Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/162

150 Sabotage is not unlike a poison shot into an organism, but it is an organism of which every laboring man and woman is vitally a part. It is a poison that will never reach capital as something wholly separate from labor. The many who are nearest to the margin of want will suffer, first and in the end, most poignantly.

Very perfectly the wiser men in the socialist movement have learned this lesson. It may have lacked practical tact, that a few months ago, the socialist officials should vote expulsion from the party of all those who preached sabotage. This may have made "a too irritating issue" at the moment. But the kind of miscellaneous advocacy given to sabotage in this country deserves all that was meant by that action. Through its trade unions and through socialistic organization, labor has got at last quite organic strength enough to choose and hold fast to constructive plans. Every hour devoted to destruction is a weakening of its cause. This criticism refers solely to sabotage as actually taught and commended. So long as the fact of warfare in our industrial system continues, the strike, boycott, and sabotage will have a place in spite of the waste and disorder that follows. All of us together must endure them, as war is suffered, until we learn the sanity and moral self-restraint to substitute enlightened and constructive measures in our human intercourse.

The incurable vice of sabotage is in the kind of general doctrinal emphasis given it. Its logic is that of the class-war elevated into a principle and recommended to excited crowds. Its practical dangers are