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Title: Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice
Author: Rudolf Rocker
Date: 1938
Language: en
Topics: class struggle, syndicalist, anarcho-syndicalism
Source: Retrieved on April 26, 2009 from http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/rocker/
Notes: Originally published in 1938 by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd

Rudolf Rocker

Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice

Chapter 1. Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes

Anarchism versus economic monopoly and state power; Forerunners of

modern Anarchism; William Godwin and his work on Political Justice; P.J.

Proudhon and his ideas of political and economic decentralisation; Max

Stirner’s work, The Ego and Its Own; M. Bakunin the Collectivist and

founder of the Anarchist movement; P. Kropotkin the exponent of

Anarchist Communism and the philosophy of Mutual Aid; Anarchism and

revolution; Anarchism a synthesis of Socialism and Liberalism; Anarchism

versus economic materialism and Dictatorship; Anarchism and the state;

Anarchism a tendency of history; Freedom and culture.

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times,

whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all

political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of

the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free

association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour,

which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary

requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in

view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social

union.

In place of the present state organisation with their lifeless machinery

of political and bureaucratic institutions Anarchists desire a

federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by

their common economic and social interest and shall arrange their

affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.

Anyone who studies at all profoundly the economic and social development

of the present social system will easily recognise that these objectives

do not spring from the Utopian ideas of a few imaginative innovators,

but that they are the logical outcome of a thorough examination of the

present-day social maladjustments, which with every new phase of the

existing social conditions manifest themselves more plainly and more

unwholesomely. Modern monopoly, capitalism and the totalitarian state

are merely the last terms in a development which could culminate in no

other results.

The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a

mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged

minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the

people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction.

and befriended it in every way. It sacrificed the general interest of

human society to the private interest of individuals, and thus

systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People

forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should only be a means

to ensure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him

the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is

everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic

despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any

political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are

fed from the same source.

The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political

dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the outgrowth of the same

political objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to

try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the

mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the

lifeless machine of the political apparatus. Our modern social system

has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes

internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up

into hostile nations; and both classes and nations confront one another

with open antagonism and by their ceaseless warfare keep the communal

social life in continual convulsions. The late World War and its

terrible after effects, which are themselves only the results of the

present struggles for economic and political power, are only the logical

consequences of this unendurable condition, which will inevitably lead

us to a universal catastrophe if social development does not take a new

course soon enough. The mere fact that most states are obliged today to

spend from fifty to seventy percent of their annual income for so-called

national defence and the liquidation of old war debts is proof of the

untenability of the present status, and should make clear to everybody

that the alleged protection which the state affords the individual is

certainly purchased too dearly.

The ever growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which

supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave

is putting ever greater obstacles in the way of the solidaric

co-operation of human beings and crushing out every possibility of new

development. A system which in every act of its life sacrifices the

welfare of large sections of the people, yes, of whole nations, to the

selfish lust for power and the economic interests of small minorities

must of necessity dissolve all social ties and lead to a constant war of

all against all. This system has been merely the pacemaker for the great

intellectual and social reaction which finds its expression today in

modern Fascism, far surpassing the obsession for power of the absolute

monarchy of past centuries and seeking to bring every sphere of human

activity under the control of the state. Just as for the various systems

of religious theology, God is everything and man nothing, so for this

modern political theology, the state is everything and the man nothing.

And just as behind the “will of God” there always lay hidden the will of

privileged minorities, so today there hides behind the “will of the

state” only the selfish interest of those who feel called to interpret

this will in their own sense and to force it upon the people.

Anarchist ideas are to be found in every period of known history,

although there still remains a good deal of work for historical work in

this field. We encounter them in the Chinese sage, Lao-Tse (The Course

and The Right Way) and in the later Greek philosophers, the Hedonists

and Cynics and other advocates of so-called “natural right,” and in

particular in Zeno who, at the opposite pole from Plato, founded the

Stoic school. They found expression in the teaching of the Gnostic,

Karpocrates, in Alexandria, and had an unmistakable influence on certain

Christian sects of the Middle Ages in France, Germany and Holland,

almost all of which fell victims to the most savage persecutions. In the

history of the Bohemian reformation they found a powerful champion in

Peter Chelcicky, who in his work, “The Net of Faith,” passed the same

judgement on the church and the state as Tolstoy did later. Among the

great humanists there was Rabelais, who in his description of the happy

Abbey of ThélÚme (Gargantua) presented a picture of life freed from all

authoritarian restraints. Of other pioneers of libertarian thinking we

will mention here only La Boétie, Sylvan Maréchal, and, above all,

Diderot, in whose voluminous writings one finds thickly strewn the

utterances of a truly great mind which had rid itself of every

authoritarian prejudice.

Meanwhile, it was reserved for more recent history to give clear form to

the anarchist perception of life and to connect it with the immediate

processes of social evolution. This was done for the first time in

William Godwin’s splendidly conceived work, Concerning Political Justice

and its Influence upon General Virtue and Happiness, London, 1793.

Godwin’s work was, we might say, the ripened fruit of that long

evolution of the concepts of political and social radicalism in England

which proceeds in a continuous line from George Buchanan through Richard

Hooker, Gerard Winstanley, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Robert Wallace

and John Bellers to Jeremy Bentham, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price and

Thomas Paine.

Godwin recognised very clearly that the cause of social evils is to be

sought, not in the form of the state, but in its very existence. Just as

the state presents only a caricature of a genuine society, so also it

makes of human beings who are held under its eternal guardianship merely

caricatures of their real selves by constantly compelling them to

repress their natural inclinations and holding them to things that are

repugnant to their inner impulses. Only in this way is it possible to

mould human beings to the established form of good subjects. A normal

human being who was not interfered with in his natural development would

of himself shape the environment that suits his inborn demand for peace

and freedom.

But Godwin also recognised that human beings can only live together

naturally and freely when the proper economic conditions for this are

given, and when the individual is no longer subject to exploitation by

another, a consideration which the representatives of mere political

radicalism almost completely overlooked. Hence they were later compelled

to make consistently greater concessions to that power of the state

which they had wished to restrict to a minimum. Godwin’s idea of a

stateless society assumed the social ownership of all natural and social

wealth, and the carrying on of economic life by the free co-operation of

the producers; in this sense he was really the founder of the later

communist Anarchism.

Godwin’s work had a very strong influence on advanced circles of the

English workers and the more enlightened sections of the liberal

intelligentsia. Most important of all, he contributed to give to the

young socialist movement in England, which found its maturest exponents

in Robert Owen, John Gray and William Thompson, that unmistakable

libertarian character which it had for a long time, and which it never

assumed in Germany and many other countries.

But a far greater influence on the development of Anarchist theory was

that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the most intellectually gifted

and certainly the most many-sided writer of whom modern socialism can

boast. Proudhon was completely rooted in the intellectual and social

life of his period, and these inspired his attitude upon every question

he dealt with. Therefore, he is not to be judged, as he has been by even

by many of his later followers, by his special practical proposals,

which were born of the needs of the hour. Amongst the numerous socialist

thinkers of his time he was the one who understood most profoundly the

cause of social maladjustment, and possessed, besides, the greatest

breadth of vision. He was the outspoken opponent of all systems, and saw

in social evolution the eternal urge to new and higher forms of

intellectual and social life, and it was his conviction that this

evolution could not be bound by any abstract general formulas.

Proudhon opposed the influence of the Jacobin tradition, which dominated

the thinking of the French democrats and of most of the Socialists of

that period with the same determination as the interference of the

central state and economic policy in the natural processes of social

advance. To rid society of these two cancerous growths was for him the

great task of the nineteenth-century revolution. Proudhon was no

communist. He condemned property as merely the privilege of

exploitation, but he recognised the ownership of the instruments of

production by all, made effective by industrial groups bound to one

another by free contract, so long as this right was not made to serve

the exploitation of others and as long as the full product of his

individual labour was assured to every human being. This organisation

based on reciprocity (mutualité) guarantees the enjoyment of equal

rights by each in exchange for equal services. The average working time

required for the completion of any product becomes the measure of its

value and is the basis of mutual exchange. In this way capital is

deprived of its usurial power and is completely bound up with the

performance of work. By being made available to all it ceases to be an

instrument for exploitation.

Such a form of economy makes an political coercive apparatus

superfluous. Society becomes a league of free communities which arrange

their affairs according to need, by themselves or in association with

others, and in which man’s freedom finds in the freedom of others not

its limitation, but its security and confirmation. “The freer, the more

independent and enterprising the individual is in a society, the better

for the society.” This organisation of Federalism in which Proudhon saw

the immediate future sets no definite limitations on further

possibilities of development, and offers the widest scope to every

individual and social activity. Starting out from this point of view of

the federation, Proudhon combated likewise the aspirations for political

activity of the awakening nationalism of the time, and in particular

that nationalism which found in Mazzini, Garibaldi, Lelewel, and others,

such strong advocates. In this respect also he saw more clearly than

most of his contemporaries. Proudhon exerted a strong influence on the

development of socialism, which made itself felt especially in the Latin

countries. But the so-called individual Anarchism, which found able

exponents in America in such men as Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl

Andrews, William B. Greene, Lysander Spooner, Francis D. Tandy, and most

notably in Benjamin R. Tucker ran in similar lines, though none of its

representatives could approach Proudhon’s breadth of view.

Anarchism found a unique expression in Max Stirner’s (Johann Kaspar

Schmidt’s) book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own),

which, it is true, quickly passed into oblivion and had no influence at

all on the Anarchist movement as such — though it was to experience an

unexpected resurrection fifty years later. Stirner’s book is

pre-eminently a philosophical work which traces man’s dependence on

so-called higher powers through all its devious ways, and is not timid

about drawing inferences from the knowledge gained by the survey. It is

the book of a conscious and deliberate insurgent, which reveals no

reverence for any authority, however exalted, and therefore impels

powerfully to independent thinking.

Anarchism found a virile champion of vigorous revolutionary energy in

Michael Bakunin, who took his stand upon the teachings of Proudhon, but

extended them on the economic side when he, along with the collectivist

wing of the First International, came out for the collective ownership

of the land and of all other means of production, and wished to restrict

the right of private ownership to the full product of individual labour.

Bakunin also was an opponent of Communism, which in his time had a

thoroughly authoritarian character, like that which it has again assumed

today in Bolshevism. In one of his four speeches at the Congress of the

League of Peace and Freedom in Bern (1868), he said: “I am not a

Communist because Communism unites all forces of society in the state

and becomes absorbed in it; because it inevitably leads to the

concentration of all property in the hands of the state, while I seek

the abolition of the state — the complete elimination of the principle

of authority and governmental guardianship, which under the pretence of

making men moral and civilising them, has up to now always enslaved,

oppressed, exploited and ruined them.”

Bakunin was a determined revolutionary and did no believe in an amicable

adjustment of the existing class conflict. He recognised that the ruling

classes blindly and stubbornly opposed even the slightest social reform,

and accordingly saw the only salvation in an international social

revolution, which should abolish all the ecclestical, political,

military, bureaucratic and judicial institutions of the existing social

system and introduce in their stead a federation of free workers’

associations to provide for the requirements of daily life. Since he,

like so many of his contemporaries, believed in the close proximity of

the revolution, he directed all his vast energy to combine all the

genuinely revolutionary and libertarian elements within and without the

International to safeguard the coming revolution against any

dictatorship or retrogression to the old conditions. Thus he became in a

very special sense the creator of the modern Anarchist movement.

Anarchism found a valuable advocate in Peter Kropotkin, who set himself

the task of making the achievements of modern natural science available

for the development of the sociological concepts of Anarchism. In his

ingenious book Mutual Aid — a Factor of Evolution, he entered the lists

against so-called Social Darwinism, whose exponents tried to prove the

inevitability of the existing social conditions from the Darwinian

theory of the struggle for existence by raising the struggle of the

strong against the weak to the status of an iron law for all natural

processes, to which even man is subject. In reality this conception was

strongly influenced by the Malthusian doctrine that life’s table is not

spread for all, and that the unneeded will just have to reconcile

themselves to this fact.

Kropotkin showed that this conception of nature as a field of

unrestricted warfare is only a caricature of real life, and that along

with the brutal struggle for existence, which is fought out with tooth

and claw, there exists in nature another principle which is expressed in

the social combination of the weaker species and the maintenance of

races by the evolution of social instincts and mutual aid.

In this sense man is not the creator of society, but society is the

creator of man, for he inherited from the that preceded him the social

instinct which alone enabled him to maintain himself in his first

environment against the physical superiority of other species, and to

make sure of an undreamed-of height of development. This second tendency

in the struggle for existence is far superior to the first, as is shown

by the steady retrogression of those species which have no social life

and are dependent merely upon their physical strength. This view, which

today is meeting with consistently wider acceptance in the natural

sciences and in social research, opened wholly new vistas to speculation

concerning human evolution.

The fact is that even under the worst despotism most of man’s personal

relations with his fellows are arranged by free agreement and solidaric

co-operations, without which social life would not be possible at all.

If this were not the case even the strongest coercive arrangements of

the state would not be able to maintain the social order for a single

day. However, these natural forms of behaviour, which arise from man’s

inmost nature, are today constantly interfered with and crippled by the

effects of economic exploitation and governmental guardianship, which

represents in human society the brutal form of the struggle for

existence, which has to be overcome by the other form of mutual aid and

free co-operation. The consciousness of personal responsibility and that

other precious good that has come down to man by inheritance from remote

antiquity: that capacity for sympathy with others in which all social

ethics, all ideas of social justice, have their origin, develop best in

freedom.

Like Bakunin, Kropotkin too was a revolutionary. But he, like ÉlisĂ©e

Reclus and others, saw in revolution only a special phase of the

evolutionary process, which appears when new social aspirations are so

restricted in their natural development by authority that they have to

shatter the old shell by violence before they can function as new

factors in human life. In contrast to Proudhon and Bakunin, Kropotkin

advocated community ownership, not only of the means of production, but

of the products of labour as well, as it was his opinion that in the

present status of technique no exact measure of the value of individual

labour is possible, but that, on the other hand, by a rational direction

of our modern methods of labour it will be possible to assure

comparative abundance to every human being. Communist Anarchism, which

before him had already been urged by Joseph Dejacque, ÉlisĂ©e Reclus,

Errico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, and others, and which is advocated by

the great majority of Anarchists today, found in him one of its most

brilliant exponents.

Mention must also be made here of Leo Tolstoy, who took from primitive

Christianity and, on the basis of the ethical principles laid down in

the gospels, arrived at the idea of a society without rulership.[1]

Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political

and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of development

of a free humanity. In this sense Mutualism, Collectivism and Communism

are not to be regarded as closed systems permitting no further

development, but merely as economic assumptions as to the means of

safeguarding a free community. There will even probably be in society of

the future different forms of economic co-operation operating side by

side, since any social progress must be associated with that free

experiment and practical testing out for which in a society of free

communities there will be afforded every opportunity.

The same holds true for the various methods of Anarchism. Most

Anarchists of our time are convinced that a social transformation of

society cannot be brought about without violent revolutionary

convulsions. The violence of these convulsions, of course, depends upon

the strength of the resistance which the ruling classes will be able to

oppose to the realisation of the new ideas. The wider the circles which

are inspired with the idea of a reorganisation of society in the spirit

of freedom and Socialism, the easier will be the birth pains of the

coming social revolution.

In modern anarchism we have the confluence of the two great currents

which during and since the French Revolution have found such

characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: Socialism

and Liberalism. Modern Socialism developed when profound observers in

social life came to see more and more clearly that political

constitutions and changes in the form of government could never get to

the bottom of that great problem that we call “the social question.” Its

supporters recognised that a social equalising of human beings , despite

the loveliest of theoretical assumptions, is not possible so long as

people are separated into classes on the basis of their owning or not

owning property, classes whose mere existence excludes in advance any

thought of a genuine community. And so there developed the recognition

that only by elimination of economic monopolies and common ownership of

the means of production, in a word, by a complete transformation of all

economic conditions and social institutions associated with them, does a

condition of social justice become thinkable, a status in which society

shall become a genuine community, and human labour shall no longer serve

the ends of exploitation, but shall serve to assure abundance to

everyone. But as soon as Socialism began to assemble its forces and

became a movement, there at once came to light certain differences of

opinion due to the influence of the social environment in different

countries. It is a fact that every political concept from theocracy to

CĂŠsarism and dictatorship have affected certain factions in the

Socialist movement. Meanwhile, there have been two great currents in

political thought which have been of decisive significance for the

development of Socialistic ideals: Liberalism, which powerfully

stimulated advanced minds in the Anglo-Saxon countries and Spain, in

particular, and Democracy in the later sense to which Rousseau gave

expression in his Social Contract, and which found its most influential

representatives in French Jacobinism. While liberation in its social

theorising started off from the individual and wished to limit the

state’s activities to a minimum, Democracy took its stand on an abstract

collective concept, Rousseau’s “general will,” which it sought to fix in

the national state.

Liberalism and Democracy were preeminently political concepts, and since

the great majority of the original adherents of both maintained the

right of ownership in the old sense, these had to renounce them both

when economic development took a course which could not be practically

reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less

with those of Liberalism. Democracy, with its motto of “all citizens

equal before the law,” and Liberalism with its “right of man over his

own person,” both shipwrecked on the realities of the capitalist

economic form. So long as millions of human beings in every country had

to sell their labour-power to a small minority of owners, and to sink

into the most wretched misery if they could find no buyers, the

so-called “equality before the law” remains merely a pious fraud, since

the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the

social wealth. But in the same way there can also be no talk of a “right

over one’s own person,” for that right ends when one is compelled to

submit to the economic dictation of another if he does not want to

starve.

Anarchism has in common with Liberalism the idea that the happiness and

prosperity of the individual must be the standard of all social matters.

And, in common with the great representatives of Liberal thought, it has

also the idea of limiting the functions of government to a minimum. Its

supporters have followed this thought to its ultimate logical

consequences, and wish to eliminate every institution of political power

from the life of society. When Jefferson clothes the basic concept of

Liberalism in the words: “that government is best which governs least,”

then Anarchists say with Thoreau: “That government is best which governs

not at all.”

In common with the founders of socialism, Anarchists demand the

abolition of all economic monopolies and the common ownership of the

soil and all other means of production, the use of which must be

available for all without distinction; for personal and social freedom

is conceivable only on the basis of equal economic advantages for

everybody. Within the socialist movement itself the Anarchists represent

the viewpoint that the war against capitalism must be at the same time a

war against all institutions of political power, for in history economic

exploitation has always gone hand in hand with political and social

oppression. The exploitation of man by man and the dominion of man over

man are inseparable, and each is the condition of the other.

As long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of

human beings face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable

to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges. When

this condition of social injustice vanishes to give place to a higher

order of things, which shall recognise no special rights and shall have

as its basic assumption the community of social interests, government

over men must yield the field to the to the administration of economic

and social affairs, or to speak with Saint-Simon: “The time will come

when the art of governing man will disappear. A new art will take its

place, the art of administering things.”

