Chapter IV: The Propaganda of Anarchy by Example

“_As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not
his mouth._”

ISAIAH.

“_Resist not evil.”
“Swear not at all.”
“Judge not that ye be not judged.”
“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give
to the poor.”
“Ye shall know them by their fruits._”—JESUS CHRIST.

“_And when He was accused of the chief priests and elders, He
answered nothing._”—SAINT MATTHEW.

“_The most dangerous foe to truth and freedom among us is the
solid majority.... The majority has might,—unhappily,—but
right it has not. I, and the few, the individuals, are
right._”

Dr. Stockman, in IBSEN’S An Enemy of the People.

“_Should you say to him, ‘But you injure your brother men by
accepting a remuneration below the value of your labour, and
you sin against God and your own soul by obeying laws which
are unjust,’ he will answer you with the fixed gaze of one who
understands you not.... Human laws are only good and valid in
so far as they conform to, explain, and apply the law of God.
They are evil whensoever they contrast with or oppose it; and
it is then not only your right, but your duty, to disobey and
abolish them._”—MAZZINI.

“_To profit by all the circumstances of life, to make one’s
acts accord with one’s ideas, is to carry on a_ propagande
par le fait _of a slow but continuous action which must
produce its results._”—JEAN GRAVE.

When that great and original child of nature, Thoreau, the Hermit of Walden, protested against the collection of taxes in Concord town, he little suspected, probably, that he was prefiguring a revolutionary movement which, before the century was over, was to alarm the sleek and the smug of the Old World and the New; and yet, whether Thoreau realised it or not, his attitude was the anarchistic attitude and his act an act of the _propagande par l’exemple_.

The attitude of the American anti-slavery champion, William Lloyd Garrison, was also essentially anarchistic.

“Garrison,” says Tolstoy, “as a man enlightened by
Christianity, starting out with a practical aim,—the struggle
against slavery,—understood very soon that the cause of
slavery was not a casual, temporary seizure of several
millions of negroes by the Southerners, but an old and
universal anti-Christian recognition of the right of violence
of some people over others. The means towards the recognition
of this right was always the evil, which people considered
possible to outroot or to lessen by rude force; that is, again
by evil. And, realising this, Garrison pointed out against
slavery, not the sufferings of the slaves, not the cruelty of
the slave-owners, not the equal rights of citizens, but the
eternal Christian law of non-resistance. Garrison understood
that which the most forward champions against slavery failed
to understand,—that the sole irresistible means against
slavery was the denial of the right of one man over the
liberty of another under any circumstances whatever.

“The Abolitionists attempted to prove that slavery was
illegal, unprofitable, cruel, degrading, and so forth; but the
pro-slavery champions, in their turn, proved the untimeliness,
the danger, and the harmful consequences which would arise
from the abolition of slavery. And neither could convince the
other. But Garrison, understanding that the slavery of the
negroes was but a private case of general violence, put forth
the general principle with which it was impossible to
disagree,—that no one, under any pretext, has the right of
ruling; that is, of using force over his equals. Garrison did
not insist so much on the right of slaves to be free as he
denied the right of any man whatever, or of any company of
men, to compel another man to do anything by force. For the
battle with slavery he put forth the principle of the battle
with all the evil of the world.”

The refusal of the citizens of the little French commune of Counozouls to pay their taxes between 1902 and 1904 because they were deprived of their hereditary right to supply themselves with wood from an adjacent forest, and the “passive resistance” of the nonconformists in England to the enforcement of the new education act, and of the French Catholics to the expulsion of the monastic orders, are recent instances of probably unconscious _propagande par l’exemple_.

Tolstoy has made a clear and full statement of the purport of the _propagande par l’exemple_.

“Taxes,” he says, “were never instituted by common consent,
... but are taken by those who have the power of taking
them.... A man should not voluntarily pay taxes to governments
either directly or indirectly; nor should he accept money
collected by taxes either as salary or as pension or as a
reward; nor should he make use of governmental institutions
supported by taxes, since they are collected by violence from
the people.”

