Page:Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov - Anarchism and Socialism - tr. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1906).pdf/108

 almost disappeared to-day? Who will give us a new ideal?"

Alas, gentlemen, there is no ideal for walking corpses such as you! You will try everything. You will become Buddhists, Druids, Sârs Chaldeans, Occulists, Magi, Theosophists, or Anarchists, whichever you prefer—and yet you will remain what you are now—beings without faith or principle, bags, emptied by history. The ideal of the bourgeois has lived.

For ourselves, Social-Democrats, we have nothing to fear from the Anarchist propaganda. The child of the bourgeoisie, Anarchism, will never have any serious influence upon the proletariat. If among the Anarchists there are workmen who sincerely desire the good of their class, and who sacrifice themselves to what they believe to be the good cause, it is only thanks to a misunderstanding that they find themselves in this camp. They only know the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat under the form which the Anarchists are trying to give it. When more enlightened they will come to us.

Here is an example to prove this. During the trial of the Anarchists at Lyons in 1883, the working man Desgranges related how he had become an Anarchist, he who had formerly taken part in the political movement, and had even been elected a municipal councillor at Villefranche in November, 1879. "In 1881, in the month of September, when the dyers' strike broke out at Villefranche, I was elected secretary of the strike committee, and it was during thismemorable event … that I became convinced of the necessity of suppressing authority, for authority spells despotism. During this strike, when the employers refused to discuss the matter with the workers, what did the prefectural and communal administrations do to settle the dispute? Fifty gendarmes, with sword in hand, were told off to settle the question. That is what is called the pacific means employed by Governments. It was then, at the end of this strike, that some working men, myself among the number, understood the necessity