Proposed Roads to Freedom

impulse and force are derived from what it has taken over from Syndicalism. Like Syndicalism; it desires not primarily to make work better paid, but to secure this result along with others by making it in itself more interesting and more democratic in organization. Capitalism has made of work a purely commercial activity, a soulless and a joyless thing. But substitute the national service of the Guilds for the profiteering of the few; substitute responsible labor for a saleable commodity; substitute self-government and decentralization for the bureaucracy and demoralizing hugeness of the modern State and the modern joint stock company; and then it may be just once more to speak of a "joy in labor," and once more to hope that men may be proud of quality and not only of quantity in their work. There is a cant of the Middle Ages, and a cant of "joy in labor," but it were better, perhaps, to risk that cant than to reconcile ourselves forever to the philosophy of Capitalism and of Collectivism, which declares that work is a necessary evil never to be made pleasant, and that the workers' only hope is a leisure which shall be longer, richer, and well adorned with municipal amenities.37 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). Whatever may be thought of the practicability of Syndicalism, there is no doubt that the ideas which it has put into the world have done a great deal to revive the labor movement and to recall it to certain things of fundamental importance which it had been in danger of forgetting. Syndicalists consider man as producer rather than consumer. They are more concerned to procure freedom in work than to increase material well-being. They have revived the quest for liberty, which was growing somewhat dimmed under the regime of Parliamentary Socialism, and they have reminded men that what our modern society needs is not a little tinkering here and there, nor the kind of minor readjustments to which the existing holders of power may readily consent, but a fundamental reconstruction, a sweeping away of all the sources of oppression, a liberation of men's constructive energies, and a wholly new way of conceiving and regulating production and economic relations. This merit is so great that, in view of it, all minor defects become insignificant, and this merit Syndicalism will continue to possess even if, as a definite movement, it should be found to have passed away with the war.