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THE NEWEST ANARCHISM 271
resorting to methods which can only end in self-destruction,
the syndicalist becomes the logical descendant of
the anarchist. He is at this moment undergoing an
evolution which appears to be leading him into the same
cul-de-sac that thwarted his forefather. His path
is
blocked by the futility of his own weapons. He is
fatally driven, as PlechanofT said, either to serve the
bourgeois politicians or to resort to the tactics of Ravachol,
Henry, Vaillant, and Most. The latter is the
more likely, since the masses refuse to be drawn into
the general strike as they formerly declined to participate
in artificial uprisings.* The daring conscious minority
more and more despair, and they
turn to the
only other weapon in their arsenal, that of sabotage.
There is a kind of fatality which overtakes the revolutionist
who insists upon an immediate, universal, and
violent revolution. He must first despair of the majority.
He then loses confidence even in the enlightened
minority. And, in the end, like the Bakouninist, he is
driven to individual acts of despair. What will doubtless
happen at no distant date in France and Italy will
be a repetition of the congress at The Hague. When
the trade-union movement actually develops into a powerful
organization,
it will be forced to throw off this
incubus of the new anarchism.
It is already thought that
a majority of the French trade unionists oppose the
anarchist tendencies of the clique in control, and certainly
a number of the largest
and most influential
* The committee on the general strike of the French Confederation
said despairingly in 1900: "The idea of the general
strike is sufficiently understood to-day. In repeatedly putting
off the date of its coming, we risk discrediting it forever by
enervating the revolutionary energies." Quoted by Levine, "The
Labor Movement in France," p. 102.