And his disposes of the theory maintained by Marx and his followers that

the state, in the form of a proletarian dictatorship, is a necessary

transitional stage to a classless society, in which the state after the

elimination of all class conflicts and then of classes themselves, will

dissolve itself and vanish from the canvas. This concept, which

completely mistakes the real nature of the state and the significance in

history of the factor of political power, is only the logical outcome of

so-called economic materialism, which sees in all the phenomena of

history merely the inevitable effects of the methods of production of

the time. Under the influence of this theory people came to regard the

different forms of the state and all other social institutions as a

“juridical and political superstructure” on the “economic edifice” of

society, and thought that they had found in that theory the key to every

historical process. In reality every section of history affords us

thousands of examples of the way in which the economic development of a

country has been set back for centuries and forced into prescribed forms

by particular struggles for political power.

Before the rise of the ecclesiastical monarchy Spain was industrially

the most advanced country in Europe and held the first place in economic

production in almost every field. But a century after the triumph of the

Christian monarchy most of its industries had disappeared. What was left

of then survived only in the most wretched conditions. In most

industries they had reverted to the most primitive methods of

production. Agriculture collapsed, canals and waterways fell into ruin,

and vast stretches of country were transformed into deserts. Down to

this day Spain has never recovered from that setback. The aspirations of

a particular caste for political power had laid economic development

fallow for centuries.

Princely absolutism in Europe, with its silly “economic ordinances” and

“industrial legislation,” which punished severely any deviation from the

prescribed methods of production and permitted no new inventions,

blocked industrial progress in European countries for centuries, and

prevented its natural development. And were there not considerations of

political power which after the World War constantly balked any escape

from the universal economic crisis and delivered the future of whole

countries to politics-playing generals and political adventurers? Who

will assert that modern Fascism was an inevitable result of economic

development?

In Russia, however, where the so-called “proletarian dictatorship” has

ripened into reality, the aspirations of a particular party for

political power have prevented any truly socialistic reconstruction of

economy and have forced the country into the slavery of a grinding

state-capitalism. The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in which naive

souls wish to see merely a passing, but inevitable, transition stage to

real Socialism, has today grown into a frightful despotism, which lags

behind the tyranny of the Fascist states in nothing.

The assertion that the state must continue to exist until class

conflicts, and classes with them, disappear, sounds, in the light of all

historical experience, almost like a bad joke. Every type of political

power presupposes some particular form of human slavery, for the

maintenance of which it is called into being. Just as outwardly, that

is, in relation to other states, the state has to create certain

artificial antagonisms in order to justify its existence, so also

internally the cleavage of society into castes, ranks, and classes is an

essential condition of its continuance. The state is capable only of

protecting old privileges and creating new ones; in that its whole

significance is exhausted.

A new state which has been brought into existence by a social revolution

can put an end to the privileges of the old ruling classes, but it can

do this only by immediately setting up a new privileged class, which it

will require for the maintenance of its rulership. The development of

the Bolshevist bureaucracy in Russia under the alleged dictatorship of

the proletariat — which has never been anything but the dictatorship of

a small clique over the proletariat and the entire Russian people — is

merely a new instance of an old historical experience which has repeated

itself uncountable times. This new ruling class, which today is rapidly

growing into a new aristocracy, is set apart from the great masses of

Russian peasants and workers just as clearly as are the privileged

castes and classes in other countries from the mass of their peoples.

It could perhaps be objected that the new Russian commisar-ocracy cannot

be put up on the same footing as the powerful financial and industrial

oligarchies of capitalist states. But the objection will not hold. It is

not the size or the extent of the privilege that matters, but its

immediate effect on the daily life of the average human being. An

American working man who, under moderately decent working conditions,

earns enough to feed, clothe and house himself humanely and has enough

left over to provide himself with some cultured enjoyments, feels the

possession of millions by the Mellons and Morgans less than a man who

earns hardly enough to satisfy his most urgent necessities [and who]

feels the privileges of a little caste of bureaucrats, even if these are

not millionaires. People who can scarcely get enough dry bread to

satisfy their hunger, who live in squalid rooms which they are often

obliged to share with strangers, and who, on top of this, are compelled

to work under an intensified speed-up system which raises their

productive capacity to the utmost, can but feel the privileges of an

upper class which lacks nothing, much more keenly than their class

comrades in capitalist countries. And this situation becomes still more

unbearable when a despotic state denies to the lower classes the right

to complain of existing conditions, so that any protest is made at the

risk of their lives.

But even a far greater degree of economic equality than exists in Russia

would still be no guarantee against political and social oppression. It

is just this which Marxism and all the other schools of authoritarian

Socialism have never understood. Even in prison, in the cloister or in

the barracks one finds a fairly high degree of economic equality, as all

the inmates are provided with the same dwelling, the same food, the same

uniform and the same tasks. The ancient Inca state in Peru and the

Jesuit state in Paraguay had brought equal economic provision for every

inhabitant to a fixed system, but in spite of this the vilest despotism

prevailed there, and the human being was merely the automaton of a

higher will, on whose decisions he had not the slightest influence. It

was not without reason that Proudhon saw in a “Socialism” without

freedom the worst from of slavery. The urge for social justice can only

develop properly and be effective when it grows out of man’s sense of

personal freedom and is based on that. In other words Socialism will be

free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this lies the

genuine and profound justification for the existence of Anarchism.

Institutions serve the same purpose in the life of society as bodily

organs do in plants or animals: they are the organs of the social body.

Organs do not rise arbitrarily, but because of the definite necessities

of the physical and social environment. The eye of a deep-sea fish is

formed very differently from that of an animal that lives on land,

because it has to satisfy quite different demands. Changed conditions of

life produce changed organs, but the organ always performs the function

it was evolved to perform, or a related one. And it gradually disappears

or becomes rudimentary as soon as its function is no longer necessary to

the organism. But an organ never takes on a function that does not

accord with its proper purpose.

The same is true of social institutions. They, too, do not rise

arbitrarily, but are called into being by special social needs to serve

definite purposes. In this way this modern state was evolved after

monopoly economy, and the class divisions associated with them had begun

to make themselves more and more conspicuous in the framework of the old

social order. The newly arise possessing classes had need of a political

instrument of power to maintain their economic and social privileges

over the masses of their own people, and to impose them from without on

other groups of human beings. Thus arose the appropriate social

conditions for the evolution of the modern state, as the organ of

political power of privileged castes and classes for the forcible

subjugation and oppression of the non-possessing classes. This task is

the political lifework of the state, the essential reason for it

existing at all. And to this task it has always remained faithful, must

remain faithful, for it cannot escape from its skin.

Its external forms have altered in the course of its historical

development, but its functions have always remained the same. They have

even been constantly broadened in just the measure in which its

supporters have succeeded in making further fields of social activity

subservient to their needs. Whether the state be monarchy or republic,

whether historically it is anchored to autocracy or in a national

constitution, its function remains always the same. And just as the

functions of the bodily organs of plants and animals cannot be

arbitrarily altered, so that, for example, one cannot at will hear with

his eyes and see with his ears, so also one cannot at pleasure transform

an organ of social oppression into an instrument for the liberation of

the oppressed. The state can only be what it is: the defender of mass

exploitation and social privileges, the creator of privileged classes

and castes and of new monopolies. Who fails to recognise this function

of the state does not understand the real nature of the present social

order at all, and is incapable of pointing out to humanity new outlooks

for its social evolution.

Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a

perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle

it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any

absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in

an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living

conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression,

and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set

any fixed goal. The worst crime of any type of state is just that it

always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite

forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider

outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished. The

stronger its supporters feel themselves, the more completely they

succeed in bringing every field of social life into their service, the

more crippling is their influence on the operation of all creative

cultural forces, the more unwholesomely does it affect the intellectual

and social development of any particular epoch.

The so-called totalitarian state, which now rests like a mountain-weight

upon whole peoples and tries to mould every expression of their

intellectual and social life to the lifeless pattern set by a political

providence, suppresses with ruthless and brutal force every effort at

alteration of the existing conditions. The totalitarian state is a dire

omen for our time, and shows with frightful clarity whither such a

return to the barbarity of past centuries must lead. It is the triumph

of the political machine over mind, the rationalising of human thought,

feeling and behaviour according to the established rules of the

officials. It is consequently the end of all intellectual culture.

Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas,

institutions and social forms. It is therefore not a fixed,

self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historic

development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual

guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for

the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in

life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it

tends constantly to become broader and affect wider circles in more

manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract

philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every

human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and

talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social

account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by

ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and

harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the

measure of the society in which it has grown.

This is the reason why all great culture periods in history have been

periods of political weakness. And that is quite natural, for political

systems are always set upon the mechanising and not upon the organic

development of social forces. State and culture are in the depth of

their being irreconcilable opposites. Nietzsche recognised this very

clearly when he wrote:

“No one can finally spend more than he has. That holds good for

individuals; it holds good for peoples. If one spends oneself for power,

for high politics, for husbandry, for commerce, parliamentarism,

military interests — if one gives away that amount of reason,

earnestness, will, self-mastery, which constitutes one’s real self for

one thing, he will not have it for the other. Culture and the state —

let no one be deceived about this — are antagonists: the ‘Culture State’

is merely a modern idea. The one lives on the other, the one prospers at

the expense of the other. All great periods of culture are periods of

political decline. Whatever is great in a cultured sense is non

political, is even anti-political.”

A powerful state mechanism is the greatest hindrance to any higher

cultural development. Where the state has been attacked by internal

decay, where the influence of political power on the creative forces of

society is reduced to a minimum, there culture thrives best, for

political rulership always strives for uniformity and tends to subject

every aspect of social life to its guardianship. And in this it finds

itself in inescapable contradiction to the creative aspirations of

cultural development, which is always on the quest after new forms and

fields of social activity, and for which freedom of expression, the

manysidedness and the kaleidoscopic changes of things, are just as

vitally necessary as rigid forms, dead rules and the forcible

suppression of every manifestation of social life which are in

contradiction to it.

Every culture, if its natural development is not too much affected by

political restrictions, experiences a perpetual renewal of the formative

urge, and out of that comes an ever growing diversity of creative

activity. Every successful piece of work stirs the desire for greater

perfection and deeper inspiration; each new form becomes the herald of

new possibilities of development. But the state creates no culture, as

is so often thoughtlessly asserted; it only tries to keep things as they

are, safely anchored to stereotypes. That has been the reason for all

revolutions in history.

Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every

manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its

intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute

force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its

supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were

originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly

striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a

machine himself and loses all human feeling.

It was from the understanding of this that modern Anarchism was born and

now draws its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things

and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling

men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new

shaping of their lives. Dreary compulsion has at its command only

lifeless drill, which smothers any vital initiative at its birth and can

bring forth only subjects, not free men. Freedom is the very essence of

life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development,

the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The

liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and

political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the

world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the

evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.

Chapter 2. The Proletariat and the Beginning of the Modern Labour

Movement

The era of machine production and modern Capitalism; The rise of the

Proletariat; The first labour unions and their struggle for existence;

Luddism; Trade Unionism pure and simple; Political radicalism and

labour; The Chartist movement; Socialism and the labour movement.

Modern Socialism was at first only a profounder understanding of the

interconnections in social life, an attempt to solve the contradictions

implicit in the present social order and to give a new content to man’s

relations with his social environment. Its influence was, therefore, for

a time confined to a little circle of intellectuals, who for the most

part came from the privileged classes. Inspired with a profound and

noble sympathy for the intellectual and material needs of great masses

they sought a way out of the labyrinth of social antagonisms in order to

open to mankind new outlooks for its future development. For them

Socialism was a cultural question; therefore, they made their appeal

directly and chiefly to the reason and ethical sense of their

contemporaries, hoping to find them receptive to the new insights.

But ideas do not make a movement; they are themselves merely the product

of concrete situations, the intellectual precipitate of particular

conditions of life. Movements arise only from the immediate and

practical necessities of social life and are never the result of purely

abstract ideas. But they acquire their irresistible force and their

inner certainty of victory only when they are vitalised by a great idea,

which gives them life and intellectual content. It is only when viewed

thus that the relation of the labour movement to Socialism can be

correctly understood and intelligently valued. Socialism is not the

creator of the modern labour movement; rather, it grew out of it. the

movement developed as the logical result of a social reconstruction out

of which the present capitalist world was born. Its immediate purpose

was the struggle for daily bread, the conscious resistance to a trend of

things was constantly becoming more ruinous for the workers.

The modern labour movement owes its existence to the great industrial

revolution which was going on in England in the latter half of the

eighteenth century, and which has since then overflowed into all five

continents. After the system of so-called “manufactures” had at an

earlier period opened the door for a certain degree of division of

labour — a division which was, however, concerned more with the methods

of applying human labour than with actual technical processes — the

great inventions of the subsequent period brought about a complete

transformation of all the apparatus of work; the machine conquered the

individual tool and created totally new forms for productive processes

in general. the invention of the mechanical loom revolutionised the

whole textile industry, the most important industry in England, and led

to a complete new set of methods in the processing and dyeing of wool

and cotton.

Through the utilisation of steam power, made available by the

epoch-making invention of James Watt, machine production was freed from

its dependence on the old motive forces of wind, water and horse power,

and the way first properly opened for modern mass production. The use of

steam made possible the operation of machines of different function in

the same rooms. Thus arose the modern factory, which in a few decades

had shoved the small shop to the brink of the abyss. This happened first

in the textile industry; the other branches of production followed at

short intervals. the utilisation of the power of steam and the invention

of cast steel led in a short time to a complete revolutionising of the

iron and coal industries and rapidly extended their influence to other

lines of work. The development of modern big plants had as a result the

fabulous growth of the industrial cities. Birmingham, which in 1801

boasted only 73,000 inhabitants, had in 1844 a population of 200,000.

Sheffield in the same period grew from 46,000 to 110,000. Other centres

of the new big industries grew in the same ratio.

The factories needed human fodder, and the increasingly impoverished

rural population met the demand by streaming into the cities. The

legislature helped, when, by the notorious Enclosure Acts, it robbed the

small farmers of the common lands and brought them to beggary. The

systematic theft of the commons had already begun under Queen Anne

(1702–1714), and by 1844 had taken in more than one third of the

tillable land of England and Wales. While in 1786 there had still

existed 250,000 independent landowners, in the course of only thirty

years their number had been reduced to 32,000.

The new machine production increased the so-called national wealth on an

undreamed-of scale. But this wealth was in the hands of a small

privileged minority and owed its origin to the unrestrained exploitation

of the working population, which by the rapid alteration of the economic

conditions of living was plunged into the most revolting misery. If one

reads the dismal descriptions of the situation of the workers of that

period as it is set down in the reports of the English factory

inspectors, of which Marx made such effective use in his Capital; or if

one picks up a book like Eugene Buret’s De la misùre des classes

labeurieuses en Angleterre et France, to which Frederick Engels was so

deeply indebted in his initial work, The Conditions of the Working

Classes in England; or any one of numerous works by contemporary English

authors, one gets a picture of that time which staggers the mind.

If Arthur Young, in his well-known account of his travels in France just

before the outbreak of the Great Revolution, could declare that a large

part of the French rural population stood almost on the level of beasts,

having lost every trace of humanity as a result of their horrible

poverty, the comparison could apply in large measure also to the

intellectual and material status of the great masses of the rising

industrial proletariat in the initial period of modern capitalism.

The enormous majority of the workers dwelt in miserable dirty holes

without even a glass window, and they had to spend from fourteen to

fifteen hours a day in the sweatshops of industry, innocent of either

hygienic equipment or provision for the protection of the lives and

health of the inmates. And this for a wage that was never enough to

satisfy even the most indispensable of needs. If at the end of the week

the worker had enough left to enable him to forget the hell he lived in

for a few hours by getting drunk on bad liquor, it was the most he could

achieve. The inevitable consequence of such a state of affairs was an

enormous increase in prostitution, drunkenness and crime. The utter

wretchedness of mankind dawns on one when he reads of the spiritual

degradation and moral depravity of those masses whom no one pitied.

The pitiful situation of the factory slaves was made still more

oppressive by the so-called truck system, under which the worker was

compelled to purchase his provisions and other articles of daily use in

the stores of the factory-owners, where often overpriced and unusable

goods were handed out to him. This went so far that the worker had

scarcely anything left of their hard-earned wages, and had to pay for

unexpected expenses, such as doctors, medicines, and the like with the

goods they had received from the factory owners, which they had, of

course, to turn in in such cases at a lower price than they had been

charged for them. And contemporary writers tell how mothers, in order to

provide burial for a dead child, would have to pay the undertaker and

the gravedigger in this way.

And this limitless exploitation of human labour-power was not confined

to men and women. The new methods of work had enabled the machine to be

served with just a few manual movements, which could be learned with no

great difficulty. This led to the destruction of the children of the

proletariat, who were put to work at the age of three or four years and

had to drag out their youth in the industrial prisons of the

entrepreneurs. The story of child labour, on which no restrictions of

any kind were imposed at first, is one of the darkest chapters in the

history of capitalism. It shows to what lengths of heartlessness a

Christian management would go, untroubled by ethical considerations, and

unthinkingly accustomed to unrestricted exploitation of the masses.

Prolonged labour under the unwholesome conditions of the factories at

last raised child mortality to the point where Richard Carlile could,

with perfect justice, speak of a “gruesome repetition of the slaughter

of the innocents at Bethlehem.” Not until then did parliament enact laws

which were for a long time evaded by the factory owners, or simply

broken.

The state lent its best assistance to the freeing of management from

restrictions burdensome on its lust for exploitation. It provided it

with cheap labour. For this purpose, for example, there was devised the

notorious Poor Law of 1834, which rouse such a storm of indignation, not

only from the English working class, but from everyone who still carried

a heart in his bosom. The old Poor Law, which had originated in 1601

under Queen Elizabeth, was an outcome of the suppression of the

monasteries in England. The monasteries had made a practise of expending

a third of their income on the maintenance of the poor. But the noble

proprietors to whom the greater part of the monastic holdings had fallen

had no thought of continuing to devote the required third to alms, so

the law imposed on the parishes the duty of caring for the poor and

finding some human means of subsistence for those whose existence had

been uprooted. the law saw in poverty a personal misfortune for which

the human being was not responsible, and conceded to him the right to

call upon society for aid when through no fault of his own he had fallen

into need and was no longer able to provide for himself. This natural

consideration gave the law a social character.

The new law, however, branded poverty as crime, and laid the

responsibility for personal misfortune upon alleged indolence. The new

law had been brought into existence under the fateful influence of the

Malthusian doctrine, whose misanthropic teachings had been hailed by the

possessing classes as a new revelation. Malthus, whose well-known work

on the population problem had been conceived as an answer to Godwin’s

Political Justice, had announced in blunt words that the poor man forced

his way into society as an uninvited guest, and could therefore lay no

claim to special rights or to the pity of his fellow men. Such a view

was, of course, grist to the mill of the industrious barons and gave the

required moral support to their unlimited lust for exploitation.

