day see in this entry of the anarchists into the syndicates one of the greatest events that has been produced in our time, and then the name of my poor friend Femand Pelloutier will be as well known as it deserves to be.[1]
The anarchist writers who remained faithful to their former revolutionary literature do not seem to have looked with much favour upon the passage of their friends into the syndicates; their attitude proves that the anarchists who became syndicalists showed real originality, and had not merely applied theories which had been fabricated in philosophical coteries.
Above all, they taught the workers that they need not be ashamed of acts of violence. Till that time it had been usual in the Socialist world to attenuate or to excuse the violence of the strikers; the new members of the syndicates regarded these acts of violence as normal manifestations of the struggle, and as a result of this, the tendencies at work in the syndicates, pushing them towards trades unionism, were abandoned. It was their revolutionary temperament which led them to this conception of violence, for it would be a gross error to suppose that these former anarchists carried over into the workers' associations any of their ideas about propaganda by deed.
Revolutionary syndicalism is not then, as many believe, the first confused form of the working-class movement, which is bound, in the end, to free itself from this youthful error; it has been, on the contrary, the produce of an improvement brought about by men who had just arrested a threatened deviation towards middle-class ideas. It might be compared to the Reformation, which wished to prevent Christianity submitting to the influence
- ↑ I believe that Léon de Sellhac was the first to render justice to the high qualities of Fernand Pelloutier (Les Congres ouvriers en France, p. 272).
