well as on relations with communists and the Comintern. Eventually all syndicalists agreed to the formation of a council tasked with spreading revolutionizing the trade union movement. Disagreements continued at the congress itself. The International Workers' Association, formed in 1922, is an international syndicalist federation of various labour unions from different countries. At its peak, it represented millions of workers and competed directly for the hearts and minds of the working class with social democratic unions and parties. Decline & New Radicalism From the early 1920s, the traditional syndicalist movements in most countries began to wane; state repression played a role, but movements that were not suppressed also declined. According to van der Linden and Thorpe, syndicalist organizations saw themselves as having three options: They could stay true to their revolutionary principles and be marginalized, they could give up those principles in order to adapt to new conditions, or they could disband or merge into non-syndicalist organizations. By the end of the 1930s, meaningful legal syndicalist organizations existed only in Bolivia, Chile, Sweden and Uruguay. National Syndicalism Syndicalist Georges Sorel began to increasingly advocate more focus on direct action to advance socialist ideals. As Marxism went through a reformist phase, this syndicalist alternative gained in support. In 1900, French syndicalist Charles Maurras declared in 's newspaper that anti-democratic socialism is the "pure" and correct form of socialism. From then on, he and other members of (like Jacques Bainville, Jean Rivain, and Georges Valois) interested in Sorel's thought discussed the similarity between the movements in 's conferences and in essays published in the movement's newspaper, hoping to form a collaboration with revolutionary syndicalists. Such collaboration was formed in 1908 with a group of labor unions' leaders led by Émile Janvion. As a result of this collaboration, Janvion founded the anti-republican journal . Georges Sorel played a role in shaping the views of Benito Mussolini and by extension the wider Italian fascist movement, which retained the syndicalist belief in direct action by organizations to advance a socialist agenda. In March 1921, Sorel wrote that Mussolini was "a man no less extraordinary than Lenin". Fascist syndicalism In the early 20th century, nationalists and syndicalists were increasingly influencing each other in Italy. From 1902 to 1910, a number of Italian revolutionary syndicalists including Arturo Labriola, Agostino Lanzillo, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Alceste De Ambris, Filippo Corridoni and Sergio Panunzio sought to unify the Italian nationalist