Although sabotage, interfering with output, clogging machinery,
blocking transportation and so forth have been advocated and practiced
by extreme syndicalists, such do not seem to me to form an essential
and lasting element in syndicalist activity, any more than we find the
wholesale destruction of machinery as carried on by displaced workmen
a hundred years ago, has remained an accepted method of trade-union
action, although such acts may easily form incidents in the progress
of the industrial warfare to which syndicalists are pledged. Neither
at Lawrence, Massachusetts, nor later at Paterson, New Jersey, did the
Industrial Workers of the World, or the large bodies of strikers whom
they led set any of these destructive practices in operation.
Syndicalism is the latest despairing cry of the industrially
vanquished and down-trodden, and is not to be suppressed by force of
argument, whether the argument comes from the side of the employer or
the fellow-workman. Only with the removal of the causes can we expect
this philosophy of despair to vanish, for it is the courage of despair
that we witness in its converts.
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