The new law took the provision for the maintenance of the poor out of

the hands of the parish authorities and put it under a central body

appointed by the state. Material support by money or provisions was for

the most part abolished and replaced by the workhouse, that notorious

and hated institution which in the popular speech was called the “poor

law Bastille.” He who, smitten by fate, was compelled to seek refuge in

the workhouse, surrendered his status as a human being, for those houses

were outright prisons, in which the individual was punished and

humiliated for his personal misfortune. In the workhouses an iron

discipline prevailed, which countered any opposition with strict

punishment. Everyone had a definite task to perform; anyone who was not

able to do it was deprived of food in punishment. The food was worse and

more inadequate than in actual prisons, and the treatment so harsh and

barbarous that children were often driven to suicide. Families were

separated and their members permitted to see one another only at stated

times and under the supervision of the officials. Every effort was

directed to making residence in this place of terror so unendurable that

only the utmost necessity would drive human beings to seek in it a last

refuge. For that was the real purpose of the new poor law. Machine

production had driven thousands out of their old means of living — in

the textile industries alone more than 80,000 hand weavers had been made

beggars by the modern big plants — and the new law saw to it that cheap

labour was at the command of management, and with it the possibility of

constantly forcing wages lower.

Under these horrible conditions a new social class was born, which had

no forerunners in history: the modern industrial proletariat. The small

craftsman of former times, who served principally the local demand,

enjoyed comparatively satisfactory living conditions, which were only

rarely disturbed by any considerable shock from without. He served his

apprenticeship, became a journeyman, and often, later, a master himself,

as the acquisition of the necessary tools of his trade was not dependent

on the possession of any great amount of capital, as it became in the

era of the machine. His work was worthy of a human being and still

offered that natural variety which incites to creative activity and

guarantees inner satisfaction to man.

Even the small home industrialist, who at the beginning of the

capitalist era was already disposing of the greater part of his product

to the rich lords of trade in the cities, was far from being a

proletarian in the present sense. Industry, the textile industry in

particular, had its centres in the rural districts, so that the small

craftsmen in most instances had at his disposal a tiny bit of land,

which made maintenance easier for him. And as the oncoming capitalism

was before the domination of the machine, still tied to the handicraft

stage of industry, its possibilities of expansion were for the time

limited, since the demand for the products of industry was as a rule

greater than supply, so that the worker was safeguarded against serious

economic crises.

However, all that was changed within a very few years after modern

machine production had began to play its part, as it was dependent in

advance on mass demand, and hence on the conquest of foreign markets.

Each new invention raised the capacity for production in ever increasing

measure and made industrial capital the undisputed master of capitalist

industry, dominating trade and finance. And since free competition,

which was held by theorists to be an iron economic law, put any planned

control of industrial production out of the question, at longer or

shorter periods there must occur periods when, owing to various causes,

the supply of industrial products outstripped the demand. This brought

on abrupt cessations of production, so-called crises, which were ruinous

to the proletarian population of the cities because they condemned the

workers to enforced inactivity and so deprived them of the means of

living. It is just this phenomenon of so-called “over production” which

is so indicative of the real nature of modern capitalism — this

condition in which, while factories and warehouses are crammed with

wares, the actual producers are languishing in bitterest misery. It is

this which reveals most plainly the horror of a system for which man is

nothing and dead possessions everything.

But the developing proletariat was completely exposed to the economic

fluctuations of this system, since its members had nothing to dispose of

except the labour of their hands. The natural human ties which existed

between the master-workman and his journeymen had no meaning for the

modern proletarian. He was merely the object of exploitation by a class

with which he no longer had any social relationship. For the factory

owner he existed merely as a “hand,” not any more as a human being. He

was, one might say, the chaff which the great industrial revolution of

that time had swept up in heaps in the cities, after he had lost all

social standing. Socially uprooted, he had become just a component of a

great mass of shipwrecked beings, who had all been smitten by the same

fate. The modern proletarian, he was the man of the machine, a machine

of flesh and blood who set the machine of steel in motion, to create

wealth for others, while the actual producer of this wealth must perish

in misery.

And dwelling close-packed with his comrades-in-misfortune in the great

centres of industry not only gave a particular character to his material

existence, it also gradually created for his thinking and feeling new

concepts which he had not originally known. Transplanted into a new

world of pounding machines and reeking chimneys, he at first merely felt

himself as a wheel or a cog in a mighty mechanism against which he as an

individual was helpless. He dared not even hope sooner or later to

escape from this condition, since to him, as the typical dispossessed

with no means of keeping alive except by the sale of his hands, every

way out was barred. And not he alone, his posterity was doomed as well

to the same fate. Bereft of every social tie, he was personally a mere

nothing in comparison with that enormous power which was using him as

the insensate tool of its selfish interests. In order to become

something once more and to effect some betterment of his lot, he would

have to act along with others of his kind and call a halt to the fate

that had smitten him. Such considerations had sooner or later to control

him if he did not wish simply to sink into the abyss; they led to the

first proletarian alliances, to the modern labour movement as a whole.

It was not the “agitator” who conjured this movement of the dispossessed

masses into life, as narrow-minded reactionaries and a rapacious

management dared to assert then, and still assert even to-day; it was

the conditions themselves which roused to life the movement and with it

its spokesmen. The combination of the workers was the only means at

their command for saving their lives and forcing more human conditions

under which to live. The first proposals of those bands of organised

wage-workers, which can be traced back to the first half of the

eighteenth century, went no further than the abolition of the most

crying evils of the capitalist system and some improvement of the

existing conditions of living.

Since 1350 there had existed in England a statute in accordance with

which apprenticeship, wages and hours were regulated by the state. The

alliances of the ancient craft corporations concerned themselves only

with questions relating to the production of commodities and the right

of disposal of them. But when, with incipient capitalism, and the spread

of “manufactures,” wages began to be pushed down further and further,

the first trade union organisations developed among the new class of

wage-workers to combat the tendency. But these efforts of the organised

workers at once encountered the unanimous resistance of the managers,

who besieged the government with petitions to uphold the ancient law and

suppress the “unlawful” organisations of the workers. And parliament

promptly responded to this demand by passing the so-called Combination

Acts of 1799–1800, which prohibited all combinations for the purpose of

raising wages or improving the existing conditions of work and imposed

severe penalties for violation.

Thus labour was given over unconditionally to exploitation by industrial

capital, and was faced with the alternatives of, either submitting to

the law and accepting without resistance all the consequences this

entailed, or breaking the law which had condemned them to outright

slavery. Confronted with such a choice the decision could not have been

too difficult for the more courageous section of the workers, as they

had scarcely more to lose anyway. They defied the law which mocked at

human dignity, and tried by every means to get around its provisions.

Since the trade union organisations, which were at first purely local in

character and confined to particular industries, had been deprived of

the legal right to exist, there sprang up all over the country so-called

mutual benefit associations or similar innocuous bodies, having as their

sole purpose the diverting of attention from the actual fighting

organisations of the proletarians.

For the inner core of these open associations was composed of the secret

conspiratory brotherhoods of the militant element among the workers,

smaller or larger groups of determined men, bound by an oath to

profoundest secrecy and mutual assistance. In the northern industrial

sections of England and in Scotland in particular there were a large

number of these secret organisations, which carried on the fight against

the employers and spurred the workers to resistance. It lay in the

nature of the affair that most of these struggles assumed an extremely

violent character, as is easy to understand when we consider the

miserable situation of the workers resulting from the disastrous

development of economic conditions and the pitiless prosecutions

following even the most modest attempt at improvement of the proletarian

standard of living. Any violation of the letter of the law was visited

with horrible punishment. Even after trade union organisations were

legally recognised in 1824, the prosecutions did not cease for a long

time. Conscienceless judges, openly and cynically protecting the class

interests of the employers, inflicted hundreds of years imprisonment on

insubordinate workers, and a considerable time elapsed before somewhat

endurable conditions prevailed.

In 1812, the secret labour organisations brought about a general strike

of the weavers in Glasgow. In the following years the whole of Northern

England was continually shaken by strikes and unrest among the workers

which finally culminated in the great strike of the spinners and weavers

in Lancastershire in 1818, in which the workers, in addition to the

usual demand for higher wages, called for reform of factory legislation

and humane regulation of the labour of women and children. The same year

brought the great strike of the Scottish miners, which was staged by

their secret organisations. In the same way the greater part of the

Scottish textile industry was periodically crippled by cessation of

labour. Often the strikes were accompanied by arson, destruction of

property and public disorder, so that the government was frequently

under the necessity of throwing the militia into the industrial

sections.

As later in every other country, so then in England, the resentment of

the workers was directed against the introduction of the machines, the

social importance of which they did not yet recognise, and which were

the immediate cause of their want. As early as 1769, a special law had

been enacted for the protection of the machines; but later, when the

application of steam power started a rapid advance in machine

production, and, in the textile industry in particular, thousands of

handworkers were robbed of the means of subsistence and plunged into

deepest misery, the destruction of machines became an everyday

occurrence. This was the period of so-called Luddism. In 1811, over two

hundred machine looms were destroyed in Nottingham. In Arnold, where the

introduction of stocking-weaving machinery had thrown hundreds of the

old stocking weavers on the payment, the workers stormed the factories

and demolished sixty of the new machines, each of which represented an

investment of forty pounds. Similar performances were repeated

everywhere.

What was the good of laws, so long as the need of the proletarian

population was steadily increasing, and management and government had

neither understanding nor sympathy for their situation! King Ludd[2]

made his royal entry in industrial circles everywhere, and even the

harshest laws were unable to put a stop to his work of destruction.

“Stop him who dares; stop him who can!” was the watchword of the secret

worker’s societies. The destruction of the machines ceased only when a

new understanding of the matter arose among themselves, and they came to

see that they could not halt technical progress by this means.

In 1812, parliament enacted a law imposing the death penalty for the

destruction of machines. It was on this occasion that Lord Byron

delivered his celebrated indictment of the government and ironically

demanded that, if the bloody law was to be put into force, the house

should provide that the jury should always consist of twelve

butchers.[3]

The officials put a price of forty thousand pounds in the heads of the

leaders of the underground movement. In January of 1813, eighteen

workers convicted of Luddism were hanged at York, and the deportation of

organised workers to the penal colonies in Australia increased at a

frightful rate. But the movement itself only grew the faster,

particularly when the great business crisis set in after the end of the

Napoleonic wars, and the discharged soldiers and sailors were added to

the armies of the unemployed. This situation was made still tenser by

several short harvests and the notorious corn laws of 1815, by which the

price of bread was raised artificially.

But although this first phase of the modern labour movement was in great

part a violent one, it still was not revolutionary in the proper sense.

For this it lacked that proper understanding of the actual causes of

economic and social processes which only Socialism could give it. Its

violent methods were merely the result of the brutal violence which was

inflicted on the workers themselves. But the methods of the young

movement were not directed against the capitalist system as such at all,

but merely at the abolishment of its most pernicious excrescences and at

the establishment of a decent human standard of living for the

proletariat. “A fair days’ pay for a fair day’s work” was the slogan of

these first unions, and when the employers resisted this modest and

certainly fully justified demand of the workers with the utmost

brutality, the latter were obliged to resort to whatever methods were

available to them under the existing conditions.

The great historical significance of the movement lay at first less in

its actual social objectives than in its simple existence. It gave a

footing once more to the uprooted masses which the pressure of economic

conditions had driven into the great industrial centres. It revived

their social sense. The class struggle against the exploiters awakened

the solidarity of the workers and gave new meaning to their lives. It

breathed new hope into the victims of an economy of unrestricted

exploitation and showed them a course which offered them the possibility

of safeguarding their lives and defending their outraged human dignity.

It strengthened the workers’ self-reliance and gave them confidence in

the future once more. It trained the workers in self-discipline and

organised resistance, and developed in them the consciousness of their

strength and their importance as a social factor in the life of their

time. This was the great moral service of that movement which was born

of the necessities of the situation, and which only he can undervalue

who is blind to social problems and without sympathy for the sufferings

of his fellow men.

When, then, in 1824, the laws against the combination of workers were

repealed, when the government and that section of the middle class

possessed of insight had at last become convinced that even the harshest

persecution would never break up the movement, the trade union

organisation of the workers spread over the entire country at an

undreamed-of rate. The earlier local groups combined into larger unions

and thus gave to the movement its real importance. Even the reactionary

turns in the government were no longer able to control this development.

They merely increased the number of victims among its adherents, but

they could not turn back the movement itself.

The new upsurge of political radicalism in England after the long French

wars naturally had a strong influence on the English working class also.

Men like Burdett, Henry Hunt, Major Cartwright, and above all William

Cobbett, whose paper the Political Register, after the price had been

reduced to twopence, attained a circulation of sixty thousand, were the

intellectual heads of the new reform movement. This was directing its

attacks chiefly against the corn laws, the Combination Acts of

1799–1800, and most of all, against the corrupt electoral system under

which even a large part of the middle class was excluded from the

franchise. Huge mass meetings in every section of the country, and

particularly in the northern industrial districts, set the populace in

motion. But the reactionary government under Castlereagh opposed any

reform, and was determined from the first to put an end to the reform

process by force. When in August, 1819, sixty thousand people poured

into the Petersfield in Manchester to formulate a mass petition to the

government, the assembly was dispersed by the militia, and four hundred

persons were wounded or killed.

To the stormy outburst in the country against the instigators of the

massacre of “Peterloo” the government replied with the notorious six gag

laws, by which the right of assembly and freedom of the press were in

effect suspended and the reformers made liable to the harshest

prosecution. By the so-called “Cato Street Conspiracy,” in which Arthur

Thistlewood and his associates planned the assassination of the members

of the British Cabinet, the government was given the wished for

opportunity to proceed with draconic severity against the reform

movement. On May 1, 1820, Thistlewood and four of his comrades paid for

their attempt on the gallows: the habeus corpus act was suspended for

two years, and England was delivered to a reactionary regime which

respected none of the rights of its citizens.

This put a stop to the movement for the time being. Then the July

revolution of 1830 in France led to a revival of the English reform

movement, which, this time, took on an entirely different character. The

fight for parliamentary reform flared up anew. But after the bourgeoisie

saw the greater part of their demands satisfied by the Reform Bill of

1832, a victory which they owned only to the energetic support of the

workers, they opposed all further attempts at reform, looking towards

universal suffrage, and left the workers to depart empty-handed. Not

only that: the new parliament enacted a number of reactionary laws by

which the workers’ right to organise was again seriously threatened. The

shining examples among these new laws were the notorious poor laws of

1834, to which reference has already been made. The workers felt that

they had been sold and betrayed, and this feeling led to a complete

break with the middle class.

The new reform movement from now on found vigorous expression in the

developing Chartism, which, it is true, was supported by a considerable

part of the petty-bourgeoisie, but in which the proletarian element

everywhere took and energetic part. Chartism, of course, had inscribed

on its banner the celebrated six points of the charter, which aimed at

radical parliamentary reform, but it had also appropriated all the

social demands of the workers and was trying by every form of direct

attack to transform these into realities. Thus J.R. Stevens, one of the

most influential leaders of the Chartist movement, declared before a

great mass meeting in Manchester that Chartism was not a political

question which would be settled by the introduction of universal

suffrage, but was instead to be regarded as a “bread and butter

question,” since the charter would mean good homes, abundant food, human

associations and short hours of labour for the workers. It was for this

reason that propaganda for the celebrated Ten-Hour Bill played such an

important part in the movement.

With the Chartist movement England had entered upon a revolutionary

period, and wide circles of both the bourgeoisie and the working class

were convinced that a civil war was close at hand. Huge mass meetings in

every section of the country testified to the rapid spread of the

movement, and numerous strikes and constant unrest in the cities gave it

a threatening aspect. The frightened employers organised numerous armed

leagues “for the protection of persons and property” in the industrial

centres. This led to the workers also beginning to arm. By a resolution

of the Chartist convention, which convened in London in March of 1839,

and was later moved to Birmingham, fifteen of their best orators were

sent out to every section of the country to make the people aquatinted

with the aims of the movement and to collect signatures to the Chartist

petition. Their meetings were attended by hundreds of thousands, and

showed what a response the movement had aroused among the masses of the

people.

Chartism had a large number of intelligent and self-sacrificing

spokesmen (such as William Lovell, Feargus O’Connor, Branterre O’Brien,

J.R. Stephens, Henry Hetherington, James Watson, Henry Vincent, John

Taylor, A.H. Beaumont, Ernest Jones, to mention only a few of the best

known.) It commanded, in addition, a fairly widespread press, of which

papers like The Poor Man’s Guardian and the Northern Star exerted the

greatest influence. Chartism was, as a matter of fact, not a movement

with definite aims, but rather a catchbasin for the social discontent of

the time, but it did effect a shaking-up, especially of the working

class, whom it made receptive to far-reaching social aims. Socialism

also forged vigorously ahead during the Chartist period, and the ideas

of William Thompson, John Gray, and especially of Robert Owen, began to

spread more widely among the English workers.

In France, Belgium and the Rhine country also, where industrial

capitalism first established itself on the Continent, it was everywhere

accompanied by the same phenomena and led, of necessity, to the initial

stages of a labour movement. And this movement manifested itself at

first in every country in the same primitive form, which only gradually

yielded to a better understanding, until at last its permeation by

Socialist ideas endowed it with loftier conceptions and opened for it

new social outlooks. The alliance of the labour movement with Socialism

was of decisive importance for both. But the political ideas which

influenced this, that or the other Socialist school determined the

character of the movement in each instance, and its outlook for the

future as well.

While certain schools of Socialism remained quite indifferent or

unsympathetic to the young labour movement, others of them realised the

real importance of this movement as the necessary preliminary to the

realisation of Socialism. They understood that it must be their task to

take an active part in the everyday struggles of the workers, so as to

make clear to the toiling masses the intimate connection between their

immediate demands and the Socialist objectives. For these struggles,

growing out of the needs of the moment, serve to bring about a correct

understanding of the profound importance of the liberation of the

proletariat for the complete suppression of wage slavery. Although

sprung from the immediate necessities of life, the movement,

nevertheless, bore within it the germ of things to come, and these were

to set new goals for life. Everything new arises from the realities of

vital being. New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract ideas,

but in the fight for daily bread in that hard and ceaseless struggle

which the needs and worries of the hour demand just to take care of the

indispensable requirements of life. In the constant warfare against the

already existing, the new shapes itself and comes to fruition. He who

does not know how to value the achievements of the hour will never be

able to conquer a better future for himself and his fellows.

