Syndicalism

WORKS BY SYNDICALISTS

WORKS ABOUT SYNDICALISM

Syndicalism is a philosophy and a style of revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary labor-union action that first took shape in the French unions of the last decade of the nineteenth century. The philosophy was further elaborated in the writings of Georges Sorel and other intellectuals. For about a generation it played a significant role in France, Italy, Spain, and other countries as the most spectacular labor protest against the industrial order, against the central state, and against the increasing tendency of socialism to make its peace with the existing political order.

The term comes from the French syndicat, a group for the defense of common interests. A labor union is a syndicat ouvrier, or simply a syndicat. In French, syndicalisme is labor unionism in general. But the term was taken over in English to mean specifically the revolutionary unionism which the French call syndicalisme révolutionnaire, or anarcho-syndicalisme. Similarly the French took from English the term trade-unionisme to designate English-style reformist unionism.

The word syndicalism, with or without accompanying adjectives, has been harnessed to a wide variety of uses, some metaphorical and some polemic. Some writers have used it to identify systems of occupational or other group organization, voluntary or state-directed; others, to label general theories of political and juridical pluralism. For still others, it has served to stigmatize an abuse of bargaining power by labor or other sectional interests at the expense of the general interest. These connotations are not those of the historical core of syndicalism.

Antecedents . As the syndicalist outlook developed first in the French unions, it combined many of the ideas current among radical groups of the nineteenth century. Proudhon was the strongest intellectual influence among the elite of French workingmen. From him and the Proudhonists of the First International, the syndicalists took their belief in the self-governing workshop as the unit of a free and decentralized society, their stress on the workers’ own efforts as the means of the workers’ emancipation, and their distrust of coercive state authority. From the Marxists, they took their emphasis on the class struggle as a principle of explanation and as a guide to action. From the French revolutionary tradition, as well as from the Blanquists and from the Bakuninists of the First International, they acquired their acceptance of violence and their stress on the role of a militant elite in the process of social emancipation. From the Paris Commune came further justification for revolt against the centralizing state. The method of the general strike, peaceful or revolutionary, had been in the air since Owenites and Chartists had preached it in Britain in the 1830s, and the First International had revived it. The anarchists who joined the French unions in large numbers in the 1890s brought a new infusion of Proudhonian and Bakuninist ideas and contributed the ideas of opposition to political action in general and to the socialist parties in particular.

Basic concepts . The concepts which were crucial to the syndicalist outlook were these: The class war is the dominant characteristic of modern society and the method of social change; the working class must achieve its own liberation from employer authority, the wage system, and the oppressive state; the workers must not rely on political action. The antithesis of party compromise and parliamentary betrayal was the workers’ direct action. This might take many forms of pressure on employers or government: boycott, sabotage (much discussed but little used), mass demonstration, or strikes. All strikes, won or lost, help deepen workers’ class consciousness. Any one of them may lead to the supreme form of direct action, the revolutionary general strike.

In the unions, central authority and the power of elected and appointed officials must be kept to a minimum, for they dull the revolutionary spirit. The general strike will come not from the action of powerful, rich unions but from the will of a conscious militant minority galvanizing the torpid mass of workers into a “sudden leap of awareness.” That elite is the driving force in history. The workers, isolated in the nation by social injustice, have no fatherland but that of class, that of the international proletariat. The unions must oppose nationalism and militarism. The labor union, organ of struggle against capitalism, will in the future be “an organization for production and distribution” and “the basis of social reorganization.” Functional organization and economic representation, in a pluralistic society based on free consensus, will replace the oppressive political state.

Unlike Marxian socialism, syndicalism was not interested in the conquest of the state by political party activity. It attempted no serious analysis of the historical process. Nor did it count on historical determinism to realize its ends.

Unlike anarchism, syndicalism relied on the occupational group and the class rather than the individual. It accepted a degree of organization which alarmed “pure” anarchists. The organization, the union, had tasks of immediate amelioration as well as of final social emancipation. The union, rather than the libertarian commune, was to be the nucleus of the freely federated society of the future.

French syndicalism . Syndicalism in France reflected the failure to develop satisfactory organic or working relationships between socialist parties and the labor unions. In the 1880s and 1890s the still-weak unions were being torn apart by rival socialist parties—five “national parties” by the late 1890s—fighting for union support. Political neutrality was a doctrine of self-protection for the unions. Syndicalist ideas also reflected the state of the unions. Emphasis on the role of active minorities and the unpredictable general strike idealized the conditions of unions without mass membership, financial resources, or central authority, and without collective bargaining rights against hostile employers.

