20 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 21 SOCIALIST POLICY IN PEACE AND WAR derstanding that relation that we can get anywhere in any re orientation within the Socialist movement.
Von Clausewitz, the great authority on war, has said that war is merely a continuation of politics by the use of different means ns musing the word politics in the sense of state policies. This is contrary to the view of the man in the street, to whom war and peace are things so utterly opposed to each other as to be quite unrelated and therefore discontinuous. But all students of the problem now admit that there is a close relation, and therefore continuity and logical sequence between a nation so called peace policies and its war policies, Home affairs and foreign relations are merely two aspects of the same state policy. It would therefore be strange if groups of people who divide along certain well defined lines in matters of home affairs should suddenly cross lines when foreign policies come into question.
To assume such a thing can only lead to confusion. In our case it has led to infinite confusion. It is due largely to this way of looking at the question of war and peace as if it were wholly detached from and independent of the great questions which troubled and divided us in times of peace that many a man in the movement has lost his mooring and his bearings, landing finally in a camp to which he does not belong.
In the following pages shall, therefore, attempt to analyze the peace policies upon which the Socialist and Labor Movement divided before the war the different modes of thought current in the movement, and the policies based thereon and correlate them to the problems which the outbreak ofi the war put before us and the manner of their solution, without attempting, however, to fit in groups or individuals into the scheme of things as see it.
Leaving out minor differences of opinion, the stream of thought which runs through the labor movement may be divided into three main currents resulting in three well differentiated courses of action or policies. These may be called for want of more exact descriptive terms: the tradeunion policy, the Socialist policy and the anarchist policy respectively.
The underlying thought of what call the trade union policy is that society consists of a great number of groups, large and small, united according to different principles, and that the same individuals fit into many of these groups according to the point of view from which we regard them from time to time social, economic, political, etc. etc.
On the economic field the workers of a certain trade or industry have a common group interest to improve their conditions of employment. This interest is opposed to that of the employers of that trade or industry, and his conflict of interests leads to a struggle between these two groups taking the form of strikes, lockouts, etc. This conflict of interests is confined to certain matters, and the resulting struggle must therefore be limited accordingly. The employers and employees, say, of the woolen or cotton industry have conflicting interests with respect to the apportionment of the product of that industry: The employers would like the workers to receive as little as possible in the form of wages, so that they may receive as much as possible in the form of profits. The interest of the workers is exactly the reverse. This does not mean, however, that the workers and their masters may not have other interests in common, including economic interests.
On the contrary, the struggle within the industry must be regarded as a sort of family affair, which must not be carried too far or permitted to affect injuriously the common interests of the family as a whole the industry as such. Whatever the antagonisms between employers and employees, they have this much in common: their joint welfare depends upon the condition of the industry. It is therefore to their common advantage that the industry should be in a flourishing condition. For this common interest they must all fight any common enemy who may want to harm it. Whenever such a fight is on in the face of the common enemy the industrial family must show a united front; the erstwhile antagonists must forget their petty, internal dissensions and make