💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › geoffrey-ostergaard-the-relevance-of-syndicalism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:38:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The Relevance of Syndicalism
Author: Geoffrey Ostergaard
Date: June 1963
Language: en
Topics: syndicalism
Source: Retrieved on 4th March 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/relevance-syndicalism
Notes: From Anarchy #028: The Future Of Anarchism

Geoffrey Ostergaard

The Relevance of Syndicalism

TO DISPLAY ANYTHING OTHER THAN AN ACADEMIC INTEREST in syndicalism at

the present time is to lay oneself open to the charge of being a social

troglodyte. Syndicalism, as a movement of any size and influence,

flourished in the first two decades of this century and, since then,

apart from a brief and cruel flowering in Spain during the Civil War, it

has been a spent force. Avowedly syndicalist groups and organisations

still exist in many countries but their memberships are numbered in the

hundreds and thousands rather than in the tens of thousands and

millions; and a dispassionate observer would be forced to place them

firmly in that half-submerged political world inhabited by “the

socialist sects”. Periodically, attempts are made to regroup the

scattered forces of syndicalism in preparation for a new offensive:

there have been several such attempts in this country since the war of

which the National Rank-and-File Movement launched two years ago is only

the latest. But it seems unlikely that such attempts will lead to any

significant movement in the foreseeable future.

Why, then, should we bother our heads with syndicalism? Why not leave

the subject to the historians? It is clearly one of the failures of

history, a movement that didn’t “come off”. With our eyes on the present

and the future, why concern ourselves with the past, especially the

unsuccessful past? As T. S. Eliot has reminded us, “We cannot revive old

factions or follow an antique drum”; and perhaps we ought not, even if

we could.

There are at least two good reasons for not adopting the viewpoint

implicit in such questions. One obvious reason is that the present and

possible future cannot be understood without an understanding of the

past. And by “the past” I mean not only the “successful” past — that

part of history which most obviously leads to the present; I include

also the “unsuccessful” past — that part of history which, from the

viewpoint of the present, seems to have led nowhere. It is a point often

overlooked, even by intelligent historians, that there is as much, if

not more, to be learned from the failures as from the successes of

history. This, as I shall try to show, is particularly true of

syndicalism. An understanding of why syndicalism failed and a pondering

on the implications of that failure can illumine our understanding of

the present in a way that no account of “successful” movements could do.

A second good reason for not dismissing syndicalism out of hand is

perhaps more debatable, since it stems from the values inherent in my

own political position. Looked at in the round, the world socialist

movement since 1917 has been divided into two great camps: the social

democratic camp, on the one side, and the Bolshevik or Communist camp,

on the other. These two camps have been and remain sharply divided over

the question of the road to the socialist society. The social democrats

have opted for the constitutional and democratic road, while the

Bolsheviks have been prepared, if necessary, to take the revolutionary

road. But despite this and other differences, both social democrats and

Bolsheviks are united in believing that the road to socialism lies

through the acquisition by their respective parties of the political

power of the State, the institution claiming, within its territory,

sovereignty and a monopoly of the instruments of coercion. In this

respect, both social democrats and Bolsheviks differ from the socialists

of what might be called the third camp: the camp of the anti-state or

non-state libertarian socialists. Not much has been heard of this camp

in the last forty years. Historically, it has comprised a variety of

groups and movements both constitutional and revolutionary. These

include the so-called pre-Marxist “utopians”; the co-operators; the

anarchists in all their different hues; the guild socialists; and, of

course, the syndicalists. Apart from the doubtful exception of the

co-operators, the list looks like a list of “failures”. But it is my

conviction that, between them, the adherents of this camp have provided

both the most realistic analysis of capitalist society and also the most

penetrating insights into the essential conditions for the realisation

and maintenance of a free, egalitarian, classless and international

society.[1]

At the present time we are witnessing the decomposition of social

democracy. The social democratic road, it is now becoming clear, leads

not to socialism as traditionally understood, but to the

managerial-bureaucratic Welfare-cum-Warfare State. In one important area

after another, Bolshevism is gaining ground at the expense of social

democracy. Bolshevism, at least, has demonstrated in a way that social

democracy has never done, its capacity to make a revolution, to

establish a new social order. What, alas, Bolshevism has not

demonstrated and shows no sign of demonstrating is its capacity to

create a new social order remotely resembling that of the classical

socialist ideal. If the future does indeed lie with Bolshevism, so much

the worse for the socialist dream!

