CHAPTER V
THE POLITICAL GENERAL STRIKE
I. Use made of the syndicates by politicians—Pressure on Parliaments—The general strike in Belgium and Russia.
II. Differences in the two currents of ideas corresponding to the two conceptions of the general strike: class war; the State; the aristocracy of thought.
III. Jealousy fostered by politicians—War as a source of heroism and as pillage—Dictatorship of the proletariat and its historical antecedents.
IV. Force and Violence—Marx's ideas about force—Necessity of a new theory in the case of proletarian violence.
I
Politicians are people whose wits are singularly sharpened by their voracious appetites, and in whom the hunt for fat jobs develops the cunning of Apaches. They hold purely proletarian organisations in horror, and discredit them as much as they can; frequently they even deny their efficacity, in the hope of alienating the workers from groups which, they say, have no future. But when they perceive that their hatred is powerless, that their abuse does not hinder the working of these detested organisations, and that these have become strong, then they seek to turn to their own profit the forces which the proletariat has created.
The co-operative societies were for a long time denounced as useless to the workers; since they have
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