotage were to be permitted, because it was
ridiculous not to say on the platform what they were already doing in the shop.
And so my final justification of sabotage is its constant use by the worker. The
position of speakers, organizers, lecturers, writers who are presumed to be
interested in the labor movement, must be one of two. If you place yourself in a
position outside of the working class and you presume to dictate to them from
some “superior” intellectual plane, what they are to do, they will very soon get
rid of you, for you will very soon demonstrate that you are of absolutely no use
to them. I believe the mission of the intelligent propagandist is this: we are
to see what the workers are doing, and then try to understand why they do it;
not tell them it’s right or it’s wrong, but analyze the condition and see if
possibly they do not best understand their need and if, out of the condition,
there may not develop a theory that will be of general utility. Industrial
unionism, sabotage are theories born of such facts and experiences. But for us
to place ourselves in a position of censorship is to alienate ourselves entirely
from sympathy and utility with the very people we are supposed to serve.
Sabotage and “Moral Fiber”
Sabotage is objected to on the ground that it destroys the moral fiber of the
individual, whatever that is! The moral fibre of the workingman! Here is a poor
workingman, works twelve hours a day seven days a week for two dollars a day in
the steel mills of Pittsburg. For that man to use sabotage is going to destroy
his moral fiber. Well, if it does, then moral fiber is the only thing he has
left. In a stage of society where men produce a completed article, for instance
if a shoemaker takes a piece of raw leather, cuts it, designs it, plans the
shoes, makes every part of the shoes, turns out a finished product, that
respresents to him what the piece of sculpturing represents to the artist, there
is joy in handicraftsmanship, there is joy in labor. But can anyone believe that
a shoe factory worker, one of a hundred men, each doing a small part of the
complete whole, standing before a machine for instance and listening to this
ticktack all day long — that such a man has any joy in his work or any pride in
the ultimate product? The silk worker for instance may make beautiful things,
fine shimmering silk. When it is hung up in the window of Altman’s or Macy’s or
Wanamaker’s it looks beautiful. But the silk worker never gets a chance to use a
single yard of it. And the producing of the beautiful thing instead of being a
pleasure is instead a constant aggravation to the silk worker. They make a
beautiful thing in the shop and then they come home to poverty, misery, and
hardship. They wear a cotton dress while they are weaving the beautiful silk for
some demi monde in New York to wear.
I remember one night we had a meeting of 5,000 kiddies. (We had them there to
discuss whether or not there should be a school strike. The teachers were not
telling the truth about the strike and we decided that the children were either
to hear the truth or it was better for them not to go to school at all.) I said,
“Children, is there any of you here who have a silk dress in your family?
Anybody’s mother got a silk dress?” One little ragged urchin in front piped up,
“Shure, me mudder’s got a silk dress.”
I said, “Where did she get it?” — perhaps a rather indelicate question, but a
natural one.
He said, “Me fadder spoiled the cloth and had to bring it home.”
The only time they get a silk dress is when they spoil the goods so that nobody
else will use it; when the dress is so ruined that nobody else would want it.
Then they can have it. The silk worker takes pride in his products! To talk to
these people about being proud of their work is just as silly as to talk to the
street cleaner about being proud of his work, or to tell the man that scrapes
out the sewer to be proud of his work. If they made an article completely or if
they made it all together under a democratic association and then they had the
disposition of the silk — they could wear some of it, they could make some of
the beautiful salmon-colored and the delicate blues into a dress for themselves
— there would be pleasure in producing silk. But until you eliminate wage
slavery and the exploitation of labor it is ridiculous to talk about destroying
the moral fiber of the individual by telling him to destroy “his own product.”
Destroy his own product! He is destroying somebody else’s enjoyment, somebody
else’s chance to use his product created in slavery. There is another argument
to the effect that “If you use this thing called sabotage you are going to
develop in yourself a spirit of histility, a spirit of antagonism to everybody
else in society, you are going to become sneaking, you are going to become
cowardly. It is an underhanded thing to do.” But the individual who uses
sabotage is not benefiting himself alone. If he were looking out for himself
only he would never use sabotage. It would be much easier, much safer not to do
it. When a man uses sabotage he is usually intending to benefit the whole; doing
an individual thing but doing it for the benefit of himself and others together.
And it requires courage. It requires individuality. It creates in that
workingman some self-respect for and self-reliance upon himself as a producer. I
contend that sabotage instead of being sneaking and cowardly is a courageous
thing, is an open thing. The boss may not be notified about it through the
papers, but he finds out about it very quickly, just the same. And the man or
woman who employs it is demonstrating a courage that you may measure in this
way: How many of the critics would do it? How many of you, if you were dependent
on a job in a silk town like Paterson, would take your job in your hands and
employ sabotage? If you were a machinist in a locomotive shop and had a good
job, how many of you would risk it to employ sabotage? Consider that and then
you have the right to call the man who uses it a coward — if you can.
