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SABOTAGE
145

masse, causing expense to the taxpayers—which are but another name for the employing class.

"In short, the I. W. W. advocates the use of militant 'direct action' tactics to the full extent of our power to make good."

The above extract rewards study. It is not a product of soap-box oratory. It is coolly written down in the official history. Government "interference" is to be met by "open violation." The general body of taxpayers is identified with the employing class, thus turning into an enemy of labor, all those who support the government by paying taxes. Against these, militant direct action is to be used upon the one principle, the degree of strategic power possessed by strikers.

Such peculiarity as there is in syndicalist teaching on this point is to make it an object of instruction, to make it more universal, more conscious and more ingeniously adapted to its end.

A foreman in a textile mill told me the racy details of sabotage as practiced in his own department. Its cunning effectiveness was such, in his opinion, that only concerted action and a good deal of tutoring by the more clever men could account for the result. The I. W. W. journals have an ample stock of informing suggestions to show the high values of this invention. A little half-heartedly they insist that violence is stupid, because the objects of sabotage can be reached with more subtle effectiveness without it. "If a teamster scabs,—don't hit him, but just hide the axle nuts of his wagon and put some artistic cuts in his harnesses." Much is said of sabotage as "a labor-