The French unions before 1914 were divided more or less evenly between reformists and revolutionists. But the revolutionary views prevailed as the official doctrine of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) well before they were proclaimed by Sorel. They were implicit in union structure, practices, and pronouncements and explicit in the writings of a remarkable elite of union activists, mostly self-taught intellectuals: Émile Pouget, Victor Griffuelhes, Georges Yvetot, Paul Delesalle, Pierre Monatte, Alphonse Merrheim, Leon Jouhaux, and earliest and foremost, Fernand Pelloutier.

Pelloutier was a personal link with the theorists outside the unions, for he was a friend of Sorel’s. As it is easier for outsiders to read books than to study union documents and practices, it is through Sorel and his followers that most people know syndicalism. Werner Sombart’s convenient explanation that Sorel had produced the theory of syndicalism has survived all the disclaimers of Sorel and his followers.

These disclaimers did not arise from false modesty. The syndicalist ideas had already made their way in the unions at a time when Sorel was still a revisionist socialist. In 1898 he first published the articles collected as “L’avenir socialiste des syndi-cats.” Here he found his model not in the syndicalist French unions, about which he was silent, but in the strong, disciplined, reformist English trade unions. Here he praised cooperatives but not the general strike.

Even after Sorel embraced syndicalism, he had little influence on the course of labor thinking or behavior in France. He had two important followers in his syndicalist phase. Edouard Berth elaborated on his anti-intellectual themes and followed his master’s course from syndicalism to royalist, anti-Semitic nationalism. Hubert Lagar-delle was a more coherent expositor of syndicalism than Sorel, more realistic and constructive, less bitterly and unjustly polemic. Unlike Sorel, he had close contacts with the union movement, and he was active in the Socialist party. He gave to the labor movement that devoted service which Sorel and Berth preached as the intellectual’s function. As editor of the Mouvement socialists from 1899 to 1914, he made it a distinguished international review that published many of the most interesting discussions of practice and theory by syndicalist activists and theoreticians. Lagardelle refused to follow the more original Sorel into the royalist camp and regarded as “monstrous” his mentor’s attempt to couple syndicalism with reactionary monarchism.

The unionists did not share Sorel’s pessimistic view of the world; they were optimistic in that expectation of an imminent social revolution which was part of the radical mood of the generation before 1914. The unionists denounced socialist intellectuals for their party politics, but they did not make a cult of anti-intellectualism and antirational-ism, as did Sorel and Berth.

The unionists often seemed to urge direct action for its own sake, but they did not urge violence for its own sake, as did the intellectuals. The general strike was for the intellectuals a great social myth. But the union people saw it as a real tactic for pragmatic purposes.

Even their modest gains in organizational strength were enough to close the “heroic period” of the syndicalist unions, and on the eve of World War i they were moving toward reformism. When in 1914 their members marched off to war without a protest from the Confederation, the foundations of syndicalist dogma and practice collapsed. Syndicalist union leaders cooperated with the French government and the Socialist party. Their share in wartime economic direction and in factory representation gave them a new appreciation of the role of the state, of the problems of political power, and of the complexities of the economy. But for another generation after the war most of them continued to pay verbal tribute to old syndicalist slogans, to the confusion of their followers. The communists entered into this heritage of extremist temperament. A handful of faithful “pure syndicalists” guarded a small, independent source of revolutionary ardor, if no longer of expectation.

Italian syndicalism . The ideas and organizational forms of the French greatly influenced the Italians. Sorel was far more popular and influential in Italy than in his own land. But the syndicalists never gained a preponderant position in the General Confederation of Labor (CGL), and they withdrew from it to found their own, much smaller union central., Italian syndicalists took a more flexible view of political action than the French, working for a time in the Socialist party and even sitting in the parliament. Arturo (not to be confused with Antonio) Labriola, the most interesting of the theorists, argued that it would be idiotic to ignore the fact of parliamentary politics. Even a revolutionary party had to make use of existing institutions as a condition of its existence.

Labriola analyzed some of the phenomena which in Italy held back class consciousness and created networks of common interests between proletarians and bourgeois—notably the great number of social groups between the extremes of class identification and the traditional, exclusivist regional feelings. Sorel never attempted this sort of realistic analysis.

The syndicalist vision of workers’ control seemed for a moment almost a reality in the wave of Italian factory occupations in 1920. But these futile occupations were not the work of the syndicalists, whose unions had by then declined to impotence.

