The Revolt of the Rank and File

Excerpted from the periodical The Nation, Vol. 109, October 25, 1919

The most extraordinary phenomenon of the present time, the most incalculable in its after effects, the most menacing in its threat of immediate consequences, and the most alluring in its possibilities of ultimate good, is the unprecedented revolt of the rank and file. ...

The common man, forgetting the old sanctions, and losing faith in the old leadership, has experienced a new access of self-confidence, or at least a new recklessness, a readiness to take chances on his own account. In consequence, as is by this time clear to discerning men, authority cannot longer be imposed from above; it comes automatically from below. ...

It is by no means impossible, then, that the apparent shift of power indicated by the new movement may bring in the beginning fresh acts of spoliation, a wild riot of red ruin, as many thoughtful observers fear. Such is particularly likely to be the case in the first instance, indeed, if this movement is to be met with nothing but sheer unthinking opposition, with forcible suppression by means of the policeman's club and the soldier's machine gun, if Gary and Huntington and the muzzled steel-towns of the Monongahela Valley are to be the sole reply to this manifestation of the workers' purpose to rule their own lives. Unhappily, our capitalists and politicians seem able to conceive the problem in no other terms. They appear to feel that we are shut up to a choice between ruthless suppression (by the use of armed force, if necessary) of this mutiny of the rank and file, and submission to a "dictatorship of the proletariat," in the worst sense of that horrendous term. ...

This new mass movement of workers cries aloud, not for opposition, but for cooperation; for it cannot be suppressed. It needs understanding, sympathetic guidance, education, rationalization, spiritualization. It needs prophets and teachers, men who shall be at once brave and honest and thoughtful and humble, men who shall have faith and vision and patience. Leaders it will in time find or create; but they must be leaders in a new sense. Theirs it will be not to rule or exercise authority on the one hand, or to assure their own power by flattering the mob on the other, but to discover and proclaim the truth of industrial and social relations, no matter whether it be at the moment popular or not. The future has no place for the soldier; the lawgiver and judge must hold their places by speaking with the voice of reason, not of force. It is time, then, for the powerful and possessing classes, before it is too late, to give up their preoccupation with authority and property, to recognize in this new movement, not the emergence of merely hostile and destructive forces, but the next step in the long march of the human race toward liberty. Let them not fight that movement, but work with it and in it. ...