e
are various reasons why the socialist prefers State capitalism to
private capitalism. It has certain advantages for the general public. It
confers certain benefits upon the toilers, chief of all perhaps the
regularity of work. And, above and beyond this, State capitalism is
actually expropriating private capitalists. The more property the State
owns, the fewer will be the number of capitalists to be dealt with, and
the easier it will be eventually to introduce socialism. Indeed, to
proceed from State capitalism to socialism is little more than the grasp
of public powers by the working class, followed by the administrative
measures of industrial democracy. All this, of course, has been said
before by Engels, part of whose argument I have already quoted.
Unfortunately, no syndicalist seems to follow this reasoning or excuse
what he considers the terrible crime of extending the domain of the
State. Not infrequently his revolutionary philosophy begins with the
abolition of the State, and often it ends there. Marx, Engels, and
Eccarius, as we know, ridiculed Bakounin's terror of the State; and how
many times since have the socialists been compelled to deal with this
bugaboo! It rises up in every country from time to time. 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. But the workers
refuse to be frightened, and in every country, including even Russia,
Italy, and France, they have less fear of State ownership of industry
than they have of that crushing exploitation which they know to-day.

Even in Germany, where Labriola considers the socialists to be more or
less free from the taint of State capitalism, they have from the very
beginning voted for State ownership. As early as 1870 the German
socialists, upon a resolution presented by Bebel, adopted by a large
majority the proposition that the State should retain in its hands the
State lands, Church lands, communal lands, the mines, and the
railroads.[AD] When adopting the new party program at Erfurt in 1891,
the Congress struck out the section directed against State socialism and
adopted a number of propositions leading to that end. Again, at Breslau
in 1895, the Germans adopted several State-socialist measures. "At this
time," says Paul Kampffmeyer, "a proposition of the agrarian commission
on the party program,