immediate and fantastic domination of the
individual was eliminated, what predominated was a discipline which had
its source in the experience of necessity and in the precise doctrine
which must proceed from the reflex consciousness of this necessity. It
was the same with the International, which appeared authoritarian only
to those who could not make their own authority prevail in it. It must
be the same, and it is so, in the working class parties and where this
character is not or cannot yet be marked, the proletarian agitation
still elementary and confused simply engenders illusions and is only a
pretext for intrigues, and when it is not so, then we have a passover
where men of understanding touch elbows with the madman and the spy; as
for example the society of The International Brothers which attached
itself like a parasite to the International and discredited it; or again
the co-operative which degenerates into a business and sells itself to
capitalists; the labor party which remains outside politics and which
studies the variations of the market to introduce its tactic of strikes
into the sinuosities of competition; or again a group of malcontents,
for the most part social outcasts and little bourgeois, who give
themselves up to speculations on socialism considered as one of the
phases of political fashion. Social democracy has met all these
impedimenta upon its way and it has been obliged to relieve itself of
them as it will have to do again from one time to another. The art of
persuasion does not always suffice. Oftener it was necessary and it is
necessary to resign ourselves and wait until the hard school of
disillusion serves to instruct, which it does better than reasonings can
do.

All these intrinsic difficulties of the proletarian movement, which the
wily bourgeoisie oftener than not stirs up of itself and which it makes
the most of, form a considerable part of the internal history of
socialism during these last years.

Socialism has not found impediments merely in the general conditions of
economic competition and in the resistance of the political power, but
also in the very conditions of the proletarian mass and in the mechanism
sometimes obscure although inevitable of its slow, varied, complex
movements, often antagonistic and contradictory. That prevents many
people from seeing the increasing reduction of all class struggles to
the single struggle between the capitalists and the proletarianized