Levée en masse

“ The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. ”

“ The processes by which and the period during which this accumulation of impulse is effected are by no means so spectacular as the events of the subsequent period when the revolutionary movement, having obtained an irresistible momentum, sweeps away like straws the obstacles that so long held it back only to swell its force and volume at last. ”

“ But when evening comes, and the outlying foundries, sewing-machine, wagon, plow, and other "works," together with the paper-mills and all the nameless industries—when the operations of all these are suspended for the day, and the workmen and workwomen loosed from labor—then, as this vast army suddenly invades and overflows bridge, roadway, street and lane, the startled stranger will fully comprehend the why and wherefore of the city's high prosperity. ”

“ One little tug pushed desperately up stream as though it would force some energy into this dreaming, dying world—a revolutionary striving to stir the dim silences that watched, from either bank, into protest. ”

“ De Quincey says, "The most remarkable instance of a combined movement in society which history, perhaps, will be summoned to notice, is that which, in our day, has applied itself to the abatement of intemperance. Two vast movements are hurrying into action by velocities continually accelerated,—the great revolutionary movement from political causes concurring with the great physical movement in locomotion and social intercourse from the gigantic power of steam. ”

“ They understood that the revolution would be born again unceasingly, perhaps to-morrow, with a general strike—the common understanding of all workers having general funds, and so able to hold out for months, eating their own bread. ”

“ Not a carriage, not a horseman, scarcely a passenger; there seems some great and sudden collapse in the metropolitan system, as if a pest had been announced, or an enemy were expected in alarm by a vanquished capital. ”

“ Why is it that after so much noisy organisation, after so much declamation and delirious excitement, the utmost they are able to do is to tear up a few yards of railway track or to smash a street lamp? Do we not find here an irrefragable demonstration that force is not realisable at any given moment but only in the historic hour when evolution shall have prepared the inevitable fall of the dominant economic system? ”

“ With steam and electricity, and the new powers born of progress, forces have entered the world that will either compel us to a higher plane or overwhelm us - as nation after nation, as civilization after civilization, have been overwhelmed before. ”

“ We have studied a proletarian general strike, which is one undivided whole; now we have to consider the general political strike, which combines the incidents of economic revolt with many other elements depending on systems foreign to the industrial system. ”

“ They viewed the chains as already forged to manacle the unborn millions; and though everyone seemed to dread any new interruption of public tranquility, the impetuosity of some led them into excesses which could not be restrained by those of more cool and discreet deportment. ”

“ The network of nobility encircled by the network of the bourgeoisie, this antagonism of two races, the one protected by immovable institutions, the other by the active patience of work and the wiles of trade, produced the revolution of 1789. ”

“ Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. ”

“ Because the proletariat has already grown in numbers and force and because it has begun to make its power felt in the machinery of economics and politics, for that very reason the question arises, "What shall be the mechanism by which the coming victory shall be obtained?" ”

“ The real movement that transforms existing conditions has been the dominant social force since the bourgeoisie’s victory within the economic sphere, and this dominance became visible once that victory was translated onto the political plane. The development of productive forces shattered the old production relations, and all static order crumbled. ”

“ If social evolution proceed according to natural law, if it be the outcome of the class struggle, waged unceasingly as part of the natural order of things, then acute revolution is no more than a special case of chronic revolution, and our estimate of acute revolution must be revised. ”

“ Shrinkage, or centralization, has become such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis may place his hand on the pulse of the world. The planet has indeed grown very small; and because of this, no vital movement can remain in the clime or country where it takes its rise. ”

“ Or again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. ”

“ A shortage of agitational leaflets and illegal literature is felt. ... The workers' circles are left without agitators. ... Simultaneously, there is a constant shortage of funds. In a word, the growth of the labour movement is outstripping the growth and development of the revolutionary organisations. The numerical strength of the active revolutionists is too small to enable them to concentrate in themselves all the influence exercised upon the whole of the discontented masses of labour, or to give this unrest even a shadow of symmetry and organisation. ”

“ The starting point ought to be the factories and plants. That means that street manifestations of a serious character, fraught with decisive events, ought to begin with political strikes of the masses. ”

“ On the Grève gathered men out of place, wandering about while waiting for work; whence comes the modern meaning of grève—a 169 strike, when men get out of place and are not anxious for a job. Here on the Grève, as their common ground, met the men who carried goods by water from up and down stream, and the men who carried goods by land, to and from the provinces. ”

“ Influences which resist Dynamic Movements.—If there is anything which, without impairing the motive powers of economic progress, puts an obstacle in the way of the movement, it has to be treated like one of these elements of friction to which we have just referred. In our discussion of the growth of population, the increase of wealth, the improvement of method, etc., we have paid attention to [Pg 374] resisting forces as well as others, and have tried to determine what is the resultant of all of them. The forces of resistance have their place in a statement of dynamic laws. ”

“ Hence it is equally the case that movements which are carried on by great masses, and are left to themselves, move on consistently to their extreme, and on the other hand a once attained equilibrium of conditions is not easily abandoned, so far as the change depends on the mass. ”