From the daily battles against the employers and their allies, the

workers gradually learn the deeper meaning of this struggle. At first

they pursue only the immediate purpose of improving the status of the

producers within the existing social order, but gradually they lay bare

the root of the evil — monopoly economy and its political and social

accompaniments. For the attainment of such an understanding the everyday

struggles are better educative material than the finest theoretical

discussions. Nothing can so impress the mind and soul of the worker as

this enduring battle for daily bread, nothing makes him so receptive to

the teachings of Socialism as the incessant struggle for the necessities

of life.

Just as in the time of feudal domination the bondmen peasants by their

frequent uprisings — which had at first only the purpose of wresting

from the feudal lords certain concessions which would mean some

betterment of their dreary standard of living — prepared the way for the

Great Revolution by which the abolition of feudal privileges was

practically brought about; so the innumerable labour was within

capitalist society constitute, one might say, the introduction to that

great social revolution of the future which shall make Socialism a

living reality. Without the incessant revolts of the peasantry — Taine

reports that between 1781 and the storming of the Bastille nearly five

hundred of these revolts occurred in almost every part of France — the

idea of the perniciousness of the whole system of serfdom and feudalism

would never have entered the heads of the masses.

That is just how it stands with the economic and social struggles of the

modern working class. It would be utterly wrong to estimate these merely

on the basis of their material origin or their practical results and to

overlook their deeper psychological significance. Only from the everyday

conflicts between labour and capital could the doctrines of Socialism,

which had arisen in the minds of individual thinkers, take on flesh and

blood and aquire that peculiar character which make of them a mass

movement, the embodiment of a new cultural ideal for the future.

Chapter 3. The Forerunners of Syndicalism

Robert Owen and the English labour movement; The Grand National

Consolidated Trade Union; William Benbow and the idea of the General

Strike; The period of reaction; Evolution of the labour organisations in

France; The International Workingmen’s Association; The new conception

of trade unionism; The idea of the labour councils; Labour councils

versus dictatorships; Bakunin on the economic organisation of the

workers; The introduction of parliamentary politics by Marx and Engels

and the end of the International.

The permeation of the labour movement by Socialist ideas early led to

tendencies which had an unmistakable relationship to the revolutionary

syndicalism of our day. These tendencies developed first in England, the

mother country of capitalist big industry, and for a time strongly

influenced the advanced sections of the English working class. After the

repeal of the Combination Acts, the effort of the workers was directed

chiefly to giving a broader character to their trade union

organisations, as practical experience had shown them that purely local

organisations could not provide the needed support in their struggles

for daily bread. Still these efforts were not at first based on any very

profound social concepts. The workers, insofar as they were influenced

by the political reform movement of that time, had no goal whatever in

view outside the immediate betterment of their economic status. Not

until the beginning of the 30’s did the influence of Socialist ideas on

the English labour movement become plainly apparent, and its appearance

then is to be ascribed chiefly to the stirring propaganda of Robert Owen

and his followers.

A few years before the convening of the so-called Reform Parliament the

National Union of the Working Classes was founded, its most important

component part being the workers in the textile industries. This

combination had summed up its demands in the following four points:

means, which means will develop automatically out of the current

conditions.

women.

demands the strong influence of the political reform movement which just

at that time held the entire country under its spell: but at the same

time one notices expressions which are borrowed from the doctrines of

Robert Owen.

The year 1832 brought the Reform Bill, by which the last political

illusions for large circles of the English working class were destroyed.

When the bill had become law it was seen that the middle class had,

indeed, won a great victory over the aristocratic landowners, but the

workers recognised that they had been betrayed again, and that they had

merely been used by the bourgeoisie to pull its chestnuts out of the

fire. The result was a general disillusionment and the steadily

sprawling conviction that the working class could find no help in an

alliance with the bourgeoisie. If, before then, the class struggle had

been an actuality which rose spontaneously out of the conflicting

economic interests of the possessing and non-possessing classes, it had

now taken shape as a definite conviction in the minds of the workers and

gave a determinate course to their activities. This turn in the thinking

of the working class is clearly revealed in numerous utterances in

labour press during those years. The workers were beginning to

understand that their real strength lay in their character as producers.

The more keenly aware they became of the fiasco of their participation

in the political reform movement, the more firmly rooted became their

newly acquired understanding of their own economic importance in

society.

They were strengthened in this conviction in high degree by the

propaganda of Robert Owen, who at that time was gaining constantly

stronger influence in the ranks of organised labour. Owen recognised

that the steady growth of trade union organisations furnished a firm

basis for his efforts at a fundamental alteration of the capitalist

economic order, and this filled him with high hopes. He showed the

workers that the existing conflict between capital and labour could

never be settled by ordinary battles over wages, though, in fact, he by

no means overlooked the great importance of these to the workers. On the

other hand he strove to convince the workers that they could expect

nothing whatever from legislative bodies, and must take their affairs

into their own hands. These ideas found willing ears among the advanced

sectors of the English working class, and first manifested themselves

strongly among the building trades. The Builders’ Union, in which were

combined a considerable number of local labour unions, was at that time

one of the most advanced and most active of labour organisations, and

was a thorn in the flesh of the managers. In the year 1831, Owen had

presented his plans for the reconstruction of society before a meeting

of delegates of this union in Manchester. The plans amounted to a kind

of Guild Socialism and called for the establishment of producer’s

co-operatives under the control of the trade unions. The proposals were

adopted, and shortly after this the Builders’ Union was involved in a

long serious of severe conflicts, the unhappy outcome of which seriously

threatened the existence of the organisation and put a premature end to

all efforts in the direction marked out by Owen.

Owen did not let himself be discouraged by this, but carried on his

activities with renewed zeal. In 1833 there convened in London a

conference of trade unions and co-operative organisations, at which Owen

explained exhaustively his plan for social reconstruction by the workers

themselves. From the reports of the delegates one can see plainly what

an influence these ideas has already gained and what a creative spirit

then animated the advanced circles of the English working class. The

Poor Man’s Guardian very justly summed up its report of the conference

in these words:

“But far different from the paltry objects of all former combinations is

that now aimed at by the congress of delegates. Their reports show that

an entire change in society — a change amounting to a complete

subversion of the existing order of the world — is contemplated by the

working classes. They aspire to be at the top instead of the bottom of

society — or rather that there should be no bottom or top at all.”

The immediate result of this conference was the founding of the Grand

National Consolidated Trade Union of Great Britain and Ireland at the

beginning of 1834. These were stirring times. The whole country was

shaken by innumerable strikes and lock-outs, and the number of workers

organised in trade unions rapidly soared to 800,000. The founding of the

G.N.C. arose from the effort to gather the scattered organisations into

one great federation, which would give greater effective force to the

actions of the workers. But what distinguished this alliance from all

the efforts in this direction which had been made previously was that it

stood, neither for pure trade unionism, not for collaboration of the

workers with the political reformers. The G.N.C. was conceived as a

fighting organisation to lend all possible aid to the needed betterment

of their condition, but it had at the same time set itself the goal of

overthrowing capitalist economy as a whole and replacing it with the

co-operative labour of all producers, which should no longer have in

view profits for all individuals, but the satisfaction of the needs of

all. The G.N.C. was, then, to be the framework within which these

aspirations would find expression and be transformed into reality.

The organisers wanted to combine in these federations the workers in all

industrial and agricultural pursuits and group them according to their

special branches of production. Each industry would constitute a special

division which would concern itself with the special conditions of their

productive activity and the related administrative functions. Wherever

this was possible the workers in the various branches were to proceed to

the establishment of co-operative plants, which should sell their

produce to consumers at actual cost, including the expense of

administration. Universal organisation would serve to bind the separate

industries together organically, and to regulate their mutual interests.

The exchange of products of the co-operative plants was to be effected

through so-called labour bazaars and the use of special exchange-money

or labour tickets. By the steady spread of these institutions they hoped

to drive capitalist competition from the field and thus to achieve a

complete reorganisation of society.

At the same time these co-operative agricultural and industrial

undertakings were to serve to make the day-to-day struggles of the

workers in the capitalist world easier. This is shown particularly in

three of the seven points in which the G.N.C. had framed its demands:

“As land is the source of the first necessaries of life, and as, without

the possession of it, the producing classes will ever remain in a

greater or less degree subservient to the money capitalists, and

subsequent upon the fluctuations of trade and commerce, this committee

advises that a great effort should be made by the unions to secure such

portions of it on lease as their funds will permit, in order that in all

turn-outs the men may be employed in rearing the greater part, if not

the whole, of their subsistence under the direction of practical

agricultural superintendents, which arrangements would not have the

effect of lowering the price of labour in any trade, but on the contrary

would rather tend to increase it by drawing off the at present

superfluous supply in manufactures.

“The committees would, nevertheless, earnestly recommend in all cases of

strikes and turn-outs, where it is practicable, that the men be employed

in the making or producing of commodities as would be in demand among

their brother unionists; and that to effect this, each lodge should be

provided with a workroom or shop in which these commodities may be

manufactured on account of such lodge, which shall make proper

arrangements for the supply of the necessary materials.

“That in all cases where it is practicable, each district or branch

should establish one or more depots of provisions and articles in

general domestic use: by which means the working man may be supplied

with the bast commodities at little above wholesale prices.”

The G.N.C. was, therefore, conceived by its founders as an alliance of

trade unions and co-operatives. By his practical participation in

co-operative undertakings the worker was to gain the understanding

necessary for the administration of the industry and thus be fitted to

bring ever wider circles of social production under their control, until

at last the whole economic life should be conducted by the producers

themselves and an end put to all exploitation. These ideas found

surprisingly clear expression in worker’s meetings and, more

particularly, in the labour press. If, for example, one reads The

Pioneer, the organ of the G.N.C. managed by James Morrison, one

frequently encounters arguments that sound thoroughly modern. This is

revealed especially in the discussions with the political reformers, who

had inscribed on their banner the democratic reconstruction of the House

of Commons. They were told in reply that the workers had no interest

whatever in efforts of that sort, since an economic transformation of

society in the Socialist sense would render the House of Commons

superfluous. Its place would be taken by the labour boards and the

industrial federations, which would concern themselves with merely with

the problems of production and consumption in the interest of the

people. These organisations were destined to take over the functions of

the present entrepreneurs; with common ownership of all social wealth

there would no longer be any need for political institutions. The wealth

of the nation would no longer be determined by the quantity of goods

produced, but by the personal advantage that every individual derived

from them. The House of Commons would in the future be merely a House of

Trades.

The G.N.C. met with an extraordinary response from the workers. In a few

months it embraced much over half a million members, and even though its

actual aims were clearly understood at first only by the most

intellectually active elements among the workers, still the great masses

recognised, at least, that an organisation of such dimensions could lend

much greater weight to their demands than could local groups. The

agitation for the ten-hour day had then taken firm hold on all sections

of the English working class, and the G.N.C. set itself with all its

energy to enforce this demand. Owen himself, and his close friends

Doherty, Fielden and Grant took a prominent part in this movement.

However, the militants in the G.N.C. placed little hope in legislation,

but tried to convince the workers that the ten-hour day could only be

won by the united economic action of the whole body of workers. “The

adults in factories must by unions among themselves make a Short Time

Bill for themselves.” This was their slogan.

The idea of the general strike met with undivided sympathy from the

organised English workers. At the beginning of 1832, William Benbow, one

of the most active champions of the new movement, had published a

pamphlet entitled Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive

Classes, which had a tremendous circulation, and in which the idea of

the general strike and its importance to the working class was for the

first time treated in its full compass. Benbow told the workers that if

the enforced sale of their labour power was the cause of their slavery,

then their organised refusal to work must be the means of their

liberation. Such an instrument of warfare dispensed with any use of

physical force and could achieve incomparably greater effects that the

best army. All that was needed to bring about the downfall of the system

of organised injustice was that the workers should grasp the importance

of this powerful weapon and learn to use it with intelligence. Benbow

advance a lot of proposals, such as preparation for the general strike

in the whole country by the establishment of local committees, so that

the eruption might burst with elemental force, and his ideas at that

time met with the heartiest response from the workers.

The rapid growth of the G.N.C. and, even more, the spirit that emanated

from it, filled the employers with secret fear and blind hatred of the

new combination. They felt that the movement must be stifled at the very

outset before it had time to be spread farther and build up and

consolidate its local groups. The entire bourgeois press denounced the

“criminal purposes” of the G.N.C., and unanimously proclaimed that it

was leading the country toward a catastrophe. The factory owners in

every industry besieged parliament with petitions urging measures

against “unlawful combinations,” and in particular against the

collaboration of workers in different categories in industrial disputes.

Many employers laid before their workers the so-called “document,” and

offered them the alternative of withdrawing from their unions or being

thrown on the street by a lock-out.

Parliament did not, it is true, re-enact the old Combination Acts, but

the government encouraged the judges to deal with the “excesses” of the

workers as severely as they could within the framework of the existing

laws. And they did so in generous measure, being often able to use as a

handle the fact that many unions had retained from the days of their

underground activity before the repeal of the Combination Acts the

formula of the oath and other ceremonial forms, and that this was

contrary to the letter of the law. hundreds of workers were sentenced to

horrible punishments for the most trivial offences. Among the terrorist

sentences of that time that imposed on six field hands in Dorchester

aroused the bitterest indignation. Through the initiative of the G.N.C.

the field workers in Tolpuddle, a little village near Dorchester, had

formed a union and demanded an increase of wages from seven shillings to

eight shillings a week. Shortly afterward six field hands were arrested

and sentenced to the frightful penalty of transportation for seven years

to the penal colonies in Australia. Their sole crime consisted in

belonging to a union.

Thus from the very beginning the G.N.C. was involved in a long series of

important wage wars and was subjected besides to constant and bitter

prosecutions, so that it hardly found time to begin in earnest its great

work of educating the masses. Perhaps, in any case, the time for that

was not yet ripe. Many of its members turned to the awakening Chartism,

which accepted many of its immediate demands, and along with other

matters kept up the propaganda for the general strike, culminating in

1842 in that great movement which tied up all the industries of

Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, the Potteries, Wales and the coal

districts of Scotland. But the original significance of the movement had

worn off, and Owen had been right when he accused Chartism of laying too

much weight of political reform and showing too little understanding of

the great economic problems. The unhappy revolutions of 1848–49 on the

continent led also to the decline of the Chartist movement, and pure

trade unionism came once more to dominate the field for years in the

English labour movement.

In France also the alliance of Socialism with the labour movement

quickly led to attempts on the part of the workers to overthrow the

capitalist economic order and pave the way for a new social development.

The antagonism between the working class and the bourgeoisie that had

just acquired mastery had already shown itself clearly during the storms

of the Great Revolution. Before the Revolution the workers had been

united in the so-called Compagnonnages, whose origin can be traced back

to the fifteenth century. These were associations of journeymen

craftsmen which had their particular ceremonials transmitted from the

middle ages, whose members were pledges to mutual assistance, and which

busied themselves with the concerns of their calling, but also resorted

often to strikes and boycotts to protect their immediate economic

interests. With the abolition of the guilds and the development of

modern industry these bodies gradually lost their importance and gave

way to new forms of proletarian organisation.

By the law of August 21, 1790, all citizens were conceded the right of

free combination within the framework of the existing laws, and the

workers availed themselves of this right by organising themselves in

trade unions for the safeguarding of their interests against the

employers. A lot of local strike movements ensued, especially in the

building industry, and caused the employers a great deal of worry, as

the organisations of workers grew constantly stronger, counting 80,000

members in Paris alone.

In a memorial to the government the employers denounced these

combinations of workers and demanded the protection of the state against

this “new tyranny” which presumed to interfere with the right of free

contract between employer and employee. The government responded

graciously to this demand and forbade all combinations for the purpose

of effecting alterations in the existing conditions of labour, assigning

as a reason that it could not permit the existence of a state within the

state. This prohibition continued in force until 1864. But here also it

was early shown that circumstances are stronger than the law. Just as

had the English, so also the French workers resorted to secret

association, since the law denied them the right to urge their demands

openly.

The so-called mutualités, harmless mutual benefit societies, often

served in this connection as a cover, spreading the mantle of legality

as over the secret organisations for resistance (sociétés de

resistance). These had, it is true, often to endure harsh prosecutions,

and to make many sacrifices, but no law was able to crush their

resistance. Under the law of Louis Phillipe the laws against the

combination of workers were strengthened still further, but even that

could not prevent the steady growth of the sociétés de resistance, nor

the development of a long series of great strike movements as a result

of their underground activities. Of these the fight of the weavers in

Lyons in 1831 grew into an event of European importance. Bitter need had

spurred these workers to a desperate resistance to the rapacity of the

employers, and owing to the interference of the militia this had

developed into an outright revolt, into which the workers carried their

banner inscribed with the significant words: “Live working or die

fighting!”

As early as the 30’s a lot of these workers’ associations had become

acquainted with Socialist ideas, and after the February Revolution of

1848 the acquaintance afforded the basis for the movement of the French

Workingmens’ Association, a co-operative movement with a trade union

trend, which worked for a reshaping of society by constructive effort.

In his history of the movement S. Englander puts the number of these

associations at about two thousand. But the coup d’état of Louis

Bonaparte put an abrupt end to this hopeful beginning, as to so many

others.

Only with the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association was

there a revival of the doctrines of a militant and constructive

Socialism, but after that they spread internationally. The

International, which exercise such a powerful influence on the

intellectual development of the body of European workers, and which even

today has not lost its magnetic attraction in the Latin countries, was

brought into being by the collaboration of the English and French

workers in 1864. It was the first great attempt to unite the workers of

all countries in an international alliance which should open the path

for the social and economic liberation of the working class. It was from

the beginning distinguished from all the political forms of organisation

of bourgeois radicalism by pointing out that the economic subservience

of the workers to the owners of the raw materials and the tools of

production was the source of the slavery which revealed itself in social

misery, intellectual degradation, and political oppression. For this

reason it proclaimed in its statutes the economic liberation of the

working class as the great purpose to which every political movement

must be subordinate.

Since the most important object was to unite the different factions of

the social movement in Europe for this purpose, the organisational

structure of the vast workers’ alliance was based on the principles of

Federalism, which guaranteed to each particular school the possibility

of working for this common goal in accordance with their own convictions

and on the basis of the particular conditions of each country. The

International did not stand for any defined social system; it was rather

the expression of a movement whose theoretical principles slowly matured

in the practical struggles of everyday life and took clearer form at

every stage of its vigorous growth. the first need was to bring the

workers of the different countries closer to one another, to make them

understand that their economic and social enslavement was everywhere

traceable to the same causes, and that consequently the manifestation of

their solidarity must reach beyond the artificial boundaries of the

states, since it is not tied up with the alleged interests of the

nation, but with the lot of their class.

The practical efforts of its sections to end the importation of foreign

strike-breakers in times of industrial warfare, and to furnish material

and moral assistance to militant workers in every country by

international collections, contributed more to the development of an

international consciousness among the workers than the loveliest

theories could have done. They gave the workers practical education in

social philosophy. It was a fact that after every considerable strike

the membership of the International soared mightily, and the conviction

of its national coherence and homogeneity was constantly strengthened.

