The Basics of Anarcho-Syndicalism

It was in the 19th century that a political ideology developed which asserted that human problems are solved by the proper organization of social production. This ideology advocated the replacement of capitalism in which private property rights allow entrepreneurs to exercise exclusive control over social production, its resources, and its product, with equal control over social production for all producers in free association. Socialism would end the oppression characteristic of class divided societies in which one class is forced to go to work for the other in virtue of the former lacking control over labor, means of production, and the product of social labor, in order to survive. In the minds of most socialists, overcoming class society in favor of the free association of producers meant overcoming the division of society into rulers and ruled and thus the very need for centralized political power and coercion.

Since the death of the first international working men’s association in the latter half of the 19th century the socialist movement underwent two major transformations. Under the influence of Marx and Engels, Peter Kropotkin, and Mikhail Bakunin, most socialists became communists. Communists are socialists who think that socialism must take the form of a new mode of production in which, instead of separate producers buying and selling, the means and product of production are the collective property of humanity and production is rationally planned by free associations of producers. The socialist and now communist movement was then divided into two major factions: Marxist and Anarchist.

Marxism premised itself on a certain interpretation of the work of philosopher and social scientist Karl Marx popularized in part by his closest colleague Friederich Engels. In excluding the Anarchists Marxism transformed itself into social democracy in which socialist parties established unions, politicians, publications, study groups, and various cultural functions with the aim of educating the working class in scientific socialism, representing the movement in government, and eventually seizing control of the state and bringing the economy under its control. This strategy was based on a reading of Marx’s work which had it that capitalism, in concentrating industry into centralized and monopolistic firms, was laying the basis for a rationally planned socialist economy which could be run by the state once the market was abolished. The state could then be used to suppress the forces that opposed the proletarian revolution and thus eliminate class divisions and social antagonism resulting in a communist society. In Russia the social democratic movement produced the Bolsheviks led by Lenin who seized power on the back of a mass worker and peasant uprising that toppled Tsarism and the liberal provisional government that replaced it. As a result of this success and the Bolsheviks establishing the third explicitly communist workers international the Marxist movement again morphed from social democracy into Leninism. Leninism as developed by the early Bolsheviks and then the Stalin led CPSU and under which communist parties took power over a third of the world was a political program of an armed seizure of state power by a communist party in the name of the workers and peasants, the nationalization and planning of the economy by the state apparatus, and industrialization to produce the abundance required for communism.

The Anarchists, on the other hand, thought it foolhardy to seize centralized political power in the name of socialism, or communism. They pointed out that the goal of socialism and communism is to replace relationships of domination with relationships of free association, but institutions of hierarchy, bureaucracy, and coercion like the state serve to entrench and reproduce domination. Accordingly they said that if the Marxists got their way and a state under the control of the socialist party were established, like all states it would empower a ruling and exploiting class instead of empowering the oppressed masses to overcome class society. Alternatively, the Anarchists called for a mass movement (typically a revolutionary one) to replace all institutions of the state including the police, military, courts, and political parties with a self-organized network of regional assemblies for taking over the organization of society and reshaping it into a classless confederation of free producers.

After a period of “propaganda by the deed” in which Anarchists carried out terrorist attacks in a failed bid to inspire mass revolt, they reconnected with Anarchism’s base in mass worker and peasant movements. They took revolutionary syndicalism, the strategy of making the socialist revolution through labor unions taking control over production and applied the Anarchist approach of self-organized regional assemblies (which they called federation) to the organization of these unions. Keeping the unions open to all workers they didn’t require those who joined the unions to sign up to a socialist, or Anarchist ideology, but organized themselves into a “militant minority” within the unions to push them over time in a more radical direction. As the unions formed a revolutionary labor movement they would train the working masses to run society for themselves by having them run the revolutionary movement for themselves. Once the movement reaches critical mass the unions can take over social production and replace the state in becoming the federal structures of the classless society.

