Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/213

Rh In the syndicalist vision coöperative groups furnish the higher efficiencies before which the private profit-maker can no longer hold his own. The capitalist is to be crowded out because of inefficiency and this can be shown through the object lessons which coöperation now offers.

I have dealt at length with this writer, because no one known to me has put the case with more coherence or on the same high level. If we can accept him as authoritative spokesman, there is no more danger in his proposals than in a new kind of Sunday school or a new breakfast food. We have only to watch and satisfy ourselves that his trade unions "functioning through coöperation," really display the superiorities claimed for them. If they should perform their various services with higher social benefit they are surely not to be feared.

It is true that many European cities have found distinct advantages in letting out various kinds of work—like paving, drainage, printing—to coöperative groups. Italy has produced a type of self-organizing gang electing its own foreman and doing job-work (in which the labor cost is high) coöperatively. Hundreds of these have proved so successful that Government and cities give them preferential advantages. The Societies are registered and work in small gangs. As elsewhere, experiment has shown that discipline becomes too difficult with larger numbers. One often finds the coöperative store affiliated with this working plan. The profits of each gang go to no outsider, but automatically to themselves when the job is done. They have built city slaughter houses and made whole