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THE NEWEST ANARCHISM 249
who have betrayed
it can be pointed out.
Those who have
lost all revolutionary fervor and all notion of class can
be held up as a tendency. Those who have fallen into
the traps of the bureaucrats and have given way to the
flattery or to the corruption of the bourgeoisie
can be
listed and put upon the index. Even working-class
political action can be assailed as never before, because
it now exists for the first time in history, and its
every
weakness is known. Moreover, there are the slowness of
movement and the seemingly increasing tameness of the
multitude. All these incidents in the growth of a vast
movement— the rapidity of whose development has
never been equaled in
the history of the world— irritate
beyond measure the impatient and ultra-revolutionary exponents
of the new anarchism.
Naturally enough, the criticisms of the syndicalists
are leveled chiefly against political action, parliamentarism,
and Statism. It is Professor Arturo Labriola, the
brilliant leader of the Italian syndicalists, who has voiced
perhaps most concretely these strictures against socialism,
although they abound in all syndicalist writings. According
to Labriola, the socialist parties have abandoned
Marx. They have left the field of the class struggle,
foresworn revolution, and degenerated into weaklings
and ineffectuals who dare openly neither to advocate
"State socialism" nor to oppose it. In the last chapter
of his "Karl Marx" Labriola traces some of the tendencies
to State socialism. He observes that the State is
gradually taking over all the great public utilities and
that cities and towns are increasingly municipalizing public
services. In the more liberal and democratic countries
"the tendency to State property was greeted," he
says, "as the beginning
of the socialist transformation.
To-day, in France, in Italy, and in Austria socialism