He holds military service in similar abhorrence:—

“Every honest man ought to understand that the payment of
taxes which are employed to maintain and arm soldiers, and,
still more, serving in the army, are not indifferent acts, but
wicked and shameful acts, since he who commits them not only
permits assassination, but participates in it.”

In an apologue, “Too Dear,” he demonstrates that law courts, prisons, and armies are alike useless to a sound civilisation. In short, Tolstoy renounces the state, and prays for its extinction, root and branch:—

“The doctrine of humility, pardon, and love, is incompatible
with the state, with its arrogance, its deeds of violence, its
executions, its wars. Real Christianity not only excludes the
possibility of acknowledging the state, but also destroys its
foundation.... The sum of all the evil possible to the people,
if left to themselves, could not equal the sum of the evil
actually accomplished by the tyranny of church and state.”

What could a militant anarchist say more? And there is no limit to the extent to which these anarchistic utterances of Tolstoy might be multiplied.

Most French anarchists believe that the privileged will never surrender their privileges without a desperate resistance. Only a little handful of them are Tolstoyans in maintaining that simple non-resistance faithfully adhered to will alone suffice to regenerate the world. But they nearly all hold that cumulative non-resistance is, under certain conditions, the most effective resistance (”_faire le vide autour des institutions sociales est le meilleur moyen de les démolir_”); and a majority of them, probably,—certainly a majority of their more intellectual element,—esteem it by far the most important propaganda for the present hour.

The average French anarchist is forced to recognise at the outset the unpalatable truth that a good half of his customary doings are based on the government and property he opposes. He rejects the theory of money, but he must buy and sell. He abhors the state, but serves it, and uses its tax-supported institutions; and he is constantly finding himself in situations where he must do violence to his inmost convictions, or get out of life altogether by the portals of suicide or want. There are some unorthodox doings, however, which can be avoided without incurring a martyrdom out of all decent proportion to the seriousness of the occasion.

“If the force of power crushes you to-day, if, in spite of
everything, authority fetters you in your evolution, there is
always a certain margin for resistance. Fill this margin
without being afraid of overstepping it,” advises one of the
moderate advocates of the _propagande par l’exemple_.

The two forms of non-resistance oftenest enjoined by Tolstoy (namely, non-payment of taxes and refusal to serve in the army) are so disastrous in their consequences—as Tolstoy himself would have seen, had he not been born into a high estate and had he not attained a ripe age and an assured position before his revolutionary ideas completely matured—that they can hardly be said to come within this margin. And they are inculcated in France less with a view to inciting isolated individuals to put them into practice immediately than in the hope that a day may arrive when they will be suddenly put into practice simultaneously by so large a number of persons that coercion will be out of the question.

Similarly, refusal to handle money, to pay interest, to pay rent, to take oath, to testify in court, and to do jury duty, call down such speedy retribution that these, too, must be interpreted as lying in the generality of cases outside the margin mentioned above.

On the other hand, protest against parliamentarianism by abstention from voting (_la propagande abstentionniste_) is a thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance, and is practised almost universally by the anarchists of France.

“If we seek,” says Jean Grave, “to _faire le vide_ around the
political machine, it is to the end of not forfeiting our
right to act by and for ourselves. It is to preserve our
liberty of action that we reject every compromise with the
actual political order of things. It is to habituate ourselves
to this liberty which is the _summum_ of our aspirations that
we attempt to exercise it in our struggle against the present
social state. To the individuals whom they wish to enlist
under their banner, the advocates of authority say, ‘Send us
to the Chamber to make laws in your favour!’

“To those whom they wish to make think, the anarchists, after
having exposed the facts, explain that they have no favours to
expect from anybody; and that, when a thing seems to them bad,
the best way to destroy it is to ‘_faire le vide_’ about it;
... that they never await from the good pleasure of their
masters the authorisation to conform their acts to their
thoughts; and that they commission nobody to legislate as to
what they should do.”