From this perspective, the libertarian socialist tradition takes on a

special significance for the present generation of socialists. It may be

— and we have cause enough to be sceptical — that there is no road to

the truly socialist society. The whole ideology of socialism over the

last 150 years may come to be seen in the future — if mankind has any

future — as yet one more ideology preparing the ground for the rise of

yet one more historic ruling class.[2] But, if there be a road, I am

convinced that it is the third road which the syndicalists helped to

pioneer. I believe that the socialists of this generation will have to

take a long step backwards if they are ever to move forwards again in

the right direction. They will have to reassess the whole libertarian

tradition from Owen to Sorel and from this re-assessment draw sustenance

for a new third camp movement.

The most striking feature of syndicalist thought and action is the

importance it attached to the class struggle. The classical syndicalist

movement emerged at about the same time as the first great revisionist

controversy at the turn of the century. Led by Bernstein, the

revisionists questioned, among other things, Marx’s analysis of class

development and his theory of the state. They argued, in effect, for

what I have called the social democratic position — the view that

socialism could be achieved gradually by a broad democratic movement

acquiring, peacefully and constitutionally, control of the existing

machinery of the State. This amounted to a right-wing revision of

Marxism. Syndicalism, in contrast, was a revision of Marxism to the

left. The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was seen

by the syndicalists as the very essence of Marxism — “the alpha and

omega of socialism”, as Sorel put it. All their energies were devoted to

the relentless pursuit of this struggle: the class war was to be fought

to a victorious finish with no compromise given or taken. Any form of

class collaboration was regarded as an anathema. Like the Marxists, the

syndicalists saw the State as a bourgeois instrument of coercion. Where

they parted company from the orthodox, however, was in their opposition

to any form of the State. Marx argued that the task of the proletariat

was to destroy, in the course of the revolution, the bourgeois state and

to put in its place a proletarian state, which would be the prelude to

the eventual liquidation of the coercive apparatus of society. The

syndicalists, influenced in this respect by the anarchists, insisted

that the State as such must be destroyed by the revolution: to build a

new state on the ruins of the old would simply result in the

perpetuation of class rule over the proletariat in a new form.

This view implied a rejection not only of parliamentary action — the

contesting of elections for bourgeois parliaments — but also of

political action in the narrow sense of the term. The syndicalists

insisted that the class war must be waged, as they put it, on the

terrain de classe by direct action. Fighting the class war involves, of

course, political action in the wider sense of a struggle for social

power. What distinguished the syndicalists was the view that this

struggle for social power, the struggle to achieve proletarian

ascendancy, did not involve setting up a specialised political

organisation, to wit, a political party. On the contrary, quite the

reverse. To try to achieve socialism through such an organisation would

be fatal to the very aims of the proletariat.

It is important to grasp this point and the reasoning behind it if we

are to make any sense of syndicalism. To Bolsheviks, rejection of party

organisation will appear to be the fatal error of the syndicalists. The

so-called Marxist revolutions of our century have been carried through

only by use of the instrument of a highly disciplined proletarian party

perfected by Lenin. No Communist party, they would argue, means no

revolution, or at least no successful revolution. How, it might be

asked, could the syndicalists have made such a stupid mistake?

This, of course, is a begging question. But, leaving aside the

suggestion that the syndicalists were in error, it is relatively easy to

see how they arrived at their position. In a sense, they did so because

they were more Marxist than Marx himself and certainly less heretical

than that arch political determinist, Lenin. For those who accept the

materialist conception of history, political power is essentially a

derivative of economic power. A class that possesses economic power will

necessarily, sooner rather than later, acquire political power. If,

then, one sets about acquiring the latter and is able to do so, one need

not worry overmuch about the former. For the proletariat, as for the

bourgeoisie, economic power means power within and over industry. If the

workers can win control of industry, the battle for supremacy is won.

