Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [281]
Industrial war did not slacken. Labour after 1905 listened increasingly to the Syndicalist teaching of direct action. Its source and influence was strongest in France, where Anarchists had long vigorously denounced the parliamentary method as a sham which diverted the labour movement from revolutionary aims to political issues and favored the leadership of intellectuals. In Syndicalist eyes the Socialist politicians, as members of a national parliament, became essentially part of the bourgeois world, taking on its codes and losing touch with the working class. Syndicalists insisted class war was economic, not political, and should be waged by strike, not debate. With the increasing infiltration of the Anarchists, the trade-union movement adopted revolutionary Syndicalism and direct action as its official doctrine at the CGT Congress of 1906. Direct action against employers consisted of the strike, the slowdown, boycott and sabotage; against the State it included propaganda, mass demonstration, resistance to militarism and to patriotism, a delusion fostered by the capitalists to perpetuate their power. Every gain by the workers was to be considered as strengthening them for the final battle and for the supreme last act of the class war—the general strike, the “revolution of folded arms” which, paralyzing the bourgeois world, would emancipate the working class and win control of the means of production.
In Italy where suppression of the labour movement by police and troops had long been brutal and the gulf of mutual hatred and fear between the classes was deep, the general strike was twice attempted under Syndicalist leadership, in 1904 and 1906, at a cost of savage strife and workers’ lives. In France the defeat of one strike after another during the years of Clemenceau’s Radical Government from 1906 to 1909 revealed the gap between Syndicalist preaching of the general strike and the actual power of the workers. Labour in France was still largely agricultural and a large share of industry was conducted in small non-union enterprises. CGT membership was not a major proportion of all industrial labour and, reflecting the old antagonism between Anarchists and Socialists, was more frequently at odds with the party than united in mutual support.
Employers fought back violently with dismissals and lockouts against CGT efforts to organize new trades and were frequently abetted by the use of troops, which Clemenceau claimed were necessary to prevent violence against non-strikers. In the strikes by miners of the Nord in 1906, by dockers at Nantes and by vineyard workers of the Midi in 1907, by construction workers in 1908, troops were dispatched by the Government in each case with a resulting total of 20 killed and 667 wounded. Strikes by postal workers and teachers were stamped out by threat of permanent dismissal on the ground that civil servants had no right to organize or strike against the government. CGT officials who had organized them were arrested on charge of incitement to rebellion. Against the stubborn resistance of employers a maximum limit of an eleven-hour day had been enacted in 1900, and a Sunday rest law and old-age pensions in 1906, but against the strike wave in the Clemenceau years, the hard hand of the Government behind the employer reflected Clemenceau’s unsentimental dictum, “France is founded on property, property, property.” The state’s intervention