Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/15

Rh down the dividing lines of the crafts and has transcended the old form of organization of industry in accordance with which the craft organization was formed. The small competing capitalist engaged in a specific and narrow part of the process of industry has been displaced by the combination of crafts which go to make up an industry.

The result upon unionism is not difficult to see. The striking craftsman finds himself confronted not by competing craft employers but by an entire industrial capitalistic organization in which the enormous resources of the combined industry are pitted against the feeble efforts of the craft. It is impossible except in very unusual circumstances for the craft to be able to meet the situation. It opposes to the united strength of the employers only such resources as it can bring to its aid under the circumstances of the particular case, and the result has been, in the majority of recent cases, crushing defeat. Then the craft organization, seeing that its property is gone, and desperate at the loss of that which it has relied upon as the only means of saving it from the pit, becomes angry, and the violence which is inseparable from strikes of this character supervenes.

It is obvious that the craft union is an individualistic manifestation. Now, physical violence is, as it always has been, the last resource of baffled individualism. To the absolutism of the trust the craftsman replies, as does the thwarted Russian revolutionist to the absolutism of the Czar, and the results are very much the same. Now and again the world is shocked by happenings in the trade union world, but the absolutism persists, just as in Russia, because there is no effective social attack upon it and because ineffectual acts of violence have precisely the same effect in trade disputes as in Russian politics of alienating public sympathy from the rebel, and strengthening the public belief that after all absolutism is the only protection from anarchy.

The craft unions are thereupon compelled to look in