Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/188

 174 strike and the political general strike are diametrically opposed to one another. Belgium is one of the countries where the Syndicalist movement is weakest; the whole Socialist organisation is founded on the bakers', grocers', and haberdashers' shops that are run by committees of the party; the worker, accustomed from of old to a clerical discipline, remains an inferior, who believes himself obliged to follow the leadership of people who sell him the commodities he needs at a slight reduction, and who din catholic or socialistic speeches into his ears. Not only do we find grocery set up as a priestcraft, but it is also from Belgium that we get the well-known theory of public services against which Guesde wrote such a violent pamphlet in 1883, and which Deville called in the same year a Belgian imitation of collectivism. The whole of Belgian Socialism tends towards the development of State industrialism and the constitution of a class of State-workers who would be firmly disciplined under the iron hand of leaders accepted by democracy. It is quite natural, therefore, that in such a country the general strike should be conceived in a political form; in such conditions the only aim of popular insurrection must be to take the power from one group of politicians and to hand it over to another—the people still remaining the passive beast that bears the yoke.

The recent troubles in Russia have helped to popularise