movement. Guild socialists saw themselves as part of a "progressive movement"; they did not want to be left behind by history. They absorbed a good deal of Sorel but paid little attention to his attack on progress. Most of them gave up on guild socialism altogether when the course of public events, in the I920s, drastically narrowed the boundaries of political debate.

The Bolshevik revolution made it more difficult than ever to resist the contention that "wage slavery" could be ended only by the socialist conquest of the state. Lenin and Trotsky appeared to have vindicated that position; the only question that now seemed to matter was whether socialists would come to power through revolutionary or parliamentary means. In the twenties, opposition to parliamentary socialism took the form of communism, not syndicalism. Active, aggressive communist parties in the West preempted the revolutionary militancy formerly associated with syndicalism, while those who regarded a revolutionary seizure of power as a childish delusion, as Cole did, found themselves forced into an alliance with the social democrats.

The economic depression that followed the war threw labor on the defensive. Faced with an immediate threat to their standard of living and the survival of their unions, workers lost interest in control of production. In 1913, Cole predicted that the struggle over scientific management would end either in one of the "greatest steps" toward workers' control or in "Labour's most crushing defeat." By the early twenties, however, the unions had come to terms with scientific management (as had the Bolsheviks, for different reasons), in order to concentrate all their efforts on the maintenance of wartime wage levels.

Both the emergence of communism and the deterioration of working conditions strengthened the Labour party—the only effective counterweight, it seemed, to the combined threat of reactionary employers and irresponsible revolutionaries. By the late twenties, a Labour majority in Parliament no longer appeared impossible, and Cole now devoted himself to formulating a short-range program around which the Labour party could unite. ^* In 1929, he told the Fabian Society that "in present circum-

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*	In Socialist Control of Industry (1933), he argued quite explicitly that workers' control would have to wait until a Labour government had nationalized the means of produc-

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