emplates the ownership of the mines by the miners, of the railroads
by the railway workers, of the land by the peasants. All the workers in
the various industries are to be organized into unions and then brought
together in a federation. Several objections are made to this outline of
a new society. In the first place, it is artificial. Except for an
occasional cooeperative undertaking, there is not, nor has there ever
been, any tendency toward trade-union ownership of industry. In
addition, it is an idea that is to-day an anachronism. It is conceivable
that small federated groups might control and conduct countless little
industries, but it is not conceivable that groups of "self-governing,"
"autonomous," and "independent" workmen could, or would, be allowed by a
highly industrialized society to direct and manage such vast enterprises
as the trusts have built up. If each group is to run industry as it
pleases, the Standard Oil workers or the steel workers might menace
society in the future as the owners of those monopolies menace it in the
present. There is no indication in the literature of the syndicalists,
and certainly no promise in a system of completely autonomous groups of
producers, of any solution of the vast problems of modern trustified
industry. It may be that such ideas corresponded to the state of things
represented in early capitalism. But the socialist ideas of the present
are the product of a more advanced state of capitalism than Owen,
Proudhon, Lassalle, and Bakounin knew, or than the syndicalists of
France, Italy, and Spain have yet been forced seriously to deal with.
Indeed, it was necessary for Marx to forecast half a century of
capitalist development in order to clarify the program of socialism and
to emphasize the necessity for that program.

It is a noteworthy and rather startling fact that Sidney and Beatrice
Webb had pointed out the economic fallacies of syndicalism before the
French Confederation of Labor was founded or Sorel, Berth, and
Lagardelle had written a line on the subject. In their "History of Trade
Unionism" they tell most interestingly the story of Owen's early
trade-union socialism. The book was published in 1894, two or three
years before the theories of the French school were born. Nevertheless,
their critique of Owenism expresses as succinctly and forcibly as
anything yet written the attitude of the socialists toward the economics
of modern syndicalism. "Of all Owen's attempts