Spanish syndicalism . In Spain the syndicalist current merged with the much older anarchist stream to create the strongest and the most militant syndicalist union center to function anywhere, one which endured after syndicalism everywhere else had spent its force. The National Confederation of Labor (CNT) had its chief center in Barcelona, where it drew strength from Catalan resistance to Castilian centralization in the state and in the Socialist party and from resentment with management intransigence and weak governmental protection of workers.

The CNT stressed spontaneity, local autonomy, ’libertarian communism,” freedom from bureaucracy in structure, and hostility to state, employers, and church in action, far more than even the French or Italian unions. It carried class warfare and local and regional general strikes to a heroic pitch but almost always to defeat, in intermittent, bloody uprisings. In its third and last decade of effective existence, after 1927, the CNT was controlled by the secret organization of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), which reaffirmed a violent intransigence against those CNT leaders who advanced more realistic, moderate methods than their own.

In 1936 the CNT militia helped save the republican regime from the first shocks of the Franco revolt. To save the republic, CNT leaders joined first the Catalan government and then the national government of Largo Caballero, showing the world the novelty of anarchosyndicalist cabinet ministers. In Catalonia, when the Civil War began, the CNT took over and ran many factories in the most significant attempt ever made to put syndicalist ideas into practice. These activities were stifled when, in May 1937, government and communist armed forces reduced the CNT center of power in Barcelona. Franco’s victory confirmed the tragic fate of a movement which had discovered the reality of politics too late for its own or the republic’s survival.

Syndicalism in other countries . From Spain and Portugal, Italy and France, syndicalism had spread to Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, and other Latin American countries. For the first two decades of this century it constituted the major current in the new labor movements of a number of these nations. In almost all of them the syndicalists were reduced to impotence by the early 1920s, and the downfall of Spanish anarchosyndicalism ended what influence they had retained.

Syndicalist ideas played a role in the labor movements of a number of other countries. They were a major current in the Dutch unions just before and after the turn of the century, represented by the interesting, theoretically oriented leader, Christian Cornelissen. In the disciplined German union movement, syndicalism was a significant though minor current that drew the support of Robert Michels.

In the United States an indigenous syndicalism appeared in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). This most colorful and radical of American labor organizations began in 1905 with a recognition of the possibility of independent working-class politics but by 1908 came under the control of the opponents of political action. The “Wobblies,” as IWW members were called, were activists to the core, rough in language, and little interested in theory. Proposing the revolutionary expropriation of the propertied classes and the abolition of the wage system, they advanced a crude theory of the social organization of the future by industrial unions.

The IWW fought for better working conditions for some of the most exploited workers in America —the unskilled, migratory, and often homeless workers of the Pacific slope and the foreign factory workers in Eastern cities—but it generally refused the discipline of collective bargaining. It defied all authority—of employers and government, of public opinion (often molded by employer propaganda), and of the mainstream of organized labor.

Taking seriously its rejection of all wars but the class war, the IWW paid dearly for its opposition to American involvement in World War I. The leadership was decimated, and the organization was shattered by government prosecutions and harassment and by government-abetted vigilante actions. A hopelessly impractical organizational structure, internal dissensions, and the competing, new appeal of communism to revolutionaries completed the downfall in the 1920s of an organization which had carried antiauthoritarianism and worker exclusivism to fatal extremes.

Norway was the one northern European country in which a group strongly influenced by syndicalism was for a time dominant in a mass labor movement. That group was the “Trade Union Opposition of 1911,” led by the talented Martin Tranmael, who had worked in the United States and had been impressed by the IWW. Although it favored sabotage and other forms of “direct action,” the “Opposition of 1911” worked effectively with the left wing of the Labor party. When it won out in the Norwegian labor movement, it did not attempt revolutionary political or industrial action. Tranmael himself, elected general secretary of the Labor party in 1918, was the most influential leader in the Norwegian labor movement between the wars.

In Sweden a small syndicalist labor federation, which split from the main trade-union movement in 1910, remained active into the 1960s. Although its behavior differed little from the practice of other unions then, its publication was an outlet for interesting dissident comments on Swedish society. The federation loyally maintained the vestiges of the once significant anarchosyndicalist International Workingmen’s Association, founded in 1922.

Russia seemed to be in the process of a partially syndicalist upheaval after the February Revolution. Workers seized factories and operated them through factory committees, soviets, and trade unions; Lenin for a time found it politic to endorse “workers’ control.” Abroad these developments helped to foster the idea of a “workers’ revolution” in Russia and to win for communism the support of old-time syndicalists. After several years of feverish debate on workers’ control, the Bolsheviks managed to put a stop to what Lenin called “syndicalist twaddle.” With the defeat of the Workers’ Opposition group, branded as “anarchosyndicalist” by its opponents, the state asserted its full control over the economy, and the party its control over the unions. Defeated in Russia, the idea of workers’ control was to reappear in the Yugoslav works councils and the revived works council movement in many countries after World War n.

