Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), which provided the prewar Ghadar movement with its foremost interface with the left in the United States.166
Syndicalism may be defined as a form of radical trade unionism that peaked in the de cades around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. It was especially prominent in France, Spain, and Latin America, where it influenced important components of the Mexican revolution that were so compelling to Khankhoje and Har Dayal. Its foremost North American variant could be found in the IWW, a conglomeration of several radical unions into “One Big Union” committed to the ambitious vision of worker solidarity across all economic sectors, and to the ultimate abolition of the capitalist system through direct action. As a basic tenet, syndicalists bypassed the political sphere, seeking neither electoral advantage nor forceful seizure of the government. They insisted rather that direct action was to be applied at the point of production, and that its practitioners would do so in their capacity as worker-producers. Accordingly, the ultimate moment of transformation would be announced not by a coup but by a general strike to bring economic function to a halt, after which society would be structured as a horizontally interlocked federation of autonomous collectives in which the workers in each industry, not the state, would manage production and distribution. The trade union or syndicate would be the basic unit both of tactical resistance and of the future social organization.
The Ghadarites, too, by necessity, sidestepped electoral and parliamentary participation in favor of other tactics. In North America, this was because they were legally excluded from full participation; that indeed was part of their grievance. In India, of course, the rejection of parliamentary in favor of revolutionary methods was the hallmark of the extremists within the nationalist movement, from whom the revolutionary movement abroad had sprung. Without having set out deliberately to replicate the syndicalist manner or prefigure a future social arrangement, the Ghadarites’ conditions of living and working in the United States did happen to be such that they functioned in de facto collectives, as work crews and jathas—miniature syndicates, one might say.
On the other hand, nation, not class, still retained its primary claim on the Ghadarites’ loyalty. Furthermore, they pinned their millennial hopes on a mutiny, not a general strike. Nevertheless, the idea of a general strike (hartal), a boycott, or withdrawal of all participation in any production, consumption, and service sector of the economy associated with British rule was of course a pillar of the Indian anticolonial movement. It should be remembered that the Ghadarites’ other main form of participation in the overseas imperial labor market was through military service. Thus for them a soldiers’ mutiny was a workplace strike. From this perspective, focusing on suborning troops to mutiny or desert, as the Ghadarites did, was in effect much the same as encouraging workers to strike or engage in sabotage at the point of production.
All these traits helped make the Ghadar movement compatible with the IWW, which would provide the movement with important North American allies. Founded in Chicago in 1905, the IWW was almost exactly coeval with the modern Indian revolutionary movement.167 Its presence in the agricultural, railroad, and lumber industries of the West Coast region corresponded neatly to the Ghadarites’ distribution. Yet despite this overlap, and although the Wobblies were unique among American organized labor in their inclusivity of immigrant and nonwhite workers, evidence of Indian participation in IWW-linked agitation or strike activity is elusive, other than a tangential reference to the presence of “Hindu” workers at the Wheatland Hop Riot of August 1913.168 One has to piece together bits of evidence that Indians were in communication with Wobblies, or that there was at the very least an ongoing proximity and/or affinity. To my knowledge the connection is not hugely significant from the American perspective. However, it must be recalled that the Indian laboring population was not large in gross terms and was concentrated in one part of the country. Even so there are some clues that indicate that contacts with the IWW had an influence on the Ghadarites.
Khankhoje relates his own first encounter with the IWW, initiating his lifelong commitment to socialism. The young man had attempted to get a job in a lumber mill in Astoria around 1910, but the boss rebuffed him as a “black Hindu.” Then he met an old Wobbly who helped him find work in an Oregon lumber camp. There, while living in a cabin in the deep forest, he and his fellow workers gathered around the fire at night to “[listen] to the lectures of the old labour leader who had got me my job. This was the first time I had heard of the labour movement in America and it was my first introduction to socialist thought.”169
Again it was Har Dayal who most explicitly articulated the Ghadar movement’s rapprochement with this form of American radicalism. He served as secretary to the Oakland branch of the IWW beginning in 1912 and lectured several times for them in their hall, including one speech called “The Future of the Labor Movement” that was covered almost verbatim in the San Francisco Bulletin of 12 July 1912. The speech, which he called his own “frank confession of faith,” indicated the importance of the radical labor movement in Har Dayal’s thinking of that period, and of labor conditions in fueling and shaping his community’s political unrest. He began with a list of the obstacles facing the worker, and the prerequisites for winning industrial freedom:
First, solidarity. Labor must think in terms of the whole world…. Should one nation acquire freedom, the rich of another nation will crush it…. For moral and practical reasons the labor movement must be universal.
Second, a complete ideal. We want not only economic emancipation, but moral and intellectual emancipation as well…. No man will lay down his life for a partial ideal.
Third, good workers and leaders. The rich and respectable cannot lead us…. We will have two kinds of leaders. First, the ascetics who have renounced riches and respectability for the love of the working man, men like Kropotkin, the St. Francises and St. Bernards of Labor. These will be difficult to find, for such renunciations are scarce and such intellects are few. Secondly, we must have the sons of toil themselves, who must take up their own cross and lead their brothers on.
Fourth, cooperation between the labor movement and the woman’s movement. The workers and the women are two enslaved classes and must fight their battles together.
Fifth, constructive educational system. We want central labor colleges where our young men can be taught, not by money, but by men. We do not want endowments, because endowments, with their incomes, are another form of exploitation….
Sixth, a feeling of actual brotherhood. The poor must love the poor. The shame of labor is that the poor must accept charity from the rich. We are not so poor but we can care for our own poor…. We must stand together.170
Har Dayal condemned parliamentarianism and parliamentary socialism, which, he said, had ended in a blind alley in its strongholds of Germany and Belgium; it was useless, he said, for labor to attempt to free itself using “the weapons furnished by capitalism.” But he had equally strong criticism for the other extreme, which he had previously advocated: “Terrorism,” meaning propaganda by the deed, “is a waste of force and gives the other party a chance for needless persecution. It provides martyrs, but the labor movement, which eschews terrorism, will have its own martyrs in plenty…. A man who lives and acts in the interests of freedom is himself living social dynamite.”171
At another address in January 1913 Har Dayal was greeted with loud applause upon entering the IWW hall in San Francisco (where the dogged Hopkinson found himself quite unsettled by the ambient talk of “socialism, anarchism, and all matters pertaining to political agitation”). After expounding on the current efforts of Indian nationalist agitators, and the repression with which the British responded to them, Har Dayal expressed his goal of “establish[ing] an association based on IWW principles for ‘the benefit and uplift ing’ of the people of India.” Although this confirmed to Hopkinson that he was by no means barking up the wrong tree in attempting implicate Har Dayal for his politics, he was nevertheless eager to make a quick exit from “surroundings [which] were composed of a very
