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ove-
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due
Property and Inheritance.
simply to the technological and administrative
principles on which the system is based. It is quite
independent of the concentration of the ownership of
capital with which it is nearly always confused.
The General Manager of the L.M.S.R. controls and
directs an organisation on which over 300,000 work-
people depend for a livelihood, not because he owns
the capital—he doesn’t—but because the develop-
ment of the railway system has created his great
office. It makes no difference to the scope and
content of his powers, since they arise from the
nature of the organisation he directs, whether the
railway is owned by a single capitalist, like the
Hampton Roads railway in Virginia, by some scores
of thousands of investors (as the L.M.S.R. actually is},
or by the State.
Syndicalism is a reaction against this concentration
of the responsible, directive work in modern industry ;
that is its significance. It has expressed itself in a
variety of experiments in the way of devolution and
decentralisation. These should be persisted in, just
because they run counter to the trend of modern
industry. But the trend has hitherto been too
strong for them. So strong is the trend that no
mere constitutional arrangement, which gives
workers a vote at some stage in the control of their
industries, is going to be effective. The workers can,
and do, participate in the regulation, in the framing
of the general conditions, under which industries
are carried on; but no development on these lines
admits them to a share in the direction, the actual
administrative control, of the industry.
The basis of this concentration is technological.
It is due to the advantages of large-scale enterprise,
which, in its turn, is economical only if its wide-
spread activities are co-ordinated and knit together
Le
2.2
