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4.—WHAT RISK DOES THE PROLETARIAT RUN?
The professional hypnotisers and lullers at the head of the Labour movement understood very well at all times, at least in Germany and Austria, how to suffocate the revolutionary spirit by terrible visions of the bloodshed which they say would be caused amongst the proletarians. With this same ghost they try to scare away the idea of the General Strike.
Although the risk which the proletariat runs during a General Strike represents only a small fraction of what it has run in earlier revolutions, candour demands that we do not deceive ourselves about it; that yet in the various small but nevertheless unavoidable skirmishes, caused by the military forces, there will necessarily be sacrifices on the side of the workers. However, should this be reason enough for the proletariat to be discouraged and wait until the year 4000 after Millerand's or Marx's birth, when the order of the capitalistic system collapses of its own accord and makes room for Socialism?
No! The working people will cast off these cowardly speculations and prove that they have not lost all courage, and will risk everything for freedom. Death or the loss of limbs in the revolution, with which they always scare the proletarians, is it not hourly around them in this present system of capitalistic exploitation? French statistics show the terrible number of 174,000 killed yearly on an average by accidents and diseases due to social conditions; not counting the innumerable daily injuries and maimings in the workshops and factories, to which little attention is paid.
In this way capitalism kills more proletarians in one year in order to save the expense of proper arrangements to protect working men, than all previous revolutions. Death surrounds the workers all day, at every hour. While he works the worker runs the risk of falling from a scaffold any moment, of being buried in a mine, poisoned in a chemical factory, killed by electric current, or torn to pieces by boiler explosions.
Death in the most terrible form haunts him, however, when he is without work; in starvation or suicide, he is driven to it by despair. On the other hand, too, workers have to think that at any time they may be called in and mustered to go to war, and kill their innocent brothers; to fight for the interest of their enemies, their oppressors, and be a thousand times surer of death than in any revolution.
In one single battle often more people are killed than in all revolutions put together. In the battle of Leipzig 143,000 were killed, at Waterloo 46,000, at Koenigsgraetz 40,000. During the Napoleonic wars over three million people lost their lives. Also think of the Russo-Japanese war in Manchuria!
The most minute step of progress, the least scientific advancement costs thousands of lives. How many chemists have died, poisoned by the gases evolved in their newly invented chemical processes, or blown to pieces by the explosion of such gases? How many physicians have died from the bacilli which they were combatting