Thus the International became the great school mistress of the socialist

labour movement and confronted the capitalist world with the world of

international labour, which was being ever more firmly welded together

in the bonds of proletarian solidarity. The first two congresses of the

International, at Geneva in 1866, and at Lausanne in 1867, were

characterised by a spirit of comparative moderation. They were the first

tentative efforts of a movement which was only slowly becoming clear as

to its task, and was seeking for a definite expression. But the great

strike movements in France, Belgium, Switzerland and other countries

gave the International a powerful forward impetus and revolutionised the

minds of the workers, a change to which the powerful revival during that

period of the democratic ideas, which had suffered a severe setback

after the collapse of the revolutions of 1848–49, contributed not a

little.

The congress at Brussels, in 1868, was animated by a totally different

spirit from that of its two predecessors. It was felt that the workers

everywhere were awakening to new life and were becoming constantly surer

of the subject of their endeavours. The congress, by a large majority,

declared itself for the collectivising of the land and other means of

production, and called upon the sections in the different countries to

go exhaustively into this question, so that at the next congress a clear

decision could be reached. With this the international took on an

outspokenly Socialistic character, which was most happily complemented

by the outstandingly libertarian tendency of the workers in the Latin

countries. The resolution to prepare the workers for a general strike to

meet the danger of a threatened war, because they were the only class

that could by energetic intervention prevent the organised mass murder,

also testified to the spirit by which the International was permeated at

that time.

At the congress in Basel in 1869 the ideational development of the great

workers’ alliance reached its zenith. The congress concerned itself only

with questions which had an immediate concern with the economic and

social problems of the working class. It ratified the resolutions which

the Brussels congress had adopted concerning the collective ownership of

the means of production, leaving the question of the organisation of

labour open. But the interesting debates at the Basel congress show very

plainly that the advanced sections of the International had already been

giving attention to this question, and had, moreover, come to very clear

conclusions about it. The was revealed particularly in the utterances

concerning the importance of trade union organisations of the working

class. In the report upon the question which EugĂšne Hins laid before the

congress in the name of the Belgian Federation there was presented for

the first time a wholly new point of view, which had an unmistakable

resemblance to certain ideas of Owen and the English labour movement of

the 30’s.

In order to make a correct estimate of this one must remember that the

various schools of state-socialism of that time attributed to the trade

unions either no importance at all or at best only a subordinate one.

The French Blanquists saw in the trade unions merely a reform movement,

with which they wished to have nothing to do, as their immediate aim was

a socialist dictatorship. Ferdinand Lassalle directed all his activities

toward wielding the workers into a political party and was an outspoken

opponent of all trade union endeavours, in which he saw only a hindrance

to the political evolution of the working class. Marx, and more

especially his friends of that period in Germany, recognised, it is

true, the necessity of the trade unions for the achievement of certain

betterments within the capitalist social system, but they believed that

their role would be exhausted with this, and that they would disappear

along with capitalism, since the transition to Socialism could be guided

only by a proletarian dictatorship.

At Basel this idea underwent for the first time a thorough critical

examination. In the Belgian report Hins laid before the Congress, the

views expressed in which were expressed by the delegates from Spain, the

Swiss Jura, and a considerable part of the French sections, it was

clearly set forth that the trade union organisations of the workers not

only had a right to existence within the present society, but they were

even more to be regarded as the social cells of a coming Socialist

order, and it was, therefore, the task of the International to educate

them for this service. In accordance with this the congress adopted the

following resolution:

“The Congress declares that all workers should strive to establish

associations for resistance in their various trades. As soon as a trade

union is formed the unions on the same trade are to be notified so that

the formation of national alliances in the industries may be begun.

These alliances shall be charged with the duty of collecting all

material relating to their industry, of advising about measures to be

executed in common, and of seeing that they are carried out, to the end,

that the present wage system be replaced by the federation of free

producers. The Congress directs the General Council to provide for the

alliance of the trade unions of all countries.”

In his argument for the resolution proposed by the committee Hins

explained that “by this double form of organisation of local workers’

associations and general alliances for each industry on the one hand the

political administration of the committees, and on the other, the

general representation of labour, regional, national and international

will be provided for. The councils of the trade and industrial

organisations will take the place of the present government, and this

representation of labour will do away, once and forever, with the

governments of the past.”

This new and fruitful idea grew out of the recognition that every new

economic form must be accompanied by a new political form of the social

organism and could only attain political expression in this. Therefore,

Socialism also had to have a special political form of expression,

within which it may become a living thing, and they thought they had

found this form in a system of labour councils. The workers in the Latin

countries, in which the International found its principal support,

developed their movement on the basis of economic fighting organisations

and Socialist propaganda groups, and worked in the spirit of the Basel

resolutions.

As they recognised in the state the political agent and defender of the

possessing classes, they did not strive at all for the conquest of

political power, but for the overthrow of the state and of every form of

political power, in which with sure instinct they saw the requisite

preliminary conditions for all tyranny and all exploitation. They did,

therefore, not choose to imitate the bourgeois classes and set up a

political party, thus preparing the way for a new class of professional

politicians, whose goal was the conquest of the political power. They

understood that, along with the monopoly of property, the monopoly of

power must also be destroyed if complete reshaping of social life was to

be achieved. Proceeding from their recognition that the lordship of man

over man had had its day, they sought to familiarise themselves with the

administration of things. So to the state politics of the parties they

opposed the economic policy of the workers. They understood that the

reorganisation of society on a Socialist pattern must be carried out in

the various branches of industry and in the departments of agrarian

production; of this understanding was born the idea of a system of

labour councils.

It was this same idea which inspired large sections of the Russian

workers and peasants at the outbreak of the revolution, even if the idea

had never been thought out so clearly and systematically in Russia as in

the sections of the First International. Under tsarism the Russian

workers lacked the requisite intellectual preparation for this. But

Bolshevism put an abrupt end to this fruitful idea. For the despotism of

dictatorship stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the constructive

idea of the council system, that is, to a Socialist reconstruction of

society by the producers themselves. The attempt to combine the two by

force could only lead to that soulless bureaucracy which has been so

disastrous for the Russian Revolution. The council system brooks no

dictatorships as it proceeds from totally different assumptions. In it

is embodied the will from below, the creative energy of the toiling

masses. In dictatorship, however, only lives barren compulsion from

above, which will suffer no creative activity and proclaims blind

submission as the highest laws for all. The two cannot exist together.

In Russia dictatorship proved victorious. Hence there are no more

soviets there. All that is left of them is the name and a gruesome

caricature of its original meaning.

The council system for labour embraces large part of the economic forms

employed by a constructive Socialism which of its own accord operates

and produces to meet all natural requirements. It was the direct result

of a fruitful development of ideas growing out of the Socialist labour

movement. This particular idea rose from the effort to provide a

concrete basis for the realisation of Socialism. This basis was seen to

lie in the constructive employment of every efficient human being. But

dictatorship in an inheritance from bourgeois society, the traditional

precipitate of French Jacobinism which was dragged into the proletarian

movement by the so-called Babouvists and later taken over by Marx and

his followers. The idea of the council system is intimately intergrown

with Socialism and is unthinkable without it; dictatorship, however, has

nothing whatever in common with Socialism, and at best can only lead to

the most barren of state capitalism.

Dictatorship is a definite form of state power: the state in state of

siege. Like all other advocates of the state idea, so also the advocates

of dictatorship proceed from the assumption that any alleged advance and

every temporal necessity must be forced on the people from above. This

assumption alone makes dictatorship the greatest obstacle to any social

revolution, the proper element of which is the free initiative and

constructive activity of the people. Dictatorship is the negation of

organic development, of natural building from below upwards, it is the

proclamation of the wardship of the toiling people, a guardianship

forced upon the masses by a tiny minority. Even if its supporters are

animated by the very best intentions, the iron logic of the facts will

always drive them into the camp of extremest despotism. Russia had given

us the most instructive example of this. And the pretence that the

so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is something different,

because we have here to do with the dictatorship of a class, not the

dictatorship of individuals, deceives no earnest critic; it is only a

sophisticated trick to fool simpletons. Such a thing as the dictatorship

of a class is utterly unthinkable, since there will always be involved

merely the dictatorship of a particular party which takes upon itself to

speak in the name of a class, just as the bourgeoisie justified any

despotic proceeding in the name of a people.

The idea of a council system for labour was the practical overthrow of

the state idea as a whole; it stands, therefore, in frank antagonism to

any form of dictatorship, which must always have in view the highest

development the power of the state. The pioneers of this idea in the

First International recognised that economic equality without social and

political liberty is unthinkable; for this reason they were firmly

convinced that the liquidation of all institutions of political power

must be the first task of the social revolution, so as to make any new

form of exploitation impossible. They believed that the workers’

International was destined gradually to gather all effective workers

into its ranks, and at the proper time to overthrow the economic

despotism of the possessing classes, and along with this all the

political coercive institutions of the capitalist state, and to replace

these by a new order of things. This conviction was held by all

libertarian sections of the international. Bakunin expressed it in the

following words:

“Sine the organisation of the International has as its goal, not the

setting up of new states or despots, but the radical destruction of

every separate sovereignty, it must have an essentially different

character from the organisation of the state. To just the degree that

the latter is authoritarian, artificial and violent, alien and hostile

to the natural development and the interests of the people, to that same

degree must the International be free, natural and in every respect in

accord with these interests and instincts. But what is the natural

organisation of the masses? It is one based on the different occupations

of their actual daily life, on their various kinds of work,

organisations according to their occupations, trade organisations. When

all industries, including the various branches of agriculture, are

represented in the International, its organisation, the organisation of

the masses of the people, will be finished.”

From this line of thought arose likewise the idea of opposing to the

bourgeois parliaments a Chamber of Labour, which proceeded from the

ranks of the Belgian Internationalists. Theses labour chambers were to

represent the organised labour of every trade and Industry, and were to

concern themselves with all questions of social economy and economic

organisation on a Socialist basis, in order to prepare practically for

the taking over by the organised workers of the means of production, and

in this spirit to provide for the intellectual training of the

producers. In addition these bodies were to pass judgement from the

workers’ point of view on all questions brought up in the bourgeois

parliaments which were of interest to the workers, so as to contrast the

policies of bourgeois society with the views of the workers. Max Nettlau

has given to the public in his book Der Anarchismus von Proudhon zu

Kropotkin, a hitherto unknown passage from one of Bakunin’s manuscripts

that is highly indicative of Bakunin’s views on this question:

“...All this practical and vital study of social science by the workers

themselves in their trade sections and in these chambers will, and

already has, engendered in them the unanimous, well-considered,

theoretically and practically demonstrable conviction that the serious,

final, complete liberation of the workers is possible only upon one

condition, that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of raw

material and all the tools of labour, including land by the whole body

of workers....The organisation of the trade sections, their federation

in the International, and their representation by the Chambers of

Labour, not only create a great academy, in which the workers of the

International, combining theory and practice, can and must study

economic science, they also bear in themselves the living germs of the

new social order, which is to replace the bourgeois world. They are

creating not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself”

These ideas were at that time generally disseminated in the sections of

the International in Belgium, Holland, the Swiss Jura, France and Spain,

and gave to the Socialism of the great workers’ alliance a peculiar

social character, which with the development of political labour parties

in Europe was for a considerable time almost completely forgotten, and

only in Spain never exhausted its power to win converts, as recent

events in that country have so clearly shown. They found active

advocates in men like James Guillaume, Adhémar Schwitzguébel, EugÚne

Varlin, Louis Pindy, CĂ©sar De Paepe, EugĂšne Hins, Hector Denis,

Guillaume De Greef, Victor Arnould, R. Farga Pellicer, G. Sentiñon,

Anselmo Lorenzo, to mention here only the best-known names, all men of

excellent reputation in the International. The fact is that the whole

intellectual development of the International is to be ascribed to the

enthusiasm of these libertarian elements in it, and received no stimulus

from either the state Socialist factions in Germany and Switzerland or

pure Trades Unionism in England.

So long as the International pursued these general lines, and for the

best respected the right of decision of the separate federations, as was

provided in its statutes, it exercised an irresistible influence over

the organised workers. But that changed at once when Marx and Engels

began to use their position in the London General Council to commit the

separate national federations to parliamentary action. This occurred

first at the unhappy London Conference of 1871. This behaviour was in

sharp violation not only of the spirit but also of the statutes of the

International. It could but encounter the united resistance of all the

libertarian elements in the International, the more so as the question

had never previously been brought before a congress for consideration.

Shortly after the London Conference the Jura Federation published the

historic circular on Sonvillier, which protested in determined and

unequivocal words against the arrogant presumption of the London General

Council. But the congress at The Hague in 1872, in which a majority had

been artificially created by the employment of the dirtiest and most

reprehensible methods, crowned the work begun by the London Conference

of transforming the International into an electoral machine. In order to

obviate any misunderstanding the Blanquist, Edwouard Vaillant, in his

argument for the resolution proposed by the General Council advocating

the conquest of political power by the working class, explained that “as

soon as this resolution has been adopted by the Congress and so

incorporated into the Bible of the International, it will be the duty of

every member to follow it under penalty of expulsion.” By this Marx and

his followers directly provoked the open split in the International with

all its disastrous consequences for the development of the labour

movement, and inaugurated the period of parliamentary politics which of

natural necessity led to that intellectual stagnation and moral

degeneration of the Socialist movement which we can observe today in

most countries.

Soon after the Hague Congress the delegates of the most important

energetic federations of the International met in the anti-authoritarian

congress in St. Immier, which declared all the resolutions adopted at

the Hague null and void. From then on dates the split in the Socialist

camp between the advocates of direct revolutionary action and the

spokesmen for parliamentary politics, which with the lapse of time has

grown constantly wider and more unbridgeable. Marx and Bakunin were

merely the most prominent representatives of the opposed factions in

this struggle between two different conceptions of the fundamental

principles of Socialism. But it would be a big mistake to try to explain

this struggle as merely a conflict between two personalities; it was the

antagonism between two sets of ideas which gave to this struggle its

real importance and still gives it today. That Marx and Engels gave such

a spiteful and personal character to the dissension was a disaster. The

International had room for every faction, and a continuous discussion of

the different views could only have contributed to their clarification.

But the effort to make all schools of thought subservient to one

particular school, one which, moreover, represented only a minority in

the International, could but lead to a cleavage and to the decline of

the great alliance of workers, could but destroy those promising germs

which were of such great importance to the labour movement in every

land.

The Franco-Prussian War, by which the focal point of the Socialist

movement was transferred to Germany, whose workers had neither

revolutionary traditions not that rich experience possessed by

Socialists in the countries to the west, contributed greatly to this

decline. The defeat of the Paris Commune and the incipient reaction in

France, which in a few years spread over Spain and Italy as well, pushed

the fruitful idea of a council system for labour far into the

background. The sections of the International in those countries were

for a long time able to carry on only an underground existence and were

obliged to concentrate all their strength on repelling the reaction.

Only with the awakening of revolutionary Syndicalism in France were the

creative ideas of the First International rescued from oblivion, once

more to vitalise the Socialist labour movement.

Chapter 4. The Objectives of Anarchosyndicalism

Anarcho-Syndicalism versus political socialism; Political parties and

labour unions; Federalism versus Centralism; Germany and Spain; The

organisation of Anarcho-Syndicalism; The impotence of political parties

for social reconstruction; The CNT in Spain: its aims and methods;

Constructive work of the labour syndicates and peasant collectives in

Spain; Anarcho-Syndicalism and national politics; Problems of our time.

Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social

aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and

which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian

wing of the great workers’ alliance. Its present day representatives are

the federations in the different countries of the revived International

Workingmen’s Association of 1922, the most important of which is the

powerful Federation of Labour (ConfederaciĂłn National de Trabajo) in

Spain. Its theoretical assumptions are based on the teachings of

Libertarian or Anarchist Socialism, while its form of organisation is

largely borrowed from revolutionary Syndicalism, which in the years from

1900 to 1910 experienced a marked upswing, particularly in France. It

stands in direct opposition to the political Socialism of our day,

represented by the parliamentary labour parties in the different

countries. While in the time of this First International barely the

first beginnings of these parties existed in Germany, France and

Switzerland, today we are in a position to estimate the results of their

tactics for Socialism and the labour movement after more than sixty

years’ activity in all countries.

Participation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought

the labour movement a hairs’ breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to

this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned

to insignificance. The ancient proverb: “Who eats of the pope, dies of

him,” has held true in this content also; who eats of the state is

ruined by it. Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the

Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the

belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of

all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous

delusion that salvation always comes from above.

Thus, in place of the creative Socialism of the old International, there

developed a sort of substitute product which has nothing in common with

real Socialism but the name. Socialism steadily lost its character of a

cultural ideal, which was to prepare the peoples for the dissolution of

capitalist society, and, therefore, could not let itself be halted by

the artificial frontiers of the national states. In the minds of the

leaders of this new phase of the Socialist movement the interests of the

national state were blended more and more with the alleged aims of their

party, until at last they became unable to distinguish any definite

boundaries between them. So inevitably the labour movement was gradually

incorporated in the equipment of the national state and restored to this

equilibrium which it had actually lost before.

It would be a mistake to find in this strange about-face an

international betrayal by the leaders, as has so often been done. The

truth is that we have to do here with a gradual assimilation to the

modes of thought of capitalist society, which is a condition of the

practical activities of the labour parties of today, and which

necessarily affects the intellectual attitude of their political

leaders. These very parties which had once set out to conquer Socialism

saw themselves compelled by the iron logic of conditions to sacrifice

their Socialist convictions bit by bit to the national policies of the

state. They became, without the majority of their adherents ever

becoming aware of it, political lightning rods for the security of the

capitalist social order. The political power which they had wanted to

conquer had gradually conquered their Socialism until there was scarcely

anything left of it.

Parliamentarianism, which quickly attained a dominating position in the

labour parties of the different countries, lured a lot of bourgeois

minds and career-hungry politicians into the Socialist camp, and this

helped to accelerate the internal decay of original Socialist

principles. Thus Socialism in the course of time lost its creative

initiative and became an ordinary reform movement which lacked any

element of greatness. People were content with successes at the polls,

and no longer attributed any importance to social upbuilding and

constructive education of the workers for this end. The consequences of

this disastrous neglect of one of the weightiest problems, one of

decisive importance for the realisation of Socialism, were revealed in

their full scope when after the World War, a revolutionary situation

arose in many of the countries of Europe. The collapse of the old system

had, in several states, put into the hands of the Socialists the power

they had striven for so long and pointed to as the first prerequisite

for the realisation of Socialism. In Russia the seizure of power by the

left wing of state Socialism, in the form of Bolshevism paved the way,

not for a Socialist society, but for the most primitive type of

bureaucratic state capitalism and a reversion to the political

absolutism which was long ago abolished in most countries by bourgeois

revolutions. In Germany, however, where the moderate wing in the form of

Social Democracy attained to power, Socialism, in its long years of

absorption in routine parliamentary tasks, had become so bogged down

that it was no longer capable of any creative act whatsoever. Even a

bourgeois democratic sheet like the Frankfurter Zeitung felt obliged to

confirm that “the history of European peoples has not previously

produced a revolution that has been so poor in creative ideas and so

weak in revolutionary energy.”

