Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/218

204 State a means of elucidating ideas which were still very confused in Marx's mind.

The method which has served us to mark the difference which exists between middle-class force and proletarian violence may also serve to solve many questions which crop up in the course of researches about the organisation of the proletariat. In comparing attempts to organise the Syndicalist strike, and attempts to organise the political strike, we may often judge what is good and what is bad, i.e. what is specifically socialistic and what has middle-class tendencies.

Popular education, for example, seems to be wholly carried on in a middle-class spirit; history shows us that the whole effort of capitalism has been to bring about the submission of the masses to the conditions of the capitalist economic system, so that society might become an organism; the whole revolutionary effort tends to create free men, but democratic rulers adopt as their mission the accomplishment of the moral unity of France. This moral unity is the automatic discipline of the producers, who would doubtless be happy to work for the glory of their intellectual leaders.

It may be said, too, that the greatest danger which threatens Syndicalism would be an attempt to imitate democracy; it would be better for it to remain content for a time with weak and chaotic organisations rather than that it should fall beneath the sway of syndicates which would copy the political forms of the middle class.

The revolutionary Syndicalists have never yet made that mistake, because those who seek to lead them into an imitation of middle-class methods happen to be adversaries of the Syndicalist general strike, and have thus stood confessed as enemies.