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Updated: June 12, 2025
However, something in addition to personality is needed to explain the rise of syndicalist socialism in France. Like anarchism, syndicalism is a natural product of certain French and Italian conditions. It is not strange that the Latin peoples have in the past harbored the ideas of anarchism, or that now they harbor the ideas of syndicalism.
Although this "group socialism" would certainly necessitate a Parliament in order to harmonize the conflicting interests of the various productive associations, there is nothing, it appears, that the syndicalist so much abhors. He is never quite done with picturing the burlesque of parliamentarism.
To those who have seen at first-hand the life of the western casual laborer, any reflections on his gratitude or spiritual buoyancy seem ironical humor. "An altogether unwarranted importance has been given to the syndicalist philosophy of the I.W.W. A few leaders use its phraseology. Of these few, not half a dozen know the meaning of French syndicalism or English guild socialism.
The idealist anarchist and even the more practical syndicalist, preaching openly and frankly that there is nothing left to the poor but war, are, after all, few in number and weak in action. Yet how many to-day despair of peaceable methods when they see all these outrages committed by mercenaries, protected and abetted by the official State, in the interest of the most sordid anarchism!
Each and all fail for one and the same reason. The municipal socialist, despairing of the huge collective state, dreams of his little town as an organic unit in which all share alike; the syndicalist in his fancy sees his trade united into a co-operative body in which all are equal; the gradualist, in whose mind lingers the leaven of doubt, frames for himself a hazy vision of a prolonged preparation for the future, of socialism achieved little by little, the citizens being trained as it goes on till they are to reach somehow or somewhere in cloud land the nirvana of the elimination of self; like indeed, they are, to the horse in the ancient fable that was being trained to live without food but died, alas, just as the experiment was succeeding.
No man to dole them out just enough to keep a roof over their heads and for bread and stew, while he spent the rest on tobacco, at the wine-shops, or for dues to the Socialist or Syndicalist Club. Every centime that came in now was theirs to administer as they pleased.
Instead of throwing up its hands in horror at one over-advertised tactical incident like sabotage, the "New Age" went straight to the creative impulse of the syndicalist movement. Every true craftsman, artist or professional man knows and sympathizes with that impulse: you may call it a desire for self-direction in labor.
But now he learned, not merely about Socialists and "Arnychists," but about State Socialists and Communist Anarchists, and Communist Syndicalists and Syndicalist Anarchists and Socialist Syndicalists, and Reformist Socialists and Guild Socialists, to say nothing about Single Taxers and Liberals and Progressives and numerous other varieties, whom he had to meet and classify and listen to respectfully and sympathetically.
In abandoning democracy, in denying the efficacy of political action, and in resorting to methods which can only end in self-destruction, the syndicalist becomes the logical descendant of the anarchist. He is at this moment undergoing an evolution which appears to be leading him into the same cul-de-sac that thwarted his forefather. His path is blocked by the futility of his own weapons.
"Secondly, that if the environment through any of the conventional instruments of repression, such as religious orthodoxy, university mental discipline, economic inferiority, imprisonment, physical disfigurement, such as short stature, hare-lip, etc., repress the full psychological expression in the field of these tendencies, then a psychic revolt, slipping into abnormal mental functioning, takes place, and society accuses the revolutionist of being either willfully inefficient, alcoholic, a syndicalist, supersensitive, an agnostic, or insane."
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