Abstention from marriage (which, as ordinarily practised, the anarchist considers legalised prostitution, and the theoretical indissolubility of which he regards as nothing short of blasphemy) is another thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance. And it is rare to find an anarchist, whose marital status was not fixed before he gave in his adherence to anarchism, who deigns to consult the pleasure or implore the blessing of any authority whatsoever in a matter which, to his thinking, concerns no one but himself and the person of his choice.[22]

Malthusianism, also,—in spite of a reverence for the procreative instinct, on the part of anarchists, which Zola’s _Fécondité_ does not surpass,—is in high favour in anarchistic circles. The motives for the anarchist’s refusal to bring offspring into the world are set forth in Octave Mirbeau’s ejaculation of disgust called out by a project of law for checking depopulation introduced by one M. Piot into the Senate:—

“I dispute that depopulation is an evil. In a social state
like ours, in a social state which fosters preciously,
scientifically, in special cultures, poverty and its
derivative, crime; in a social state which, in spite of new
investigations and in spite of new philosophies, relies solely
on the prehistoric forces,—murder and massacre,—what matters
to the people—the only class, for that matter, which still
produces children—this much-discussed question of
depopulation? If the people were clairvoyant, logical with
their wretchedness and their servitude, they would desire, not
the cessation of depopulation, but its redoubling. We are
constantly being told that depopulation is the gravest danger
which threatens the future of the country. In what, pray, dear
Monsieur Piot, and you, also, excellent legislators, who lull
us ceaselessly with your twaddle? In this, you say, that there
will come inevitably a time when we shall no more have enough
men to send out to be killed in the Soudan, in Madagascar, in
China, in the _bagnes_, and in the barracks. You are dreaming
of repeopling now, then, only for the sake of depeopling later
on? Ah, no, thank you. If we must die, we like better to die
at once and by a death of our own choosing.”

Besides discountenancing elections and marriage, the zealous propagandist _par l’exemple_ flouts “those whose sole power lies in the obedience of cringers”; defies “those whose character he despises”; refuses to go to law or to accept interest for loans; abstains from the luxuries which the bourgeois deems indispensable; protests against insolence on the part of government functionaries, brutality, high-handed invasion of domiciles, and insults to women on the part of the police, cruelty on the part of landlords, and bulldozing on the part of foremen and employers. He violates deliberately the deep-seated social usages which, equally with the political, judicial, and economic usages, twist and warp existence; and strives to keep himself in his labour, his friendships, and his domestic relations “saturated with aversion for the bourgeois, and for whatever in existence savours of capitalism and the _bourgeoisie_, and with a sentiment of solidarity towards all who are struggling for sincere living.”

“There is a view [of culture],” says Matthew Arnold in his
immortal essay _Sweetness and Light_, “in which all the love
of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and
beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing
human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble
aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found
it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as
part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent
part. Culture is, then, properly described, not as having its
origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of
perfection: it is _a study of perfection_. It moves by the
force not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for
pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for
doing good.”

Something of the same noble and refined philosophy underlies this insistence, by the greater anarchist teachers, on the proselyting value of truth of intercourse and of downright living and on the consequent necessity of the training and purifying of the individual as the surest means of changing a social _milieu_. In the individual refusal to live the “conventional lies” which Max Nordau (who has long trembled on the verge of anarchism) anathematised is a real disintegrating force. “We must begin with ourselves,” says Jean Grave, “in our efforts at transformation.” And it is sure that the saintliness of Louise Michel, the fine simplicity and modesty of Elisée Reclus, the voluntary poverty of the gentle Jean Grave, and the unobtrusive virtues of their obscure disciples are factors of tremendous importance to the anarchist movement. Dialectics are powerless before the blameless living of such real apostles of “sweetness and light.” They may not have the whole truth,—they would be the last to claim that they have,—but there must be some shred of truth in a belief that is thus witnessed by beautiful character.