In the labor unrest which shook Britain in the years just before 1914, the word syndicalism was much bruited about. There was something of the syndicalist spirit in the heightened class consciousness and militant strike action of certain groups of industrial workers, notably the miners. The militancy reappeared after the first few years of war in the protest movements led by local shop stewards and in demands for workers’ control. Syndicalist concepts influenced the British guild socialists, many of them middle class, who stressed the role of unions or “national guilds” of producers as administrative agencies of the cooperative commonwealth. But the guild socialists’ temper was rational and moderate, and they left to a democratized, pluralistic government an essential role in their complex utopia.

Evaluation . Syndicalism claims our attention less as a constructive political and economic doctrine than as a trenchant ethical criticism of institutions and as a libertarian way of facing authority. It related widespread labor exploitation and unrest to a romantic notion of the autonomy and the primacy of the working class. But its demands for workers’ control were based on excessively optimistic concepts of workers’ psychology, and its vision of economic organization was rudimentary and quixotic.

Its critique of the modern state and of liberal democracy and its stress upon functional association helped to stimulate pluralist speculation. But, although the syndicalists were not altogether economic determinists, they carried the overemphasis on economic factors, which prevailed in the late nineteenth century, in many ways even further than did the Marxists. Their stress upon the “apolitical” character of their own action arose from an oversimplified view of societal processes which obscured the political nature both of their goal—total revolutionary change—and of their method—the general strike.

The syndicalist assertion of the need for spontaneity within the workers’ organization threw new light on the comparative moderation, smugness, and bureaucratization already setting in among the socialist parties and reformist trade unions. The syndicalist language of extremism flashed warnings of the strange interplay of the rational and the irrational and of the latent sources of violence in social behavior—among intellectuals as well as among manual workers.

The refusal of most syndicalists to recognize the reality and legitimacy of political action left many of them in France and Italy unable to distinguish between democratic politics and the claims of a totalitarian party and the authoritarian state. Other, far more brutal movements put into practice the much bruited about. There was something of the violence that the syndicalists had advocated or condoned and their rather mystical view of elite leadership but sacrificed all of the syndicalists’ ethical concerns and their generous solidarity.

Val R. Lorwin

[See also ANARCHISM;Labor Unions. Other relevant material will be found in Marxism;Socialism; and in the biography of Sorel

WORKS BY SYNDICALISTS

Griffuelhes, Victor 1908 L’action syndicalists. Paris: Rivierè.

Jouhaux, Leon 1920 Le syndicalisme et la C.G.T. Paris: La Sirène.

Labriola, Arturo; Michels, Robert et al. 1908 Syndicalisme & socialisms. Paris: Rivierè.

Lagardelle, Hubert 1911 Le socialisms ouvrier. Paris: Giard et Briére.

Peirats, JosÉ 1952-1955 La C.N.T. en la revolución española. 3 vols. Buenos, Aires: Ediciones C.N.T.

Pelloutier, Fernand (1902)1946 Histoire des bourses du travail. Paris: Costes. → Published posthumously with a preface by Georges Sorel.

Sorel, Georges (1898) 1921 L’avenir socialiste des syndicats. Pages 77-133 in Georges Sorel, Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat. 2d ed. Paris: Rivierè.

Sorel, Georges (1908) 1950 Reflections on Violence. Translated by T. E. Hulme and J. Roth, with an introduction by Edward Shils. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. → First published in French. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier.

WORKS ABOUT SYNDICALISM

Brenan, Gerald (1943) 1950 The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Brissenden, Paul F. (1917)1957 The I.W.W.: A Study of American Syndicalism. 2d ed. New York: Russell.

Cole, G. D. H. (1913) 1919 The World of Labour: A Discussion of the Present and Future of Trade unionism. 4th ed. London: Bell.

Cole, G. D. H. 1953-1960 A History of Socialist Thought. 5 vols. New York: St. Martins; London: Macmillan. → Volume 1: Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850, 1953. Volume 2: Marxism and Anarchism 1850-1890, 1954. Volume 3: The Second International 1889-1914, 2 parts, 1956. Volume 4: Communism and Social Democracy 1914-1931, 2 parts, 1958. Volume 5: Socialism and Fascism 1931-1939, 1960.

DollÉans, Édouard (1939) 1946 Histoire du mouve-ment ouvrier. Volume 2: 1871-1936. Paris: Colin.

