Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/8

 is adequately characterized by Losovsky in dealing with the world situation. In the international movement this tendency is largely represented by the British and American unions. One important difference in the pre-war development of the two Anglo-Saxon movements, however, necessary to an understanding of many present problems, is that while in Britain the trade unions (and trade unionism as a system of ideas) had entered a period of change and development even before the war, in America this process has started much later and under different world conditions. Thus while the British labor movement, reformist to the core though it was, yet was developing independent political action in the British Labor Party and embarked upon projects of amalgamation that broke up the hard and fast concepts of craft unionism, in this same period the American Federation of Labor stood solidly against the slightest deviation from its classical policies—collaboration in the capitalist parties and strict craft autonomy.

The syndicalist tendency in the world movement has its counterpart in America in the Industrial Workers of the World (I. W. W.) Arising as a protest against the antiquated structure and class collaboration policies of the A. F. of L., on the one hand, and against the parliamentary cretinism of the Socialist Party on the other, this organization played a considerable role in the ideological development of American revolutionists, though a much smaller one in the class struggle itself. Dominated at its birth by a leadership imbued with Marxism, yet early it adopted the anti-political theories of syndicalism. Although the form of this syndicalist doctrine was largely molded by the syndicalist schools of Europe, it was actually based in the social and economic conditions of the western migratory worker of America, the only element of labor that has been permanently in the E W. W, On its positive side the I. W. W. developed a complete theory of industrial unionism, an ideal plan for reorganizing the labor movement from top to bottom. It is this concept of industrial unionism, necessarily applying centralized organization, which is the chief difference between the I. W. W. and European syndicalism. During the pre-war period the I. W. W. undoubtedly represented the most militant and class conscious section of the American proletariat.

The Socialist Party as a force in the trade union movement, has played no dominating role in America. When it came upon the scene it found the trade unions already established, with a crystallized leadership that was hostile to Socialism. The impatience of the socialists with this reactionary trade unionism led not only to the dual unionism which culminated in the I. W. W., bat also divided the socialists themselves on the trade union field. The split which divided the Socialist Party from the Socialist Labor Party, one of the issues of which was the latter's policy of dual unionism, did not leave the Socialist Party free to develop as a power in the trade union movement. The socialist left-wing became militant advocates of the I. W. W., while the right-wing, which stood for working within the trade unions, was incapable