streets in Parma. The Minister Luzzatti gave them his active sympathy and helped them to the uses of the coöperative banks, of which he was founder.
Is there here the germ from which the future Commonwealth may spring? Taken together with many thousands of other coöperative forms in agriculture, banking, distribution and production, it offers the fairest hopes for the democratic management of business that actual experience can show. Ordinary "State Socialism" is much less democratic than the free activities of workingmen's coöperation.
What charms "the higher syndicalism" in coöperation is that it eliminates the master. The Italian "braccianti" and "muratori" have no boss except of their own electing. If they need a technical engineer, he comes as their fellow counsellor and peer, never as a "boss." The gang substitutes its own supervision for that of an employer and also takes the risks. If one can imagine the world's chief business done through such voluntary groups, they would displace the bureaucratic State hated by all Syndicalists.
In this manner, Kropotkin's shining dream would be fulfilled. In loosely federated groups, men and women would do their work like artists and men of science. There would be no enslaving trusts, but "small factories and upon the land, such intensive culture as science now makes possible." This thought has long hovered in the minds of Anarchists of the Kropotkin type.[1]
- ↑ As this goes to press, G. P. Putnam's Sons publish a cheap up-to-date edition of Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops in which this faith in the "decentralization of industries;" the "combination of industry and agriculture" has the most intelligent and inspiring expression yet given it.
