was ready. That is what Jaurès intended to convey in his articles of 1901 when he said that modern society "will recoil from an enterprise as indeterminate and as empty (as the Syndicalist strike) as one draws back from a precipice."[1]
There are plenty of young barristers, briefless and likely to remain so, who have filled enormous note-books with their detailed projects for the social organisation of the future. If we have not yet been favoured with the breviary of the revolution which Lucien Herr announced in 1900, we know at least that regulations have been framed for the establishment of the book-keeping branch of collectivist society, and Tarbouriech has even gone into the question of the printed forms to be recommended for the use of the future bureaucracy.[2] Jaurès is continually bewailing the fact that so many lights are condemned to remain hidden under the capitalist bushel; and he feels convinced that the revolution depends very much less on the conditions Marx had in mind than on the efforts of unknown geniuses.
C. I have already called attention to the terrible nature of the revolution as conceived by Marx and the Syndicalists, and I have said that it is very important that its character of absolute and irrevocable transformation should be preserved, because it is that which gives Socialism its high educational value. The comfort-loving followers of our politicians could not view with any approval the profoundly serious work which is being carried on by the proletariat; the former desire to reassure the middle
- ↑ Jaurès, Études socialistes, p. 107.
- ↑ Many idiotically serious things like this may be found in Tarbouriech's Cité future. People who call themselves well-informed say that Arthur Fontaine, Directeur du Travail, has some astonishing solutions of the social question in his portfolios, and that he will reveal them on the day he retires. Our successors will bless him for having saved up for them pleasures we shall not know.
