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Would he have us believe that the typical great movements of our times Socialism, Trades Unionism, Syndicalism, Insurance Bills, Land Laws, Old Age Pensions, Charity Organisation, Improved Education bound up as they all are with economic problems are not the sort of objects which more and more are absorbing the best activities of Christendom?
Now, every once in a while I had read in the "Times" how another bunch of these I.W.W's. were put on trial, and how they were insolent to the judge, and how it was proved they had committed many crimes, and how they were sentenced to fourteen years in State's prison under our criminal syndicalism act.
But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario. She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life.
Rolfe had been absent for a week, in New York, consulting with some of the I.W.W. leaders; with Lockhart, the chief protagonist of Syndicalism in America, just returned from Colorado, to whom he had given a detailed account of the Hampton strike. And Lockhart, next week, was coming to Hampton to make a great speech and look over the ground for himself.
And so the consumer ultimately decides what work shall be done. The Guildsman says that the producer ought to decide what he shall produce and what is to be done with it when he has produced it. "Under Guild Socialism," says Mr Cole, "as under Syndicalism, the State stands apart from production, and the worker is placed in control."
Ramsay McDonald, by no means an indulgent critic of syndicalism, does not believe that Sorel really anticipates the general strike as the inauguration of the new order, but as a myth, which will lead the people on to the fulfillment of the ideal that lies beyond and on the other side of all anticipated revolutionary action.
Shorn of its socialistic futurity this philosophy became non-political "business" unionism; but, when combined with a strong revolutionary spirit, it became a non-political revolutionary unionism, or syndicalism.
In harmony with the above facts, we find that the strongest centers of syndicalism in France, Italy, and Spain are in those districts where the factory system is very backward. Where syndicalism and anarchism prevail most strongly, we find conditions of economic immaturity which strikingly resemble those of England in the time of Owen. In all these districts trade unionism is undeveloped.
Some German leagues have been cited as having saved over three millions sterling in subscriptions. The extension of the labour movement in all countries shows that it is not, like Socialism, a dream of Utopian theorists, but the result of economic necessities. In its aim, its means of action, and its tendencies, Syndicalism presents no kinship with Socialism.
Such is Syndicalism, the cheap Labour Panacea, to which the more passionate and less intelligent portion of the younger workers, impatient of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism, drifts steadily. It is the direct and logical reaction to our present economic system, which has counted our workers neither as souls nor as heads, but as hands.