By “direct action” against employers and the State the workingmen may wrest from the ruling classes reforms which may improve their condition more or less. Such reforms can not pacify the working-class because they do not alter the fundamental conditions of the wage system, but they are conducive to the fortification of the working-class and to its preparation for the final struggle. Every successful strike, every effective boycott, every manifestation of the workingmen's will and power is a blow directed against the existing order; every gain in wages, every shortening of hours of work, every improvement in the general conditions of employment is one more position of importance occupied on the march to the decisive battle, the general strike, which will be the final act of emancipation.
The general strike—the supreme act of the class-war—will abolish the classes and will establish new forms of society. The general strike must not be regarded as a deus ex machina which will suddenly appear to solve all difficulties, but as the logical outcome of the syndicalist movement, as the act that is being gradually prepared by the events of every day. However remote it may appear, it is not a Utopia and its possibility cannot be refuted on the ground that general strikes have failed in the past and may continue to fail in the future. The failures of to-day are building the success of to-morrow, and in time the hour of the successful general strike will come.
What are the forms of the social organization which will take the place of those now in existence? The Congress of Lyons (1901) had expressed the wish to have this question on the program of the next Congress. In order that the answer to this question should reflect the ideas prevalent among the workingmen, the Confederal Committee submitted the question to the syndicats for study. A questionnaire was sent out containing the following questions:
(1) How would your syndicat act in order to transform itself from a group for combat into a group for production?
(2) How would you act in order to take possession of the machinery pertaining to your industry?
(3) How do you conceive the functions of the organized shops and factories in the future?
(4) If your syndicat is a group within the system of highways, of transportation of products or of passengers, of distribution, etc., how do you conceive its functioning?
(5) What will be your relations to your federation of trade or of industry after your reorganization?
(6) On what principle would the distribution of products take place and how would the productive groups procure the raw material for themselves?
(7) What part would the Bourses du Travail play in the transformed society and what would be their task with reference to the statistics and to the distribution of products?