Ledesma failed to win approval for his ideas from the CNT in 1931, and instead merged into the Falange, creating the in 1934. After the nationalist victory in the civil war, a corporatist and vertical Spanish Labour Organization became the sole legal trade union in Francoist Spain. Reasons for decline Syndicalism's decline was the result of a number of factors. In Russia, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, syndicalist movements were suppressed by authoritarian governments. The IWW in the United States and the Mexican House of the World Worker were weakened considerably by state repression. Syndicalist movements that were not suppressed also declined. According to van der Linden and Thorpe, this was primarily the result of the integration of the working class into capitalist relations. Proletarian families became units of individualized consumption as standards of living increased. This was partly the result of state intervention, particularly the emergence of the welfare state. Avenues for social reform opened up and the franchise was widened, giving parliamentary reformism legitimacy. Altena agrees that the state's growing influence in society was decisive for syndicalism's diminished influence. In addition to the welfare state, he refers to the increased significance of national policies, which eroded local autonomy. This made centralized unions able to negotiate national agreements more important and national and parliamentary politics more enticing for workers. They therefore turned to social democracy in larger numbers. Additionally, according to Altena, syndicalism lost out to sports and entertainment in the cultural sphere. Vadim Dam'e adds to this that the development of capitalist production and changes in the division of labor diminished syndicalism's recruitment base. According to authors like Stearns, Edward Shorter, Charles Tilly, and Bob Holton, who deem syndicalism a transitional form of workers' resistance between older craft-based artisanship and modern factory-based industry, syndicalism's decline was a product of that transition having been completed and workers being assimilated to capitalist factory discipline. Darlington counters that syndicalism attracted a variety of workers, not just artisans and skilled workers, but concedes that such changes did play a role in Spain, France, and some other countries. Several authors claim that syndicalism's demise was the result of workers' inherent pragmatism or conservatism, causing them to only be interested in immediate material gains, rather than long-term goals like overthrowing capitalism. Robert Hoxie, Selig Perlman, and Patrick Renshaw invoke this argument to explain the IWW's decline and Stearns, Dermot Keogh, and G.