In the first decades of the twentieth century, a period of instability and ferment in the British labor movement, syndicalism "took the restless, the discontented and the extremist" by storm, as G. D. H. Cole observed in 1913. Beatrice Webb, the personification of Fabian socialism and therefore the target of syndicalist contempt, admitted in 1912 that syndicalism had "taken the place of old-fashioned Marxism." She noted with disapproval that it appealed equally to the "glib young workman," whose tongue ran away with him as he mouthed the "phrases of French Syndicalism instead of those of German Social Democracy" and to the "inexperienced middle-class idealist," who welcomed the new movement as a "new and exciting Utopia."

Utopian or not, syndicalism exposed the shortcomings of parliamentary socialism. It appeared on the scene at a time when many people were beginning to wonder whether "state socialism," as the Fabian program was called by its enemies, would represent any improvement over the "state capitalism" that was emerging as a result of the corporations' growing dependence on big government. Hilaire Belloc called attention to the dangers of centralization in The Servile State (1912), a book that made a deep impression even on those who rejected his demand for the restoration of small-scale ownership. Almost everyone on the left, syndicalist and socialist alike, now took it for granted that small proprietorship was a thing of the past. "The factory has come to stay," said Cole, "and the machine has come to stay.... We cannot ... set back the hands of the clock." But that did not mean that the problems of modern society could be solved by increasing the powers of the state. The Fabian solution, Cole argued, was "altogether wrong," and Belloc had rendered an important service by showing how "the vast extension of the sphere of State action ... led to the confrontation of the pygmy man by a greater Leviathan, and produced a situation extremely inimical to personal liberty."

No English radicals of any importance agreed with the syndicalists that "direct action" could completely replace political action, but a great many of them agreed that party politics would never accomplish any

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