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.