Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/175

Rh whole social machine, it can seize a few factories and yards if it wants to, but it really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hands a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of transportation.

Destruction will be the only resource open to the working class, astonished as it will be at its powerlessness in the midst of an apparent victory. But what good would acts of destruction accomplish except to give a savage character to the rising of the proletariat? Observe that the tactics of a general strike have for their object and do indeed result in the decomposition, the infinite subdivision of economic life. To stop the locomotives, tie up the steamers, and deprive industry of coal, is to substitute the scattered life of innumerable local groups for the unified and general life of the nation. Now this cutting-up and subdivision of life is exactly counter to the Revolution.

The bourgeois Revolution was accomplished by groups that drew closer and closer together with Paris as a central bond. Every great revolution presupposes an exaltation of life, and this exaltation is only possible when there is that consciousness of unity produced by the ardent intercommunication of strength and enthusiasm. And the proletariat will accomplish its revolution by the organisation, both in the political and economic world, of strong class representation and class action, which will penetrate and bind