portant organ, the "Mouvement Socialiste."[1] The entire object is to make labor clearly conscious of its relation to economic power. Wage earners are to be made first to believe it has this power and then to act upon the belief. "The revolution is to be first in the thought, and then in act." To popularize these conceptions is the work of their propaganda. Throughout is the "catastrophic idea."
As many of the revolutionary spirits in Europe and among English Chartists in the days before 1848 were inflamed with hopes of some impending political change, those of this temper are now caught up by beliefs that an economic revolution is at hand. The centralizing forces of present day industry open a new vista to these believers. "We have not now," they tell us, "to worry over the practical difficulties of the 'strike-universal.' We can turn a partial strike into one that has unusual results. To stop transportation alone is to stop a thousand other industries." "With a motion of the hand," says Pataud, "I can make Paris dark as night." It is these mechanical possibilities which have transformed the tactics of "this last great remedy," as a little knowledge of chemistry may give new terrors to sabotage.
This has been the strategy of recent strikes of this character. But—what the believers do not tell us, it has also been the source of their failure. Like Mr. Haywood, Arnold Roller's study of the General Strike turns an indiscriminate mass of historic revolts
- ↑ These opinions are now found in a small volume, La Grève Générale et le Socialisme. See also L'Action Syndicaliste, Griffuelhes, pp. 27–37.
