utopian rather than "evolutionary." Their mindless opposition to technological progress recalled the Luddites, as did their inability to see beyond the workers' immediate interests—their "avowed indifference to social interests, and their avowed readiness to adopt methods to secure the immediate gain of the proletariat which are, from the point of view of society, retrogressive."

Revolutionary socialists found the syndicalist movement even more threatening to their own position than social democrats did. They had to find a way to distinguish themselves from the syndicalists on their left while also distinguishing themselves from the contemptibly mild-mannered reformers and social democrats on their right. William English Walling attempted this feat in two books written at the height of the uproar over syndicalism, Socialism as It Is (1912) and Progressivism—and After (1914). Walling attributed the "ultra-utopian" and "anarchistic" elements in syndicalism to its class origins. The movement reflected the sensibility of a "decaying class which has no future," namely the artisans and craftsmen, squeezed out by centralized factory production. "Decaying trades and crafts" hoped to establish socialism by insurrection and general strike," Walling said, whereas "state capitalists" and "state socialists," equally misguided, hoped to establish it by the "beneficent rule of ... the intellectuals."

Walling commended syndicalists for seeing the need for industrial unionism but deplored their indifference to political action. Workers alone could not achieve socialism. They needed leadership from a socialist party committed to capturing the state. But the Socialist party would have to become more militant if it expected to succeed. It could not afford to forgo the use of violence, either in daily struggles in the workplace or in the final showdown with the capitalist state. The party had made a mistake in expelling the IWW, especially since a number of syndicalists had now modified their formerly unconditional opposition to political action.

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