for these people. State Socialism would be advantageous, because they would go up one in the social hierarchy.
But all oppositions become extraordinarily clear when conflicts are supposed to be enlarged to the size of the general strike; then all parts of the economico-judicial structure, in so far as the latter is looked upon from the point of view of the class war, reach the summit of their perfection; society is plainly divided into two camps, and only into two, on a field of battle. No philosophical explanation of the facts observed in practical affairs could throw such vivid light on the situation as the extremely simple picture called up by the conception of the general strike.
(2) It would be impossible to conceive the disappearance of capitalistic dominance if we did not suppose an ardent sentiment of revolt, always present in the soul of the worker; but experience shows that very often the revolts of a day are far from possessing a really specifically socialistic character; more than once the most violent outbursts have depended on passions which could be satisfied inside the middle-class world; many revolutionaries have been seen to abandon their old irreconcilability when they found themselves on the road to fortune.[1] It is not only satisfactions of a material kind which produce these frequent and scandalous conversions; vanity, much more than money, is the great motive force in transformation of the revolutionary into a bourgeois. All that would be negligible if it were only a question of a few exceptional people, but it has often been maintained that the psychology of the working classes would so easily adapt itself to the capitalistic order of things that social peace would be
- ↑ It may be remembered that in the eruption at Martinique a governor perished who, in 1879, had been one of the protagonists of the Socialist congress held at Marseilles. The Commune itself was not fatal to all its partisans; several have had fairly distinguished careers; the ambassador of France at Rome was among the most importunate of those who, in 1871, demanded the death of the hostages.
