robably pass on to social democracy through a
period of monopoly rule, "State Socialism," and political reforms that
in themselves promise no relative advance, economic or political, to the
working class.

In a recent congress of the French Party, Jaures protested against a
statement of Lagardelle's that Socialism was opposed to democracy.
"Democracy," Lagardelle answered, "corresponds to an historical movement
which has come to an end; syndicalism is an anti-democratic movement to
the extent that it is post-democratic. Syndicalism comes after
democracy; it perfects the life which democracy was powerless to
organize." It is difficult to understand why Lagardelle persists in
saying that a movement which thus supplements democracy, which does what
democracy was claiming to do, and which is expected to supersede it,
should on this account be considered as "anti-democratic." Socialism
fights the "State Socialists" and opposes those whose democracy is
merely political, but it is attacking not their democracy or their
"State Socialism," but their capitalism.

"Political society," says Lagardelle, "being the organization of the
coercive power of the State, that is to say, of authority and the
hierarchy, corresponds to an economic regime which has authority and the
hierarchy as its base."[265] This proposition (the truth of which all
Socialists would recognize in so far as it applies to political society
in its present form) seems sufficient to Lagardelle to justify his
conclusion that we can no more expect Socialist results through the
State, than we could by association with capitalism. He does not agree
with the Socialist majority that, while capitalism embodies a ruling
class whose services may be dispensed with, the State is rather a
machine or a system which corresponds not so much to capitalism, as to
the system and machinery of industry which capitalism controls.

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. Lagardelle adopts Rousseau's view that the
essence of representative government (all existing governments that are
not autocratic being representative) is "the inactivity of the citizen"
and urges that political parties, like society in general, are divided
between the governing and the governed. While there is much truth in