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.