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for the benefit of humanity? What numbers of martyrs did every new truth cost! How many of the greatest men, of the apostles of truth, have met death at the stake, on the gallows, on the wheel, on the guillotine, in the underground prisons, or in the snows of Siberia?
What oceans of blood! What a minute drop of blood is the blood shed in revolutions compared with this? Remarkable! One does not dissuade the people from the courage to go to war, but from the courage to fight for their own freedom and future; one always tries to advise against it!
In the revolutions for national independence or for political rights the people stake their lives ever readily and do not fear death.
Is not the social revolution, which will final free all humanity from chains and social misery, an infinitely higher ideal, far more worthy of man, that one should put at stake his whole personality, and, if need be, even his life? Thus the revolution, conducted as a General Strike, threatens less danger for the proletariat; prevents quick concentration of large military forces; makes many collisions with troops unnecessary, even impossible; and thus presents the most chances for success, for a final victory, bought with the least possible sacrifices.
5.—ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS: WAGE STRIKES AND THE
GENERAL STRIKE.
Each historical epoch has its particular mode of struggle, its particular economic conditions and technical forms of revolution. The knights fought clad in steel armour, with sword and spear; the citizens of the communes of the Middle Ages fought organised in their complots; the peasants in the Peasants War, whose banner was the "Bundschuh," had their particular war tactics; another form of revolution was the "Jacquerie" of the revolutionary peasants at the time of the great French Revolution, and the tactic in the epoch of the revolutionary petit citizens was the battle on the barricades.
The proletariat can no more apply the tactics of bygone epochs; but it creates, as a necessary result of the economic development and the enlargement of its economic organisation, the particular conditions and new forms of tactics of its own. At present all incidents point to the General Strike, and so the working class necessarily finds itself forced to seize this weapon everywhere, in spite of the opposition of its leaders, as soon as an important struggle impends. With the continually growing feeling of solidarity in the proletariat, with those labour organisations ever growing in might and number, and particularly, as a logical result, the strikes ever growing more numerous and larger, the idea of the General Strike is spontaneously created.
In order to be successful the strikes had to continually acquire a tendency of growing larger—that is, to always draw larger masses of the same branch into the strike.
