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Title: Workers Societies Author: Eugène Varlin Date: 11th March 1870 Language: en Topics: syndicalism, workers Source: Retrieved on 24th April 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=1080 Notes: Introduction by Iain McKay. Originally published in La Marseillaise.
It is a standard cliché of Marxist attacks on anarchism to contrast
“individualistic” anarchism with “collectivist” syndicalism. The former
are backward looking, reactionary and beyond the pale while the latter
are almost Marxist, and so worthy of faint praise. Another, also wrong,
cliché has wider acceptance, namely that syndicalism arose in France
during the 1890s in response to the failure of “propaganda of the deed.”
It is a standard cliché of Marxist attacks on anarchism to contrast
“individualistic” anarchism with “collectivist” syndicalism. The former
are backward looking, reactionary and beyond the pale while the latter
are almost Marxist, and so worthy of faint praise. Another, also wrong,
cliché has wider acceptance, namely that syndicalism arose in France
during the 1890s in response to the failure of “propaganda of the deed.”
Yet rather than being two different ideas or movements, anarchism has
always had its syndicalist elements. Proudhon argued for workers’
associations to replace wage-labour, rejecting political action in
favour of workers self-organisation and self-liberation on the economic
terrain. However, he was a reformist and rejected strikes as a means of
change, arguing that economic power was too skewed against workers to be
effect. Co-operatives not unions, were his means of social
transformation.
Proudhon’s works were eagerly by workers across Europe and adapted to
their needs. In 1864 French and British trade unionists – not Marx –
created the International Workers Association and at its national
congresses the practice and theory of the workers movement were
discussed and developed. As well as extending the socialisation and
association of property from industry to land, the idea that the
workers’ unions would both fight capitalism and be the framework to
replace it was raised and embraced.
The Belgium section were firm advocates of this idea, as shown by their
report to the International’s Congress in 1868. Frenchman Jean Louis
Pindy expressed it the Resolution on Resistance Societies at its 1869
Congress. Bakunin championed it, arguing that for workers there was “but
a single path, that of emancipation through practical action” which “has
only one meaning. It means workers’ solidarity in their struggle against
the bosses. It means trades-unions, organisation, and the federation of
resistance funds.” This would create “an earnest international
organisation of workers associations from all countries capable of
replacing this departing political world of States and bourgeoisie.”
So by 1870, the International had two tendencies: syndicalist and
social-democratic. A fact Marx was aware of, when, unlike his latter-day
followers, he admitted that Bakunin argued that the “working class must
not occupy itself with politics. They must only organise themselves by
trades-unions… by means of the International they will supplant the
place of all existing states.”
Yet Marx underestimated the influence of these ideas. For the
syndicalist wing was the majority, as proved when he tried to impose
social-democracy onto the International after the Paris Commune.
However, expelling Bakunin did not nullify his all-too accurate
prediction that sending socialists to Parliament would see the
“worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into an
atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas… cease to be workers and, becoming
Statesmen, they will become bourgeois… For men do not make their
situations; on the contrary, men are made by them.”
This is more than reclaiming a much distorted history. We see echoes of
the same debates today. A rejuvenated Labour Party membership is in
conflict with its thoroughly bourgeois MPs. Worse, the hopes and
energies of these new activists are being wasted, constructive socialism
is being ignored, waiting for a general election the Tories are unlikely
to call so a few enlightened politicians may save capitalism from
itself.
We end with an all-too relevant article by Eugène Varlin (1839–1871), a
leading French Internationalist. Son of a poor peasant family, he was a
bookbinder by profession and organised mutual aid societies alongside
unions and strikes. Unlike many French Internationalists, he was firm
advocate of equality of the sexes. An associate of Bakunin, he was
active in the Paris Commune before being tortured and shot after his
capture during its final week. Sadly, few writings by this pioneering
syndicalist activist are available in English which hopefully this a new
and complete translation corrects to some degree (a much edited version
appeared in The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the Left [1972]).
---
While our statesmen try to substitute a parliamentary and liberal
government (Orleans style) for the regime of personal government, and so
hope to divert the advancing Revolution threatening their privileges; we
socialists, who by experience know that all the old political forms are
powerless to satisfy popular demands, must, while taking advantage of
the mistakes and blunders of our adversaries, hasten the hour of
deliverance. We must actively work to prepare the organisational
elements of the future society in order to make the work of social
transformation that is imposed on the Revolution easier and more
certain.