“ A general revolt is then the ultimate aim that is furthered by the gain in solidarity and the power of protest of the workmen. Their chances of conducting a revolutionary movement efficiently and of hastening the downfall of the bourgeoisie are thereby increased. ”

“ The idea of the revolution is to the crowd a symbol, the function of which is compensation for the burdens of the struggle for existence, for the feeling of social inferiority, and for desires suppressed by civilization. It is an imaginary escape from hard reality, a new-world system in which the ego seeks refuge, a defense mechanism under the compulsive influence of which crowds behave like somnambulistic individuals. ”

“ The change to the present régime of railroads, telegraphs, daily papers, telephones and the rest has involved a revolution in every phase of life; in commerce, in politics, in education, even in mere sociability and gossip—this revolution always consisting in an enlargement and quickening of the kind of life in question. ”

“ This revolt, appearing spontaneously all over the industrial field in the form of demands for an increased share of the joint product, is being carefully and shrewdly shaped for a political assault upon society. ”

“ The theme throughout was plain: the world revolution is coming, by inescapable economic laws discovered by our theory. The world revolution, which will come, will remove the owning classes from control of the productive capital, and will put all capital in the hands of the workers. ”

“ With you everything happens with great ups and downs. But each up wins definite terrain and thus one does go forward. Thus for instance, the tremendous wave of the Knights of Labor and the strike movement from 1886 to 1888, despite all defeats, did bring us forward. There is an altogether different spirit in the masses than before. ”

“ The reorganization of these countries took the form of revolution. It was a time of confusion and violence. Everywhere institutions and governments were crashing. Everywhere, with the exception of two or three countries, the erstwhile capitalist masters fought bitterly for their possessions. ”

“ And could such a movement be barren of important results, organised and carried through as it would be by the essentially productive class, that class for which no substitute can be found because none exists? ”

“ Those arrested motions, where the rest is only apparent, not real—where the 'yielding' forces are only, as it were, annihilated, whether by equilibrium of forces, or an absolute predominance, but biding their time, ready to burst their bonds and renew their wrestling, ready to show themselves, not as 'subjects,' but predominators—not as states, but revolutions. ”

“ All the social forces will then be thrown into spasmodic commotion; and, when those forces, in their native wildness, break through their traditional restraints, the world may have to witness a spectacle of revolutionary chaos without example in history. ”

“ Universal symptoms, visible in all nations, show us the rapid growth of the power of crowds, and do not admit of our supposing that it is destined to cease growing at an early date. Whatever fate it may reserve for us, we shall have to submit to it. All reasoning against it is a mere vain war of words. Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilisation, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society. ”

“ And beneath will be the abyss, wherein will fester and starve and rot, and ever renew itself, the common people, the great bulk of the population. And in the end, who knows in what day, the common people will rise up out of the abyss; the labor castes and the Oligarchy will crumble away ”

“ Besides these natural causes of population and depopulation (which proceed, as we have observed, from a certain turn given to the spirit of a people) there are others which operate with irresistible force, by sudden and violent revolutions. ”

“ Sometimes, on seizing a branch in her progress, she will throw herself, by the power of one arm only, completely round it, making a revolution with such rapidity as almost to deceive the eye, and continue her progress with undiminished velocity. ”

“ The whole effect upon the mind of a cool observer was of a covey of unsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over a series of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled about like towers in an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the common work-people going on with their lives as well as they could, suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for anything but violent, fruitless protests, impotent. ”

“ No such reorganization of our industrial methods could be effected without a prolonged period of agitation, which would undoubtedly injure the prosperity and unsettle the standing of the victims of the agitation ”

“ In short, the revolution has, in general, made the higher orders poor, and dispirited, and the lower barbarous, and insolent, whilst a third class has sprung up, with the silence and suddenness of an exhalation, higher than both, without participating in the original character of either, in which the principles of computation, and the vanity of wealth, are at awkward variance. ”

“ But other matters have for you a less doubtful interest. The great physical revolution which has left its mark no less in the political world than in the material, has become consolidated and solidified into a permanent feature of the earth. ”

“ The movement is as inevitable and, in the long run, as resistless as that which draws water from its mountain sources to the sea. It is one way of redressing the economic balance and bringing about an economic equilibrium. ”

“ The amazing revolution which has lately taken place in the arts and sciences, as applicable to the purposes of human economy, ought naturally to give birth to another revolution of a kindred quality in the political and social mechanism of society. ”

“ The revolutionary movement sweeping through Europe has various precipitating causes, and responds to mixed and, apparently conflicting motives. Fundamentally it is, consciously and unconsciously, an impulse of the mass of the people to win back the land, the pivot of their economic and human liberties, the nursing-mother of man. ”

“ A revolt, political in its aims but economic in its origin, will take place; an economic revolt tending to change the economical conditions of the masses and a political revolt tending to modify the very essence of the political organization, demanding that these vast armies be disbanded, the swords turned into ploughshares, and the victory of the industrial over the military type of civilization be established. ”

“ At home, restlessness, demonstrations, increasing tensions, and conflicts that became more acute as the curve of production went lower frightened the bankers, the industrialists, the landowners, and their political and ideological pensioners. ”