Anarcho-Syndicalism

Also known as revolutionary syndicalism (often abbreviated simply as syndicalism), anarchosyndicalism is a revolutionary strategy for workers' liberation from class oppression that aims to create a socialized economy based on workers' self-management of production. Most anarcho-syndicalists also advocate the application of self-management to decision making in all aspects of society. Syndicalism is Left-libertarian in the sense that it interprets liberty as self-determination or control over one's life, and believes that freedom for the working class requires the elimination of working-class subordination to capitalist or state bosses.

The word syndicalism derives from the word for unionism in languages derived from Latin (syndicalisme in French, e.g.). At the beginning of the 20th century, the labor movement in countries such as France, Spain, and Italy had been strongly influenced by the libertarian Left, with a strong emphasis on mass direct action by workers, and a revolutionary conception of unionism.

The principles of the first International Workers Association (IWA), formed in 1864, included the slogan “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.” Anarchosyndicalists take this principle very seriously. The syndicalist political tendency can trace its lineage back to the anti-statist, libertarian socialist tendencies in the first IWA, grouped around Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin.

Syndicalists oppose a strategy for achieving a post-capitalist economy through electoral or parliamentary politics, or through the building up of a political party to gain control of a state, with the aim of implementing its program top-down throughout the state. This is because syndicalists believe that the hierarchical nature of the state, and subordination of workers to such a hierarchical apparatus, would imply continued subordination and exploitation of the working class.

The strategy proposed by syndicalists involves the development of large-scale worker solidarity and mass actions that develop a sense of power and class consciousness; a sense of “us versus them.” The massive national general strike in Russia in 1905 encouraged the development of this strategic vision for social change in the European labor movement in the period between 1906 and World War I. Syndicalists believe that a revolution in which the working class would gain control of society presupposes a process of the development of class consciousness, the capacity for self-organization, and self-confidence within the working class.

Syndicalists believe that direct management of industry by workers and the absence of a hierarchical state standing above society are essential for the emancipation of the working class. Most anarchosyndicalists advocate ownership of the means of production by the entire society, with a system of grassroots social planning, not a system of privately owned collectives competing in a market economy.

Anarcho-syndicalists advocate the development of mass organizations of workers that would be directly controlled by them, without subordination to a hierarchical apparatus of paid officials. Anarcho-syndicalists believe that if the working class is to create a set of new institutions through which the people control their own lives and through which workers run the industries where they work, the process of self-management—collective control by the rank and file—must first emerge in the self-management of struggles in the existing society. In the syndicalist view, the self-managed mass organizations prefigure self-management of social production by workers and the direct self-governance of society by the mass of the people.

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