Page:Jay Fox - Amalgamation (1923).pdf/13

tach ourselves to those that are new and up to date; he it is who shocks and shames us into abandoning grand-fathery ideas that are a hindrance to our progress, but that we cherish because we were brought up with them. Nowhere is the revolutionist a greater menace to old-fogy ideas and practices than in the union. The union is his stronghold because there he is up against practical problems that call for solution by the most advanced methods. Now, when the radical deserts the union and goes Off by himself we can readily imagine what happens. Lacking the stimuli to progress, it reverts back to old ideas and stagnates in them. That is what has happened to the American labor movement, and this is how it came about:

About thirty years ago the revolutionaries got the idea that they could make greater progress by withdrawing from the old unions and starting unions with radical programs. Headed by Daniel De Leon, who wasn't a worker but a college professor, the revolutionaries went off by themselves and started the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, a supposedly correct union believed to answer all the requirements of the social revolution. Its theory was a success except in the getting of members. When the rebels quit them, all progress stopped in the unions. In thirty years we have hardly advanced an inch. In other countries the workers have kept abreast of the times. They have the revolutionist amongst them, they have been there all the time. Only here have they deserted the unions and left them to their fate in the hands of reactionary leaders.

De Leon and his followers deduced a theory from somewhere that the unions were not susceptible to the ordinary laws of evolution. They avowed the unions could no more change their policies and constitutions than the leopard could change his spots. Acting upon this theory, they whooped it up for the new union, but nobody joined it except themselves. All their good radical energy was wasted on that child of the professor's brain, energy that could have been used to such good effect in building up and revolutionizing the old unions.

Many similar utopian experiments have been made to cast aside the whole labor movement and to start entirely with a new organization. These have had a very serious effect upon the organization of Labor as a whole, an effect approaching disaster. They have drawn away the revolutionists and progressives from the old trade unions where they. were most sorely needed to offset the capitalistic teachings