United States or Nicaragua ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Facing a blank wall, they began then to discuss the necessity of radically changing their tactics, and in that year one of the most militant of them, Émile Pouget, who had been arrested several times for provoking riots, undertook to persuade his associates to enter actively into the trade unions.
Under the compulsion of 200,000 men, a nation of 40,000,000 is to be forced immediately, without palaver or delay, to revolutionize society. The next year, at Toulouse, the French unions again assembled, and here it was that Pouget and Delesalle, both anarchists, presented the report which outlined still another war measure, that of sabotage.
It has served to keep its soul free from that cynical distrust of the people which is evident in the writings of the anarchists and of the syndicalists in Bakounin, Nechayeff, Sorel, Berth, and Pouget. It has also served to keep it from those emotional reactions which have led nearly every great leader of the direct-actionists in the last century to become in the end an apostate.
The writer of the article in the Banner was unfamiliar with the words "syndicalism" and "sabotage," or the phrase "direct action," he was too young to know the history of the Knights, he had never heard of a philosophy of labour, or of Sorel or Pouget, but the West he had heard of, the home of lawlessness, of bloodshed, rape, and murder.
Pouget confesses: "The syndicalist has a contempt for the vulgar idea of democracy the inert, unconscious mass is not to be taken into account when the minority wishes to act so as to benefit it...." He refers in another place to the majority, who "may be considered as human zeros.
He regarded her as his proselyte, he called her a Puritan, and he seemed more concerned that she should shed these relics of an ancestral code than acquire the doctrines of Sorel and Pouget. And yet association with him presented the allurement of a dangerous adventure.
"Syndicalism and Democracy," says Émile Pouget, "are the two opposite poles, which exclude and neutralize each other.... Democracy is a social superfluity, a parasitic and external excrescence, while syndicalism is the logical manifestation of a growth of life, it is a rational cohesion of human beings, and that is why, instead of restraining their individuality, it prolongs and develops it."
The newly arrived was there baptized, and received by all, says Pouget, with warm enthusiasm. This sabotage was hardly born before it, too, made a tour of the world, creating everywhere the same furore of discussion that had been aroused by syndicalism. It presents itself in such a multitude of forms that it almost evades definition.
This deed may be committed en masse, or it may be committed by an individual. It is when Pouget grows enthusiastic over sabotage that we find in him the same spirit that actuated Brousse and Kropotkin when they despaired of education and sought to arouse the people by committing dramatic acts of violence.
The writer of the article in the Banner was unfamiliar with the words "syndicalism" and "sabotage," or the phrase "direct action," he was too young to know the history of the Knights, he had never heard of a philosophy of labour, or of Sorel or Pouget, but the West he had heard of, the home of lawlessness, of bloodshed, rape, and murder.
Word Of The Day