Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/36

 Rh membership of not more than 15,000, whereas in 1905 it had 40,000. Even its former revolutionary spirit has degenerated until the organization has now become little more than a sort of league to make war upon the trade unions and to revile and slander struggling Soviet Russia. The I. W. W. is a monument to the folly of dual unionism.

The One Big Union of Canada is another example of rebel effort wasted in dual unionism. Four years ago it started out with a great blare of trumpets and about 40,000 members. Its advent threw dissension into the old trade unions and shattered their ranks. They lost heavily in membership, the militants pulling out the more active elements on behalf of the O. B. U. Yet, today, this organization, despite the great effort put into it, has but an insignificant membership, not over 4,000 at most, and its constructive influence is about in proportion. It was a costly, ill-fated experiment, and in the main has worked havoc to Canadian labor. The Workers' International Industrial Union, another universal dual union, has occupied the attention of the Socialist Labor Party's active spirits for 14 years, but now it can muster only a few hundred actual members. Similar records of disastrous waste of rebel effort are shown by the dozens of dual unions started in the various single industries, all of which literally burned up the energies of the militants. Except for those in the textile, food, and shoe industries, which have secured some degree of success, these dual unions have all failed completely. They have absorbed untold labor of the best elements among the workers and have yielded next to nothing in return. Dual unionism is a useless and insupportable squandering of Labor's most precious life force. It is a bottomless pit into which the workers have vainly thrown their energy and idealism.

The waste of rebel strength, caused so long by dual unionism, has reacted directly and disastrously upon the trade unions. For many years practically all the radical papers and revolutionary leaders in this country were deeply tinged with dual unionism, In their program the ideas of secessionism and progressive unionism were welded into one. The consequence was that as fast as the active workers in the trade unions became acquainted with the principles of revolutionary unionism they also absorbed the idea of dualism. Thus they lost faith and interest in their old organizations, either quitting them entirely for some dual union, or becoming