Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/235

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SOME EFFECTS OF RESPONSIBILITY
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the I. W. W., as at present directed in the United States. If there were some psychic scale or metre by which we could measure the accumulation of anger and resentment which sabotage alone kindles in the heart of industrial managers, it would make a very ghastly showing. I have never put this question to one I. W. W. member who thought of this manufactured hostility except with satisfaction. The reply is, "We want no coöperation with the employing class. The less of it, the better and the more hope for us." This does not meet the difficulty. It is not only that the three-fold weapon of the I. W. W. enrages the managers of business, it angers and irritates a large part of the wage earners. At this moment the real strength of Socialism and of trade unionism is against I. W. W. methods. Much of the very best in these two bodies is as hot in their protest as any capitalist manager.

Here, within the inner ranks of labor itself, the I. W. W. creates the exact opposite of the coöperative spirit and habit. As we have seen, these antagonisms are already smarting among Syndicalists themselves. This is the slippery anarchist slope from which the movement will free itself with utmost difficulty. Its raw fighting tactics are and have been its own worst enemy, if and in so far as a coöperating commonwealth is its declared hope.

This coöperative plan is nowhere better seen than in the "Preferential shop" in New York garment industries. The trade union, the employer and the public have organic recognition. It is a form of coöperation as educational to labor as it is to capital. Automatically the consumer becomes a partner in