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264 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
of capitalism. It has its representatives in every movement
that promises to be hostile. It has its spies in the
labor unions, its agents provocateurs in insurrections ;
it. One
and its
money can always find hands to accept
does not escape corruption by abandoning Parliament.
And Bordat, the anarchist, was the slave of a mania
when he declared : "To send workingmen to a parliament
is to act like a mother who would take her daughter
to a brothel." (36) Parliaments are perhaps more corrupt
than trade unions, but that is
simply because they
have greater power. To no small degree bribery and
campaign funds are the tribute that capitalism pays to
the power of the State.
The consistent opposition of the syndicalists to the
State is leading them desperately far, and we see them
developing, as the anarchists did before them, a contempt
even for democracy. The literature of syndicalism
teems with attacks on democracy. "Syndicalism and
Democracy," says Emile Pouget, "are the two opposite
poles, which exclude and neutralize each other. . . .
Democracy is a social superfluity, a parasitic and external
excrescence, while syndicalism
is the logical manifestation
of a growth of life,
of human beings, and that is
it is a rational cohesion
why, instead of restraining
their individuality, it
prolongs and develops it." (37)
Democracy is, in the view of Sorel, the regime par excellence,
in which men are governed "by the magical
power of high-sounding words rather than by ideas ;
by
formulas rather than by reasons ; by dogmas, the origin
of which nobody cares to find out, rather than by doctrines
based on observation." (38) Lagardelle declares
that syndicalism is post-democratic. "Democracy corresponds
to a definite historical movement," he says, "which
has come to an end. Syndicalism
is an anti-democratic