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FORERUNNERS OF THE I. W. W.
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same emphasis on the economic aspects—the same appeal to the entire labor mass. Disraeli's Sybil, written in this period, has a passage[1] to which I have seen several references in syndicalist sheets. It has the ring of the I. W. W. orator in every line. "Hope had deserted the laboring classes: they had no confidence in any future of the existing system. Their organization, independent of the political system of the Chartists, was complete. Every trade had its union, and every union its lodge in every town and its central committee in every district.

"Every engine was stopped, the plug was driven out of every boiler, every fire was extinguished, every man was turned out. The decree went forth that labor was to cease until the charter was the law of the land; the mine and the mill, the foundry and the loomshop, were, until that consummation, to be idle; nor was the mighty pause to be confined to these great enterprises. Every trade of every kind and description was to be stopped—tailor and cobbler, brushmaker and sweep, tinker and carter, mason and builder, all, all."

The next link is the "International" of the early sixties. The "General Rules" of this body throw the entire responsibility for their emancipation upon the "working classes." It is to be an economic emancipation. "Solidarity of labor" is the shibboleth.

The founder of French Syndicalism expressly acknowledges the parenthood of the International,[2] as

  1. Quoted in Harley's Syndicalism. The words which I put in italics show the familiar economic reaction against sectional attempts to make too much of political hopes.
  2. Pelloutier at the Fourth Congress of the Bourses du Travail.