Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Five

Part Five: A Modern Syndicalism

In this series of posts, I have been sketching a common thread of left-wing thought which rejects both the state-socialist/communist tradition (for its authoritarianism and focus on the interests of the consumer over those of the producer) and the producer-only focus of anarcho-syndicalism, Wobblyism, and pre-war French syndicalism. In this post, I will bring together these different currents of thought (guild socialism, De Leonism, the post-war CGT, the Workers’ Opposition) and propose a synthesis based on the best ideas of each:

*The economy would be a mixed one, resembling Tito’s Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union under the New Economic Policy. The means of production would mostly be publicly owned, but workplaces and industries would be self-governing by the workers employed therein, subject to a degree of worker-consumer co-determination. Small businesses, sole traders, and private agriculture would continue to exist, and much of the retail and distribution sector would be taken over by consumers’ co-operatives.

*In the sectors of the economy in which the means of production are publicly owned, the relevant union would be charged with co-ordinating the activities of workplaces, by planning; procuring supplies and raw materials; organising distribution, branding, and marketing; and conducting research and development. In order to safeguard the interests of consumers, each industry will also have a state-appointed regulatory body, whose powers would be modelled on those historically exercised by the United States’ Interstate Commerce Commission with regards to preventing undue price rises and restrictions on output.

*Workers would keep all profits made, and workers in each workplace or industry would decide democratically how these would be split among them or re-invested. (If the new economic system comes about peacefully, a portion of the profits might be designated to compensating the former capitalist owners of the means of production.)

*The United States’ National Labor Relations Act would be adopted, in which a majority vote in a ‘bargaining unit’ is required to unionise the entire membership of the bargaining unit. By adopting bargaining units covering an entire industry, class-conscious industrial unions can secure compulsory unionism in their sector of the economy by majority vote. (The National Labor Relations Board did something like this in 1938, when it settled a jurisdictional dispute between the AFL and the CIO by placing all West Coast longshoremen, from San Diego to Anchorage, in a single bargaining unit.)

*The members of these unions would directly elect local, regional, and national officials of their union, as well as their union’s delegates to the All-Industrial Congress. The All-Industrial Congress would settle disputes between the unions, plan the national economy, arrange financing for new investment, and co-ordinate foreign trade. The unions, as well as militant minorities within them, would retain all rights to engage in industrial action.

*A number of consumers’ co-operatives, modelled on the British co-operative movement, would be set up with state aid. These would purchase products from the unions and agricultural marketing boards, and operate retail stores, returning their profits to their members through a ‘dividend’ weighted according to purchases made. Co-operative officers would be elected on a one-member-one-vote basis, and co-operatives would federate at local, regional, and national levels.

*To represent the interest of consumers of public utilities and public services, the nation would be covered in a patchwork of American-style special districts, dealing with subjects such as roads, railways, water, sewerage, electricity, gas, telecommunications, schools, health, and housing. These bodies would be elected for two-year terms of office by all residents of the relevant jurisdiction, and would act as consumers’ co-operatives, procuring goods or services from the relevant union(s).

*To deal with the remaining functions of the state (taxation, high politics, law and order, constitutional affairs), there would be established at local, regional, and national levels a series of soviets. On local soviets in each city, town, and shire, three-fifths of delegates would be elected by local union branches, while the remaining two-fifths would be split between delegates elected by local consumers’ co-operatives and appointees of special districts whose jurisdiction overlaps that of the soviet. Local soviets would send recallable delegates to regional Congresses of Soviets, which would in turn send recallable delegates to the national Congress of Soviets. All soviets would elect their executive committees, as well as regulatory bodies acting in the interest of consumers.

*Domestic purchasing power would be increased via the creation of extra scrip money, which loses value over time so as not to cause inflation (as proposed in the early twentieth century by the German-Argentine economist Silvio Gesell). This scrip would be put into the money supply so as to make up the shortfall between aggregate demand and aggregate output.

*Agricultural produce, both for domestic consumption and for export, would be purchased in bulk by grower-controlled marketing boards modelled on the Australian Wheat Board.