James Connolly put the syndicalist point succinctly when he wrote, “The

workshop is the cockpit of civilisation … The fight for the conquest of

the political state is not the battle, it is only the echo of the

battle. The real battle is being fought out every day for the power to

control industry.”[3]

But there is more to the syndicalist case than this. Taking seriously

the theory of the class struggle, the syndicalists worked for a

clean-cut, uncompromising proletarian victory. Socialism for them meant

the replacement of bourgeois culture and institutions by proletarian

culture and institutions. Their whole conception of socialism was a

thoroughly working class conception[4]: they had no patience at all for

middle class socialists, not even for the guildsmen who were closest to

them and who, with their statist ideas, were, as they put it, “incapable

of conceiving a commonwealth which is not designed on the canons of

bourgeois architecture”.[5] When Marx in his Address to the First

International had said that the emancipation of the proletariat must be

the work of the workers themselves, the syndicalists thought he meant

it. They did not think that emancipation would come through the

organisation of a self-styled proletarian party led principally by men

of bourgeois origin who for one reason or another had taken up the cause

of the workers. Bourgeois socialist intellectuals — students,

professors, publicists and the like — had only a limited auxiliary role

to play in the strategy of the revolution.[6] Their task was to make

explicit what was implicit in the social situation of capitalist

society: it was most definitely not their task to instruct the

proletariat, to guide them and to lead them into correct courses of

action. Any movement which allowed itself to be directed by bourgeois

intellectuals, even déclassé intellectuals, would, they believed, end up

either by compromising with the status quo or by establishing a new form

of class rule.

This perspective led the syndicalists to juxtapose the concept of class

against that of party.[7] As social formations, these two are quite

different. A class is a natural product of historical development,

comprising individuals who occupy essentially the same position in the

economic order. A party, in contrast, is an artificial aggregate, a

consciously contrived organisation, composed of heterogeneous elements

drawn from all classes. A class is based on homogeneity of origin and

conditions of life, and the bond of unity is economic. A party, however,

represents essentially an intellectual unity; the bond uniting its

members is ideological. When an individual is approached on the basis of

class, the focus is on his role in the economic order, a role which

separates him from members of other classes; and the opposition of class

interests is high-lighted. When, however, an individual is approached on

the basis of party, the focus is on his role as a citizen and elector in

the political order, a role he shares with members of all classes; and

inevitably the opposition of class interests is muted. Parties may and

often do express class interests but, more important, they also serve to

moderate and to contain class antagonisms.[8]

The syndicalists, of course, appreciated that classes as such do not

act. Social action involves the actions of individuals in organisations.

Organisation, therefore, was an admitted necessity: in this they

differed from the classical anarchists who minimized the importance of

organisation and pinned their hopes on the possibility of spontaneous

revolutionary uprisings. But, if the class struggle was the basic

reality, why, asked the syndicalists, create an organisation — the party

— which would inevitably from its very nature undermine that struggle?

Why, indeed, when the proletariat already had an organisation of its

own: the trade union, an organisation based on the working class,

confined to members of the working class, and created by the workers for

the purpose of defending their interests in the daily struggle against

their capitalist masters. True, the trade unions had been conceived,

even by their creators, as mainly ameliorative instruments, as a means

to win for the workers concessions within the capitalist social

framework. But there was no a priori reason why their role should be so

limited. Given proper direction, it was argued, they could be

transformed into revolutionary instruments.

A single-minded emphasis on the potentialities of the trade union is in

fact the most distinctive single feature of syndicalism. The

syndicalists saw the trade unions as organisations with a dual role to

perform: first, to defend the interests of the workers in existing

society, and secondly to constitute themselves the units of

administration in the coming socialist society. From a long term point

of view, the second role was, of course, the more important. It was a

role that did not begin on the morrow of the revolution. The

syndicalists did not simply assert that the basic unit of social

organisation in a socialist society would be the trade union and draw up

blue-prints in which the unions, federated at the local, regional,

national and international levels, would take on all the useful

functions now performed by various capitalist bodies. The revolutionary

role became operative at once. The task of the unions was to struggle

now to divest the existing political organisations of capitalist society

of all life and to transfer whatever value they might have to the

proletarian organisations. This part of the syndicalist programme was

summed up in Sorel’s words: “to snatch from the State and from the

Commune, one by one, all their attributes in order to enrich the

proletarian organisms in the process of formation”.[9]

