Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/29

 24 of the labor movement. It is the thinking and acting part of the working class, the very soul of Labor. It works out the fighting programs and takes the lead in putting them into execution. It is the source of all real progress, intellectual, spiritual, and organizational, in the workers' ranks. It is "the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump." The militant minority, made famous by the Russian revolution as the "advance guard of the proletariat," is the heart and brain and nerves of the labor movement all over the world.

The fate of all labor organization depends directly upon the effective functioning of these militant, progressive spirits among the ignorant and sluggish organized masses. In England, Germany, and other countries with strong labor movements the militants have so functioned. They have remained within the old trade unions and acted as the practical teachers, stimulators, and leaders of the masses there assembled, Consequently they have been able to communicate to these masses something of their own understanding and revolutionary fighting spirit, and to make their movements flourish and progress. But in the United States dual unionism for years destroyed this natural liason between the militants and the masses, which is indispensibie to the health and vigor of Organized Labor. It withdrew the militants from the basic trade unions, and left the masses there leaderless. This destroyed the very foundations of progress and condemned every branch of the labor movement, political, industrial, co-operative, to stagnation and impotency. Dual unionism, so to speak, severed the head from the body of American Labor.

Before indicating more directly the devastating effects of dual unionism it will be well for us to glance for a moment at the historical development of that tendency in this country: Dual unionism is essentially a product of utopianism; it is the result of a striving to reach the revolutionary goal by a shortcut of ready-made, perfectionist organizations. In the early days of our labor movement, 30 to 40 years ago, it played little or no part. Then the militants, not yet having worked out the fine-spun union theories and cartwheel charts of our times, accepted the primitive mass unions of those days as their working organization. Consisting principally of Anarchists and Socialists, these early fighters took a very active part in the everyday struggles of the organized workers. They sought diligently, not to coax the workers to desert one set of supposedly unscientific