nces, look after our
common interests?"[52] And, moreover, he was consistent when he
declared: "I want you to make the very institutions which I charge you
to abolish, ... so that the new society shall appear as the spontaneous,
natural, and necessary development of the old."[53] If that were once
done the dissolution of government would follow, as he says, in a way
about which one can at present make only guesses. But Proudhon urged his
followers to establish cooeperative banks, cooeperative industries, and a
variety of voluntary industrial enterprises, in order eventually to
possess themselves of the means of production. If the working class,
through its own cooeperative efforts, could once acquire the ownership of
industry, if they could thus expropriate the present owners and
gradually come into the ownership of all natural resources and all means
of production--in a word, of all social capital--they would not need to
bother themselves with the State. If, in possessing themselves thus of
all economic power, they were also to neglect the State, its machinery
would, of course, tumble into uselessness and eventually disappear. As
the great capitalists to-day make laws through the stock exchange,
through their chambers of commerce, through their pools and
combinations, so the working class could do likewise if they were in
possession of industry. But the working class to-day has no real
economic power. It has no participation in the ownership of industry. It
is claimed that it might withdraw its labor power and in this manner
break down the entire economic system. It is urged that labor alone is
absolutely necessary to production and that if, in a great general
strike, it should cease production, the whole of society would be
forced to capitulate. And in theory this seems unassailable, but
actually it has no force whatever. In the first place, this economic
power does not exist unless the workers are organized and are
practically unanimous in their action. Furthermore, the economic
position of the workers is one of utter helplessness at the time of a
universal strike, in that they cannot feed themselves. As they are the
nearest of all classes to starvation, they will be the first to suffer
by a stoppage of work. There is still another vital weakness in this
so-called economic theory. The battles that result from a general strike
will not be on the industrial field. They will be battles between the
armed agents of the Sta