Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states and two territories passed anti-criminal syndicalism laws. Conceived in a moment of widespread labor militancy, political radicalism, and wartime state repression, criminal syndicalism laws were presented as a tool for preventing terrorism and buttressing state security. In reality, they were intended to facilitate the elimination of the small but increasingly influential Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). The laws effectively criminalized membership in the organization and support of its political positions—including the I.W.W.’s controversial endorsement of sabotage—and, like the conspiracy laws that preceded them, required little evidence of wrongdoing for prosecution. Indeed, criminal syndicalism laws were concerned with the teaching, writing, and promotion of radical ideas as much as with any specific intent to commit a crime. As Ahmed White has written, according to the language of these laws, the very notion of “radical social change, even of a purely economic sort, became the basis of criminal liability.”
Because these laws have barely been used since the 1920s, and because they targeted a single organization that has largely faded from public view, it is easy to overlook their ongoing relevance. Yet the language contained in these anti-criminal syndicalism laws laid out a formula for anti-left repression that has proven both durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and organizing in the name of property protection. The language of “sabotage” contained in these statutes deserves our attention, as property destruction continues to demarcate the boundary of acceptable speech and action. Destruction of property, no matter how minor or incidental, is regularly used to signal that a protest has “gone too far,” and to rally support for repression from those otherwise sympathetic to the politics of the demonstrators. By looking back at these laws, as well as the I.W.W.’s support for sabotage, we can see the class-driven mechanics of current campaigns against the Left more clearly.
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During the course of nearly any major protest, something will get broken. Given this mundane fact, the left must resist the common sense equating political legitimacy with a strict respect for property rights, and instead identify it for what it is: a strategy for repressing speech and limiting assembly. The I.W.W.’s pamphlets promoting sabotage aimed to do just that by explaining that moral injunctions against property destruction were an expression of class interests.
The I.W.W. began publishing pamphlets promoting sabotage in 1913. The template was an 1898 pamphlet by the French Syndicalist Emile Pouget, translated into English by the Italian labor organizer and poet Arturo Giovannitti. Giovannitti, like Pouget, understood sabotage as an important, ultimately non-violent strategy that damaged inert property but never people. And he self-consciously understood these pamphlets as a way of wresting discursive control from the mainstream press. “Of all the words of a more or less esoteric taste which have been purposely denaturalized and twisted by the capitalist press to terrify and mystify a gullible public,” he wrote in the introduction, “‘direct action’ and ‘sabotage’ rank easily next to anarchy, Nihilism, Free Love, Neo-Malthusianism, etc. in the hierarchy of infernal inventions.”
One of the I.W.W.’s most famous organizers, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, published a sabotage pamphlet that defined it as “the guerrilla warfare of the working class.” Flynn’s pamphlet was, for a time, the union’s most popular publication. While the consistently destructive nature of nineteenth-century American labor conflict demonstrated that sabotage was not a new phenomenon, no one had explicitly and publicly promoted it as a strategy for organized labor. According to Walker Smith, editor of The Industrial Worker, the word “sabotage” was so terrifying that the employer class did not even want to utter it for fear that the working class would learn what it was. Judging by the legal reaction to sabotage, this promotion was as disturbing to the ruling class as the many acts of destruction perpetrated by workers against their employers.
To combat this advocacy, criminal syndicalism laws typically identified “sabotage” as distinct from crime, violence, or terrorism. And they were far more concerned with talking about sabotage than with its commission. Montana’s law, for instance, held that any person “who, by word of mouth or writing, advocates, suggests, or teaches… sabotage” or who advocates “the destruction of or damage to any property… as a means of accomplishing…any industrial or political ends, change, or revolution” is guilty of a felony. As Benjamin Oppenheim, a Boise lawyer and the author of Idaho’s anti-criminal syndicalism law, later admitted, it was a way of eliminating the I.W.W. organizers who were disrupting production in lumber camps not by spiking trees but by organizing itinerant workers in remote locations.
In 1917, at the start of World War I, the I.W.W. was at the height of its organizing power. Its campaigns in agriculture, lumber, and mining posed real and immediate threats to employer power and profits. But the union had, according to Philip Foner, an influence that far exceeded its membership numbers, and this was at least partly due to their success as propagandists. The I.W.W. took ideas very seriously, waged many free speech campaigns, and their members often went to jail for speaking rather than criminal activity. Some historians, such as Melvyn Dubofsky, have claimed that the free speech fights were a distraction from the “real” organizing that the I.W.W. began to do later, and that the sabotage pamphlets amounted to a regrettable, youthful stunt. Indeed, the promotion of sabotage has been blamed for the union’s near destruction at the hands of federal and state authorities, with ample help from vigilantes and local chambers of commerce.
This was true strictly speaking. A philosophy that encouraged workers to “hit the boss where it hurts, in the pocketbook” by slowing, stopping, or permanently disabling the machinery of production was unacceptable, particularly at a moment when expensive direct action, including sabotage, was common. But this causality is always more normative than descriptive—the historian’s equivalent of “the protesters went too far.” The idea that union could have accomplished more had only it focused on “real” organizing and dropped this immature “sabotage” stuff misunderstands both organizing and political repression, both of which depend on a combination of propaganda and coercion. Sabotage, whether it was broadly defined to include any form of direct action or narrowly defined as machine wrecking, was not incidental to the politics and organizing strategy of a revolutionary union; the destruction of private property was the whole point.
Anti-criminal syndicalism laws demonstrated an understanding that more sympathetic chroniclers of the I.W.W. seem to lack. The threat posed by the I.W.W. stemmed from its ability to disrupt production, as well as its promotion of a worldview that presented an alternative understanding of the relationship between property and democracy, culture and economics. Sabotage was the endorsement of strategic destruction and a sophisticated, critical analysis of the “bourgeois morality” of private property. Sabotage was both a straightforward strategy of coercion and an understanding that private property was not, as we are led to believe, the necessary background condition for a functioning society.
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Today, the associational logic of the criminal syndicalism laws is mirrored in laws proscribing protest near oil, gas, and other “critical infrastructure.” Membership in an organization that can be shown to threaten the integrity or interrupt the operation of these facilities also results in fines and potential prison sentences. This is obviously a restriction of the right to speech and assembly in the name of property protection. Property that is, in turn, framed as particularly important for the maintenance of social and political order.
This threat to property isn’t entirely fabricated. Sabotage does actually happen. In the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline, two members of the Catholic Workers organization, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek, confessed to destroying portions of the pipeline running through Iowa. But more importantly, effective protests are themselves threats to private property. Occupation and the interruption of commerce are important strategies for “hitting the boss where it hurts.” Whether Montoya and Reznicek had any impact on the outcome of the protests is anyone’s guess, but for a brief, glorious moment, construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and whatever wealth it was set to generate was halted by the Obama administration. This future property in oil and gas was, in a sense, destroyed, and it was far more valuable than the construction equipment actually destroyed by saboteurs. When protesters organize effective occupations, the temporary disruption if not permanent disabling of environmentally devastating critical infrastructure is actually the point. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and leaves activists and their supporters unprepared to defend their actions.
Here again, we should learn from the history of Leftist repression. The success of the anti-criminal syndicalism in decimating the I.W.W. laws was due, in no small part, to the fact that progressives, socialists, and other allies found a defense of sabotage unthinkable. This is not to say that those of us on the Left need to promote property destruction, but supporters of radical politics do need ways to defend it when it happens. In order for the left to defend legitimate protest, the always bad faith question “so do you support vandalism?” needs a clear and principled answer.
