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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill RELIGION To call any proletarian revolutionary movement religious may seem perverse to the respectable, and crass to some of the revolutionists themselves, although M. Georges Sorel (in the brave days when he wrote as a stimulating prophet of radicalism) has already emphasized some religious tendencies in syndicalism. We must endeavor to meet all charges by describing first the so-called "materialism" of the militant proletariat, and by then describing and comparing what seems to be essential and common in all religions. The use of the word "materialism" by the revolutionary laborers is simple, simple in an admirable sense of the word. It is silly to quarrel with the word; for, though it is as vague as the word "spiritual" which is fashionable in the "upper" classes, it is not half as deceptive to the proletariat as is the word "spiritual" to the bourgeoisie. It has been of genuine value for proletarian purposes, and it is really very expressive. Some new "materialism" is forever rising to purge some shallow "idealism" and to be itself in turn destroyed. Itsfrequent reincarnations are certainly due to the fact that it is, after all, the most straightforward, if not the most profound of metaphysical views. Materialism, as a rough and ready metaphysics, fills some scientific savants and some proletarian agitators with an invigorating sense of freedom from all considerations that interfere with their own cherished faiths and aspirations, whether these be in relation to chemistry, biology or the conflict of labor and capital. Clear the field absolutely of gods, clear the field of those haunting beliefs rephrased in dialectic which are but the crystal maze with which the philosopher hypnotizes his practical faculties, clear the field of all these phantasmagoria, thinks the...