No movement commits itself to coöperation without at the same time committing itself to the peaceful and creative methods of reform. Workmen's coöperation has a growth of two generations. There is not a spot where it has won the least real power that it has not affiliated with politics and with reforms. This is both its hope and its strength. It grows only by creative action. Sabotage and strikes alike are an abomination to the coöperator. His success is measured by his achievements in substituting an efficiency superior to that of private profit-making employers. He deliberately enters into competition with them to prove that certain middlemen are useless and therefore parasitic.
This high and strenuous task leaves no time for the "organized delays of sabotage." So far as Syndicalism turns to coöperation, it falls into line with the world's best and safest reform work.
No one assures of this with more impressiveness than the "intellectual father" of the movement, George Sorel. It is not merely that he rejects sabotage, he rejects even more all attempts to chart off the future of society. His interest is in the obscure, unconscious forces which underlie this mass-movement. He sees the middle class in a state of decay. All the commanding energies through which, for centuries, it came to power have sickened. It is to him a thing for pity and contempt. If a spark of hope is left for the bourgeois, it can only be kindled by the breath of revolution.[1] This leads him to exalt the possibilities
- ↑ See the brilliant and impartial analysis in the first chapters of La Philosophie Syndicaliste, by George Guy-Grand.