In pinning so much of their faith to the gradual modification of daily habits of thinking and acting, these anarchists reveal themselves no mean psychologists and no ordinary students of human nature; and it is regarding this relatively prosaic _propagande par l’exemple_ that the choicest anarchist spirits have spoken their most sagacious and most winning words.

Thus, the late Pierre Lavroff wrote: “There exists another form of propaganda accessible to all temperaments, provided the conviction be sincere; and many times this form, though wanting the _éclat_ which accompanies the burning word or the heroic act, proves to be the most efficacious in the life of every day.

... “The conditions of the actual social régime oppose
themselves at every instant to a life in conformity with
conviction more than the juridical conditions retard the
extension of advanced ideas and more than the police
surveillance prevents the revolutionary agitation.

“It has often been remarked that the most considerable
transformations in the ideas of society have occurred, not
because the arguments which were advanced against existing
forms and beliefs had acquired more force, but in consequence
of an insensible modification in mental habits. During entire
centuries the same arguments were repeated; but the habits of
thought acted as a cuirass, and repulsed for a long time all
the attacks made against error. Then, at a given moment, this
cuirass yielded, all at once, without any apparent cause.
Religious doubt, political liberalism, the propaganda of
socialism, are more or less prominent examples. The heroic
acts which strike the imagination merely prepare a soil which
befits these changes. The great majority lets itself—and will
a long time yet let itself—be guided by habits. Arguments make
no great impression upon it. It modifies its customs by
imitation alone. In the case of heroic acts this imitation
extends only to individuals exceptionally placed. Its
veritable domain is the daily living. Every new doctrine which
embraces practical moral elements must provide a series of
models which may be imitated, not by an exceptional hero, but
by an ordinary man. The numerous examples incorporate the new
doctrine into the daily life. They are, broadly speaking, the
most efficacious propagandists of new ideas. Truth realising
itself in living is much more accessible than truth in a state
of thought. The ideas which an individual propagates act upon
a small number, upon the best prepared. A way of life is less
conspicuous, but exercises a more intense action on the
masses. The propaganda carried on by the daily example is the
most potent auxiliary of the spoken word. It surpasses often
in influence the most energetic agitation directed against an
existing evil....

“For the majority of men the _propagande par l’exemple_ is the
only form which makes tangible the spoken propaganda. It alone
changes the habits of thinking and living. It produces, in
fact, a modification of the psychic dispositions of society;
and it opens the way for society to be influenced by the
energetic acts of exceptional individuals, for whom it
prepares a receptive soil.”

Before words of such keen observation and high moral and philosophic import from men who have not forgotten how to think because they seem sometimes to dream, only an attitude of reverence is possible; and the admission is forced that some of these anarchists are not so very flighty, after all, and that some of them are “not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before their thoughts, but that they can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless they know how and what they ought to act and institute.”

Another manifestation of the _propagande par l’exemple_ has been the creation, in France and abroad, of anarchist experiment stations where an effort has been made to realise on a small scale, by isolation from the world at large, the social arrangements which are, on a large scale, the anarchist dream.

The agricultural colony founded in Algeria by M. Regnier, one of the sons-in-law of Elisée Reclus, seems to have been the only really successful venture in this line; and I am not sure whether even this is still in existence.

The other anarchist colonies set up abroad—notably _La Colonie Cecilia_, which was one of the by-products of the emigration from France to South America—have all come to more or less speedy grief.

The reasons are not far to seek. The colonists were totally ignorant of the regions to which they emigrated. They looked to find easier living and well-nigh perfect liberty, and were amazed and disillusionised when they discovered that conditions were not so very different under these new civilisations from what they were under the old.

