of seriously studying economic questions, and, in order to do so, we agreed to meet in the evening to study together."[1] It is hardly necessary to add that this group became Anarchist.
That is how the trick is done. A working man, active and intelligent, supports the programme of one or the other bourgeois party. The bourgeois talk about the well-being of the people, the workers, but betray them on the first opportunity. The working man who has believed in the sincerity of these persons is indignant, wants to separate from them, and decides to study seriously "economic questions." An Anarchist comes along, and reminding him of the treachery of the bourgeois, and the sabres of the gendarmes, assures him that the political struggle is nothing but bourgeois nonsense, and that in order to emancipate the workers political action must be given up, making the destruction of the State the final aim. The working man who was only beginning to study the situation thinks the "companion" is right, and so he becomes a convinced and devoted Anarchist! What would happen, if pursuing his studies of the social question further, he had understood that the "companion" was a pretentious ignoramus, that he talked twaddle, that his "Ideal" is a delusion and a snare, that outside bourgeois politics there is, opposed to these, the political action of the proletariat, which will put an end to the very existence of capitalist society? He would have become a Social-Democrat.
Thus the more widely our ideas become known among the working classes, and they are thus becoming more and more widely known, the less will proletarians be inclined to follow the Anarchists. Anarchism, with the exception of its "learned" housebreakers, will more and more transform itself into a kind of bourgeois sport, for the purpose of providing sensations for "individuals" who
- ↑ See report of the Anarchist trial before the Correctional Police and the Court of Appeal of Lyons; Lyons, 1883, pp. 90–91.
