Page:Jay Fox - Amalgamation (1923).pdf/12

10 to fight primitive craft capitalism. It now faces. modern giant industrial capitalism, before which its antiquated tactics are as a straw in the wind.

The way to fight machine guns is with machine guns or better. Only an idiot would go up against a machine gun with a bow and arrow. Yet our Labor Generals have been leading their bow-and-arrow craft-union batallionsbattalions [sic] against the industrial machine guns of capitalism with disastrous results—defeat after defeat, strike after strike lost, wages slashed right and left, and the unions in retreat before the onslaughts of capital. Such downright incompetency, such dastardly betrayal of the workers has no parallel in history. If our labor leaders had a twentieth of the brains, daring, and enterprise of the leaders of capital we would have a union movement that could at least put up a defensive fight. No suggestion of improvement in our trade union tactics, no hint even that there is anything wrong in our system of organization, has issued from the lips of our inane leaders. They are utterly helpless in the face of the enemy.

In other capitalistic countries the union movement is in the process of readjusting itself to meet the changed industrial development. The European labor movement is far more progressive than ours and its leadership has life and energy and initiative. It is not afraid of change. It knows that its only hope lies in new tactics. It is fully aware that craft unionism is out of date and must be replaced by a more powerful form of organization that will function industrially. It has learned from its defeats. In every way the European labor movement, despite its faults, is far in advance of ours. It is more progressive; it has a much larger membership; it has vastly more shop control; and it recognizes the basic economic fact that it represents, not a section of society seeking to improve conditions by petty reforms, but a sharply defined economic stave class fighting for its life and liberty against a powerful master class determined to suppress with the iron heel every aspiration of the workers.

When we come to seek the cause why the American labor movement is so reactionary Gt will be well for us to first learn what is the main element that makes a union movement progressive. Who is it that is forever preaching progress and kicking over the old outworn institutions? Why, the rebel, of course! He is the busybody that is perpetually hammering at us to "can" our 19th-century ideas and