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strategies for change 137<br />
issue directives from above. Committed anarcho-syndicalists<br />
reject these claims and argue that the syndicalists’ chief weapon, the<br />
strike, provides a perfect medium through which to realize their<br />
goals.<br />
The idea of early-twentieth-century anarcho-syndicalists was<br />
that local wildcat strikes would culminate in a general strike of all<br />
workers and that this would demonstrate both their immense power<br />
whilst simultaneously provoking a reaction from government and<br />
the employers that would provide the spark to civil war and popular<br />
rebellion. The self-consciously utopian picture described by Emile<br />
Pataud and Emile Pouget suggested that:<br />
The most obvious result of the repressive efforts of the capitalists<br />
was to make the breach between them and the working class deeper<br />
and wider. Things had come to such a pass, that periods of calm<br />
were now rare.<br />
When the crisis lessened in one Union, it became envenomed in<br />
another. Strikes followed strikes; lock-outs were replied to by<br />
boycotts; sabotage was employed with ruinous intensity.<br />
This happened to such an extent, that there were manufacturers<br />
and commercial people who came to regard their privileged<br />
position as a not very enviable one, and even doubted its being<br />
tenable. 28<br />
In reality, the general strike has not proved to be such a decisive<br />
weapon. Strikes have succeeded in frightening the authorities, in<br />
demonstrating the significant power and resolve of the workers and<br />
in achieving particular aims. But the general strike has failed to<br />
sustain momentum for revolution. The limited success of anarchosyndicalist<br />
action suggests that if the general strike is to be employed<br />
as an instrument of revolution, it must be both strong enough to<br />
withstand violent repression and sufficiently well-organized to begin<br />
self-management. The danger of the general strike is that it collapses<br />
either into reformism or into armed struggle. This is what one recent<br />
scenario suggests:<br />
… we are ready to use every form of dissuasion in the course of the<br />
struggle – particularly the destruction of machines, stocks and<br />
hostages to get the state forces in retreat and disarmed. At a less<br />
acute stage in the struggle, there would be point in cutting off water,<br />
gas, electricity and fuel for active bourgeois districts, to dump refuse<br />
on them, to sabotage lifts in blocks of flats etc.