virtues too long monopolized by capitalists, were just what workers needed, as Sorel pointed out, in order to overcome servile habits of thought. Workers needed to assert themselves in the immediate present, moreover, not in some distant socialist future. What made syndicalism appealing was not just its rejection of compromise but its rejection of delay. Sorel did not worry about the "transition" to a new social order. Indeed he did not think of a new social order as the object of political action. The object of political action was precisely to gain individualism and self-assertion, and the workers could achieve those things, Sorel thought, without waiting for the revolution.

The guild socialists appreciated the importance of immediate actions that would prepare workers for the management of industry. Their insistence that workers' control depended on the nationalization of industry, however, tended to weaken the "nascent demand for the control of industry ... springing up within trade unionism," notwithstanding Cole's emphasis on the importance of an "unremitting propaganda for control." He warned the labor movement "not to put too much faith in the State and the public," but he still made nationalization the precondition, the "half-way house to producers' control." Although he understood that producers' control would never be effective as long as industry remained highly centralized, he rejected the possibility of an immediate return to handicraft production and local markets. Decentralization remained a distant prospect, with which the workers were to console themselves, it appeared, while they worked for immediate reforms that would inevitably have the opposite effect. Cole could not offer a convincing justification of his belief that decentralization would somehow follow nationalization. Nor could he explain, for that matter, how nationalization would be carried out in the first place, if the Labour party, by his own estimate, could not expect to gain a parliamentary majority. He could only hope, as he put it in Guild Socialism Restated, that once labor was in control of the state, "there will come, from producer and consumer alike, a widespread demand for goods of a finer quality ... and that this will bring about a new standard of craftsmanship and a return, over a considerable sphere, to small-scale production."

Even at the peak of its influence, then, guild socialism had compromised too deeply with social democracy and the ideology of progress to provide effective opposition to the dominant tendencies in the labor

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