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THE NEWEST ANARCHISM 269
ing of street lights, the disemboweling of soldiers, the
burning of factories, can constitute a means of transforming
the ownership of property.
. . .
Supposing
that the strikers were masters of the streets and should
seize the factories, would not the factories still remain
private property Instead of being the property of a
few employers or stockholders, they would become the
property of the 500 or the 5,000 workingmen who had
taken them, and that is all. The owners of the property
will have changed; the system of ownership
will have
remained the same. And ought we not to consider it
necessary to say
that to the workers over and over
again Ought we to allow them to take a path that
leads nowhere . . .
No; the socialists could not,
without crime, lend themselves to such trickery. It is
our imperative duty to bring back the workers to reality,
to remind them always that one can only be revolutionary
if one attacks the government and the State." (45)
"Trade-union action moves within the circle of capitalism
without breaking through it,
and that is necessarily
reformist, in the good sense of the word. In order to
ameliorate the conditions of the victims of capitalist
society, it does not touch the system. All the revolutionary
wrangling can avail nothing against this fact.
Even when a strike is triumphant, the day after the
strike the wage earners remain wage earners and capitalist
exploitation continues. It is a necessity, a fatality,
which trade- union action suffers." (46)
Any comment of mine would, I think, only serve to
mar this masterly logic of Guesde's. There is nothing
perhaps in socialist literature which so ably sustains the
traditional position of the socialist movement. The battles
in France over this question have been bitterly
fought for over half a century. The most brilliant of