But that was not all: not only was political Socialism in no position to

undertake any kind of constructive effort in the direction of Socialism,

it did not even possess the moral strength to hold on to the

achievements of bourgeois Democracy and Liberalism, and surrendered the

country without resistance to Fascism, which smashed the entire labour

movement to bits with one blow. It had become so deeply immersed in the

bourgeois state that it had lost all sense of constructive Socialist

action and felt itself tied to the barren routine of everyday practical

politics as a galley-slave was chained to his bench.

Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is the direct reaction against the concepts

and methods of political Socialism, a reaction which even before the war

had already made itself manifest in the strong upsurge of the

Syndicalist labour movement in France, Italy, and other countries, not

to speak of Spain, where the great majority of the organised workers had

always remained faithful to the doctrines of the First International.

The term “workers’ syndicate” meant in France merely a trade union

organisation of producers for the immediate betterment of their economic

and social status. But the rise of revolutionary Syndicalism gave this

original meaning a much wider and deeper import. Just as the party is,

so to speak, the unified organisation for definite political effort

within the modern constitutional state, and seeks to maintain the

bourgeois order in one form or another, so, according to the Syndicalist

view, the trade union, the syndicate, is the unified organisation of

labour and has for its purpose the defence of the interests of the

producers within existing society and the preparing for and the

practical carrying out of the reconstruction of social life after the

pattern of Socialism. It has, therefore, a double purpose: 1. As the

fighting organisation of the workers against the employers to enforce

the demands of the workers for the safeguarding and raising of their

standard of living; 2. As the school for the intellectual training of

the workers to make them acquainted with the technical management of

production and economic life in general so that when a revolutionary

situation arises they will be capable of taking the socio-economic

organism into their own hands and remarking it according to Socialist

principles.

Anarcho-Syndicalists are of the opinion that political parties, even

when they bear a socialist name, are not fitted to perform either of

these two tasks. The mere fact that, even in those countries where

political Socialism commanded powerful organisations and had millions of

voters behind it, the workers had never been able to dispense with trade

unions because legislation offered them no protection in their struggle

for daily bread, testifies to this. It frequently happened that in just

these sections of the country where the Socialist parties were strongest

the wages of workers were lowest and the conditions of labour worst.

That was the case, for example, in the northern industrial districts of

France, where Socialists were in the majority in numerous city

administrations, and in Saxony and Silesia, where throughout its

existence German Social Democracy had been able to show a large

following.

Governments and parliaments seldom decide on economic or social reforms

on their own initiative, and where this has happened thus far the

alleged improvements have always remained a dead letter in the vast

waste of laws. Thus the modest attempts of the English parliament in the

early period of big industry, when the legislators, frightened by the

horrible effects of the exploitation of children, at last resolved on

some trifling amelioration’s, for a long time had almost no effect. On

the one hand they ran afoul of the lack of understanding of the workers

themselves, on the other they were sabotaged outright by the employers.

It was much the same with the well-known law which the Italian

government enacted in the middle 90’s to forbid women who were compelled

to toil in the sulphur mines in Sicily from taking their children down

into the mines with them. This law also remained a dead letter, because

these unfortunate women were so poorly paid that they were obliged to

disregard the law. Only a considerable time later, when these working

women had succeeded in organising, and thus forcing up their standard of

living, did the evil disappear of itself. There are plenty of similar

instances in the history of every country.

But even the legal authorisation of a reform is no guarantee of its

permanence unless there exist outside of parliament militant masses who

are ready to defend it against every attack. Thus the English factory

owners, despite the enactment of the ten-hour law in 1848, shortly

afterward availed themselves of an industrial crisis to compel workers

to toil for eleven or even twelve hours. When the factory inspectors

took legal proceedings against individual employers on this account, the

accused were not only acquitted, the Government hinted to the inspectors

that they were not to insist on the letter of the law, so that the

workers were obliged, after economic conditions had revived somewhat, to

make the fight for the ten-hour day all over again on their own

resources. Among the few economic improvements which the November

Revolution of 1918 brought to the German workers, the eight-hour day was

the most important. But it was snatched back from the workers by the

employers in most industries, despite the fact that it was in the

statutes, actually anchored legally in the Weimar Constitution itself.

But if political parties are absolutely incapable of making the

slightest contribution to the improvement of the standard of living of

the workers within present day society, they are far less capable to

carry on the organic upbuilding of a Socialist community or even to pave

the way for it, since they utterly lack every practical requirement for

such an achievement. Russia and Germany have given quite sufficient

proof of this.

The lancehead of the labour movement is, therefore, not the political

party but the trader union, toughened by daily combat and permeated by

Socialist spirit. Only in the realm of economy are the workers able to

display their full social strength, for it is their activity as

producers which holds together the whole social structure, and

guarantees the existence of society at all. In any other field they are

fighting on alien soil and wasting their strength in hopeless struggles

which bring them not an iota nearer to the goal of their desires. in the

field of parliamentary politics the worker is like the giant Antaeus of

the Greek legend, whom Hercules was able to strangle after he took his

feet off the earth who was his mother. Only as producer and creator of

social wealth does he become aware of his strength; in solidaric union

with his fellows he creates in the trade union the invincible phalanx

which can withstand any assault, if it is aflame with the spirit of

freedom and animated by the ideal of social justice.

For the Anarcho-Syndicalists the trade union is by no means a mere

transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society,

it is the germ of the Socialist society of the future, the elementary

school of Socialism in general. Every new social structure makes organs

for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any

social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and

mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the

consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or

create new worlds out of nothing. It therefore concerns us to plant

these germs while there is still yet time and bring them to the

strongest possible development, so as to make the task of the coming

social revolution easier and to ensure its permanence.

All the educational work of the Anarcho-Syndicalist is aimed at this

purpose. Education for Socialism does not mean for them trivial campaign

propaganda and so-called “politics-of-the-day,” but the effort to make

clear to the workers the intrinsic connections among social problems by

technical instruction and the development of their administrative

capacities, to prepare them for their rĂŽle of re-shapers of economic

life, and give them the moral assurance required for the performance of

the task. No social body is better fitted for this purpose than the

economic fighting organisations of the workers; it gives a definite

direction to their social activities and toughens their resistance in

the immediate struggle for the necessities of life and the defence of

their human rights. This direct and unceasing warfare with the

supporters of the present system develops at the same time the ethical

concepts without which any social transformation is impossible: vital

solidarity with their fellows-in-destiny and moral responsibility for

their own actions.

Just because the educational work of the Anarcho-Syndicalists is

directed toward the development of independent thought and action, they

are outspoken opponents of all those centralising tendencies which are

so characteristic of all political labour parties. But centralism, that

artificial organisation from above which turns over the affairs of

everybody in a lump to a small minority, is always attended by barren

official routine; and this crushes individual conviction, kills all

personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic

ossification, and permits no independent action. The organisation of

Anarcho-Syndicalism is based on the principles of Federalism, on free

combination from below upward, putting the right of self-determination

of every member above everything else and recognising only the organic

agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions.

It has often been charged against federalism that it divides the forces

and cripples the strength of organised resistance, and, very

significantly, it has been just the representative of the political

labour parties and of the trade unions under their influence who have

kept repeating this charge to the point of nausea. But here, too, the

facts of life have spoken more clearly than any theory. There was no

country in the world where the whole labour movement was so completely

centralised and the technique of organisation developed to such extreme

perfection as in Germany before Hitler’s accession to power. A powerful

bureaucratic apparatus covered the whole country and determined every

political and economic expression of the organised workers. In the very

last elections the Social Democratic and Communist parties united over

twelve million voters for their candidates. But after Hitler seized

power six million organised workers did not raise a finger to avert the

catastrophe which had plunged Germany into the abyss, and which in a few

months beat their organisation completely to pieces.

But in Spain, where Anarcho-Syndicalism had maintained its hold upon

organised labour from the days of the First International, and by

untiring libertarian propaganda and sharp fighting had trained it to

resistance, it was the powerful C.N.T. which by the boldness of its

action frustrated the criminal plans of Franco and his numerous helpers

at home and abroad, and by their heroic example spurred the Spanish

workers and peasants to the battle against Fascism — a fact which Franco

himself has been compelled to acknowledge. Without the heroic resistance

of the Anarcho-Syndicalist labour unions the Fascist reactions would in

a few weeks have dominated the whole country.

When one compares the technique of the federalist organisation of the

C.N.T. with the centralistic machine which the German workers had built

for themselves, one is surprised by the simplicity of the former. In the

smaller syndicates every task for the organisation was performed

voluntarily. In the larger alliances, where naturally established

official representatives were necessary, these were elected for one year

only and received the same pay as the workers in their trade. Even the

General Secretary of the C.N.T. was no exception to this rule. this is

an old tradition which has been kept up in Spain since the days of the

International. This simple form of organisation not only sufficed the

Spanish workers for turning the C.N.T. into a fighting unit of the first

rank, it also safeguarded them against any bureaucratic regime in their

own ranks and helped them to display that irresistible spirit of

solidarity and tenaciousness which is so characteristic of this

organisation, and which one encounters in no other country.

For the state centralisation is the appropriate form of organisation,

since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity in social life for the

maintenance of political and social equilibrium. But for a movement

whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favourable moment

and on the independent thought and action of its supporters, centralism

could but be a curse by weakening its power of decision and

systematically repressing all immediate action. If, for example, as was

the case in Germany, every local strike had first to be approved by the

Central, which was often hundreds of mils away and was not usually not

in a position to pass a correct judgement on the local conditions, one

cannot wonder that the inertia of the apparatus of organisation renders

a quick attack quite impossible, and there thus arises a state of

affairs where the energetic and intellectually alert groups no longer

serve as patterns for the less active, but are condemned by these to

inactivity, inevitably bringing the whole movement to stagnation.

Organisation is, after all, only a means to an end. When it becomes an

end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its

members and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the

characteristic of all bureaucracies.

Anarcho-Syndicalists are, therefore, of the opinion that trade union

organisation should be of such a character as to afford workers the

possibility of achieving the utmost in their struggle against the

employers, and at the same time provide them with a basis from which

they will be able in a revolutionary position to proceed with reshaping

of economic and social life.

Their organisation is accordingly constructed on the following

principles: The workers in each locality join the unions for their

respective trades, and these are subject to the veto of no Central but

enjoy the entire right of self-determination. The trade unions of a city

or rural district combine in a so-called labour cartel. The labour

cartels constitute the centres for local propaganda and education; they

weld the workers together as a class and prevent the rise of any

narrow-minded factional spirit. In times of local labour trouble they

arrange for the solidaric co-operation of the whole body of organised

labour in the use of every agency available under the circumstances. All

the labour cartels are grouped according to districts and regions to

form the National Federation of Labour Cartels, which maintain the

permanent connection between the local bodies, arranges for free

adjustment of the productive labour of the members of the different

organisations on co-operative lines, provide for the necessary

co-operation in the field of education, in which the stronger cartels

will need to come to the aid of the weaker ones, and in general support

the local groups with council and guidance.

Every trade union is, moreover, federatively allied with all the same

organisations in the same trade throughout the country, and these in

turn with all related trades, so that all are combined in general

industrial alliances. It is the task of these alliances to arrange for

the co-operative action of the local groups, to conduct solidaric

strikes where the necessity arises, and to meet all the demands of the

day-to-day struggle between capital and labour. Thus the Federation of

Labour Cartels and the Federation of Industrial Alliances constitute the

two poles about which the whole life of the trade unions revolves.

Such a form of organisation not only gives the workers every opportunity

for direct action in their struggles for daily bread, it also provides

them with the necessary preliminaries for carrying through the

reorganisation of social life on a Socialist plan by their own strength

and without alien intervention, in case of a revolutionary crisis.

Anarcho-Syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order

cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only

by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand or brain in each

special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the

management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form

that the separate groups, plants and branches of industry are

independent members of the general economic organism and systematically

carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest

of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements.

In such a case the labour cartels would take over the existing social

capital in each community, determine the needs of the inhabitants of

their districts, and organise local consumption. Through the agency of

the national Federation of Labour Cartels it would be possible to

calculate the total requirements of the country and adjust the work of

production accordingly. On the other hand, it would be the task of the

Industrial Alliances to take control of all the instruments of

production, machines, raw materials, means of transportation and the

like, and to provide the separate producing groups with what they need.

In a word:

of the work by labour councils elected by them.

and agricultural alliances.

In this respect, also practical experience has given the best

instruction. It has shown us that economic questions in the Socialist

meaning cannot be solved by a government, even when that is meant the

celebrated dictatorship of the proletariat. In Russia the Bolshevist

dictatorship stood for almost two whole years helpless before its

economic problems and tried to hide its incapacity behind a flood of

decrees and ordinances, of which ninety-nine percent were buried at once

in the various bureaus. If the world could be set free by decrees, there

would long ago have been no problems left in Russia. In its fanatical

zeal for government, Bolshevism has violently destroyed just the most

valuable beginnings of a Socialist social order, by suppressing the

co-operatives, bringing the trade unions under state control, and

depriving the soviets of their independence almost from the beginning.

Kropotkin said with justice in his “Message to the Workers of the West

European Countries”:

“Russia has shown us the way in which Socialism cannot be realised,

although the populace, nauseated with the old regime, opposed no active

resistance to the experiments of the new government. The idea of the

workers’ councils for the control of the political and economic life is,

in itself, of extraordinary importance...But so long as the country is

dominated by the dictatorship of a party, the workers’ and peasants’

councils naturally lose their significance. They are thereby degraded to

the same passive rĂŽle which the representatives of the estates used to

play in the time of the absolute monarchies. A workers’ council ceases

to be a free and valuable adviser when no free press exists in the

country, as has been the case with us for over two years. Worse still:

the workers’ and peasants’ councils lose all their meaning when no

public propaganda takes place before their election, and the elections

themselves are conducted under the pressure of party dictatorship. Such

a government by councils (soviet government) amounts to a definite step

backward as soon as the Revolution advances to the erection of new

society on a new economic basis: it becomes just a dead principle on a

dead foundation.”

The course of events has proved Kropotkin right on every point. Russia

is today farther from Socialism than any other country. Dictatorship

does not lead to the economic and social liberation of the toiling

masses, but to the suppression of even the most trivial freedom and the

development of an unlimited despotism which respects no rights and

treads underfoot every feeling of human dignity. What the Russian worker

has gained economically under this regime is a most ruinous form of

human exploitation, borrowed from the most extreme stage of capitalism,

in the shape of the Stakhanov system, which raises his productive

capacity to its highest limit and degrades him to galley slave, who is

denied all control of his personal labour, and who must submit to every

order of his superiors if he does not wish to expose himself to

penalties life and liberty. But compulsory labour is the last road that

can lead to Socialism. It estranges the man from the community, destroys

his joy in his daily work, and stifles that sense of personal

responsibility to his fellows without which there can be no talk of

Socialism at all.

We shall not even speak of Germany here. One could not reasonably expect

of a party like the Social Democrats — whose central organ VorwĂ€rts,

just on the evening before the November Revolution of 1918 warned the

workers against precipitancy, “as the German people are not ready for a

republic” — that it would experiment with Socialism. Power, we might

say, fell into its lap overnight, and it actually did not know what to

do with it. Its absolute impotence contributed not a little to enabling

Germany to bask today in the sun of the Third Reich.

The Anarcho-Syndicalist labour unions of Spain, and especially of

Catalonia, where their influence is strongest, have shown us an example

in this respect which is unique in the history of Socialist labour

movement. In this they have only confirmed what the Anarcho-Syndicalists

have always insisted on: that the approach to Socialism is possible only

when the workers have created the necessary organism for it, and when

above all they have previously prepared for it by a genuinely

Socialistic education and direct action. But this was the case in Spain,

where since the days of the International the weight of the labour

movement had lain, not in political parties, but in the revolutionary

trade unions.

When, on July 19, 1936, the conspiracy of the Fascist generals ripened

into open revolt and was put down in a few days by the heroic resistance

of the C.N.T.(National Federation of Labour) and the F.A.I.(Anarchist

Federation of Iberia), ridding Catalonia of the enemy and frustrating

the plan of the conspirators, based as it was on sudden surprise, it was

clear that the Catalonian workers would not stop halfway. So there

followed the collectivising of the land and the taking over of the

plants by the workers’ and peasants’ syndicates; and this movement,

which was released by the initiative of the C.N.T. and the F.A.I., with

irresistible power overran Aragon, the Levante and other sections of the

country, and even swept along with it a large part of the trade unions

of the Socialist Party, organised in the U.G.T. (General Labour Union).

The revolt of the Fascists had set Spain on the road to a social

revolution.

This same event reveals that the Anarcho-Syndicalist workers of Spain

not only know how to fight, but that they are filled with that great

constructive spirit derived from their many years of Socialist

education. It is the great merit of Libertarian Socialism in Spain,

which now finds expression in the C.N.T. and F.A.I., that since the days

of the First International it has trained the workers in that spirit

which treasures freedom above all else and regards the intellectual

independence of its adherents as the basis of its existence. The

libertarian labour movement in Spain has never lost itself in the

labyrinth of an economic metaphysics which crippled its intellectual

buoyancy by fatalistic conceptions, as was the case in Germany; nor has

it unprofitably wasted its energy in the barren routine tasks of

bourgeois parliaments. Socialism was for it a concern of the people, an

organic growth proceeding from the activity of the masses themselves and

having its basis in their economic organisations.

Therefore the C.N.T. is not simply an alliance of industrial workers

like the trade unions in every other country. It embraces within its

ranks also the syndicates of the peasant and field-workers as well as

those of the brain workers and the intellectuals. If the Spanish

peasants are now fighting shoulder to shoulder with city workers against

Fascism, it is the result of the great work of Socialist education which

has been performed by the C.N.T. and its forerunners. Socialists of all

schools, genuine liberals and bourgeois anti-fascists who have had an

opportunity to observe on the spot have thus far passed only one

judgement on the creative capacity of the C.N.T. and have accorded to

its constructive labours the highest admiration. Not one of them could

help extolling the natural intelligence, the thoughtfulness and

prudence, and above all the unexampled tolerance with which the workers

and peasants of the C.N.T. have gone about their difficult task.[4]

Workers, peasants, technicians and men of science had come together for

co-operative work, and in three months gave an entirely new character to

the whole economic life of Catalonia.

