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Updated: August 31, 2025
In any case, it will accelerate the tendency toward the democratization of the State and, therefore, toward socialism. As an alternative to this actual evolution toward socialism, the syndicalists propose to force society to put the means of production into the hands of the trade unions.
Another and closely related idea of the syndicalists is that all political parties, as well as governments, necessarily become the tools of their leaders, that they always become "machines," bureaucratically organized like governments.
The syndicalists will have done their work if they rouse the rest of us to a keener sense of our responsibilities. When the day comes that every worker receives the full product of his toil, the reasons for existence of this form of revolutionary activity will have passed away. Of one thing the present writer is convinced.
But it would be a mistake to confuse aims with methods: however little we may agree with the proposal to force the millennium on a reluctant community by starvation, we may yet agree that much of what the Syndicalists desire to achieve is desirable.
A queer, yet inevitable alliance was brought about between the royalists of the Action Francaise and the syndicalists of the C. G. T. Balzac speaks somewhere of the men of his time who "though aristocrats by inclination, yet became Republicans in spite, of themselves, only to find many inferiors among their equals." A scant sort of pleasure.
The system which they advocate is, I believe, the best hitherto proposed, and the one most likely to secure liberty without the constant appeals to violence which are to be feared under a purely Anarchist regime. The attitude of the Syndicalists to Guild Socialism is far from sympathetic.
The syndicalists are, of course, quite right when they say that State socialism is an attempt to allay popular discontent, but they are quite wrong when they accept this as proof that it must inevitably sidetrack socialism. They overlook the fact that it is always a concession granted grudgingly to the growing power of democracy.
Parties are constituted in order to acquire the conquest of these employments, and they are analogous to the State. La Decomposition du Marxisme, p. 53. Syndicalists aim at organizing men, not by party, but by occupation. This, they say, alone represents the true conception and method of the class war.
"The working class would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair for a method of revolution." The struggle, therefore, between the syndicalists and the socialists is, as we see, the same clash over methods that occurred in the seventies and eighties between the anarchists and the socialists.
"Well, he is a Socialist. I admit that we are rather lax in our definitions. You see, there is just one subject, of late years, which has brought together the Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth.
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