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Syndicalism—and its cognates, known as anarcho-syndicalism or revolutionary syndicalism—was a radical movement linked to the rise of trade unionism and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Syndicalists traced their origins and beliefs to Marxian political thought. They believed that in society and the economy there was a split between capitalists (employers) and labor (workers) and that these two contending classes were engaged in a perpetual struggle over the proper division of an economy’s total product. Syndicalists and socialists maintained that the class struggle between capital and labor would persist until workers seized the full fruits of their productivity by eliminating production for profit. Syndicalists differed from socialists in their insistence that workers could liberate themselves from capitalism only through self-activity and direct action at the point of production, without resort to politics and legislation. Syndicalists shared with trade unionists an ideology that stressed worker self-activity and direct action above politics and parliamentarianism; indeed, the term is derived from syndicat, the French word for trade union. What most sharply distinguished syndicalists from other trade unionists was the former’s commitment to the abolition of capitalism through revolutionary direct action.
Syndicalism achieved its largest membership and peak influence between 1905 and 1919. The first workers’ organization to adopt a syndicalist program was the French Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), which in its 1905 Charter of Amiens declared its autonomy from the Socialist Party and other political bodies that sought parliamentary representation. Instead of seeking to advance workers’ interests through electoral activity and legislative reforms, the CGT called upon its members to combat their class enemies through direct action on the job. That same year a select group of radicals in the United States created the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). At its 1905 founding convention, the IWW included members of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Socialist Labor Party among its most prominent delegates and platform speakers, but by 1908 the organization had severed all formal relations with socialist and other political parties. During the same years, syndicalist organizations emerged in Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, among other places. Yet except for France, Italy, and the Spanish-speaking nations, syndicalism represented only a minority tendency within a much broader worker and radical movement. This was especially true in those nations with more developed economies and powerful trade union movements, such as Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. In Germany, syndicalism was overshadowed by the Deutsche Gewerkshaften Bund (DGB) and the Socialist Party (SPD). In Britain, syndicalism existed largely as the personal cause of a single prominent labor leader, Tom Mann, whose Industrial Syndicalist Education League published pamphlets but lacked members. And in the United States, the IWW rarely built a substantial membership. Only in France, Italy, Spain, and the Latin American nations, which all had far smaller and weaker labor movements, did syndicalism emerge as a dominant tendency, and even in these nations it existed mor clearly among leaders than followers.
Between 1905 and 1913, no transnational or international body united the movement’s separate national manifestations. Yet syndicalists shared a common ideology and common strategy and tactics. Moreover, syndicalist leaders regularly crossed national borders to promote their cause. Tom Mann traveled often to Australasia, South Africa, and North America; the American syndicalists William D. Haywood and William Z. Foster visited Britain and France; and French, Italian, and Spanish syndicalists crossed their respective borders and traversed the Atlantic. A common set of ideas and assumptions united all syndicalists. Whether they claimed to find their original inspiration in the French anarchist Pierre Proudhon’s tirades against property and the state or Mikhail Bakunin’s battles with Marx and Engels about the role of political parties and the state, they insisted that workers must liberate themselves from capitalism through direct action, with the strike as the workers’ most effective weapon.
For a syndicalist, no strike brought failure or defeat. If workers won their struggle, they learned the lesson of solidarity and worker power. If a strike failed, they discovered that employers were their enemies and that class struggle remained the essence of existence. Thus, even defeated strikers could return to their jobs without relinquishing the class struggle. Back on the job, workers could harass their employers and diminish their profits by strictly applying work rules to slow production, declining to use inferior materials, refusing to maintain machines in optimum condition, regulating the pace of work, and, in some instances, damaging the machinery, tools, and goods with which they worked. Syndicalists defined these tactics as “sabotage,” and they taught workers concrete lessons in the application of their power, without casting ballots or seeking legislative reforms. Indeed, syndicalists believed that as workers assimilated the lessons of direct action and applied them in practice, they could eliminate capitalism. The culmination of direct action would be the social “general strike,” in which all workers left their jobs or laid down their tools simultaneously, paralyzing the economy and demonstrating that labor, not capital, wielded power. In the aftermath of the general strike, workers’ organizations would administer the economy, eliminate production for profit, and reorganize the economy. As a result, political parties and the state would vanish.
In 1913 the separate national syndicalist movements united to create their own international body, a counterpart to the socialist Second International. And like the Second International, the Syndicalist International failed to survive the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918). Another result of the war—the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—brought more grief to syndicalists. Most syndicalists initially found vindication in the triumph of the Bolsheviks, which they perceived as a victory for workers. Indeed, syndicalists considered the Soviets to be the Russian version of the self-governing workers’ institutions that would govern society and economy in the aftermath of revolution, and they enlisted enthusiastically in the Comintern and its trade union affiliate, the Profintern. But as Lenin and his comrades established their dictatorship of the proletariat and used the party and the state apparatus to dominate the new Soviet Republic, many syndicalists felt that the Bolsheviks had subjected workers to new forms of subjugation. Other syndicalists, such as Mann and Haywood, remained loyal to the Bolshevik cause. A majority of syndicalists, however, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, served as the most vitriolic critics of the Bolshevik dictatorship.
In 1923 the anti-Bolshevik syndicalists formed a second Syndicalist International. By then, however, the separate syndicalist national movements formed, at best, marginal and often minuscule worker movements compared to the dominant trade union movements. In Britain, syndicalism disappeared as a living presence, while in Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, France, and the United States it survived as a marginal, minority movement. Only in Spain did syndicalism—in its anarcho-syndicalist form—maintain a vital presence. Here, it dominated the national labor movement until its crushing defeat by Franco and the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Since then, wherever syndicalism has survived, it has done so solely as a concept of worker self-activity esteemed by small circles of intellectuals or as a minuscule movement among workers.
Bibliography:
- Joll, James. 1980. The Anarchists. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Stearns, Peter. 1971. Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor: A Cause without Rebels. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
- Thorpe, Wayne. 1989. “The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labor, 1913–1923. Amsterdam, Netherlands: International Institute of Social History.
- Van der Linden, Marcel, and Wayne Thorpe, eds. 1990. Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press.
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