In Catalonia today three-fourths of the land is collectivised and

co-operatively cultivated by the workers’ syndicates. In this each

community presents a type by itself and adjusts its internal affairs in

its own way, but settles its economic questions through the agency of

its Federation. Thus there is preserved the possibility of free

enterprise, inciting new ideas and mutual stimulation. One-fourth of the

country is in the hands of small peasant proprietors, to whom has been

left the free choice between joining the collectives or continuing their

family husbandry. In many instances their small holdings have even been

increased in proportion to the size of their families. In Aragon an

overwhelming majority of the peasants declared for collective

cultivation. There are in that province over four hundred collective

farms, of which about ten are under the control of the Socialist U.G.T.,

while all the rest are conducted by syndicates of the C.N.T. Agriculture

has made such advances there that in the course of a year forty per cent

of the formerly untilled land has been brought under cultivation. In the

Levante, in Andalusia and Castile, also, collective agriculture under

the management of the syndicates is making constantly greater advances.

In numerous smaller communities a Socialist form of life has already

become naturalised, the inhabitants no longer carrying on exchange by

means of money, but satisfying their needs out of the product of their

collective industry and conscientiously devoting the surplus to their

comrades fighting at the front.

In most of the rural collectives individual compensation for work

performed has been retained, and the further upbuilding of the new

system postponed until the termination of the war, which at present

claims the entire strength of the people. In these the amount of the

wages is determined by the size of the families. The economic reports in

the daily bulletins of the C.N.T. are extremely interesting, with their

accounts of the building up of the collectives and their technical

development through the introduction of machines and chemical

fertilisers, which had been almost unknown before. The agricultural

collectives in Castile alone have during the past year spent more than

two million pasetas for this purpose. The great task of collectivising

the land was made much easier after the rural federations of the U.G.T.

joined the general movement. In many communities all affairs are

arranged by delegates of the C.N.T. and the U.G.T., bringing about a

rapprochement of the two organisations which culminated in an alliance

of the workers in the two organisations.

But the workers’ syndicates have made their most astounding achievements

in the field in industry, since they took into their hands the

administration of industrial life as a whole. In Catalonia in the course

of a year the railroads were fitted out with a complete modern

equipment, and in punctuality the service reached a point that had been

hitherto unknown. The same advances were achieved in the entire

transport system, in the textile industry, in machine construction, in

building, and in the small industries. But in the war industries the

syndicates have performed a genuine miracle. By the so-called neutrality

pact the Spanish Government was prevented from importing from abroad any

considerable amount of war materials. But Catalonia before the Fascist

revolt not a single plant for the manufacture of army equipment. The

first concern, therefore, was to remake whole industries to meet the war

demands. A hard task for the syndicates, which already had in their

hands full setting up of a new social order. But they perfumed it with

an energy and a technical efficiency that can be explained only by the

workers and their boundless readiness to make sacrifices for their

cause. Men toiled in the factories twelve and fourteen hours a day to

bring the great work to completion. Today Catalonia possesses 283 huge

plants which are operating day and night in the production of war

materials, so that the fronts may be kept supplied. At present Catalonia

is providing for the greater part of all war demands. Professor Andres

Oltmares declared in the course of an article that in this field the

workers’ syndicates of Catalonia “had accomplished in seven weeks as

much as France did in fourteen months after the outbreak of the World

War.”

But that is not all by a great deal. The unhappy war brought into

Catalonia an overwhelming flood of fugitives from all the war-swept

districts in Spain; their number has today grown to a million. Over

fifty per cent of the sick and wounded in the hospitals of Catalonia are

not Catalonians. One understands, therefore, with what a task the

workers’ syndicates were confronted in the meeting of all these demands.

Of the re-organisation of the whole educational system by the teachers’

groups in the C.N.T., the associations for the protection of works of

art, and a hundred other matters we cannot even make mention here.

During this same time the C.N.T. was maintaining 120,000 of its militia,

who were fighting on all fronts. No other organisation has thus far made

such sacrifices of life and limb as the C.N.T.-F.A.I. In its heroic

stand against Fascism it has lost a lot of its most distinguished

fighters, among them Francisco Asco and Buenaventura Durutti, whose epic

greatness made him the hero of the Spanish people.

Under these circumstances it is, perhaps, understandable that the

syndicates have not thus far been able to bring to completion their

great task of social reconstruction, and for the time being were unable

to give their full attention to the organisation of consumption. The

war, the possession by the Fascist armies of important sources of raw

materials, the German and Italian invasion, the hostile attitude of

foreign capital, the onslaughts of the counter-revolution in the country

itself, which, significantly, was befriended this time by Russia and the

Communist Party of Spain — all this and many other things have compelled

the syndicates to postpone many great and important tasks until the war

is brought to a victorious conclusion. But by taking the land and the

industrial plants under their own management they have taken the first

and most important step on the road to Socialism. Above all, they have

proved that the workers, even without the capitalist, are able to carry

on production and to do it better than a lot of profit-hungry

entrepreneurs. Whatever the outcome of the bloody war in Spain may be,

to have given this great demonstration remains the indisputable service

of the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalists, whose heroic example has opened for

the Socialist movement new outlooks for the future.

If the Anarcho-Syndicalists are striving to implant in the working

classes in every country an understanding of this new form of

constructive Socialism, and to show them that they must, today, give to

their economic fighting organisations the forms to enable them during a

general economic crisis to carry through the work of Socialist

upbuilding, this does not mean that these forms must everywhere be cut

to the same pattern. In every country there are special conditions which

are intimately intergrown with its historical development, its

traditions, and its peculiar psychological assumptions. The great

superiority of Federalism is, indeed, just that it takes these important

matters into account and does not insist on a uniformity that does

violence to free thought, and forces on men from without things contrary

to their inner inclinations.

Kropotkin once said that, taking England as an example, there existed

three great movements which, at the time of a revolutionary crisis would

enable the workers to carry through a complete overturn of social

economy: trades unionism, the co-operative organisations, and the

movement for municipal Socialism; provided that they had a fixed goal in

view and worked together according to a definite plan. The workers must

learn that, not only must their social liberation be their own work, but

that liberation was possible only if they themselves attended to the

constructive preliminaries instead of leaving the task to the

politicians, who were in no way fitted for it. And above all they must

understand that however different the immediate preliminaries for their

liberation might be in different countries, the effect of capitalist

exploitation are everywhere the same and they must, therefore, give to

their efforts the necessary international character.

Above all they must not tie up these efforts with the interests of the

national states, as has, unfortunately, happened in most countries

hitherto. The world of organised labour must pursue its own ends, as it

has its own interests to defend, and these are not identical with the

state or those of the possessing classes. A collaboration of workers and

employees such as was advocated by the Socialist Party and the trade

unions in Germany after the World War can only result in the workers

being condemned to the role of the poor Lazarus, who must be content to

eat the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. Collaboration is

possible only where the ends and, most importantly of all, the interests

are the same.

No doubt some small comforts may sometimes fall to the share of the

workers when the bourgeoisie of their country attain some advantage over

that of another country; but this always happens at the cost of their

own freedom and the economic oppression of other peoples. The worker in

England, France, Holland, and so on, participates to some extent in the

profits which, without efforts on their part, fall into the laps of the

bourgeoisie of his country from the unrestrained exploitation of

colonial peoples; but sooner or later there comes the time when these

people, too, wake up, and he has to pay all the more dearly for the

small advantages he has enjoyed. Events in Asia will show this still

more clearly in the near future. Small gains arising for increased

opportunity of employment and higher wages may accrue to the worker in a

successful state from the carving out of new markets at the cost of

others; but at the same time their brothers on the other side of the

border have to pay for them by unemployment and the lowering of their

standard of living. The result is an ever widening rift in the

international labour movement, which not even the loveliest resolutions

by international congresses can put out of existence. By this rift the

liberation of the workers from the yoke of wage-slavery is pushed

further and further into the distance. As long as the worker ties up his

interests with those of the bourgeoisie of his country instead of with

those of his class, he must logically also take in his stride all the

results of that relationship. He must stand ready to fight the wars of

the possessing classes for the retention and extension of their markets,

and to defend any injustice they may perpetrate on other peoples. The

Socialist press of Germany was merely being consistent when, at the time

of the World War, they urged the annexation of foreign territory. This

was merely the inevitable result of the intellectual attitude and the

methods which the political labour parties had pursued for a long time

before the war. Only when the workers in every country shall come to

understand clearly that their interests are everywhere the same, and out

of this understanding learn to act together, will the effective basis be

laid for the international liberation of the working class.

Every time has its particular problems and its own peculiar methods of

solving these problems. The problem that is set for our time is that of

freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and

social enslavement. The era of political revolution is over, and where

such still occur they do not alter in the least the bases of the

capitalist social order. On the one hand it becomes constantly clearer

that bourgeois democracy is so degenerate that it is no longer capable

of offering effective resistance to the threat of Fascism. On the other

hand political Socialism has lost itself so completely on the dry

channels of bourgeois politics that it no longer has any sympathy with

the genuinely Socialistic education of the masses and never rises above

the advocacy of petty reforms. But the development of capitalism and the

modern big state have brought us today to a situation where we are

driving on under full sail toward a universal catastrophe. The last

World War and its economic and social consequences, which are today

working more and more disastrously, and which have grown into a definite

danger to the very existence of all human culture, are sinister signs of

the times which no man of insight can misinterpret. It therefore

concerns us today to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from

the ground up and build it up anew in the spirit of Socialism. But only

the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they are the

only value-creating element in society out of which a new future can

arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labour from all the fetters

which economic exploitation has fastened on it, of freeing society from

all the institutions and procedures of political power, and of opening

the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on

co-operative labour and a planned administration of things in the

interests of the community. To prepare the toiling masses in city and

country for this great goal and to bind them together as a militant

force is the objective of modern Anarcho-Syndicalism, and in this its

whole purpose is exhausted.

Chapter 5. The Methods of Anarcho-Syndicalism

Anarcho-Syndicalism and political action; The Significance of political

rights; Direct Action versus Parliamentarism; The strike and its meaning

for the workers; The Sympathetic Strike; The General Strike; The

Boycott; Sabotage by the workers; Sabotage by capitalism; The social

strike as a means of social protection; Anti-militarism.

It has often been charged against Anarcho-Syndicalism that it has no

interest in the political structure of the different countries, and

consequently no interest in the political struggles of the time, and

confines its activities to the fight for purely economic demands. This

idea is altogether erroneous and springs either from outright ignorance

or wilful distortion of the facts. It is not the political struggle as

such which distinguishes the Anarcho-Syndicalists from the modern labour

parties, both in principle and in tactics, but the form of this struggle

and the aims which it has in view. They by no means rest content with

the ideal of a future society without lordship; their efforts are also

directed, even today, at restricting the activities of the state and

blocking its influence in every department of social life wherever they

see an opportunity. It is these tactics which mark off

Anarcho-Syndicalist procedure from the aims and methods of the political

labour parties, all of whose activities tend constantly to broaden the

sphere of influence of the political power of the state and to extend it

in ever increasing measure over the economic life of society. But by

this, in the outcome, the way is merely prepared for an era of state

capitalism, which according to all experience may be just the opposite

of what Socialism is actually fighting for.

The attitude of Anarcho-Syndicalism toward the political power of the

present-day state is exactly the same as it takes toward the system of

capitalist exploitation. Its adherents are perfectly clear that the

social injustices of that system rest, not on its unavoidable

excrescences, but in the capitalistic economic order as such. But, while

their efforts are directed at abolishing the existing form of capitalist

exploitation and replacing it by a Socialist order, they never for a

moment forget to work also by every means at their command to lower the

rate of profit of the capitalists under existing conditions, and to

raise the producer’s share of the products of his labour to the highest

possible.

Anarcho-Syndicalists pursue the same tactics in their fight against that

political power which finds its expression in the state. They recognise

that the modern state is just the consequence of capitalist economic

monopoly, and the class divisions which this has set up in society, and

merely serves the purpose of maintaining this status by every oppressive

instrument of political power. But, while they are convinced that along

with the system of exploitation its political protective device, the

state, will also disappear, to give place to the administration of

public affairs on the basis of free agreement, they do not all overlook

that the efforts of the worker within the existing political order must

always be directed toward defending all achieved political and social

rights against every attack of reaction, constantly widening the scope

of these rights wherever the opportunity for this presents itself.

For just as the worker cannot be indifferent to the economic conditions

of his life in existing society, so he cannot remain indifferent to the

political structure of his country. Both in the struggle for his daily

bread and for every kind of propaganda looking toward his social

liberation he needs political rights and liberties, and he must fight

for these himself in every situation where they are denied him, and must

defend them with all his strength whenever the attempt is made to wrest

them from him. It is, therefore, utterly absurd to assert that the

Anarcho-Syndicalists take no interest in the political struggles of the

time. The heroic battle of the C.N.T. in Spain against Fascism is,

perhaps, the best proof that there is not a grain of truth in this idle

talk.

But the point of attack in the political struggle lies, not in the

legislative bodies, but in the people. Political rights do not originate

in parliaments; they are, rather, forced on parliaments from without.

And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee

of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every

concession they had made to labour as soon as opportunity offered, as

soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers’

organisations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to

abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they

imagine that the people will put up no resistance. Even in these

countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly,

right of combination and the like have long existed, governments are

constantly trying to restrict these rights or to reinterpret them by

juridical hair-splitting. Political rights do not exist because they

have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have

become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair

them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this

is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any

Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others

when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being. This is not

only true in private life, it has always been the same in political life

as well.

The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy

today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their

governments, but to their own strength. Governments have employed every

means that lay in their power to prevent the attainment of these rights

or to render them illusory. Great mass movements among the people and

whole revolutions have been necessary to wrest these rights from the

ruling classes, who would never have consented to them voluntarily. One

need only study the history of the past three hundred years to

understand by what relentless struggles every right has to be wrested

inch by inch from the despots. What hard struggles, for example, had the

workers in England, France, Spain, and other countries to endure to

compel their governments to recognise the right of trade union

organisation. In France the prohibition against trade unions persisted

until 1886. Had it not been for the incessant struggles of the workers,

there would be no right of combination in the French Republic even

today. Only after the workers had by direct action confronted parliament

with accomplished facts, did the government see itself obliged to take

the new situation into account and give legal sanction to the trade

unions. What is important is not that governments have decided to

concede certain rights to the people, but the reason why they have had

to do this. To him who fails to understand the connection here history

will always remain a book with seven seals.

Of course, if one accepts Lenin’s phrase and thinks of freedom as merely

a “bourgeois prejudice,” then, to be sure, political rights and

liberties have no value at all for the workers. But then all the

countless struggles of the past, all the revolts and revolutions to

which we owe these rights, are also without value. To proclaim this bit

of wisdom it would hardly have been necessary to overthrow tsarism, for

even the censorship of Nicholas II would certainly have had no objection

to the designation of freedom as a “bourgeois prejudice.” Moreover, the

great theorists of reaction, Joseph de Maistre and Louis Bonald, has

already done this, though in different words, and the defenders of

absolutism had been very grateful to them.

But the Anarcho-Syndicalists would be the every last to mistake the

importance of these rights to the workers. If they, nevertheless, reject

any participation in the work of bourgeois parliaments, it is not

because they have no sympathy with political struggles in general, but

because they are firmly convinced that parliamentary activity is for the

workers the very weakest and the most hopeless form of the political

struggle. For the bourgeois classes the parliamentary system is without

a doubt an appropriate instrument for the settlement of such conflicts

as arise, and for making profitable collaboration possible, as they are

all equally interested in maintaining the existing economic order and

the political organisation for the protection of that order. Now, where

a common interest exists, a mutual agreement is possible and serviceable

to all parties. But for the working class the situation is very

different. For them the existing economic order is the source of their

economic exploitation, and the organised power of the state the

instrument of their political and social subjection. Even the freest

ballot cannot do away with the glaring contrast between the possessing

and non-possessing classes in society. It can only serve to impart to a

system of social injustice the stamp of legal right and to induce the

slave to set the stamp of legality on his own servitude.

But, most important of all, practical experience has shown that the

participation of the workers in parliamentary activity cripples their

power of resistance and dooms to futility their warfare against the

existing system. Parliamentary participation has not brought the workers

one iota nearer to their final goal; it has even prevented them from

protecting the rights they have won against the attacks of the reaction.

In Prussia, for example, the largest state in Germany, where the Social

Democrats until shortly before Hitler’s accession to power were the

strongest party in the government and had control of the most important

ministries in the country, Herr von Papen, after his appointment as

Reichskanzler by Hindenburg, could venture to violate the constitution

of the land and dissolve the Prussian ministry with only a lieutenant

and a dozen soldiers. When the Socialist Party in its helplessness could

think of nothing to do after this open breach of the constitution except

to appeal to the high court of the Reich instead of meeting the

perpetrators of the coup d’etat with open resistance, the reaction knew

they had nothing more to fear and from then on could offer the workers

what they pleased. The fact is that von Papen’s coup d’etat was merely

the start along the road to the Third Reich.

Anarcho-Syndicalists, then, are not in any way opposed to the political

struggle, but in their opinion this struggle, too, must take the form of

direct action, in which the instruments of economic power which the

working class has at its command are the most effective. The most

trivial wage fight shows clearly that, whenever the employers find

themselves in difficulties, the state steps in with the police, and even

in some cases with the militia, to protect the threatened interests of

the possessing classes. It would, therefore, be absurd for them to

overlook the importance of the political struggle. Every event that

affects the life of the community is of a political nature. In this

sense, every important economic action, such, for example, as a general

strike, is also a political action and, moreover, one of incomparably

greater importance than any parliamentary proceeding. Of a political

nature is likewise the battle of the Anarcho-Syndicalists against

Fascism and the anti-militarist propaganda, a battle which for decades

was carried on solely by the libertarian Socialists and the

Syndicalists, and which was attended by tremendous sacrifices.

The fact is that, when the Socialist labour parties have wanted to

achieve some decisive political reform, they have always found that they

could not do so by their own strength and have been obliged to rely

wholly on the economic fighting power of the working class. The

political general strikes in Belgium, Sweden and Austria for the

attainment of universal suffrage are proof of this. And in Russia it was

the great general strike of the working people that in 1905 pressed the

pen into the tsar’s hand for the signing of the constitution. What the

heroic struggle of the Russian intelligentsia had not been able to

accomplish in decades, the united economic action of the working classes

quickly brought to fulfilment.

The focal point of the political struggle lies, then, not in the

political parties, but in the economic fighting organisations of the

workers. It as the recognition of this which impelled the

Anarcho-Syndicalists to centre all their activity on the Socialist

education of the masses and on the utilisation of their economic and

social power. Their method is that of direct action in both the economic

and the political struggles of the time. That is the only method which

has been able to achieve anything at all in every decisive moment in

history. And the bourgeoisie in its struggles against absolutism has

also made abundant use of this method, and by refusal to pay taxes, by

boycott and revolution, has defiantly asserted its position as the

dominant class in society. So much the worse if its representatives of

today have forgotten the story of their fathers, and howl bloody murder

at the “unlawful methods” of the workers fighting for liberation. As if

the law had ever permitted a subject class to shake off its yoke.

