EPILOGUEFrench working men with the corrupt political life o f the early
Third Republic, and it was inspired largely by the tradition o f the
First International, particularly as it had been expressed by the
federalist wing.
T ike Bakunin, the syndicalists believed in the violent prosecu
tion o f the class struggle, and their favourite weapon was the
general strike, by which they hoped one day to usher in the revo
lutionary millennium. But, on the whole, they showed more paral
lels with than divergences from Proudhon. Like him, they saw
the condition o f social struggle as incessant and hailed it as a
creative force. They declared economic groupings to be ‘the most
fundamental and the most permanent’ o f human organisations,
and sought to build future society as a network of syndicates and
other workers’ associations which would administer economic
affairs and, by dispensing with the State (which they dismissed as
the political organisation of the capitalist class), enable men to
manage their affairs in freedom. They denounced the deceptions
o f democratic government, based on what they regarded as ‘the
fiction of the general will,’ and declared, in almost the same terms
as Proudhon had used, that the liberation o f the workers was their
own task and that this very fact precluded them from taking part
in political action, which merely served to perpetuate the rule of
authority.
Outside the Latin countries, Proudhon’s influence was prob
ably strongest in Russia. Herzen and the Narodniks adopted his
distrust of the State, his decentralism, and his recognition of the
importance of the peasantry. Tolstoy was impressed by his
writings, and absorbed the Proudhonian criticisms o f property
and government into his non-violent anarchism, while his War
and Peace owed not only its title but also a great deal of its theory
o f war and o f the nature of leadership to Proudhon’s book of the
same name. The two other great Russians who were profoundly
influenced by Proudhon— Kropotkin and Bakunin— have already
been mentioned. Their teachings were most effective in Western
Europe, and the anarchist movement that arose in Russia under
their influence was the least of the major revolutionary groupings
of Tsarist days; significantly, it was most influential among the
peasants of the Ukraine. In America, Proudhonian echoes can be
found in the financial reform ideas o f the Populists and in the
homebred anarchism o f theWobblies, and, beyond the Rio Grande,