They were ignorant of each other. No selection having been exercised in forming the groups, the orthodox were overshadowed by the heterodox and by adventurers who were not anarchists at all; and many even of the orthodox were too timorous or too weary to resume, under new skies, the struggle which they fancied, in quitting Europe, they had left behind forever. Misunderstandings, disputes, and even spoliation were the natural result.

They were farther handicapped by a lack of preliminary funds for their installations, by the absence of the appliances of civilisation to which they were accustomed, and by unfamiliarity with the agriculture or other work they had to do.

But the primary reason—the reason which may indeed be said to include all the other reasons—for the failure of the French anarchist colonies in foreign lands is that the transition the colonists were called upon to make was far too abrupt. As Jean Grave has pointed out in this connection, “People cannot pass thus brusquely from a society where fighting and egoism are obligatory on every being to a society where the relations between individuals are those of love, of sympathy, of benevolence, of solidarity, where you take no heed of the faults of those who surround you, ignoring the follies of your neighbours while they ignore yours. The existing social state has in no way prepared us for solidarity and benevolence.”

The French attempts to found anarchist colonies at home have fared little, if any, better than the attempts to found them abroad.

A communistic workshop, opened in Paris in 1885 by a number of anarchistic tailors whom a strike had left without employment, was closed at the end of a year; but whether by reason of internal disagreements or by reason of the intrigues of interested employers it is not easy, from the evidence, to determine. The product was divided equally among all the members of the association,—the unskilled, the sick, the aged, and the impotent included.

The anarchist _Commune de Montreuil_ (said to be the original of the _phalanstère_ of Descaves’ and Donnay’s highly successful play, _La Clairière_) was established in 1892 at Montreuil-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris. A workshop was rented in which the members spent all the time they could spare from their regular employments in working for the benefit of those who might be in need, and Saturday lectures were given. The plans involved, further, hiring a piece of ground to be cultivated for a similar purpose in a similar fashion, a gradual cessation of working for employers as occasion permitted and results warranted, a school for children, and a library for adults. These plans were frustrated, not by the petty rivalries of the women (as in the Descaves-Donnay play), but by the dissolution of the _Commune_ by the government as a part of the wholesale anarchist repressions of 1893-94. Some of the original members of the _Commune de Montreuil_ have since banded themselves together for an exchange of services with the idea of habituating themselves to make and utilise products “without commercial exchange, representative value, or appraisal”; but the exchangers remain in their respective homes.

At Angers, in the Maine-et-Loire, a department remote from Paris, a number of anarchist workingmen pledged themselves some time since to divide their wages at the end of each week “in order to equalise the conditions of existence.”

It is impossible to draw any conclusion whatsoever from experiments that are so partial as these and that have been conducted under such unfavourable conditions.

In the two great modern industrial reform movements—trade-unionism and co-operation—the anarchist finds other fields for the _propagande par l’exemple_.

He is bound to look askance at trade-unions, and, if a purist, to hold himself aloof from them, because by the very fact of trying to raise wages they recognise the legitimacy of the wage system, and because they often resort to politics, and implore the intervention of parliament to gain their ends.

“The unions are wheels in the capitalistic machine because
they are placed—if only temporarily—under the conditions of
the capitalistic system,” says one. “To accept discussion with
one’s exploiters is to confess their right to exploitation,”
says another. “The _raison d’être_ of the union is to
negotiate with the employers, to quibble over the greater or
less degree of exploitation; while an anarchist should aim
only at the destruction of this exploitation,” says still
another.

