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270 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
minds have been engaged in the struggle. Proudhon,
Bakounin, Briand, Sorel, Lagardelle, Berth, Herve, are
men of undoubted ability. Opposed to them we find the
Marxists, led in these latter years by Guesde and Jaures.
And while direct action has always been vigorously
supported in France both by the intellectuals and by the
masses, it is the policy of Guesde and Jaures which has
made headway. At the time when the general strike was
looked upon as a revolutionary panacea, and the French
working class seemed on the point of risking everything
in one throw of the dice, Jaures uttered a solemn
warning: "Toward this abyss
. . . the proletariat
is feeling itself more and more drawn, at the risk not
only of ruining itself should it fall over, but of dragging
down with it for years to come either the wealth
or the security of the national life." (47) "If the proletarians
take possession of the mine and the factory,
it
will be a perfectly fictitious ownership. They will be
embracing a corpse, for the mines and factories will
be no better than dead bodies while economic circulation
is
suspended and production is stopped. So long as
a class does not own and govern the whole social machine,
it can seize a few factories and yards, if it wants
to, but it really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hand
a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master
of transportation." (48) "The working class would be
the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession
if it mistook what can be only the tactics of
despair for a method of revolution." (49)
The struggle, therefore, between the syndicalists and
the socialists is, as we see, the same clash over methods
that occurred in the seventies and eighties between the
anarchists and the socialists. In abandoning democracy,
in denying the efficacy of political action, and in