At first sight, Walling's revolutionary socialism seemed to have more in common with syndicalism than with social democracy. The appearance was deceptive, however. Like many Americans, Walling equated syndicalism with industrial unionism. In fact, hard-line syndicalists opposed the IWW's attempt to force all workers into industrial unions. William Z. Foster, at that time head of the Syndicalist League of North America (later a leading communist theoretician and organizer), pointed out that the IWW was not really a syndicalist organization at all. It aimed to organize all workers into "one big union," whereas syndicalists favored decentralization and local autonomy. IWW president Bill Haywood and his friends proposed to entrust leadership of the labor movement to a "beneficent, omnipotent executive board," which they themselves would presumably dominate. They aimed to replace existing craft unions with industrial unions, even though successful attempts to "propagate revolutionary ideas in the old unions," in Britain and France, showed that craft unions had "marked capacities for evolution." The "ridiculous theory" that "nothing can be accomplished in the old unions" had merely left them in the "undisputed control of conservatives." "Syndicalists by no means put as strong emphasis upon the industrial form of labor union as the industrial unionists do," Foster wrote. They saw that centralization was the issue, not any particular form of organization, and that highly centralized industrial unions were actually "inferior to a number of craft unions covering the same categories of workers."

In supporting the IWW's industrial unionism, revolutionary socialists like Walling thus supported a program that was repudiated by proper syndicalists. Except for its opposition to political action (by no means unqualified in any case, as Walling noted), Haywood's program was indistinguishable from left-wing socialism. Ostensibly the IWW condemned "wage slavery," but in fact, like all Marxian socialists, its leaders merely asserted the worker's right to the "full product of his labor." ^* "All wealth is produced by labor," Haywood declared. This formula, with its corol-

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*	As G. D. H. Cole pointed out, the implications of this slogan were not very radical (see above, p. 319). Like Foster, Cole noted that although the IWW talked about the "abolition of the wage system," it was far more interested in organizing unskilled workers.

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