The difficulty of distinguishing revolutionary socialism from progressivism or the "new liberalism" was illustrated by an anonymous letter from a "socialist social worker" to the editors of Survey, quoted by Walling as an incisive contribution to the debate. The "difference between the near socialist and the true socialist," according to this writer, lay in the latter's concern with the "positive side" of the "social problem." Instead of confining his attention to the "condition of the submerged classes," the true socialist kept in mind the "wonderful development, power and life that would come [about] ... if a wise and social use were to be made of the surplus of industry." The disposition of the "social surplus" furnished the best "criterion of social justice in every civilized community." In the past, the surplus had gone into "pyramids," "wars," and a "sensuous life for ... a privileged class." The writer did not bother to explain the advantages of a more equitable distribution of the surplus. Monuments for the masses? A "sensuous life" for all? Nor did he clarify his uninformative observation that "the main indictment of capitalism is that it selfishly and stupidly blocks the road of orderly and continuous progress for the race." The advantages of socialism, specifically of revolutionary socialism as opposed to "near socialism," remained nebulous and unspecified. Distributive democracy evidently needed no justification. Neither Marxists nor liberal democrats attempted to answer the objection that the most efficient instrument of democratizing the social surplus might turn out to be the "servile state."

The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bunkhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap

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