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of the State must first be conquered! In their hands it shall be concentrated, and afterwards they want to rain prosperity down upon the common people like heavenly manna. The original idea of all political revolution has been deductive—that power should be seized by single individuals, that they might hand down from above liberty for all the people.
The General Strike idea, however, is in its negative as well as positive part consistent all the way through it builds itself entirely upon the logic of modern science. The General Strike takes no dialectical roundabout ways, does not jump back and forth in logic-chopping, but leads to the goal organically and direct, without the aid of political agents.
For this reason this mode of struggle is opposed to the political mode, which tries to get there by roundabout ways, in conquering the political power; and is the direct action of the working people. The organisation of the Trade Unions and the preparation for the General Strike bear in themselves the vital elements of the future reorganisation without conquering political power.
In the same manner the General Strike in itself contains the demand for the direct seizure of the means of production by the Trade Unions, a common teaching, created by and born from the people; while the teachings of the conquering of political power are created by those who want to conquer this power for themselves, who strive personally for the dictatorship, which, by the way, they certainly exercised unlimitedly in the old International.
We see how the whole system of reorganisation developes from below upwards, out of the daily struggle of the Trade Unions, out of the organisations already in existence, in an inductive way. In this manner inductive logic speaks for the theory of the General Strike, the most modern and only scientific method of investigation and study. Every new political condition corresponds with a new economic phase. In just the same manner absolute monarchy corresponds with economic feudalism and serfdom, and Parliamentarism with capitalism and wage-slavery.
With a free society without class rule and exploitation, a society of free co-operation, we have that which corresponds with the absence of government, Anarchism.
Well known is the passage from Friedrich Engel's book: "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State":—"They [the classes] will fall as inevitably as the State. The society which organises production on a free and equal base and equal association of the producers will transport the State machinery to a place where it belongs into the museum of antiquities next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe." This condition of Socialism without the State is Anarchist Communism. In the same way is determined the form of every revolution from the existing economic conditions.
The economic conditions which dictated the form of the Jacobinic revolution are no longer in existence; it cannot be believed that Parliamentarism can be the result of the economic contrasts, and will give capitalism its death blow.
On the other hand, the General Strike is nothing else but the
