Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/12

 Through long and bitter experience many trade unionists have sworn off from "brain-workers." Three-quarters of the people who come from other economic classes to help them have their own axes to grind. The other quarter are ineffectual fools. They lead the rank and file off on impractical wild-goose chases. They spoil union discipline and create dissension. Their attitude is intolerably patronizing. They find comfortable berths for themselves and then from their security preach to the wage-earner with a wife and family on the necessity of sacrificing all in warfare against the established order. Labor can fight its own battles without these college upstarts.

When one considers the situation, it is easy to understand the rift which often appears between the intellectuals and the labor movement.

Numerous intellectuals who have read this pamphlet complain that the preceding sections underestimate the role of the intellectual and his high purpose, and are likely to dampen the fine enthusiasm of youth concerning the labor movement, which is the most vital and significant current in the modern world. One suggests that I should use Barbusse's definition of the intellectual—one who deals in ideas. Another says that I should string through the matter a red thread of hope and courage.

It is significant to me that no trade unionist who has read the pamphlet expresses such an opinion. The tone of this introduction has been deliberately unflattering, since one of its objects is to discourage an inflated and surface enthusiasm which usually wreaks as much harm as it does good. Unless the inner spirit of a man is robust enough to bear such a matter-of-fact analysis, his courage and enthusiasm certainly will not endure through an experience of the reality. I am confident that a deep fire of conviction can and must be capable of a straight look at the facts and will be willing to prove itself in the unromantic drudgery necessary to accomplishment. There is no discouragement for those who have such a spirit in what I have tried to say.

It is not true that the high mutual expectations of the intellectual and labor are entirely unfounded. The picture which the enthusiast forms of the onward march of labor