*International trade would be structured so as to allow developing countries the chance to industrialise. (In any case, increased domestic purchasing power resulting from the creation of the scrip will remove all countries’ need to dump their excess output in foreign markets.) Developing countries would practice import-substitution industrialisation, and would form OPEC-style cartels for various categories of agricultural produce and minerals.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Four

Part Four: Detroit and Donetsk

An early Soviet propaganda poster exhorted its readers:

Let’s take the torrent of the Russian revolution

Add the effectiveness of American technology

And construct socialism!

On a similar note, Bolshevik leader and former New York resident Nikolai Bukharin called for the party to “add Americanism to Marxism”. For them, and for many other leftists of their generation, the United States symbolised all that was modern and progressive.

In the first post in this series, I mentioned that the political base of Daniel De Leon and his Socialist Labor Party was in Detroit. In 1914, it was attempting to organise workers at Henry Ford’s automotive plant at River Rouge. To stave off the threat of unionisation and reduce staff turnover, Ford more than doubled the daily pay of his employees to the previously unthinkable five dollars, reducing the working day from nine hours to eight in the process. Thus, syndicalism – or the threat thereof – provoked one of the most important changes in the nature in capitalism.

Fordism was the practical implementation of the ‘scientific management’ theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer from Philadelphia who had become a household name in the United States in the early 1910s thanks to his work on rationalising the operations of firms. Aside from raising wages and lowering the prices of consumer goods, Fordism aimed at simplifying production methods so as to reduce the power of skilled workers, the base of the early American craft unions. Indeed, Fordism was opposed by the class-collaborationist leader of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gospers, and welcomed by the IWW, which fancied its chances of recruiting all the new unskilled workers created in the Detroit factories.

When these techniques spread across the Atlantic, they initially met with fierce resistance. As mentioned earlier, the quasi-syndicalist Workers’ Opposition arose in Russia and the Ukraine to resist the Taylorist policies of the Soviet leadership in the transport and metallurgy industries. In France, the then-syndicalist CGT said that the worker under the Taylorist regime was “reduced to a machine without a soul, producing intensely and excessively”. But after the War, much of the European Left came round to the position of a German writer who stated that Fordism was “the most powerful and welcome ally of socialism”. The new breed of CGT leaders such as Jouhaux and Merrheim became supporters of both Fordism and the consumerist economy which was the logical product of its proto-Keynesian stimulation of demand (which meshed nicely with their revision of pre-war producer-only syndicalism), while commentators inside and outside of the early Soviet Union hailed it as the world’s first Taylorist state.

In some ways, the CGT’s reconciliation with mass production was not an accident. There was a definite technocratic and productivist strand in left-wing French thought going back to Saint-Simon, the déclassé aristocrat and early nineteenth-century utopian socialist who proposed a new order based on industrial progress, full employment, class collaboration, and technocracy. It was Saint-Simon who first introduced the concept of the ‘government of men’ being replaced by the ‘administration of things’. CGT leaders and thinkers in the 1910s adapted some saint-simonien ideas, such as the central role of technology in economic history, and used them to reassess their own ideas. For example, the Marxist contention that capitalism was doomed by a falling rate of profits was held to be negated by mass production and mass consumption.

While the Left saw the emancipatory potential in Fordism, it was Europe’s reactionaries who defended the small workshop and craftsman of the nineteenth century against this new invasion. Rightists such as French electoral geographer and future Vichy collaborator André Siegfried bemoaned the homogenising and levelling social effects of consumerism; a fashionable Frenchwoman, Siegfried moaned, could no longer be the only lady in Paris wearing a particular type of hat if hats were being mass produced for an undifferentiated mass market. Unlike the twenty-first century, when so-called ‘leftists’ take up middle-class NIMBY concerns about development and growth and attack popular consumption habits, the Dieselpunk era was one in which the Left was the side of politics which hailed technological advance and consumerism.

