the
Webbs have said on the utopian features of syndicalism or even upon the
haphazard method adopted to achieve them. "No politics in the unions"
follows logically enough from an avowed antagonism to the State. If one
starts with the assumption that nothing can be done through the
State--as Owen, Bakounin, and the syndicalists have done--one is, of
course, led irretrievably to oppose parliamentary and other political
methods of action.

When the syndicalists throw over democracy and foreswear political
action, they are fatally driven to the point where they must abandon the
working class. In the meantime, they are sadly misleading it. It is when
we touch this phase of the syndicalist movement that we begin to
discover real bitterness. Here direct action stands in opposition to
political action. The workers must choose the one method or the other.
The old clash appears again in all its tempestuous hate. Jules Guesde
was early one of the adherents of Bakounin, but in all his later life he
has been pitiless in his warfare on the anarchists. As soon, therefore,
as the direct-actionists began again to exercise an influence, Guesde
entered the field of battle. I happened to be at Limoges in 1906 to hear
Guesde speak these memorable words at the French Socialist Congress:
"Political action is necessarily revolutionary. It does not address
itself to the employer, but to the State, while industrial action
addresses itself to the individual employer or to associations of
employers. Industrial action does not attack the employer _as an
institution_, because the employer is the effect, the result of
capitalist property. As soon as capitalist property will have
disappeared, the employer will disappear, and not before. It is in the
socialist party--because it is a political party--that one fights
against the employer class, and that is why the socialist party is truly
an economic party, tending to transform social and political economy. At
the present moment words have their importance. And I should like to
urge the comrades strongly never to allow it to be believed that
trade-union action is economic action. No; this latter action is taken
only by the political organization of the working class. It is the party
of the working class which leads it--that is to say, the socialist
party--because property is a social institution which cannot be
transformed except by the exploited class making use of political power
for this purpose....