It is an egregious error to accuse the syndicalists, as some Bolsheviks

have done, of ignoring the problem of power. Not only did they not

ignore the problem; they proposed the most realistic way open to the

workers of acquiring power. It is true that they were mistaken in their

belief that the unions could perform the dual role assigned to them. To

be effective as defensive organisations, the unions needed to embrace as

many workers as possible and this inevitably led to a dilution of their

revolutionary objectives. In practice, the syndicalists were faced with

the choice of unions which were either reformist and purely defensive or

revolutionary and largely ineffective.[10] But in the context of modern

society, their general strategy of power was surely correct. They

proposed to begin to acquire power at the point where, according to the

logic of Marxist theory, they ought to begin — in the fields, factories

and mines. And they did so because they were convinced that, unless they

did win power within the social base of capitalism, there would be no

proletarian revolution, whatever other kind of revolution there might

be. The syndicalists said, in effect, that the revolution must begin in

the workshop. Their message to the workers was much the same as Goethe’s

to the emigrant in search of liberty: “Here or nowhere is your America”

Here, in the workshop, in the factory and in the mine, they said, we

must accomplish the revolution or it will be accomplished nowhere. So

long as we are a subject class industrially, so long will we remain a

subject class politically. The real revolution must be made not in

Parliament or at the barricades but in the places where we earn our

daily bread. The organisations that we have built up to carry on the

daily struggle must be the foundations of the new order and we must be

its architects. The law and morality that we have evolved in our long

struggle with capitalism must be the law and morality of the future

workers’ commonwealth. All other proposals are but snares and delusions.

The syndicalist strategy of revolution, therefore, involved a struggle

for social power through direct action based on the workers’ own class

organisations. The tactics of direct action included sabotage, ca’canny,

the use of the boycott and the trade union label, and, of course,

industrial strikes. What is common to all these means is a determined

refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of bourgeois rule. It was not,

argued the syndicalists, a proper function of trade unions to make

agreements with the employers. Negotiations, agreements, contracts all

necessarily involve bargaining and compromise within the framework of

capitalist contrived rules. The function of the unions was not to

participate with employers in ruling the workers but to impose, as far

as they were able, the will of the workers on the employers. The only

contract the syndicalists cared to consider was the collective contract

conceived as part of a movement of “encroaching control” — a system by

which the workers within a factory or shop would undertake a specific

amount of work in return for a lump sum, to be allocated by the

work-group as it saw fit, on conditions that the employers abdicated

their control of the productive process itself.[11] After a period of

vigorous pursuit of such tactics, the workers in their unions would, it

was envisaged, have won sufficient power to make a successful General

Strike possible. Such a strike, since it was only the form of the

revolution, could not be planned in advance: the conditions had to be

ripe for it. It would probably begin as a local or national strike

confined to a single industry. Class solidarity would lead to its

extension to other industries and rapidly it would build up to a strike

general in its dimensions.[12] The mass symbolic “folding of arms”

would, in effect, be a total withdrawal of the workers of their consent

to a system of class servitude. The legitimacy of the capitalist order

would be shattered and in its place would emerge a proletarian social

order based on the unions.

For a movement that is generally labelled a failure, there is

surprisingly much in syndicalism that is relevant for our own age. Most

significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that it did fail. In

retrospect, syndicalism appears as the great heroic movement of the

proletariat, the first and only socialist movement to take seriously

Marx’s injunction that the emancipation of the working class must be the

work of the workers themselves. It attempted to achieve the emancipation

of labour unaided by middle class intellectuals and politicians and

aimed to establish a working class socialism and culture, free from all

bourgeois taints. That it failed suggests that, whatever else they may

be, the socialist revolutions of recent decades are not the proletarian

revolutions the ideologists would have us believe. In this connection

the eclipse of the syndicalist doctrine of workers’ control, in the USSR

no less than elsewhere, and the subordination of trade unions to

political parties and their quasi-incorporation into the machinery of

government, take on a special and ominous significance. We are, indeed,

living in a revolutionary epoch in which dramatic changes are taking

place in the composition and structure of the ruling class. But in both

East and West the emerging rulers, displacing the old capitalist class,

are not the workers but the managerial bureaucrats whose privileges and

power are based on their command of organisational resources. In the

West the rule of this new class is being legitimized in terms of a

rationalized corporate capitalism operating in a mixed economy; in

Communist countries, the formula of legitimization is avowedly socialist

and the economy is state-owned and managed. But, in both, the rulers,

like all ruling classes known in history, accord to themselves superior

rewards and privileges; and the mass of mankind continue to toil and to

spin for inferior rewards and for the privilege of keeping their rulers

in a state to which they show every sign of becoming accustomed. The new

society, rationalized managerial capitalism or bureaucratic state

socialism, is in many respects a more tolerable society than competitive

capitalism. Given industrialisation and modern economic techniques, mass

poverty can be and is being abolished. For this reason, in all advanced

industrial countries the acute class divisions that marked 19^(th) and

early 20^(th) century capitalism are becoming blurred and it is no

longer possible to locate in the social arena a simple straight-forward

contest between two main classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

