As an alternative to this actual evolution toward socialism, the syndicalists propose to force society to put the means of production into the hands of the trade unions. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Owen, Proudhon, Blanc, Lassalle, and Bakounin all advocated what may be called "group socialism."[28] This conception of future society contemplates the ownership of the mines by the miners, of the railroads by the railway workers, of the land by the peasants. All the workers in the various industries are to be organized into unions and then brought together in a federation. Several objections are made to this outline of a new society. In the first place, it is artificial. Except for an occasional cooeperative undertaking, there is not, nor has there ever been, any tendency toward trade-union ownership of industry. In addition, it is an idea that is to-day an anachronism. It is conceivable that small federated groups might control and conduct countless little industries, but it is not conceivable that groups of "self-governing," "autonomous," and "independent" workmen could, or would, be allowed by a highly industrialized society to direct and manage such vast enterprises as the trusts have built up. If each group is to run industry as it pleases, the Standard Oil workers or the steel workers might menace society in the future as the owners of those monopolies menace it in the present. There is no indication in the literature of the syndicalists, and certainly no promise in a system of completely autonomous groups of producers, of any solution of the vast problems of modern trustified industry. It may be that such ideas corresponded to the state of things represented in early capitalism. But the socialist ideas of the present are the product of a more advanced state of capitalism than Owen, Proudhon, Lassalle, and Bakounin knew, or than the syndicalists of France, Italy, and Spain have yet been forced seriously to deal with. Indeed, it was necessary for Marx to forecast half a century of capitalist development in order to clarify the program of socialism and to emphasize the necessity for that program.