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THE NEWEST ANARCHISM 259
ism, the syndicalists propose to force society to put the
means of production into the hands of the trade unions.
It is
perhaps worth pointing out that Owen, Proudhon,
Blanc, Lassalle, and Bakounin all advocated what may
be called "group socialism." (28) This conception of
future society contemplates the ownership of the mines
by the miners, of the railroads by the railway workers,
of the land by the peasants. All the workers in the various
industries are to be organized into unions and then
brought together in a federation. Several objections are
made to this outline of a new society. In the first place,
it is artificial. Except for an occasional cooperative undertaking,
there is not, nor has there ever been, any
tendency toward trade-union ownership of industry. In
addition, it is an idea that is to-day an anachronism. It
is conceivable that small federated groups might control
and conduct countless little industries, but it is not conceivable
that groups of "self-governing," "autonomous,"
and "independent" workmen could, or would, be allowed
by a highly industrialized society to direct and manage
such vast enterprises as the trusts have built up. If
each group is to run industry as it pleases, the Standard
Oil workers or the steel workers might menace society
in the future as the owners of those monopolies menace
it in the present. There is no indication in the literature
of the syndicalists, and certainly no promise in a
system of completely autonomous groups of producers,
of any solution of the vast problems of modern trustified
industry. It may be that such ideas corresponded to the
state of things represented in early capitalism. But the
socialist ideas of the present are the product of a more
advanced state of capitalism than Owen, Proudhon, Lassalle,
and Bakounin knew, or than the syndicalists of
France, Italy, and Spain have yet been forced seriously