Cole, World of Labour, p. 65. ↩
“Syndicat in France still means a local union—there are at the present day only four national syndicats” (World of Labour, p. 66). ↩
Cole, World of Labour, p. 69. ↩
In fact the General Strike was invented by a Londoner, William Benbow, an Owenite, in 1831. ↩
World of Labour, pp. 212, 213. ↩
Quoted in Cole, World of Labour, p. 128. ↩
World of Labour, p. 135. ↩
Brooks, American Syndicalism, p. 79. ↩
Brooks, American Syndicalism, pp. 86–87. ↩
“Although uniformly held that the writ of habeas corpus can only be suspended by the legislature, in these labor disturbances the executive has in fact suspended or disregarded the writ. … In cases arising from labor agitations, the judiciary has uniformly upheld the power exercised by the military, and in no case has there been any protest against the use of such power or any attempt to curtail it, except in Montana, where the conviction of a civilian by military commission was annulled” (“Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations (1915) appointed by the United States Congress,” p. 58). ↩
Literary Digest, May 2 and May 16, 1914. ↩
The ideas of Guild Socialism were first set forth in National Guilds, edited by A. R. Orage (Bell & Sons, 1914), and in Cole’s World of Labour (Bell & Sons), first published in 1913. Cole’s Self-Government in Industry (Bell & Sons, 1917) and Rickett & Bechhofer’s The Meaning of National Guilds (Palmer & Hayward, 1918) should also be read, as well as various pamphlets published by the National Guilds League. The attitude of the Syndicalists to Guild Socialism is far from sympathetic. An article in The Syndicalist for February, 1914, speaks of it in the following terms: “Middle-class of the middle-class, with all the shortcomings (we had almost said ‘stupidities’) of the middle-classes writ large across it, ‘Guild Socialism’ stands forth as the latest lucubration of the middle-class mind. It is a ‘cool steal’ of the leading ideas of Syndicalism and a deliberate perversion of them. … We do protest against the ‘State’ idea … in Guild Socialism. Middle-class people, even when they become Socialists, cannot get rid of the idea that the working-class is their ‘inferior’; that the workers need to be ‘educated,’ drilled, disciplined, and generally nursed for a very long time before they will be able to walk by themselves. The very reverse is actually the truth. … It is just the plain truth when we say that the ordinary wage-worker, of average intelligence, is better capable of taking care of himself than the half-educated middle-class man who wants to advise him. He knows how to make the wheels of the world go round.” ↩
The above quotations are all from the first pamphlet of the National Guilds League, National Guilds, an Appeal to Trade Unionists. ↩
The Guild Idea, No. 2 of the Pamphlets of the National Guilds League, p. 17. ↩
Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 74. ↩
Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 81. ↩
Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops, p. 6. ↩
“Notwithstanding the egotistic turn given to the public mind by the merchant-production of our century, the Communist tendency is continually reasserting itself and trying to make its way into public life. The penny bridge disappears before the public bridge; and the turnpike road before the free road. The same spirit pervades thousands of other institutions. Museums, free libraries, and free public schools; parks and pleasure grounds; paved and lighted streets, free for everybody’s use; water supplied to private dwellings, with a growing tendency towards disregarding the exact amount of it used by the individual, tramways and railways which have already begun to introduce the season ticket or the uniform tax, and will surely go much further on this line when they are no longer private property: all these are tokens showing in what direction further progress is to be expected.”—Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism. ↩
An able discussion of this question, at of various others, from the standpoint of reasoned and temperate opposition to Anarchism, will be found in Alfred Naquet’s L’Anarchie et le Collectivisme, Paris, 1904. ↩
“Overwork is repulsive to human nature—not work. Overwork for supplying the few with luxury—not work for the well-being of all. Work, labor, is a physiological necessity, a necessity of spending accumulated bodily energy, a necessity which is health and life itself. If so many branches of useful work are so reluctantly done now, it is merely because they mean overwork, or they are improperly organized. But we know—old Franklin knew it—that four hours of useful work every day would be more than sufficient for supplying everybody with the comfort of a moderately well-to-do middle-class house, if we all gave ourselves to productive work, and if we did not waste our productive powers as we do waste them now. As to the childish question, repeated for fifty years: ‘Who would do disagreeable work?’ frankly I regret that none of our savants has ever been brought to do it, be it for only one day in his life. If there is still work which is really disagreeable in itself, it is only because our scientific men have never cared to consider the means of rendering it less so: they have always known that there were plenty of starving men who would do it for a few pence a day.” Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism. ↩
“As to the so-often repeated objection that nobody would labor if he were
