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The anarchist, the anarchist-communist, the Lokalisten, the anarcho-socialist, the young socialist, and the syndicalist have all in their time solemnly come to warn the working class of this insidious enemy.
At the same time, they point out that the condition of the toilers for the State has not improved, and that they are exploited as mercilessly by the State as they were formerly exploited by the capitalist. To dispute this would be time ill spent. If it be indeed true, it defeats the argument of the syndicalist.
It expresses need. And statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks very different the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph.
These are my reflections, or these try to be my reflections when I consider the Syndicalist how he grows or when I look up and see a class-war socialist an Upton Sinclair banging loosely about the world.
Given an inarticulate mass of grievously exploited workers speaking many foreign tongues and despised alike by the politician, the policeman, and the native American labor organizer; given a group of energetic revolutionary agitators who make the cause of these workers their own and become their spokesmen and leaders; and a situation will clearly arise where thousands of workmen will be apparently marshalled under the flag of revolution while in reality it is the desire for a higher wage and not for a realization of the syndicalist program that reconciles them to starving their wives and children and to shedding their blood on picket duty.
But as soon as they are sufficiently powerful, when their contrary interests will necessarily enter into conflict, as during the Syndicalist period of the old Italian republics Florence and Siena, for example the present fraternity will speedily be forgotten, and equality will be replaced by the despotism of the most powerful. Such a future seems near at hand.
There are those, of course, who maintain that syndicalism is wholly a natural and inevitable product of economic forces, and, so far as the actual syndicalist movement is concerned, that is unquestionably true.
Even now both friends and opponents see in the growth of State socialism the gradual formation of that transitional stage that leads from capitalism to socialism. The syndicalist and anarchist alone fail to see here any drift toward socialism; they see only a growing tyranny creating a class of favored civil servants, who are divorced from the actual working class.
There was reason to believe that the syndicalist strategists would postpone the fight for a more favorable opportunity. During the latter half of April Olivier had an attack of influenza: he used to get it every winter about the same time, and it always used to develop into his old enemy, bronchitis. Christophe stayed with him for a few days. The attack was only a slight one, and soon passed.
Political action was to be abandoned, while the discussion on trade unions introduced for the first time in the International the idea of a purely economic struggle and a conception of future society in which groups of producers, and not the State or the community, should own the tools of production. This syndicalist conception of socialism was not new.
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