At the same time, the techniques of social control available to the

rulers in the shape of the mass media of communications and the mass

political parties have enormously increased their power vis-a-vis the

ruled. All in all, the emerging managerial-bureaucratic society

possesses historically unparalleled potentialities for maintaining a

stable system of exploitation. There is only one major flaw in the

system: its patent inability to solve the problem of war in an age when,

for technological reasons, war has become a truly deadly institution.

The omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation now clearly vindicates

the anti-statism of the anarchists and the syndicalists. For war is a

function of the state and of the state system into which mankind is

politically divided. The emerging new social order has modified the

bourgeois state system: it is no longer a system of many balancing

sovereign nation-states but rather a system of two super-states each

surrounded by their satellites plus a group of uneasy non-aligned and

relatively undeveloped states. The state system has been rationalized

but not rationalized enough: for, within the framework of a state

system, nothing short of one world state would be adequate to solve the

problem of war in a nuclear age. And a world state — set up by mutual

agreement — is just not on the political agenda of the great powers. The

reasons which led to the capitalist ruling class in their several states

to engage in mutually destructive wars still operate to make possible,

and perhaps almost inevitable, the final war between states dominated by

the managerial-bureaucrats. The great tragedy of our epoch is the

lamentable failure of the socialist movement, with its fine promise of

universal peace and brotherhood, to appreciate that an indispensable

condition for achieving its objective was the liquidation of that

supreme bourgeois institution, the sovereign state. Failing to

appreciate this, the socialists after one hundred and fifty years of

endeavour have succeeded not in making socialism but only in making

socialist states. Not surprisingly, in this situation the socialist

leaders have found what the anarchists and syndicalists always predicted

they would find: that it is impossible for socialists to accept the

responsibility of governing in existing states without thereby becoming

defenders of them.[13] The role that they occupy as state leaders

inevitably impels them to act like state leaders, even to the extent, as

in the case of the USSR, of making them subordinate, in the interests of

the Soviet State, the revolutionary Communist movements in other

countries. That the Soviet leaders have not always and everywhere

succeeded in this subordination, with the result that we are now

witnessing the development of national rivalries within the

international Communist sector of the world, is no consolation. It makes

only more obvious the fact that socialist revolutions within states,

even socialist revolutions within all the states of the world, would not

solve the problem that now faces mankind. If the USA were to sink into

the ocean tomorrow, the state system in the rest of the world would not,

for example prevent the possibility of war sooner or later between a

Communist China and a Communist Russia. To think otherwise is to put far

too high a value on the beneficent effects of a common ideology, to

ignore the material interests that divide one state from another, and to

overlook the disastrous increase in nationalist sentiment that is a

feature of the contemporary world.

It may be that, from the point of view of sheer survival as a species,

mankind has already passed the eleventh hour. In the present context of

human affairs, Lenin’s cryptic phrase, “We are all dead men on

furlough”, takes on a new significance. In the contemporary crisis,

there is only one sensible course open to those who wish to survive the

next decade: to join the struggle to control, or better still to

overthrow, the nuclear warlords, militarists and political bosses in all

states. This struggle in an inchoate form has begun and is already

gathering momentum in many countries. And it is no accident that the

most determined participants in the anti-war movement have found

themselves adopting the classic stance of the syndicalists: direct

action. A direct action movement always has been and always will be an

anathema to the rulers and would-be rulers of mankind. For direct action

involves a refusal to play the political game according to the rules

laid down by our masters. It is a grassroots, do-it-yourself kind of

action which recognises implicitly the truth of what Gandhi called

‘voluntary servitude’; the fact that, in the last analysis, men are

governed in the way they are because they consent to be so governed.

