which Walling was at such pains to establish? The "essential or practical difference," Walling thought, was that reformers expected "to work, on the whole, with the capitalists who are to be done away with, while socialists expect to work against them." Piecemeal reforms would never assure the worker of the "total product" of his labor. Maybe not; but it was unclear why the worker would still be "shut off" from "all the possibilities of modern civilization," as Walling claimed, just because his share fell short of the "total product." Nor was it clear exactly what "possibilities" Walling had in mind, except that they did not include the possibility of a return to the kind of small-scale, locally controlled production under which the workers became directly responsible for their work. If the "possibilities of modern civilization" referred simply to a more equitable distribution of wealth, it was hard to explain why the workers could not achieve this goal without a revolution.

Syndicalists and guild socialists, as we have seen, believed that small‐ scale proprietorship conferred moral independence, self-respect, and responsibility. They did not seek to restore proprietorship as such, but they never lost sight of the virtues associated with it. They envisioned a society of small workshops, in which effective control over production remained at the local level. For those committed to the dogma of progress, the syndicalist sociology of virtue was deplorably regressive and "utopian," and it found most of its adherents, as they never tired of pointing out, in "backward" countries like France and Italy. They could not deny, however, that its adherents displayed an intensity of revolutionary conviction unmatched by any other social movement. Herein lay the scandal of syndicalism: it was retrograde but obviously revolutionary and therefore difficult for people on the left to dismiss. Its existence was particularly embarrassing to revolutionary socialists, because its radicalism made Marxism look tame by comparison and served to reveal the many points of agreement between Marxism and the "new liberalism." Syndicalism (like populism) fell outside the broad consensus in favor of progress, centralization, and distributive democracy. It undercut the Marxist claim to offer a radical alternative to the capitalist regimentation of the workplace. It forced Marxists to justify their program on the grounds of superior efficiency, on the increasingly implausible grounds that only a socialist state could assure prosperity for all, or on vague appeals to the progress of the human race.

-335-