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34
VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
more and more rebellious, but neither they nor those who
sought to lead them, and often did, in fact, lead them,
had much of any program beyond destruction. Bakounin
was not far wrong, at the time, in thinking that he
was "spreading among the masses ideas corresponding
to the instincts of the masses," (4) when he advocated
the destruction of the Government, the Church, the mills,
the factories, and the palaces, to the end that "not a stone
should be left upon a stone."
This was the mire of confusion that Engels speaks of.
There was not one with any program at all adequate to
meet the problem. The aim of the rebels went little beyond
retaliation and destruction. What were the weapons
employed by the warriors of this period Street riots and
barricades were those of the "bourgeois democrats";
strikes, machine-breaking, and incendiarism were those of
the workers; and later the terrorists came with their
robber worship and Propaganda of the Deed. In the
midst of this veritable passion for destruction Marx and
Engels found themselves. Here was a period when direct
action was supreme. There was nothing else, and no
one dreamed of anything else. The enemies of the existing
order were employing exactly the same means and
methods used by the upholders of that order. Among
the workers, for instance, the only weapons used were
general strikes, boycotts, and what is now called sabotage.
These were wholly imitative and retaliative. It is clear
that the strike is, after all, only an inverted lockout;
and as early as 1833 a general strike was parried by a
general lockout. The boycott is identical with the blacklist.
The employer boycotts union leaders and union
men. The employees boycott the non-union products of
the employer; while sabotage, the most ancient weapon
of labor, answers poor pay with poor work, and broken