State socialists, or "collectivists," as Cole and his friends referred to them, regarded social justice simply as a matter of achieving a more equitable distribution of the goods produced in such quantity by modern technology. In their eyes, socialism was a "business proposition," according to Cole; they forgot that it was a " 'human' proposition also." Putting their faith in the state, they "forgot that the State cannot ... be better than the citizens, and that, unless the citizens are capable of controlling the Government, extension of the powers of the State may be merely a transference of authority from the capitalist to the bureaucrat." Collectivists saw things from the consumer's point of view. They assumed, Cole said, that "production on a large scale" was the "cheapest and most efficient method" and that large-scale production had to be centrally controlled. They assumed that workers would still remain a "cog in the machine" under socialism, as Cole put it, but would gladly submit to factory discipline if their material position could be made tolerably secure. The pleasures of consumption would make up for the monotony of the job.

Guild socialists had learned from William Morris that the case for socialism had to rest on the right to expect pride and pleasure from one's work. Cole had been "converted" to socialism by Morris's utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which justified socialism on the grounds of "morals and decency and aesthetic sensibility," as Cole put it. It was a mistake to argue for socialism on the grounds that the workers had a "right to the whole product of his work." Even syndicalists subscribed to the labor theory of value. They could make a "far more reasonable case," according to Cole, if they gave up "abstract economics," left the "theory of value to take care of itself," and embraced "concrete and commonsense ethics." Justice and expediency both suggested that "the producer should have the fullest possible share in the control of the conditions under which he works."

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have to rest on a respect for particular cultural traditions. The socialist myth of the worker as a man without a country, a "pure class-conscious cosmopolitan," a kind of disembodied essence of exploitation, was just as abstract and "unreal," in Cole's view, as the "'economic man' of the older economists." Indeed the class-conscious cosmopolitan was the direct descendant of economic man; here again, the socialist movement drew heavily on the liberal ideologies it claimed to reject.

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