Regarding the efficiency of trade-unions as a means of permanently bettering the conditions of the working classes, to say nothing of insuring their emancipation, the anarchist has no illusions. On the contrary, he does them scanter justice than even the capitalist, who, however he may antagonise them, at least pays them the sincere compliment of fearing them. The anarchist has not a particle of faith in trade-unionism as such. He is more orthodox than the most orthodox of economists as to the iron law of wages (_la loi d’airain des salaires_), the inexorableness of the operation of supply and demand, and the impotence of strikes. He maintains stoutly that a so-called trade-union victory can, in the nature of the case, be only the semblance of a victory, since gains cannot be defended, since an increase in wages cannot be maintained, against an unfavourable market, and since, even if it could be maintained, it would be counterbalanced in the long run by the increased cost of living consequent thereon. Whoever would oppose the trade-union theory and practice will find in the anarchist writings and speeches the completest possible arsenal of weapons ready forged to his hand. No apologist for things as they are can have exposed more relentlessly than he the financial foolishness of fighting millions of dollars with hundreds of dollars, and of pitting the danger of actual starvation against the relatively insignificant danger of decreased profits,—of combating strength with weakness, in a word, on the former’s chosen ground.

Nevertheless, the anarchist recognises that the trade-union is a natural grouping of the proletariat; that it was the first important grouping to acknowledge, by acts, the irrepressible conflict between capital and labour, the first to boldly lift and wave the standard of industrial revolt, the first to shift the attempt at enfranchisement from the political to the economic ground, and the first to appreciate the advantages of internationalism; that it is the best considerable example thus far of solidarity in action, the most favourable soil for anarchistic good seed—particularly the good seed of the _propagande par l’exemple_—within present reach, the most favourable ground for disputing the future with the socialists, and an excellent weapon of offence and defence. And he approves of strikes, with all their demonstrable financial futility, because they keep to the fore the idea of revolt, and because—a sort of left-handed reason—every unsuccessful strike is an argument in his favour, inasmuch as it shows the emptiness of partial measures that do not reach the cause.

Besides, he discerns a trend his way in the growing trade-union advocacy of the “universal strike” (_grève universelle_ or _grève générale_) which he regards as but another name for the revolution.

At the time of the memorable _grève des terrassiers_,[23] Gustave Geffroy contributed to _Le Journal_ a sketch entitled “_Tableau de Grève_,” which is at once a vivid pen-picture and a prophecy:—

“We could easily have believed ourselves, these latter days,
borne backward to the days of the siege of Paris or the weeks
which followed the time of the Commune, in perceiving above
the pedestrians the silhouettes of cavaliers on patrol and the
hands of soldiers in campaign accoutrements in the public
squares and along the banks of the Seine.... When the
redoubtable question of labour and of _misère_ is the order of
the day, it is anguish with silence which reigns in the street
where pass the soldiers under arms.

“It has been so everywhere this week. About the stacks of
arms, along the route of the cavaliers, not a cry has escaped,
as if each one, by some tacit understanding, knew that destiny
must not be tempted nor risks run. The public regarded without
uttering a word, gazed fixedly at these sons of the soil and
of the faubourg, wearing uniforms and equipped with provisions
and cartridges as if they were entering on a campaign in this
peaceful city. Where was the enemy? These strikers, slowly
promenading, listlessly dangling their arms,—they who set
forth habitually to work, and who return from work with a
rapid, cadenced step,—and quite stupefied at having become
idle strollers; adversaries little fierce, without arms,
without their tools even, having in their favour only their
patience, their passivity, their hope, and especially their
assurance that sooner or later they will conquer, when all
their fellows shall will it like them.

“It is this fatality of the victory of numbers which is the
enemy; it is against this that the regiments and the squadrons
have been sent out, against this that to-morrow they would
have trundled out the artillery. All this parade of force
would have been made this time, could have been made, in fact,
only in pure loss.... And so it will be—we can now affirm
it—on that future day when the _grève générale_ shall be
interpreted in this fashion, when there shall be everywhere
only dismaying calm, the tragic refusal to work, when the
soldiers called out to guarantee order shall find only order
everywhere,—placid visages and folded arms. Military display
will be useless on that day. The great social change will have
come by the fact of that new sort of revolution which a
reactionary journalist designated very justly, the other day,
by the name of the passive revolution....

... “Ah! the good time when the people offered itself freely
as a target on a pile of paving-stones in a narrow street!

