Page:Roads to freedom.djvu/50

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48
Roads to Freedom

order to acquire the conquest of these employments, and they are analogous to the State."[1]

Syndicalists aim at organizing men, not by party, but by occupation. This, they say, alone represents the true conception and method of the class war. Accordingly they despise all political action through the medium of Parliament and elections: the kind of action that they recommend is direct action by the revolutionary syndicate or trade union. The battle cry of industrial versus political action has spread far beyond the ranks of French Syndicalism. It is to be found in the I.W.W. in America, and among Industrial Unionists and Guild Socialists in Great Britain. Those who advocate it for the most part aim also at a different goal from that of Marx. They believe that there can be no adequate individual freedom where the State is all-powerful, even if the State be a Socialist one. Some of them are out-and-out Anarchists, who wish to see the State wholly abolished; others only wish to curtail its authority. Owing to this movement, opposition to Marx, which from the Anarchist side existed from the first, has grown very strong. It is this opposition in its older form that will occupy us in our next chapter.

  1. "La Décomposition du Marxisme," p. 53.