Page:Eleven Blind Leaders (1910?).pdf/5



The Labor Movement in America has undergone a severe shaking up since the advent of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. Old ideas and methods of warfare have been put to the test of severe criticism at the hands of workingmen themselves, and the lines of the Class Struggle are appearing in broader and clearer perspective. Emphasis is being placed upon the constructive phases of Labor's problem as exemplified in Industrial Organization, rather than upon the hair-splitting distinctions and well argued though often ridiculous formulas of sectarian dogmatists. Cowardly and hypocritical "bourgeois idealism" wherein "the phrase surpasses the substance" is giving way to the practical idealism of the man in overalls, whose every-day environment enables him to suffer hardship and even, if necessary, to cheerfully go to jail, for a principle; but who, at the same time, never loses sight of the fact that the Labor Question is primarily an everyday problem of bread and butter, and that only by treating it as such, will its ultimate solution be at all possible.

Simultaneously with this coming to the front of the Industrial Union and its tactics, we see the old-time political socialist movement losing its tone. Under the tutelage of middle class and professional "intellectuals," for the most part without first-hand knowledge of the class struggle, the political movement is becoming more and more "opportunistic"; pinning its faith more and more to reforms, such as "labor legislation," "government ownership," "co-operatives," "taxation reforms," and other ineffectual schemes of "attacking capitalist society behind its back." At the same time it is hugging more closely to its breast the reactionary American Federation of Labor; adapting itself more closely to the tenets of craft unionism, and altogether losing its claim to the title, "Revolutionary." Accompanying this