Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/120

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AMERICAN SYNDICALISM

worst enemies are those foolish and litigious advocates who antagonize and estrange every development of human Good Will and does not pay tribute to their vanity in open acquiescence. Its most loyal servants, its most effectual helpers on the side of art, invention and public organization and political reconstruction, may be men who will never adopt the Socialist name."[1] It is from a leader of the English Parliamentary Socialists that we have this opinion: "It is the whole of society and not merely a part of society that is developing toward Socialism. The consistent exponent of the class struggle must, of course, repudiate these doctrines, but then the class struggle is far more akin to Radicalism than to Socialism." "Socialists should, therefore, think of the State and of political authority not as the expression of majority rule or of the will of any section, but as the embodiment of the life of the whole community."[2]

A clear-headed Socialist like Mr. W. J. Ghent stands stiffly for the class struggle which he rightly derives from the "economic interpretation of history," but he sounds a warning to those who overdo it. He admits that the "intellectuals" outside the proletariat devised and gave this very doctrine, "the philosophy of it and the reasons for it," to the manual workers. He then adds,[3] "It needs to be said plainly that there is no more shameless misleader of the Socialist proletariat than the demagogue who tries to create antagonism against the educated men in the movement."

  1. New Worlds for Old, pp. 321–307.
  2. Macdonald's Socialism and Government, Vol. I, p. 91.
  3. Socialism and Success, p. 164.