With the economic climate of the New Economic Policy being open to the granting of concessions to foreign capitalists, Henry Ford took the opportunity to set up a plant at Nizhny Novgorod (later known until the fall of communism as Gorky) in 1929. The Soviet regime’s emulation of American industry went even further – when it established the planned iron and steel city of Magnitogorsk, the city was modelled on Gary, Indiana. Like many good things about early Soviet society, this flirtation with Americanism was cut short by Stalin’s accession to power.

The Soviet Union in the following years did, however, have its own version of Fordism-Taylorism. Named after Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner from the Donetsk region who supposedly hauled a ridiculous amount of coal in a short period of time, the Stakhanovite movement was the regime’s way of exhorting workers to higher productivity. Writers on the subject have suggested that Stakhanovism was less about increasing the authority of management, and was instead a way for the regime to harness the workers against their managers; nevertheless, Stakhanovism was only an incomplete adaptation of Fordism, lacking the high wages and consumerism of its American counterpart.

The impact of Ford’s new way of doing business was profound enough that the era from (approximately) the 1920s to the 1960s is referred to as the ‘Fordist’ period, and that Aldous Huxley portrayed his dystopian future society in Brave New World (1931) as worshipping Ford as a deity. While Ford was hostile to unions, many syndicalists saw his methods as beneficial to the material prosperity of the working class, while also providing a blueprint for a rationally governed post-capitalist economy.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Three

Part Three: Parallels with Syndicalism/Guild Socialism in Yugoslavia and Broken Hill

Although history furnishes no examples of syndicalist states as such, a (very partial) imitation was found in Yugoslavia under communist rule. After Marshal Tito’s early rift with Moscow, the Yugoslav regime wanted to differentiate itself ideologically from the Soviet Union, and fell back on an old idea common to syndicalism and libertarian forms of socialism – workers’ self-management. Reportedly, when presented with the idea by an advisor, Tito paced around the room and exclaimed: “[f]actories belonging to the workers – something that has never yet been achieved!”

The system in operation in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia resembled syndicalism and guild socialism in its broad outlines. Workers in state-owned firms elected works councils, managers, and delegates to federations of enterprises in each industry, and shared in the election of firm directors with the organs of state power. They procured parts and raw materials, and marketed the products of the labour autonomously, in a mixed economy more like the New Economic Policy than anything in the post-1928 Soviet Union (indeed, Yugoslavia’s public sector accounted for a lower share of the country’s workforce than in some ostensibly capitalist countries). In common with other communist regimes, however, it lacked a strong trade union movement independent of the state which could provide a solid basis for working-class power; otherwise, its system of worker-state co-determination was reminiscent of the ideas of the Lyon congress, the Plumb Plan, and the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain plan mentioned in earlier posts. At the height of the experiment, however, the system was working: in the 1950’s, Yugoslavia was the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Tito: the only communist leader to give ‘the factories to the workers’

Tito’s Yugoslavia also embraced, for a time, another aspect of syndicalism and guild socialism. Between 1956 and 1963, it operated a bicameral legislature with a lower house elected by territorial constituencies and a ‘Council of Producers’, in which voters selected representatives based on their economic function (with a touch of malapportionment favouring industry over agriculture). This feature, however, was later dropped – given Yugoslavia’s ethnic and national antagonisms, its leaders preferred to use the upper house of its legislature for the ‘senatorial’ function of equally representing its constituent republics. While it lasted, however, the Council of Producers could be seen as carrying on the tradition of the CGT, De Leon, Kollontai, and Cole, who argued for separate bodies to represent producing and consuming interests.

While there was no officially stated link between Titoism and syndicalism or guild socialism, orthodox communists were quick to draw the comparison, branding Tito with the tag of ‘syndicalist deviationist’ that they had bestowed on Kollontai in 1921. In addition, one of Tito’s chief economic advisors had studied in London and was familiar with the works of the guild socialists.

As described in two earlier posts, Broken Hill provided a good model of working-class rule in action during the middle chunk of the twentieth century, when it was Australia’s ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’. The Barrier Industrial Council functioned in the way the fin-de-siècle French syndicalists imagined their bourses du travail would operate. It enforced a virtual city-wide closed shop, negotiated with employers on behalf of its constituent unions, and regulated social conditions, prices, and labour markets in the Silver City.

