strike and the political general strike are diametrically opposed to one another. Belgium is one of the countries where the Syndicalist movement is weakest; the whole Socialist organisation is founded on the bakers', grocers', and haberdashers' shops that are run by committees of the party; the worker, accustomed from of old to a clerical discipline, remains an inferior, who believes himself obliged to follow the leadership of people who sell him the commodities he needs at a slight reduction, and who din catholic or socialistic speeches into his ears. Not only do we find grocery set up as a priestcraft, but it is also from Belgium that we get the well-known theory of public services against which Guesde wrote such a violent pamphlet in 1883, and which Deville called in the same year a Belgian imitation of collectivism.[1] The whole of Belgian Socialism tends towards the development of State industrialism and the constitution of a class of State-workers who would be firmly disciplined under the iron hand of leaders accepted by democracy.[2] It is quite natural, therefore, that in such a country the general strike should be conceived in a political form; in such conditions the only aim of popular insurrection must be to take the power from one group of politicians and to hand it over to another—the people still remaining the passive beast that bears the yoke.[3]
The recent troubles in Russia have helped to popularise
- ↑ Deville, Le Capital, p. 10.
- ↑ Paul Leroy-Beaulieu recently proposed to call the whole body of Government employees "the Fourth Estate," and those in private employment "the Fifth Estate"; he said that the first tended to form hereditary castes (Débats, November 28, 1905). As time goes on, the distinction between the two groups will grow more pronounced; the first group is a great source of support to Socialist politicians, who desire to transform it into a perfectly disciplined corporation capable of taking the lead in the working-class movement; thus, by the intermediacy of the employees of the State, the Parliamentarians would govern the more easily the workers in private industry.
- ↑ This does not prevent Vandervelde from comparing the future world to the Abbey of Thelema, celebrated by Rabelais, where every-