So far political states have been, so to speak, only the continuation of
the regime of conquest, which presided over the establishment of
authority and the enslavement of the masses: Republican Governments, as
in Switzerland or the United State; constitutional and oligarchic, as in
Belgium or England; autocratic, as in Russia, or personal, as in France
since the Empire; it is always authority charged with keeping working
people in respect of the law established for the benefit of a few. This
authority may be more or less rigid, more or less arbitrary, but this
does not change the basis of economic relations, and workers are always
at the mercy of the holders of capital.
To be permanent, the next revolution must not stop at a simple change of
government etiquette, and some superficial reforms; it must completely
liberate the worker from all forms of exploitation, capitalist or
political, and establish justice in social relations.
Society can no longer leave the disposition of public wealth to the
arbitrariness of the privileges of birth or success: the product of
collective labour, it can be used only for the benefit of the
collectivity; all members of human society have an equal right to the
benefits derived from them.
But this social wealth can ensure the well-being of humanity only on the
condition of being put into operation by labour.
If, then, the industrial or commercial capitalist should no longer
arbitrarily dispose of collective capital, who then will make them
productive for the benefit of all? Who, in a word, will organise the
production and distribution of products?
Unless you want to reduce everything to a centralising and authoritarian
state, which would appoint the directors of mills, factories,
distribution outlets, whose directors would in turn appoint deputy
directors, supervisors, foremen, etc. and thus arrive at a top-down
hierarchical organisation of labour, in which the worker would be
nothing but an unconscious cog, without freedom or initiative; unless we
do, we are forced to admit that the workers themselves must have the
free disposal of their instruments of labour, under the condition of
exchanging their products at cost price, so that there is reciprocity of
service between the different specialities of workers.
It is to this last idea that most workers who in recent years have been
energetically pursuing the emancipation of their class tend to rally. It
is this which has prevailed in the various congresses of the
International Workers Association.
But it should not be believed that such an organisation can be easily
improvised in every respect! For this a few intelligent, devoted,
energetic men are not enough! Above all, it is necessity that workers,
thus called to work together freely and on the basis of equality, should
already be prepared for social life.
One of the greatest difficulties that the founders of all kinds of
[workers] societies tried for the last few years have encountered is the
spirit of individualism, excessively developed in most men and even
amongst those who understand that only by association can workers
improve living standards, and hope for their liberation.
Well! Workers societies, in whatever form they exist at present, already
have this immense advantage of accustoming men to social life, and so
preparing them for a wider social organisation. They accustom them not
only to reach an agreement and understanding, but also to take care of
their affairs, to organise, to discuss, to think about their material
and moral interests, and always from the collective point of view since
their personal, individual, direct interest disappears as soon as they
become part of a collectivity.
Together with the advantages that each of these societies can provide to
its members, there is, by this fact, the development of sociability,
enough to make them recommended to all citizens who aspire to the advent
of socialism.
But trade societies (resistance, solidarity, union) deserve out
encouragement and sympathy, for they are the natural elements of the
social construction of the future; it is they who can easily become
producer associations; it is they who will be able to operate social
tools and organise production.
Many of their members are often unconscious at first of the role that
these societies are called upon to play in the future; at first they
think of only resisting the exploitation of capital or of obtaining some
superficial improvements; but soon the hard efforts they have to make to
achieve insufficient palliatives or even, sometimes, negative results,
easily lead them to seek radical reforms that can free them from
capitalist oppression. Then they study social questions and get
represented at workers congresses.
The congress of the international association held in Basle last
September recommended that all workers should group themselves into
resistance societies by trade in order to secure the present and prepare
for the future. I propose to make a study of the various forms of
corporative workers’ societies, and their progressive development, in
order to make known to workers who are not yet associated the present
advantages which they can gather from their organisation, and to make
them benefit from the experience bitterly acquired in these past years
by other trade associations.
It is necessary that the new groups get in step with the old ones, for
it is only through solidarity, widely understood, by world-wide union of
workers of all professions and all countries that we will surely arrive
at the suppression of privileges and equality for all.