, 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 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
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 drive