workers' control. Without nationalization, the transformation of unions into guilds would remain incomplete, since industry would still be governed by the need to show profits. On the other hand, powerful unions would nullify the danger of a "servile state." The state could safely be entrusted with coordinating powers over production and distribution as long as the guilds had a hand in major decisions. For "those who had caught the fever from France," as Cole referred to them, "direct action" and local control had become an obsession in the same way that nationalization had become an obsession for the Fabians. Localism was a "hopeless attitude"; "central control alone" could "meet the needs of modern industrial warfare" and modern industrial planning.

The uncompromising quality of syndicalism, especially in its Sorelian version, offended the British sense of practicality. English radicals did not know what to make of Sorel's "myth of the general strike." Bertrand Russell, during his brief flirtation with guild socialism, warned that if the workers "were brought to believe that the General Strike is a mere myth, their energy would flag, and their whole outlook would become disillusioned." Much as they felt the need of an antidote to the "apathy" and "stupidity" of the British labor movement, guild socialists found syndicalism too exotic for their taste. Some of its shortcomings, Cole thought, derived from the survival of small-scale production in France, which made Sorelians underestimate the need for centralized control. In general, syndicalists paid too little attention to the practical details of organization, urging the workers instead to gird themselves for the final showdown with their masters. Whether the general strike was conceived as a myth or as an actual event, it was "grotesquely unpractical and even without instinctive appeal," in Cole's opinion. "The English worker is far too stably organized, and far too conservative in nature, to take any such leap in the dark."

Sounding a little like Burke, Cole defended British stodginess against Gallic flamboyance, with heavy sarcasm. "In countries like England, painfully afflicted with the art of compromise and 'muddling through,' ideas gain more by being turned into 'business propositions' than by being artistically and dramatically expressed." At the same time, he criticized the Fabians for making socialism a "business proposition." It was a fine line he was trying to walk; instead of "reconciling" syndicalism and collectivism, he was always in danger of falling off his tightrope into the "state socialist" camp.

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