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200 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
It was of course inevitable that such an "organization"
should soon disappear. Vigorous efforts were made by
a few of the devoted to keep the movement alive, but
it is
easy to see that an aggregation so loosely united, and
without any really
definite purpose, was destined to dissolution.
During the next few years
various small congresses
were held, but they were merely beating a corpse
in the effort to keep it alive. And, while the Bakouninists
were engaged in this critical struggle with death, the
spirit that had animated all their battles with Marx withdrew
himself. Bakounin was tired and discouraged, and
he left his friends of the Jura
without advice or assistance
in their now impossible task. Thus precipitately
a new In-
ended the efforts of the anarchists to build up
ternational. George Plechanoff illuminates the insolvable
problem of the anarchists with his powerful statement:
"Error has its logic as well as truth. Once you reject
the political action of the working class, you are fatally
driven— provided you do not wish to serve the bourgeois
politicians — to accept
the tactics of the Vaillants
and the Henrys." (10) That this is terribly true is open
to no question whatever. And the anarchists now found
themselves in a veritable cul-de-sac. Like the poor in
Sidney Lanier's poem, they were pressing
"Against an inward-opening door
That pressure tightens evermore."
The more they fretted and stormed and crushed each
other, the more hopelessly impossible became the chance
of egress. The more desperately they threw themselves
against that door, the more securely they imprisoned
themselves. It was the very logic of their tactics that
they could not circumvent so small an obstacle as that
inward-opening door. It meant self-destruction. And