When sufficient numbers of the governed can be persuaded to withdraw

that consent and to demonstrate by their actions that they do not

recognise the legitimacy of the rulers to act in their name, the

government must either collapse or radically change its policies. When

the bishops and the editorial pundits warn the participants in the

recent Civil Disobedience campaigns that they are undermining the

foundations of social order, we should take heed. Civil Disobedience,

pressed to its logical conclusion, involves just that. All we need to

add is that it undermines the present social order which has brought

mankind to the edge of the abyss and prepares the way for a new social

order in which power will be retained by the people.

There is thus a clear link between the syndicalist movement of forty

years ago and the present movement against nuclear weapons. The link is

there both in the political style and in several of the basic values of

the two movements. The differences, of course, are obvious too.

Syndicalism was a proletarian class movement: the anti-war movement

appeals to the sane-minded in all classes. In terms of revolutionary

potential, the present movement is perhaps of greater significance. The

immediate issues involved are simpler and more dramatic than those

raised by the syndicalists and the crisis is more compelling. If mankind

survives the present crisis, some of the other issues raised by the

syndicalists, notably workers’ control as a means of ensuring a wide

dispersion of social power, will again come to the fore — are indeed

already doing so.[14] It is, therefore, I think, no extravagance to

claim that the spirit of syndicalism, dormant so long in this country,

is once again in the air. In this, if anything, lies a hope for the

future. The serious anti-war radical would do well to breathe in full

measure the syndicalist spirit of militant direct action.

[1] Towards the end of his life, G. D. H. Cole placed himself squarely

in this third camp. “I am neither a Communist nor a Social Democrat

because I regard both as creeds of centralisation and bureaucracy,

whereas I feel sure that a Socialist society that is to be true to its

equalitarian principles of human brotherhood must rest on the widest

possible diffusion of power and responsibility, so as to enlist the

active participation of as many as possible of its citizens in the tasks

of democratic self-government” — A History of Socialist Thought, Vol. V,

p.337.

[2] The idea that socialism may be no more than the ideology of the

future ruling class is not a new one. It was first elaborated by the

Polish revolutionary, Waclaw Machajski, in his book The Intellectual

Worker, published in Poland in 1898. Hints of the same thesis may be

found earlier in some of Bakunin’s writings. For a discussion of

Machajski’s ideas, see Max Nomad’s Apostles of Revolution and, more

especially, Aspects of Revolt.

[3] Socialism Made Easy, 1908.

[4] See the editorial, “Syndicalism — a Working Class Conception of

Socialism” Freedom, Nov.-Dec. 1912.

[5] Socialist Labour Party, The Development of Socialism (c.1912).

[6] That intellectuals have only an auxiliary role to play in the

socialist movement is a major theme in Sorel’s writings.

[7] cf. A. Gray, The Socialist Tradition, 1947, p.414.

[8] The wealth of empirical data on the social class basis of most major

parties should not blind us to this important truth. It is not an

either-or matter: either parties express class interests or they do not.

Within a political system, parties frequently express class interests

(though not necessarily according to the Marxist category of classes);

from the point of view of the system as a whole however, for the reasons

adumbrated by the syndicalists, parties tend to mitigate class conflicts

and hence to preserve the socio-political system. Communist parties

implicitly recognize this fact in the special measures they adopt in an

attempt to preserve their revolutionary character, e.g., subordination

of the parliamentarians to the party caucus. These measures, needless to

say, are not always successful.

[9] L’Avenir socialiste des Syndicats, 1898.

[10] For a discussion of this crux, see Gaston Gerard, “Anarchism and

Trade Unionism”, The University Libertarian, April, 1957.

[11]

W. Gallacher & J. Paton, Towards Industrial Democracy, 1917.

[12] The syndicalist vision of the revolution is well described in E.

Pataud & E. Pouget, Syndicalism & the Co-operative Commonwealth, 1913.

[13] The popular radical notion that socialism is continually being

“betrayed” by leaders more interested in their own than in working class

emancipation is sociologically naive. There is no reason to believe that

socialist leaders, as individuals, are any more corruptible than most

other men. What is corrupting is their acceptance of certain roles

which, if they are to be performed at all, impel them to act in ways

that radicals define as “betrayal”. It is as difficult for a socialist

statesman not to betray socialism as it is for the rich man to enter the

kingdom of heaven — and for the same kind of sociological reason.

[14] See, e.g., The Bomb, Direct Action & the State (1962) published by

the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation.