Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/165

Rh Experience gained in strikes leads us to a conception identical with that of Marx. Workmen who put down their tools do not go to their employers with schemes for the better organisation of labour, and do not offer them assistance in the management of their business; in short, Utopias have no place in economic conflicts. Jaurès and his friends are well aware that this is a very strong argument against their own ideas of the way in which Socialism is to be realised: they would like even now to have fragments of the industrial programmes manufactured by learned sociologists and accepted by the workers introduced into strike negotiations; they would like to see the creation of what they call industrial parliamentarism which, exactly as in the case of political parliamentarism would imply, on the one hand, the masses who are led and, on the other, demagogues to show them the way. This would be the apprentice stage of their sham Socialism, and might begin at once.

With the general strike all these fine things disappear; the revolution appears as a revolt, pure and simple, and no place is reserved for sociologists, for fashionable people who are in favour of social reforms, and for the Intellectuals who have embraced the profession of thinking for the proletariat.

C. Socialism has always inspired terror because of the enormous element of the unknown which it contains; people feel that a transformation of this kind would permit of no turning back. Utopists have used all their literary art in the endeavour to lull anxiety by pictures of the future, so enchanting that fear might be banished; but the more they accumulated fine promises, the more did thoughtful people suspect traps, and in this they were not altogether mistaken, for the Utopists would have led the world to disasters, tyranny, and stupidity, if they had been hearkened to.

Marx was firmly convinced that the social revolution L