It is not the knocking down indulged in by labour and by capital that the Crowd fears.

It is the not-thinking.

The Crowd has noticed that the knocking-down disposition and the not-thinking disposition go together.

The Crowd has watched Force and Force-people, and has seen what always happens after a time.

It has come to see that people who have to get things by force and not by thinking will not be able to think of anything to do with the things when they get them.

So the Crowd does not want them to get them.

The Crowd has learned all this even from the present owners of things.  It does not want to learn them all over again from new ones.  The present owners of things have got them half by force, and that is why they only half understand how to run them.

But they do half understand because they only half believe in force.  The crowd has seen them get their supremacy by the use of the employment-hold-up, or by starving or threatening to starve the workers.  And now it sees the Syndicalist workers proposing to get control by starving or threatening to starve everybody.  Of the two, those who propose to starve all the people to get their own way, and those who threaten to starve part of the people, it has seemed to the Crowd, naturally, that those who only half believe in starving, and who only starve a part of us, would be likely to be more intelligent as world-runners.

In other words (accepting for the sake of argument the worst possible interpretation of the capitalist class), they have spent several years in learning, and have already half learned that force in industry is inefficient and cannot be made to work.

Now when the Crowd sees the Syndicalists swinging their hats in a hundred nations, with one big hoarse hurrah around a world, with five minutes’ experience, come rushing in, and propose to take up the world—­the whole world in two minutes more and run it in the same old bygone way—­the way that the capitalists are just giving up—­by force—­it knows what it thinks.

It thinks it will fight Class Syndicalism.  It makes up its mind it will fight Class Syndicalism with Crowd Syndicalism.  It has decided that, in the interests of all of us, of a crowd civilization, of what we call the world or Crowd Syndicate, its industries should be controlled, not by the owners and not by the workers, but by those men, whoever they are, who can control them with the most skill and efficiency.

The Crowd has come to see that the present owners—­judging from current events, and taking them as a whole, and speaking impersonally and historically—­have proved themselves, on the whole, incompetent to control industries with skill and efficiency, because they have treated labour as the natural enemy of capital and have quarrelled with it.  It sees that the present workers, acting as syndicates or otherwise, are incompetent to own and control and manage industry