Georges, Bernard; and Tintant, Denise 1962 Leon Jouhaux: Cinquante ans de syndicalisme. Volume 1: Des origines á 1921. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Goetz-Girey, Robert 1948 La pensée syndicale fran-caise: Militants et théoriciens. Paris: Colin.

Leroy, MÁxime 1913 La coutume ouvriére. 2 vols. Paris: Giard et Briére.

Lohwin, Lewis L. (1912) 1914 Syndicalism in France. 2d rev. ed. New York: Longmans; London: King. → First published as The Labor Movement in France.

Lorwin, Val R. 1954 The French Labor Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Maithon, Jean 1951 Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (1880-1914). Paris: Société Universitaire d’Éditions et de Librairie.

Michels, Robert 1926 Storia critica del movimento socialista itaiiano dagii inizi fino al 1911. Florence: La Voce.

Wiardi Beckman, Herman B. 1931 Het syndicalisme in Frankrijk. Amsterdam: Querido.

syndicalism , political and economic doctrine that advocates control of the means and processes of production by organized bodies of workers. Like anarchists, syndicalists believe that any form of state is an instrument of oppression and that the state should be abolished. Viewing the trade union as the essential unit of production, they believe that it should be the basic organizational unit of society. To achieve their aims, syndicalists advocate direct industrial action, e.g., the general strike , sabotage , slowdowns, and other means of disrupting the existing system of production. They eschew political action as both corruptive and self-defeating. The writings of Pierre Joseph Proudhon , with his attacks on property, and of Georges Sorel , who espoused violence, have influenced syndicalist doctrine. Syndicalism, like anarchism , has flourished largely in Latin countries, especially in France, where trade unionism was for years strongly influenced by syndicalist programs. Syndicalism began a steady decline after World War I as a result of competition from Communist unions, government suppression, and internal splits between the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists and moderate reformers. In the United States the chief organization of the syndicalist type was the Industrial Workers of the World , which flourished early in the 20th cent. but was virtually extinguished after World War I.

Bibliography: See F. F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France (1970).

SYNDICALISM

SYNDICALISM, or revolutionary industrial unionism, originated in France but has been identified in the United States with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905. The IWW sought strong, centralized unions, while French syndicalists preferred smaller unions. Both opposed action through existing governments.

Syndicalists sought to establish a producers' cooperative commonwealth, with socially owned industries managed and operated by syndicats, or labor unions. Emphasizing class struggle, they advocated direct action through sabotage and general strikes. Opponents, criticizing the movement for militant actions, opposing political government, and condoning violence, secured antisyndicalist laws in several states. The syndicalist movement waned after World War I when many former adherents joined Communist, Trotskyite, or other Socialist groups.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kimeldorf, Howard. Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Gordon S.Watkins/c. w.

See alsoCommunist Party, United States of America ; Industrial Workers of the World ; Labor .

syndicalism, a movement looking to the use of trade union power to achieve the restructuring of society along socialist lines. Both Larkin and Connolly were influenced by French and American syndicalist ideas. A similar belief in industrial action as a direct route to the achievement of social revolution may be detected in some at least of the soviets set up during and after the Anglo‐Irish War. The subsequent history of Irish labour politics, however, suggests that these were never more than minority tendencies in a movement most of whose members saw the assertion of trade union rights primarily as a means of preserving or improving wages and conditions within the existing industrial order.

syn·di·cal·ism / ˈsindəkəˌlizəm/ • n. hist. a movement for transferring the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution to workers' unions. Influenced by Proudhon and by the French social philosopher Georges Sorel (1847–1922), syndicalism developed in French labor unions during the late 19th century and was at its most vigorous between 1900 and 1914, particularly in France, Italy, Spain, and the U.S. DERIVATIVES: syn·di·cal·ist n. & adj.

syndicalism A labour movement originating in France and influenced by anarchism which believed in the inevitability of class warfare and in direct action by the workers themselves. Thus, rather than socialist parties, the central agents for the workers were held to be the syndicats, the trade unions, whose ultimate weapon was the general strike. Syndicalism was very influential in France in the first decades of this century, as well as in Spain (until the end of the Republic) and Italy, where many of its adherents became attracted by Fascism.

syndicalism A political movement or ideology which promotes workers' control through the medium of the workplace. It was particularly strong in France, Italy, and Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but was extinguished in the 1930s.

syndicalism Early 20th-century form of socialism originating in France, but also influential in Spain and Italy. It proposed public ownership of the means of production by small worker groups and called for the elimination of central government.