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The democratic social movement has overleaped its platform and escaped out of the hands of its instigators. It is larger than any school of ideas and will not be bound by any program. It can be analyzed in part, and in general terms described, but it can no longer be defined.

Socialism as one phase of this unmanaged and unmanageable tide, has itself been profoundly affected by the magnitude, the complexity, and the waywardness of the mass motion. It now has its “Right” and its “Left.” There is a conservative, and there is a radical socialism. Each proclaims the class struggle, and both demand the collective ownership of the chief means of production. But conservative socialism lays stress upon collective ownership, and would move toward it by peaceful, evolutionary steps. It relies on the ballot, believes in legislation, in law, and in government; while radical socialism proclaims “the revolution,” plans for the general strike, and preaches the expediency of sabotage and violence.

At first sight almost identical with radical socialism is Syndicalism, which, however, proves upon examination to be both more and less than any socialistic program. In its most characteristic expression, syndicalism denies the state and would substitute for it a purely voluntary collectivism. So far it is at one with anarchism, and there are those who conceive of syndicalism as an anarchistic movement in opposition to socialism. The trade-union organization of labor the world over is looked upon by the syndicalist as the natural basis and agency of his enterprise, quite as existing political organizations are accepted by the conservative or parliamentary socialist as the best preliminary norms from which to evolve a new social order.

In this division of the forces of social democracy into right and left groups over the question of organization and control, we have a significant demonstration of the inadequacy of that Marxian analysis which resolves all social conflict into the antagonism of economic classes. More profound than that antagonism, and in the order of time more ancient, is the unending warfare between those who believe in law and government for all, and those who believe in law and government for none. The more or less paradoxical character of the socialistic movement at the present moment is attributable to the circumstance that, for the time being, these antagonistic forces of socialism and anarchism are confronting a common enemy—the individualist, who believes in law and government for everybody but himself.

To describe, explain and estimate a phenomenon so complex as modern revolutionary syndicalism is a task from which the economist and the historian alike might well shrink. To understand it and to enable readers to understand it is an achievement. I think that I am not speaking in terms of exaggeration in saying that Dr. Levine has been more successful in this arduous undertaking than any predecessor. His pages tell us in a clear and dispassionate way what revolutionary syndicalism is, how it began, and how it has grown, what its informing ideas and purposes are, and by what methods it is forcing itself upon the serious attention of the civilized world. I think that it is a book which no student of affairs can afford to overlook, or to read in any other spirit than that of a sincere desire to know what account of the most profound social disturbance of our time is offered by a competent reporter of the facts.

Franklin H. Giddings.

Columbia University.