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272 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
unions frankly class themselves as reformist syndicalists,
in order to distinguish themselves from the revolutionary
syndicalists. What will come of this division
time only can tell.
In any case, it is becoming clear even to the French
unionists that direct action is not and cannot be, as
Guesde has pointed out, revolutionary action. It cannot
transform our social system. It is destined to failure
just as insurrection as a policy was destined to
failure. Rittinghausen said at Basel in 1869: "Revolution,
as a matter of fact, accomplishes nothing. If you
are not able to formulate, after the revolution, by legislation,
your legitimate demands, the revolution will perish
miserably." (50) This was true in 1848, in 1871, and
even in the great French Revolution itself. Nothing
would have seemed easier at the time of the French
Revolution than for the peasants to have directly possessed
themselves of the land. They were using
it. Their
houses were planted in the midst of it. Their landlords
in many cases had fled. Yet Kropotkin, in his
story of "The Great French Revolution," relates that
the redistribution of land awaited the action of Parliament.
To be sure, some of the peasants had taken the
land, but they were not at all sure that it
might not
again be taken from them by some superior force.
Their
rights were not defined, and there was such chaos in
the entire situation that, in the end, the whole question
had to be left to Parliament. It was only after the
action of the Convention, June 11, 1793, that the rights
of ownership were defined. It was only then, as Kropotkin
says, that "everyone had a right
to the land.
It was a complete revolution." (51) That the greatest
of living anarchists should be forced to pay this tribute
to the action of Parliament is in itself an assurance.