ndustrial self-government.

* * * * *

Perhaps an even better evidence of the intention of English labor in
this direction is the movement towards decentralization in the trade
union organization. This movement, known as the "shop-stewards"
movement is essentially an effort of the men in the workshops to
assume responsibility in industrial reconstruction after the war, a
responsibility which they have heretofore under all circumstances
delegated to representatives not connected directly with the work in
the shops. As these representatives were isolated from actual problems
of workshop production and alien therefore to the problems in their
technical and specific application, they were incapable of functioning
efficiently as agents of productive enterprise. This "shop stewards"
movement recognizes and provides for the interdependence of industrial
interests, but at the same time it concerns itself with the competent
handling of specific matters.

Such organization as the movement in England seems to be evolving, the
syndicalists have contended for as they opposed the German idea of
state socialism. But the syndicalists in their propaganda did not
_develop_ the idea of industry as an adventure in creative enterprise.
Instead they emphasized, as did the political socialists and the trade
unionists, the importance of protecting the workers' share in the
possession of wealth. They made the world understand that business
administration of industry exploited labor, but they did not bring out
that both capital and labor, so far as it was possible for each to
do, exploited wealth. That was not the vision of industry which they
carried from their shops to their meetings or indeed to their homes.
Their failure at exploitation was too obvious.

An interesting illustration of what would happen in the ranks of
the syndicalists if the business idea of labor's intellectual and
emotional incapacity for functioning, gave way before a community's
confidence in the capacity of labor--we have in the case of the
migratory workers in the harvesting of our western crops. The
harvesters who follow the crops with the seasons from the southern to
the northern borders of the United States and into Canada are members
of the most uncompromisingly militant organization of syndicalists,
The Industrial Workers of the World. On an average it takes ten years
for these harvesters to become skilled workers and these men,