“This good time is no more. The great boulevards, the broad
avenues, the power of the artillery which can sweep everything
from afar without the insurgents seeing anything but the quick
flame, the sounding light, the cloud of smoke, were already
there to assure the end of the ancient street war. It was not
enough. The revolutionary tactics also have changed, in
proportion as the revolutionary party has extended, has gained
in force, and has become more conscious of its destinies....

“Seek not elsewhere than in a profound transformation of the
human mind the cause of the tranquillity of a strike in which
we behold the placid confrontation of the workingman and the
soldier. For all observers endowed with reason and
_sang-froid_, to whatever party they belong, the spectacle is
that of the toiling mass reconnoitring the ground and testing
its strength. Nothing less than a pacific and irresistible
transformation is announced. Of course, the _grève générale_
can be realised only by an understanding throughout an
organisation far-seeing and complete, and then, only, thanks
to a certain combination of circumstances; but this is not
saying it cannot be realised.

“It is easy to brand such a programme as tainted with Utopia
and struck with sterility. But to do so is to refuse to
recognise the sense of facts and especially the power of a
unique idea. Bear in mind that this idea of the _grève
générale_ has already thousands of adherents, not only in
France, but in Germany, in England, in America, and you will
have some chance of appreciating the significance of the
strike of to-day, so different from the strike of yesterday,
in spite of a few traditional incidents into which the
strikers and the government have been betrayed.”

Geffroy, the writer of the above, is not an anarchist, but a socialist. Few anarchists see in the _grève générale_, as he does, a purely passive revolution, which will prevail without the shedding of a drop of blood or any other violence whatsoever. Most of its anarchist advocates regard it, “not as a strike of folded arms, but as a general revolt of the proletariat, outside of all political lines, for the conquest of the means of production and for complete emancipation.”

The _grève générale_ apart, the anarchist who enters the trade-union[24] does it, incidentally, perhaps, to rid the union of the curse of politics and to score over the socialists, but primarily to transform it by the influence of precept (and, still more, of example) from “a reform movement for the defence of the material and moral interests of the workers, and especially the satisfaction of such immediate desires as the amelioration of salaries and the diminution of the working day,” into “an economic movement of the working class against the capitalistic class for the suppression of the latter and of the régime which they represent.”

Consequently, anarchist writings are replete with solemn warnings to the faithful against the insidious peril of having anything to do with the unions with any other object in view than that of making them other than they are.

From co-operation, as from trade-unionism, the purists of anarchy keep themselves prudently aloof by reason of the risk of contamination from too close contact with commercial processes and partial measures.

Other anarchists—the majority, perhaps—are still holding co-operation under observation, waiting for it to display more satisfactory credentials before they declare themselves. Thus the _Etudiants Socialistes Révolutionnaires Internationalistes_[25] “have pronounced for it,” says A. D. Bancel, “all in pronouncing against it.”

Others do not object to participating passively in the movement, so that they are not called on to aid in the work of organisation and serve on boards and committees.

The rest have espoused it with more or less enthusiasm because its efforts are economic rather than political, because it militates against socialism, because it is a phase of the struggle between classes; because it is of a high educational value to the proletariat in showing it its real position; because it fosters internationalism; because its unit, the co-operative group, like the union, is an expression of solidarity, an excellent field for the _propagande par l’exemple_ and a convenient weapon of combat; and finally because its ultimate aim is _la liberté intégrale_.

There is a _pan-coopération_ as there is a _grève universelle_. And, as the _grève universelle_ (which is the revolution) is regarded by some as the inevitable consummation of trade-unionism, so _la pan-coopération_, alias _la république coopérative_, alias _l’alliance coopérative internationale_ (which is likewise the revolution), is regarded by some as the inevitable consummation of co-operation.

By these latter a critical moment is foreseen when the angry meeting of _le capitalisme autoritaire_ and _le coopératisme libertaire_ will kindle a colossal, world-wide, and purifying conflagration.