struggles, and that by rearing them he is ... furnishing a new supply of slaves to capitalism." This was hardly the argument for family planning preferred by Goldman, who was offended by the "indiscriminate breeding of children by unfit parents." Goldman stressed the "right of every child to be well born," whereas Foster saw families merely as impedimenta that weighed down the army of revolutionary workers and inhibited its freedom to maneuver. His perfunctory support of the cultural revolution lacked Goldman's zeal. "The syndicalist accepts on principle the anarchist positions on the modern school, neo-Malthusianism, marriage, individualism, religion, art, the drama, etc., that go to make up the intellectual revolution"; but he cared about these issues, Foster added, "only in so far as they contribute to the success of his bread and butter fighting organization." Neither as a syndicalist nor later as a communist did Foster show much interest in the cultural program of the left. He simply went along with enlightened opinion, not caring enough about these issues to challenge the prevailing consensus.
If the syndicalist movement in England was absorbed by social democracy, in America it was absorbed by the intellectuals' revolt against "middle-class morality." For a time, however, it posed a radical alternative to the welfare state and to a purely distributive conception of democracy. Even people who thought of themselves as part of the "progressive movement" in politics were attracted to it, as well as to guild socialism, to Hilaire Belloc's critique of the "servile state," and to the political "pluralism" advocated by J. N. Figgis and Harold Laski (before he too became a collectivist). Mary Parker Follett, a communitarian progressive who drew on Figgis, Laski, and Cole, recommended guild socialism, in The New State (1918), as a happy blend of "state socialism" and syndicalism. Syndicalism had "gained many adherents," she wrote, because "people do not want the servile state and, therefore, may think they do not want any state" at all. Guild socialists, on the other hand, favored "state owner
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