Like the guild socialists’ proposed guilds, Broken Hill’s mining unions oversaw the supply of labour in their industry, limiting the mining companies’ ability to choose their employees to men born in the town or qualifying by a period of residency. Echoing Cole’s concept of ‘encroaching control’, they infringed upon the prerogatives of the capitalists, such as in the 1930s and 1940s when militant ‘job committees’ asserted their freedom to determine how their jobs were to be carried out. The Barrier Industrial Council functioned as a parallel legislature, taking away the initiative in much local economic decision-making from the city council and state and federal governments.

However, the unions at Broken Hill were never – aside from a short period of syndicalist agitation in the immediate aftermath of the First World War – ideologically committed to anti-capitalism. Their contribution to syndicalist/guild socialist theory resides in the practical example that they set: a city in which the working class holds the whip hand would look a lot like mid-twentieth-century Broken Hill.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Two

Part Two: Guild Socialism in Britain

Syndicalism spread to the British Isles, where it was strong among shipbuilders in the west of Scotland and coal miners in South Wales. James Connolly, one of the executed leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, was a syndicalist of the De Leonist variety. It was in Britain, however, that a group of young intellectuals ironed out some of the kinks in early Franco-American syndicalism and transformed it into guild socialism.

The name ‘guild socialism’ gives it a somewhat misleadingly medieval image. Although this was the intent of the first (in 1906) exponent of the guild idea, A. J. Penty, it was expanded upon in the next decade by S. G. Hobson and G. D. H. Cole, who adapted it to the needs of the modern, industrial economy. In the Middle Ages, guilds united the producers in a particular town or city who practiced the same craft. In addition to the trade union-like function of forming a ‘labour cartel’ to secure higher remuneration, they self-regulated their respective industries. They operated at a time when the state lacked the omnipotence it assumed in later centuries, and was instead one of a number of sovereign institutions in society, alongside the church, the guilds, and other voluntary groupings. Both of these aspects of medieval life (control of the economy by producers and the taming of state power) appealed to the guild socialists.

For the guild socialists, however, the ‘guilds’ of which they spoke were not citywide federations of individual artisans, but nationally-organised industrial unions. Like the unions in a syndicalist economy, the guilds would regulate the internal affairs of their industry, ensuring a supply of labour and raw materials and guaranteeing production of goods and services. The break with pre-war syndicalism came in guild socialism’s view of the state. At this time, Fabian socialists frankly admitted that their goal was to run the economy in the interest of consumers rather than producers, hence their use of the state as their preferred instrument. Guild socialists sought a middle path between anarcho-syndicalism and state socialism; for them, the state could not ‘wither away’ because some organisation was necessary to represent the interests of the consuming public, but neither could the state be entrusted with supreme power, as this would be used to oppress producers.

Different guild socialists had different solutions at various times, but the best exposition of the movement’s principles was Cole’s Guild Socialism Re-stated (1920). A post-capitalist society would have guilds to represent producers, who would self-regulate their industry or service. The ‘consumptive’ functions of the state would be hived off to councils elected on a geographical basis at local, regional, and national levels. There would be Co-operative Councils for regular goods and services, Collective Utilities Councils for public utilities, and Cultural Councils and Health Councils for education, health, and other public services. (Although Cole doesn’t make the connection, these bodies would be similar to the patchwork of special districts in American local government, and which, in the form of school boards and boards for administering the Poor Laws, still existed in Cole’s Britain.) Local, regional, and national ‘communes’, uniting producers’ and consumers’ bodies in equal measure, would carry out the remaining functions of the state: taxation, the police power, high politics, and demarcation of functions in the network of guilds and councils.

