position, and finally Guillaume introduced the following:

"Whereas partial strikes can only procure for the workers momentary and
illusory relief, and whereas, by their very nature, wages will always be
limited to the strictly necessary means of subsistence in order to keep
the worker from dying of hunger,

"The Congress, without believing in the possibility of completely
renouncing partial strikes, recommends the workers to devote their
efforts to achieving an international organization of trade bodies,
which will enable them to undertake some day a general strike, the only
really efficacious strike to realize the complete emancipation of
labor."[9] All the delegates approved the resolution, excepting Hales,
who voted against it, and Van den Abeele, who abstained from voting
because the matter would be later discussed in Holland.

It was of course inevitable that such an "organization" should soon
disappear. Vigorous efforts were made by a few of the devoted to keep
the movement alive, but it is easy to see that an aggregation so loosely
united, and without any really definite purpose, was destined to
dissolution. During the next few years various small congresses were
held, but they were merely beating a corpse in the effort to keep it
alive. And, while the Bakouninists were engaged in this critical
struggle with death, the spirit that had animated all their battles with
Marx withdrew himself. Bakounin was tired and discouraged, and he left
his friends of the Jura without advice or assistance in their now
impossible task. Thus precipitately ended the efforts of the anarchists
to build up a new International. George Plechanoff illuminates the
insolvable problem of the anarchists with his powerful statement: "Error
has its logic as well as truth. Once you reject the political action of
the working class, you are fatally driven--provided you do not wish to
serve the bourgeois politicians--to accept the tactics of the Vaillants
and the Henrys."[10] That this is terribly true is open to no question
whatever. And the anarchists now found themselves in a veritable
_cul-de-sac_. Like the poor in Sidney Lanier's poem, they were pressing

"Against an inward-opening door
That pressure tightens evermore."

The more they fretted and stormed and crushed each other, the more
hopelessly impossible became the chance of egress. The more desperately
they threw themselves against that door, the more securely they
impr