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all instruments of production in the hands of the state; that isthe proletariat organized as the ruling class." Vandervelde said "thefunction of the government is to govern, not to manage industrialenterprises. . . . We shall come to a social system in which thefunctions of the state, organ of authority, are reduced to a minimum,while the functions of the state, organ of managementy are carriedto a maximum" 2This development was inevitable. The great terror of the worldhad been the tyrannous state. The old Italian republicans had soughtto build a friendly state whose powers were so limited by constitutionalrestrictions and the counterbalancing of functions amongking, commons, and senate that it could not be used as an instrumentof oppression. The socialist proposals to arm the state withall the instruments of production led logically to a plan to escapethe inevitable consequences of that program.Here in syndicalist-socialism was the catalytic agent that wasbringing together a number of hostile elements in society andgradually uniting them, however little they perceived it, in agreementupon the following set of principles:1. The renunciation of the old principle of liberalism in fact,though of course the language of liberalism continued to be used.The unions were as far from liberalism as the nationalists.2. The economic system must be subjected to planning.3. This planning must be done outside the political state.4. It must be committed to the hands of the producing groups.All—employers through their trade associations and cartels,workers through their unions, socialists through their gradual indoctrinationwith syndicalism—were approaching a common groundby different routes while all the time it seemed to observers thatthey were moving farther apart. They were growing more violentabout the points on which they disagreed while all the time that veryviolence was drawing them together on the central idea of syndicalism.Syndicalism, in the end, was the agent which, modified to suitthe necessities and the coming crisis and the interests of variousgroups, would produce that incredible synthesis—the ultimate gettingtogether of radicals and reactionaries, the revolutionary leaders^Socialism Versus the State, by Emile Vandervelde, Chas. Kerr & Co., Chicago, 1919.3*

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