A further idea of the guild socialists was the doctrine of ‘encroaching control’. Rejecting both the parliamentary tactics of the official labour movement and blanquiste revolutionary methods of the communists (not to mention Sorel’s general strike), they developed a third way between the two. Instead of merely agitating for wage increases and security of tenure, unionists would seek to wrest managerial powers, such as the appointment of foremen and the supplying of labour, away from the capitalists. In this way, the capitalists would be transformed from dictators of the economy to constitutional monarchs, until they became superfluous.

During and after the war, guild socialism began to permeate the thinking of the labour movement. In 1919, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain proposed the public ownership of the mines, with national, regional, and local committees comprising an equal ratio of delegates elected by the workers and appointees of the state. Its influence could be seen in the French CGT’s 1919 proposals for tripartite worker-consumer-state co-determination of nationalised firms (mentioned in the previous post, and which Cole regarded as bearing a close resemblance to guild socialism), and in the Plumb Plan, a proposal for the nationalisation of American railways which assigned workers, management, and the state one-third of the members of national and regional boards to govern the industry.

Unfortunately, Cole wasn’t able to resist the lure of consumer-based socialism, and was more or less a card-carrying Fabian by the end of the 1920s (though at least he didn’t follow the trajectory of certain Fabians towards useful idiocy for Uncle Joe). The ideas that he developed as a young radical intellectual, however, serve as a guide to how the interests of producers and consumers can be reconciled in a post-capitalist society. Although the Cole of Guild Socialism Re-stated rejected syndicalism as the producer-centred mirror image of consumer-centred state socialism, it is clear that syndicalists such as Jouhaux and Merrheim, De Leon, and Kollontai were moving in his direction.

Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part One

It’s been a while since I set out my political philosophy on this blog, and my views have changed a little since then. This, therefore, is something of a manifesto in the form of a history lesson.

Part One: Syndicalism in France, the United States, and Russia

Syndicalism, derived from the French syndicat, meaning ‘trade union’, was described by the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica as “the most purely proletarian in origin” of all then-existing political ideologies. It was first espoused in France around the turn of the century, where it was associated with the publication Le Mouvement socialiste, edited by Hubert Lagardelle. Lagardelle promoted segregation of social classes (as a reaction to the middle-class domination of socialism), opposed parliamentarism and liberal democracy, and defended the right of a militant minority (similar yet different from the Leninist conception of the vanguard party) to act on behalf of the working class. The next major French syndicalist thinker to emerge was Georges Sorel, who published Reflections on Violence in 1908. This work gave the syndicalist movement the concept of the general strike, which would be used to bring down capitalism and the bourgeois state.

The key to understanding the rift between syndicalism and socialism is the question of whose interests a post-capitalist economic order ought to serve. Socialism, particularly in its Fabian and Leninist/Stalinist varieties, sees the administrative state as the agent which should control the economy in the interests of all. Syndicalists understood that the state’s function is to represent people in their capacity as consumers (of public utilities and public services), and thus sought to give to the workers in each workplace, firm, and industry a large degree of self-government. This necessarily entailed the disappearance of the state, and the management of the economy by producers organised in a nationwide federation of trade unions. (As we shall see, guild socialists and post-war syndicalists modified their views to provide some space for the expression of both consumers’ and producers’, interests.) Put simply, syndicalism puts its faith in the workers themselves, and in their self-created organisations (trade unions and co-operatives), rather than in the state or in majoritarian public opinion.

Syndicalism was at its most powerful and widespread in the first fifth of the twentieth century. It was the dominant ideology in the trade union movements of France, Italy, Spain, and Argentina. In France, it also inspired the formation of bourses du travail (‘exchanges of labour’; roughly equivalent to Australian Trades Halls), which syndicalists conceived of as the local governing bodies of their future society, which would regulate local economic conditions and the supply of labour.

