Revolutionary syndicalism

Two recent documents coming from different parts of the anarchist movement both make attempts to address the questions of the role of the unions and how workers can struggle...

The main characteristic of revolutionary syndicalism is the conception that the unions are the ideal form of working class organisation on the one hand and, on the other, that after the revolution in the form of a victorious general strike, they will be the basis for a new social structur...

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We are publishing here the position distributed from the very outset of the conflict in Georgia in the summer of 2008 by the comrades of the KRAS, a small group in the anarcho-syndicalist movement, mainly based in Russia.

In this fourth article in the series on the CNT we will show how syndicalism weakened the revolutionary currents within the CNT (those with a Marxist orientation, which were in favour of joining the Third International, as well as those oriented towards anarchism).

The CNT, alongside the IWW,was one of the very few union organisations to maintain its loyalty to the proletariat at that time. Nevertheless, in the period we are going to look at, it is clear that the syndicalist component dominated the actions of the organisation and put an end to the revolutionary tendency that existed within it.

The first 14 years of the 20th century, known as the Belle Époque, marked capitalism’s high-point. An atmosphere of optimism pervaded society as the economy endlessly prospered and inventions and scientific discoveries followed one upon the other. The workers’ movement was infected with this atmosphere, accentuating tendencies towards reformism and illusions about to the possibility of reaching socialism peacefully through a series of gradual conquests...

In continuity with the series on revolutionary syndicalism which we began in International Review n°118, the article below is the first in a series of articles on the experience of the Spanish CNT. Today, a new generation of workers are gradually getting involved in the class struggle against capitalism. This confrontation raises a great many questions, one of the most frequent of which is the union question.

In this article, the second in the series, we will see how far the IWW’s theory and practice allowed it to live up to its own goals, and to the greatest challenge yet faced by the workers’ movement world wide: the outbreak of history’s first great inter-imperialist conflict in 1914.

A century ago on June 27, 1905, in a crowded hall in Chicago, Illinois, Big Bill Haywood, leader of the militant Western Miners Federation, called to order “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” a gathering convened to create a new working class revolutionary organization in the United States: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to as the Wobblies...

A century ago on June 27, 1905, in a crowded hall in Chicago, Illinois, Big Bill Haywood, leader of the militant Western Miners Federation, called to order “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” a gathering convened to create a new working class revolutionary organization in the United States: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to as the Wobblies.

"In Western Europe revolutionary syndicalism in many countries was a direct and inevitable result of opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism. In our country, too, the first steps of "Duma activity" increased opportunism to a tremendous extent and reduced the Mensheviks to servility before the Cadets (...) Syndicalism cannot help developing on Russian soil as a reaction against this shameful conduct of 'distinguished' Social-Democrats". These words of Lenin's, which we quoted in the previous article in this series, are wholly applicable to the situation in France at the beginning of the 20th century. For many militants, disgusted by "opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism", the French Confédération générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour - CGT) served as a beacon for the new "self-sufficient" (to use the words of Pierre Monatte) and "revolutionary" syndicalism.

Ever since 1968, and especially since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, many of those who want to work for the revolution have turned their backs on the experience of the Russian revolution and the 3rd International, to look for lessons for the proletariat's struggle and organisation in another tradition: “revolutionary syndicalism” (sometimes known as “anarcho-syndicalism”).

The initiative has been taken by three organisations (International Communist Current, the Moscow organisation of the Confederation of revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists, Russia, and the Group of the revolutionary proletarian collectivists, Russia) to set up an internationalist discussion forum. The first subject submitted for debate is that of the lessons to be learned from the defeat of the October Revolution.