Limiting The Over-Supply of Slaves
It is my hope that the workers will not only “sabotage” the supply of products,
but also the over-supply of producers. In Europe the syndicalists have carried
on a propaganda that we are too cowardly to carry on in the United States as
yet. It is against the law. Everything is “against the law,” once it becomes
large enough for the law to take cognizance that it is in the best interests of
the working class. If sabotage is to be thrown aside because it is construed as
against the law, how do we know that next year free speech may not have to be
thrown aside? Or free assembly or free press? That a thing is against the law,
does not mean necessarily that the thing is not good. Sometimes it means just
the contrary: a mighty good thing for the working class to use against the
capitalists. In Europe they are carrying on this sort of limitation of product:
they are saying, “Not only will we limit the product in the factory, but we are
going to limit the supply of producers. We are going to limit the supply of
workers on the market.” Men and women of the working class in France and Italy
and even Germany today are saying, “We are not going to have ten, twelve and
fourteen children for the army, the navy, the factory and the mine. We are going
to have fewer children, with quality and not quantity accentuated as our ideal
who can be better fed, better clothed, better equipped mentally and will become
better fighters for the social revolution.” Although it is not a strictly
scientific definition I like to include this as indicative of the spirit that
produces sabotage. It certainly is one of the most vital forms of class warfare
there are, to strike at the roots of the capitalist system by limiting their
supply of slaves and creating individuals who will be good soldiers on their own
behalf.
Sabotage a War Measure
I have not given you are rigidly defined thesis on sabotage because sabotage is
in the process of making. Sabotage itself is not clearly defined. Sabotage is as
broad and changing as industry, as flexible as the imagination and passions of
humanity. Every day workingmen and women are discovering new forms of sabotage,
and the stronger their rebellious imagination is the more sabotage they are
going to invent, the more sabotage they are going to develop. Sabotage is not,
however, a permanent weapon. Sabotage is not going to be necessary, once a free
society has been established. Sabotage is simply a war measure and it will go
out of existence with the war, just as the strike, the lockout, the policeman,
the machine gun, the judge with his injunction, and all the various weapons in
the arsenals of capital and labor will go out of existence with the advent of a
free society. “And then,” someone may ask, “may not this instinct for sabotage
have developed, too far, so that one body of workers will use sabotage against
another; that the railroad workers, for instance, will refuse to work for the
miners unless they get exorbitant returns for labor?” The difference is this:
when you sabotage an employer you are sabotaging somebody upon whom you are not
interdependent, you have no relationship with him as a member of society
contributing to your wants in return for your contribution. The employer is
somebody who depends absolutely on the workers. Whereas, the miner is one unit
in as society where somebody else supplies the bread, somebody else the clothes,
somebody else the shoes, and where he gives his product in exchange for someone
else’s; and it would be suicidal for him to assume a tyrannical, a monopolistic
position, of demanding so much for his product that the others might cut him off
from any other social relations and refuse to meet with any such bargain. In
other words, the miner, the railroad worker, the baker is limited in using
sabotage against his fellow workers because he is interdependent on his fellow
workers, whereas he is not meterially interdependent on the employer for the
means of subsistence.
But the worker will not be swerved from his stern purpose by puerile objections.
To him this is not an argument but a struggle for life. He knows freedom will
come only when his class is willing and courageous enough to fight for it. He
knows the risks, far better than we do. But his choice is between starvation in
slavery and starvation in battle. Like a spent swimmer in the sea, who can sink
easily and apathetically into eternal sleep, but who struggles on to grasp a
stray spar, suffers but hopes in suffering — so the worker makes his choice.
His wife’s worries and tears spur him forth to don his shining armor of
industrial power; his child’s starry eyes mirror the light of the ideal to him
and strengthens his determination to strike the shackles from the wrists of toil
before that child enters the arena of industrial life; his manhood demands some
rebellion against daily humiliation and intolerable exploitation. To this
worker, sabotage is a shining sword. It pierces the nerve centers of capitalism,
stabs at its hearts and stomachs, tears at the vitals of its economic system. It
is cutting a path to freedom, to ease in production and ease in consumption.
Confident in his powers, he hurls his challenge into his master’s teeth — I am,
I was and I will be —
“I will be, and lead the nations on, the last of all your hosts to meet,
Till on your necks, your heads, your crowns, I’ll plant my strong, resistless
feet.
Avenger, Liberator, Judge, red battles on my pathway hurled,
I stretch forth my almighty arm till it revivifies the world.”
PREAMBLE: Industrial Workers of the World
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. The can be no
peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and
the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world
organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production,
and abolish the wage system.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer
hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the
employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of
workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby
helping to defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the
employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have
interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only
by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry,
or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in
any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we
must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage
system.”
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The
army of production must be organized, not only for the everyday struggle with
capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been
overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new
society within the shell of the old.