Paris’s bourse du travail

France’s syndicalist-led union body, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was divided over the question of the First World War, and in the resulting convulsions the dominant anti-political strand of thought lost power to a new species of syndicalist. At its first post-war congress at Lyon in 1919, the CGT called for the socialisation of transportation, mining, electricity generation, and banking, but balked at putting the power to run these industries in the hands of the state. It also shied away from advocating control by the workers only; instead, it called for workers, organised consumers (co-operatives and industrial consumers), and the state to each elect one-third of the board of the socialised concerns, with the state’s quota to be further split between national, regional, and municipal government. Further proposed reforms included profit-sharing in the socialised industries, and a Conseil Economique du Travail (‘Economic Council of Labour’), which united the CGT with white-collar unions and co-operatives, and which was conceived as a replacement for the parliament. Anarcho-syndicalists have portrayed the Lyon congress as the victory of a reformist wing over the previously dominant radical wing of the CGT; a better explanation is that leaders such as Léon Jouhaux and Alphonse Merrheim took note of ideological developments in England, the United States, and Russia to craft a syndicalism fit for a modern, industrial, productivist economy.

Across the Atlantic, the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the ‘Wobblies’) was formed in Chicago in 1905, an attempt to create the industrial unionists’ ‘One Big Union’. The IWW rapidly gained a sizeable following, particularly among unskilled and/or immigrant workers, and its influence spread to Britain and Australia. After the war, it was one of the main targets of the First Red Scare. State legislatures passed ‘criminal syndicalism’ laws, criminalising the advocacy of syndicalist doctrines, and IWW members were lynched and assassinated by Pinkerton agents.

Daniel De Leon became a key figure in the Socialist Labor Party in 1890 and supported the foundation of the IWW in 1905. He split from the Wobblies in 1908, however, and his Detroit-based faction later rebadged itself as the Workers’ International Industrial Union. The cause of the split was the question of political action; the majority ‘Chicago faction’ followed the same anti-political line as the pre-war CGT, while De Leon saw the IWW and SLP as two pillars of a dual strategy by the working class to overthrow capitalism. If this goal were accomplished, however, he saw no further place for the SLP, arguing that it should have Congress “adjourn sine die” and leave the management of industry to the unions, which would be united in an All-Industrial Congress, meeting not in D.C. but in a Midwestern industrial centre such as Chicago, and governing the nation by finding “the statistics of the wealth needed, the wealth producible, and the work required”. De Leon had added the concept of political action to the economistic doctrines of the IWW and CGT, but shared their blanket condemnation of the state (although modern De Leonist groups often do provide for separate economic and political legislatures). It would be left to others to provide for the representation of consumers alongside producers.

Daniel De Leon: father of political syndicalism

Although most syndicalists around the world welcomed the October Revolution, it wasn’t long before they had buyers’ remorse when the Fabian instincts of the Bolshevik regime became clear to all. Syndicalist ideas motivated many of the leftist opponents of the Bolsheviks, and touched a raw nerve with the authoritarian state-socialists in the Kremlin, who slandered one such group, the Workers’ Opposition, as a “syndicalist and anarchist deviation” at the 1921 party congress. Trotsky, the slayer of the Kronstadt rebels, hysterically squealed that “[t]hey have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party”.

The public face of the Workers’ Opposition was Alexandra Kollontai, radical feminist, first People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, and first Soviet ambassador to Norway. The faction received its strongest support from workers in those industries – primarily metallurgy and transport – which had been most thoroughly revolutionised by Taylorist or Fordist production techniques. Although it didn’t cite any foreign influences, the ideology of the Workers’ Opposition closely resembles De Leonism. Kollontai called for management of the economy by the workers themselves, via trade unions uniting in a central body akin to De Leon’s All-Industrial Congress. She didn’t call for the abolition of the state, however, and proposed the leave the Bolshevik Party in charge in the ‘political’ sphere, giving it a role somewhat similar to De Leon’s SLP.

Alexandra Kollontai: ‘syndicalist deviant’

Thus, when we combine the ideas of the Lyon congress, De Leonism, and the pamphlets of the Workers’ Opposition, we have a type of syndicalism which conceives of two supreme bodies jointly controlling a society: on the one side, an economic governing body channelling the interests of producers, and on the other, a political governing body channelling the interests of citizen-consumers, as well as a two-pronged strategy – militant industrial unions and a party – for the working class to attain power.