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Updated: June 12, 2025
The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, "We will take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves," is going to say, "We will make ourselves fit to run the factories ourselves."
This is often recognized by Syndicalists themselves. See, e.g., an article on ``The Old International'' in the Syndicalist of February, 1913, which, after giving an account of the struggle between Marx and Bakunin from the standpoint of a sympathizer with the latter, says: ``Bakounin's ideas are now more alive than ever.
Regarded as a project of social development, Syndicalism is ridiculous; regarded as an illuminating and unintentionally ironical complement to the implicit theories of our present social order, it is worthy of close attention. The dream of the Syndicalist is an impossible social fragmentation.
In Germany they were schooled in philosophy and science; in France they found themselves in a most amazing fermentation of revolutionary spirit and idealism; and in England they studied with the minutest care the coöperative movement and self-help, the trade-union movement with its purely economic aims and methods, the Chartist movement with its political action, and the Owenite movement, both in its purely utopian phases and in its later development into syndicalist socialism.
In a word, syndicalism is only to be understood in the light of the criticisms of revolutionary Socialism as presented by Kautsky, just as the standpoint of the latter can only be comprehended after it is subjected to the syndicalist criticism and doubtless both positions, however one-sided they appear elsewhere, were fairly justified by the economic and political situations in France and Germany respectively.
Pouget confesses: "The syndicalist has a contempt for the vulgar idea of democracy the inert, unconscious mass is not to be taken into account when the minority wishes to act so as to benefit it...." He refers in another place to the majority, who "may be considered as human zeros.
And as the editor of the Syndicalist, the leader of the most imposing and revealing labour rally the world has seen, he is of universal interest.
Catholics and Protestants, instead of saying to one another the things with which we are familiar, should look to their own houses; and if in this age of fashionable agnosticism, they should conclude that the general enemy is the atheist, socialist, and the syndicalist, they should still be reminded to look to their own houses; and if the agnostic take this to justify himself, he should be reminded he has never done anything to justify himself.
What is practically the Syndicalist program was advocated by a French delegate to the Congress of the International at Bale in that same year. And also in Italy. A good, short account of the Italian movement is given by A. Lanzillo, ``Le Mouvement Ouvrier en Italie, Bibliotheque du Mouvement Proletarien. See also Paul Louis, ``Le Syndicalisme Europeen, chap. vi.
Furthermore, the syndicalists differ from the socialists in their conception of the class struggle. To the socialist the capitalist is as much the product of our economic system as the worker. No socialist believes that the capitalist is individually to blame for our economic ills. The syndicalist dissents from this view. To him the capitalist is an individual enemy.
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