Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/79

 Rh councils as they would not let themselves be dazzled by fine words so easily as the workers' delegates.

When the strike is finished the workmen do not forget that the employers at first declared that no concession was possible; they are led thus to the belief that the employers are either ignorant or liars. This result is not conducive to the development of social peace!

So long as the workers submitted without protest to the exactions of the employers, they believed that the will of their masters was completely dominated by economic necessities; they perceived, after the strike, that this necessity is not of a very rigid kind, and that if energetic pressure from below is brought to bear on the masters, the latter will find some means of liberating themselves from the pretended fetters of economic necessity; thus within practical limits capitalism appears to the workers to be unfettered, and they reason as if it were entirely so. What in their eyes restrains this liberty is not the necessities of competition but the ignorance of the employers. Thus is introduced the notion of the inexhaustibility of production, which is one of the postulates of the theory of class war in the Socialism of Marx.

Why then speak of social duty? Duty has some meaning in a society in which all the parts are intimately connected and responsible to one another; but if capitalism is inexhaustible, joint responsibility is no longer founded on economic realities, and the workers think they would be dupes if they did not demand all they can obtain; they look upon the employer as an adversary with whom one comes to terms after a war. Social duty no more exists than does international duty.