ism and the constructions made by men entirely devoid of higher culture. Marx had acquired in Germany a taste for very condensed formulas, and these formulas were so admirably suited to the conditions in the midst of which he worked that he naturally made great use of them. When he wrote, there had been none of the great and numerous strikes which would have enabled him to speak with a detailed knowledge of the means by which the proletariat may prepare itself for the revolution. This absence of knowledge gained from experience very much hampered Marx's thought; he avoided the use of too precise formulas which would have had this inconvenience of giving a kind of sanction to existing institutions, which seemed valueless to him; he was therefore happy to be able to find in German academic writing a habit of abstract language which allowed him to avoid all discussion of detail.[1]
No better proof perhaps can be given of Marx's genius than the remarkable agreement which is found to exist between his views and the doctrine which revolutionary Syndicalism is to-day building up slowly and laboriously, keeping always strictly to strike tactics.
III
For some time yet, the conception of the general strike will have considerable difficulty in becoming acclimatised in circles which are not specially dominated by strike tactics. I think it might be useful at this point to enquire
- ↑ I have elsewhere put forward the hypothesis that Marx, in the penultimate chapter of the first volume of Capital perhaps wished to demonstrate the difference between the evolution of the proletariat and that of middle-class force. He said that the working class is disciplined, united and organised by the very mechanism of capitalist production. There is perhaps an indication of a movement towards liberty, opposed to the movement towards automatism which will be discussed later when we come to consider middle-class force (Saggi di critica. pp. 46–47).