This synthesis of Anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism came to be known as Anarcho-Syndicalism. As the Anarchist version of communism influenced by Kropotkin and Bakunin became the dominant vision of socialism in the Anarchist movement (known as Anarchist Communism, or Libertarian Communism) Anarcho-Syndicalism became the dominant strategic orientation of the Anarchist movement. The Anarcho-Syndicalist movement came to encompass millions of workers and peasants in an international movement that stretched from the global north to the global south. In the early 1920s after the Bolsheviks created the Third International, in rejection of the corresponding communist union international, various organizations created the Anarcho-Syndicalist International Workers’ Association.

The height of Anarcho-Syndicalism came in 1936-39 when the millions strong Anarcho-Syndicalist CNT-FAI union in Spain overthrew a right-wing coup attempt and established worker-peasant control of the economically important regions of the country. There was remarkable success in collectivizing agriculture by setting up voluntary peasant communes as well as having urban workers take over factories and run them themselves. The failure of the movement was when leading Anarchists ignored the decision of the rest of the movement to implement the Libertarian Communist program of federation that was adopted at Zaragoza and opted to accept an invitation to join the Soviet backed Spanish Republic because of their anxieties over losing the civil war with the far right. Ironically the decision ensured their defeat as the Stalin backed Republic was interested in constructing a liberal nation-state and thereby shoving the social revolution aside. Despite criticism from within Spanish Anarchism (chief among them the Friends of Durruti Group) and the International Workers’ Association the CNT was a member of, joining the Republic turned the Anarchist leaders into their own worst enemies. They became “Anarchist Ministers” in the Republican government whose job was to help it police the social revolution. The government went out of its way to limit worker control in the interests of capital. This demoralized the working class who were fighting the far-right paving the way for the defeat of the Republic by the right and the establishment of the Franco authoritarian conservative dictatorship. CNT, now underground, concluded that the decision to join the government was mistaken.

Despite the defeat Anarcho-Syndicalism has remained the mainstay of the Anarchist movement. There is no other Anarchist international which has survived as long as the International Workers’ Association. It is under its banner that the Anarchist movement has expanded into Asia in the last 5 years. The oldest Anarchist organization in the United States, Workers’ Solidarity Alliance, is a friend of the IWA, and thus an Anarcho-Syndicalist organization in its own right.

The Anarchist prediction of state socialism’s failure held up in the cases of social democracy and Leninism as well as in the case of Anarchists joining the Spanish Republic. The construction of centralized bureaucratic national political parties by the social democrats transformed these parties into mechanisms for control of the working class by the capitalist state. By participating in the dolling out of benefits to the working class in exchange for class unity under the banner of the nation the social democratic movement helped integrate the European working class into the capitalist world-economy and the nationalist ideology of its states. This explains why social democracy collapsed when instead of standing up for the international working class against World War 1, the major parties voted in favor of war credits.

When Leninist parties seized state power, they found that holding on to it required suppressing any further revolutionary energy as well as militarily and economically mobilizing the workers and peasants so that the communist ruled state could compete in the world-market and geopolitical order with the capitalist states. “Existing socialism” in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and Cuba was just another mechanism for the subordination of labor to capital. Workers and peasants came under the management of either a ruling class consisting of communist state functionaries or some combination of this “nomenklatura” class and private capitalists either foreign, or domestic. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the replacement of the nomenklatura ruling class with a ruling class of private oligarchs who pilfered the Soviet state’s vast industrial edifice.

As we saw, the decision of the Anarchists to join the Republic in the Spanish Civil War led to the crushing of the social revolution and the victory of the far-right dictatorship. In each case the power of the state only served to subordinate labor to capital and prevent the overcoming of class society in favor of communism. In a world of man-made climate change, economic collapse, discrimination along many axes, and drastic economic inequality, the history of Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in relation to the rest of the socialist movement makes a persuasive case. This goes especially for those who accept the moral case for socialism outlined above.

Sources
The Cambridge History of Socialism, Vol.1, Van Der Linden
Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, Newman
Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, Rocker
Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and Socialist Experiences in The Modern World-System, Wallerstein
The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), Kautsky
Lenin and Bolshevism, Lih
The Hard-Earned Integration of The East in the World-Economic System, Silviu Brucan
Socialist States in The Capitalist World-Economy, Chase-Dunn
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Wallerstein
Anarcho-Syndicalism In The 20th Century, Damier 
Antisystemic Movements, Wallerstein, Hopkins, Arrighi