great error. We should be misconceiving the nature of the movement if we supposed that it was merely a protest against harshness of discipline, against the length of military service, or against the presence, in the higher ranks, of officers hostile to the existing institutions of the country;[1] these are the reasons which led many middle-class people to applaud declamations against the army at the time of the Dreyfus case, but they are not the Syndicalists' reasons.
The army is the clearest and the most tangible of all possible manifestations of the State, and the one which is most firmly connected with its origins and traditions. Syndicalists do not propose to reform the State, as the men of the eighteenth century did; they want to destroy it,[2] because they wish to realise this idea of Marx's that the Socialist revolution ought not to culminate in the replacement of one governing minority by another minority.[3] The Syndicalists outline their doctrine still more clearly when they give it a more ideological aspect, and declare themselves antipatriotic—following the example of the Communist Manifesto.
It is impossible that there should be the slightest understanding between Syndicalists and official Socialists on this question; the latter, of course, speak of breaking up everything, but they attack men in power rather than power itself; they hope to possess the State forces, and
- ↑ According to Joseph Reinach, an error was committed after the war in choosing as generals former pupils of the military schools (Saint-Cyr and the Polytechnique). He said that the Jesuit colleges had sent many clericals to the School, and it would have been better to choose instead officers who had risen from the ranks; the generals would have then been less clerical. Loc. cit. pp. 555−556 (I believe that his system would not have had the result he imagined it would).
- ↑ "The society which will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers will transport the whole machinery of State to where its place will be henceforward—in the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe" (Engels, Les Origines de la Société, French trans, p. 281).
- ↑ Manifeste communiste, translated, Andler, tome i. p. 39.
