on labor policy.  However, there is also a place for the American intellectual as an ally of trade unionism, not only as its paid servant.  The American labor movement has committed a grave and costly error because it has not made use of the services of writers, journalists, lecturers, and speakers to popularize its cause with the general public.  Some of its recent defeats, notably the steel strike of 1919, were partly due to the neglect to provide a sufficient organization of labor publicity to counteract the anti-union publicity by the employers.

FOOTNOTES: 

[106] This assumes that the legislative program of labor would deal primarily with the regulation of labor conditions in private employment analogous to the legislative program of the British trade unions until recent years.  Should labor in America follow the newer program of labor in Britain and demand the taking over of industries by government with compensation, it is not certain that the courts would prove as serious a barrier as in the other case.  However, the situation would remain unchanged so far as the difficulties discussed in the remainder of this chapter are concerned.

[107] For the control of the national government and of the forty-eight State governments.

[108] Such as a state of war; see above, 235-236.

[109] See above, 203-204.

CHAPTER 15

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT AND TRADE UNIONISM

The rise of a political and economic dictatorship by the wage-earning class in revolutionary Russia in 1917 has focussed public opinion on the labor question as no other event ever did.  But one will scarcely say that it has tended to clarity of thought.  On the one hand, the conservative feels confirmed in his old suspicions that there is something inherently revolutionary in any labor movement.  The extreme radical, on the other hand, is as uncritically hopeful for a Bolshevist upheaval in America as the conservative or reactionary is uncritically fearful.  Both forget that an effective social revolution is not the product of mere chance and “mob psychology,” nor even of propaganda however assiduous, but always of a new preponderance of power as between contending economic classes.

To students of the social sciences, it is self-evident that the prolonged rule of the proletariat in Russia in defiance of nearly the whole world must be regarded as a product of Russian life, past and present.  In fact, the continued Bolshevist rule seems to be an index of the relative fighting strength of the several classes in Russian society—­the industrial proletariat, the landed and industrial propertied class, and the peasantry.