By direct action the Anarcho-Syndicalists mean every method of immediate

warfare by the workers against their economic and political oppressors.

Among these the outstanding are: the strike, in all its gradations from

the simple wage-struggle to the general strike; the boycott; sabotage in

its countless forms; anti-militarist propaganda; and in particularly

critical cases, such, for example, as that in Spain today, armed

resistance of the people for the protection of life and liberty.

Among these fighting techniques the strike, that is, organised refusal

to work, is the most used. It plays in the industrial age the same rĂŽle

for the workers as did their frequent uprisings for the peasants in the

feudal era. In its simplest form it is for the workers an indispensable

means of raising their standard of living or defending their attained

advantages against the concerted measures of the employers. But the

strike is for the workers not only a means for the defence of immediate

economic interests, it is also a continuous schooling for their powers

of resistance, showing them every day that every least right has to be

won by unceasing struggle against the existing system.

Just as are the economic fighting organisations of the workers, so also

are the daily wage-struggles a result of the capitalist economic order,

and consequently, a vital necessity for the workers. Without these they

would be submerged in the abyss of poverty. Certainly the social problem

cannot be solved by wage-struggles alone, but they are the best

educative equipment for making the workers aquainted with the real

essence of the social problem, training them for the struggle for

liberation from economic and social slavery. It may also be taken as

true that so long as the worker has to sell hands and brain to an

employer, he will in the long run never earn more than is required to

provide the most indispensable necessities of life. But these

necessities of life are not always the same, but are constantly changing

with the demands which the worker makes on life.

Here we come to the general cultural significance of the labour

struggle. The economic alliance of the producers not only afford them a

weapon for the enforcement of better living conditions, it becomes for

them a practical school, a university of experience, from which they

draw instruction and enlightenment in richest measure. The practical

experiences and occurrences of the everyday struggles of the workers

find an intellectual precipitate in their organisations, deepen their

understanding, and broaden their intellectual outlook. By the constant

intellectual elaboration of their life experiences there are developed

in individuals new needs and the urge for different fields of

intellectual life. And precisely in this development lies the great

cultural significance of these struggles.

True intellectual culture and the demand for higher interests in life

does not become possible until man has achieved a certain material

standard of living, which makes him capable of these. Without this

preliminary any higher intellectual aspirations are quite out of the

question. Men who are constantly threatened by direst misery can hardly

have much understanding of the higher cultural values. Only after the

workers, by decades of struggle, had conquered for themselves a better

standard of living could there be any talk of intellectual and cultural

development among them. But it is just these aspirations of the workers

which the employers view with deepest distrust. For capitalists as a

class, the well-known saying of the Spanish minister, Juan Bravo

Murillo, still holds good today: “We need no men who can think among the

workers; what we need is beasts of toil.”

One of the most important results of the daily economic struggles is the

development of solidarity among the workers, and this has for them a

quite different meaning from the political coalition of parties whose

following is composed of people of every social class. A feeling of

mutual helpfulness, whose strength is constantly being renewed in the

daily struggle for the necessities of life, which is constantly making

the most extreme demands on the co-operation of men subjected to the

same conditions, operates very differently from abstract party

principles, which for the most part are of only Platonic value. It grows

into the vital consciousness of a community of fate, and this gradually

develops into a new sense of right, and becomes the preliminary ethical

assumption of every effort at the liberation of an oppressed class.

To cherish and strengthen this natural solidarity of the workers and to

give to every strike movement a more profoundly social character, is one

of the most important tasks which the Anarcho-Syndicalists have set

themselves. For this reason the sympathetic strike is one of their

choicest weapons, and has developed in Spain to a compass it has not

attained in any other country. Through it the economic battle becomes a

deliberate action of the workers as a class. The sympathetic strike is

the collaboration of related, but also of unrelated, categories of

labour, to help the battle of a particular trade to victory by extending

the strike to other branches of labour, where this is necessary. In this

case the workers are not satisfied with giving fighting assistance to

their striking brethren, but go further, and by crippling entire

industries cause a break in the whole economic life in order to make

their demands effective.

Today, when by the formation of national and international cartels and

trusts private capitalism grows more and more into monopoly capitalism,

this form of warfare is in most cases the only one by which the workers

can still promise themselves success. Because of the internal

transformation in industrial capitalism the sympathetic strike becomes

for the workers the imperative of the hour. Just as the employers in

their cartels and protective organisations are building an ever broader

basis for the defence of their interests, so also the workers must turn

their attention to creating for themselves by an ever wider alliance of

their national and international economic organisations the required

basis for solidaric mass action adequate for the demands of the time.

The restricted strike is today losing more and more of its original

importance, even if it is not doomed to disappear altogether. In the

modern economic struggle between capital and labour the big strike,

involving entire industries, will play a larger and larger part. Even

the workers in the old craft organisations, which are as yet untouched

by Socialist ideas, have grasped that, as is shown clearly enough by the

rapid springing up of industrial unions in America in contrast with the

old methods of the A.F.of L.

Direct action by organised labour finds its strongest expression in the

general strike, in the stoppage of work in every branch of production by

the organised resistance of the proletariat, with all the consequences

arising from it. It is the most powerful weapon which the workers have

at their command, and gives the most comprehensive expression to their

strength as a social factor. After the French trade union congress in

Marseilles (1892), and the later congresses of the C.G.T. (General

Federation of Labour) had by a large majority declared for the

propaganda of the general strike, it was the political labour parties in

Germany and most other countries which assailed most violently this form

of proletarian action, and rejected it as “Utopian.” “The general strike

is general madness” was the trenchant phrase which was coined at that

time by one of the most prominent leaders of the German Social

Democracy. But the great strike movement of the years immediately

following, in Spain, Belgium, Italy, Holland, Russia, and so on, showed

clearly that this alleged “Utopia” lay wholly within the realm of the

possible and did not arise from the imagination of a few revolutionary

fanatics.

The general strike is, of course, not an agency that can be invoked

arbitrarily on every occasion. It needs certain social assumptions to

give it its proper moral strength and make it a proclamation of the will

of the broad masses of the people. The ridiculous claim, which is so

often attributed to the Anarcho-Syndicalists, that it is only necessary

to proclaim a general strike in order to achieve a Socialist society in

a few days, is, of course, just a silly invention of evil-minded

opponents bent on discrediting an idea which they cannot attack by any

other means.

The general strike can serve various purposes. It can be the last stage

of a sympathetic strike, as for example, the general strike in Barcelona

in February, 1902, or that in Bilbao in October, 1903, which enabled the

mine workers to get rid of the hated truck system and compelled the

employers to establish sanitary conditions on the mines. It can as

easily be a means by which organised labour tries to enforce some

general demand, as, for example, in the attempted general strike in the

U.S.A. in 1886, to compel the granting of the eight-hour day in all

industries. The great general strike of the English workers in 1926 was

the result of a planned attempt by the employers to lower the general

standard of living of the workers by a cut in wages.

But the general strike can also have political objectives in view, as,

for example, the fight of the Spanish workers in 1904, for the

liberation of political prisoners, or the general strike in Catalonia in

July, 1909, to compel the government to terminate the war in Morocco.

And the general strike of the German workers in 1920, which was

instituted after the so-called Kapp putsch and put an end to a

government that had attained to power by a military uprising, belongs to

this category; as do also the mass strikes in Belgium in 1903, and in

Sweden in 1909, to compel the granting of universal suffrage, and the

general strike of the Russian workers in 1905, for the granting of the

constitution. But in Spain the widespread strike movement among the

workers and peasants after the Fascist revolt in July, 1936, developed

into a “social general strike” (huelga general) and led to armed

resistance, and with this to the abolishment of the capitalist economic

order and the reorganisation of the economic life by the workers

themselves.

The great importance of the general strike lies in this: at one blow it

brings the whole economic system to a standstill and shakes it to its

foundations. Moreover, such an action is in no wise dependent on the

practical preparedness of all the workers, as all the citizens of a

country have never participated in a social overturn. That the organised

workers in the most important industries quit work is enough to cripple

the entire economic mechanism, which cannot function without the daily

provision of coal, electric power, and raw materials of every sort. But

when the ruling classes are confronted with an energetic, organised

working class, schooled in daily conflict, and are aware of what they

have at stake, they become much more willing to make the necessary

concessions, and, above all, they fear to take a course with the workers

which might drive them to extremes. Even Jean JaurĂšs who, as a Socialist

parliamentarian, was not in agreement with the idea of the general

strike, had to concede that the constant danger arising from the

possibility of such a movement admonished the possessing classes to

caution, and, above everything, made them shrink from the suppression of

hard-won rights, since they saw that this could easily lead to

catastrophe.

But at the time of a universal social crisis, or when, as today in

Spain, the concern is to protect an entire people against the attacks of

benighted reactionaries, the general strike is an invaluable weapon, for

which there is no substitute. By crippling the whole public life it

makes difficult mutual agreements of the representatives of the ruling

classes and the local officials with the central government, even when

it does not entirely prevent them. Even the use of the army is, in such

cases, directed at very different tasks from those of political revolt.

In the latter case it suffices for the government, so long as it can

rely on the military, to concentrate its troops in the capital and the

most important points in the country, in order to meet the danger that

threatens.

A general strike, however, leads inevitably to a scattering of the

military forces, as in such a situation the important concern is the

protection of all important centres of industry and the transport system

against the rebellious workers. But this means that military discipline,

which is always strongest when soldiers operate in fixed formations, is

relaxed. Where the military in small groups faces a determined people

fighting for its freedom, there always exists the possibility that at

least a part of the soldiers will reach some inner insight and

comprehend that, after all, it is their own parents and brothers at whom

they are pointing their weapons. For militarism, also, is primarily a

psychologic problem, and its disastrous influence always manifests

itself where the individual is given no chance to think about his

dignity as a human being, no chance to see that there are higher tasks

in life than lending oneself to the uses of a bloody oppressor of one’s

own people.

For the workers the general strike takes the place of the barricades of

the political uprising. It is for them a logical outcome of the

industrial system whose victims they are today, and at the same time it

offers them their strongest weapon in their struggle for liberation,

provided they recognise their own strength and learn how to use this

weapon properly. William Morris, with the prophetic vision of the poet,

foresaw this development in affair, when, in his splendid book News from

Nowhere, he has the Socialist reconstruction of society preceded by a

long series of general strikes of ever increasing violence, which shook

the old system to its deepest foundations, until at last its supporters

were no longer able to put up any resistance against this new

enlightenment of the toiling masses in town and country.

The whole development of modern capitalism, which is today growing into

an ever graver danger to society, can but serve to spread this

enlightenment more widely among the workers. The fruitlessness of the

participation of the organised workers in parliaments, which is today

becoming more and more manifest in every country, of itself compels them

to look about for new methods for the effective defence of their

interests and their eventual liberation from the yoke of wage slavery.

Another important fighting device for direct action is the boycott. It

can be employed by the workers both in their character of producers and

of consumers. A systematic refusal of consumers to buy from firms that

handle goods not produced under conditions approved by the labour unions

can often be of decisive importance, especially for those branches of

labour engaged in the production of commodities of general use. At the

same time the boycott is very well adapted to influencing public opinion

in favour of the workers, provided it is accompanied by suitable

propaganda. The union label is a effective means of facilitating the

boycott, at it gives the purchaser the sign by which to distinguish the

goods he wants from the spurious. Even the masters of the Third Reich

experienced what a weapon the boycott can become in the hands of the

great masses of people, when they had to confess that the international

boycott against German goods had inflicted serious damage on German

export trade. And this influence might have been greater still, if the

trade unions had kept public opinion alert by incessant propaganda, and

had continued to foster the protest against the suppression of the

German labour movement.

As producers the boycott provides the workers with the means of imposing

an embargo on individual plants whose managers show themselves

especially hostile to trade unions. In Barcelona, Valencia and Cadiz the

refusal of the longshoremen to unload German vessels compelled the

captains of these vessels to discharge their cargoes in North African

harbours. If the trade unions in the other countries had resolved on the

same procedure, they would have achieved incomparably greater results

than by Platonic protests. In any case the boycott is one of the most

effective fighting devices in the hands of the working class, and the

more profoundly aware of this device the workers become, the more

comprehensive and successful will they become in their everyday

struggles.

Among the weapons in the Anarcho-Syndicalist armoury sabotage is the one

most feared by the employer and most harshly condemned as “unlawful.” In

realty we are dealing here with a method of economic petty warfare that

is as old as the system of exploitation and political oppression itself.

It is, in some circumstances, simply forced upon the workers, when every

other device fails. Sabotage consists in the workers putting every

possible obstacle in the way of the ordinary modes of work. For the most

part this occurs when the employers try to avail themselves of a bad

economic situation or some other favourable occasion to lower the normal

conditions of labour by curtailment of wages or by lengthening of the

hours of labour. The term itself is derived from the French word, sabot,

wooden shoe, and means to work clumsily as if by sabot blows. The whole

import of sabotage is exhausted in the motto: for bad wages, bad work.

The employer himself acts on the same principle, when he calculates the

price of his goods according to their quality. The producer finds

himself in the same position: his goods are his labour-power, and it is

only good and proper that he should try to dispose of it on the best

terms he can get.

But when the employer takes advantage of the evil position of the

producer to force the price of his labour-power as low as possible, he

need not wonder when the latter defends himself as best he can and for

this purpose makes use of the means which the circumstances put in his

hands. The English workers were already doing this long before

revolutionary Syndicalism was spoken of on the continent. In fact the

policy of “ca’ canny” (go slow), which, along with the phrase itself,

the English workers took over from their Scottish brethren, was the

first and most effective form of sabotage. There are today in every

industry a hundred means by which the workers can seriously disturb

production; everywhere under the modern system of division of labour,

where often the slightest disturbance in one branch of the work can

bring to a standstill the entire process of production. Thus the railway

workers in France and Italy by the use of the so-called grÚve perlée

(string-of-pearls-strike) threw the whole system of transportation into

disorder. For this they needed to do nothing more than to adhere to the

strict letter of the existing transport laws, and thus made it

impossible for any train to arrive at its destination on time. When the

employers are at once faced with the fact that even in an unfavourable

situation, where the workers would not dare to think of a strike, they

still have in their hands the means of defending themselves, there will

also come to them the understanding that it does not pay to make use of

some particular hard situation of the workers of force harder conditions

of living upon them.

The so-called sit down strike, which was transplanted from Europe to

America with such suprising rapidity and consists of the workers

remaining in the plant day and night without turning a finger in order

to prevent the installing of strike-breakers, belongs in the realm of

sabotage. Very often sabotage works thus: before a strike the workers

put the machines out of order to make the work of possible

strike-breakers harder, or even impossible for a considerable time. In

no field is there as so much scope for the imagination of the worker as

in this. But the sabotage of the workers is directed against the

employers, never against the consumers. In his report before the C.G.T.

in Toulouse in 1897, Emile Pouget laid special stress on this point. All

the reports in the bourgeois press about bakers who had baked glass in

their bread, or farm hands who had poisoned milk, and the like, are

malicious inventions, designed solely to prejudice the public against

the workers.

Sabotaging the consumers is the age old-privilege of the employers. The

deliberate adulteration of provisions, the construction of wretched

slums and insanitary tenements of the poorest and cheapest material, the

destruction of great quantities of foodstuffs in order to keep up

prices, while millions are perishing in direst misery, the constant

efforts of the employers to force the subsistence of the workers down to

the lowest point possible, in order to grab for themselves the highest

possible profits, the shameless practice of the armament industries of

supplying foreign countries with complete equipment for war, which,

given the appropriate occasion, may be employed to lay waste the country

that produced them, all these and many more are merely individual items

in an interminable list of types of sabotage by capitalists against

their own people.

Another form of direct action is the social strike, which will, without

doubt, in the immediate future play a much larger part. It is concerned

less with the immediate interests of the producers than with the

protection of the community against the most pernicious outgrowths of

the present system. The social strike seeks to force upon the employers

a responsibility to the public. Primarily it has in view the protection

of the consumers, of whom the workers themselves constitute the great

majority. The task of the trade union has heretofore been restricted

almost exclusively to the protection of the worker as producer. As long

as the employer was observing the hours of labour agreed on and paying

the established wage this task was being performed. In other words: the

trade union is interested only in the conditions under which its members

work, not in the kind of work they perform. Theoretically, it is,

indeed, asserted that the relation between employer and employee is

based upon a contract for the accomplishment of a definite purpose. The

purpose in this case is social production. But a contract has meaning

only when both parties participate equally in the purpose. In reality,

however, the worker has today no voice in determining production, for

this is given over completely to the employer. The consequence is that

the worker is debased by doing a thousand things which constantly serve

only to injure the whole community for the advantage of the employer. He

is compelled to make use of inferior and often actually injurious

materials in the fabrication of his products, to erect wretched

dwellings, to put up spoiled foodstuffs, and to perpetuate innumerable

acts that are planned to cheat the consumer.

To interfere vigorously here is, in the opinion of the

Anarcho-Syndicalists, the great task of the trade unions of the future.

An advance in this direction would at the same time enhance the position

of the workers in society, and in large measure confirm that position.

Various efforts in this field have already been made, as witness, for

example, the strike of the building-workers in Barcelona, who refused to

use poor material and the wreckage from old buildings in the erection of

workers’ dwelling (1902), the strikes in various large restaurants in

Paris because the kitchen workers were unwilling to prepare for serving

cheap, decaying meat (1906), and a long list of instances in recent

times; all going to prove that the workers’ understanding of their

responsibility to society is growing. The resolution of the German

armament workers at the congress in Erfurt (1919) to make no more

weapons of war and to compel their employers to convert their plants to

other uses, belongs also to this category. And it is a fact that this

resolution was maintained for almost two years, until it was broken by

the Central Trades Unions. The Anarcho-Syndicalist workers of Sommerda

resisted with great energy to the last, when their place were taken by

members of the “free labour unions.”

As outspoken opponents of all nationalist ambitions the revolutionary

Syndicalists, especially in the Latin countries, have always devoted a

very considerable part of their activity to anti-militarist propaganda,

seeking to hold the workers in soldiers’ coats loyal to their class and

to prevent their turning their weapons against their brethren in time of

a strike. This has cost them great sacrifices; but they have never

ceased their efforts, because they know that they can regain their

efforts only by incessant warfare against the dominant powers. At the

same time, however, the anti-militarist propaganda contributes in large

measure to oppose the threat of wars to come with the general strike.

The Anarcho-Syndicalists know that wars are only waged in the interest

of the ruling classes; they believe, therefore, that any means is

justifiable that can prevent the organised murder of peoples. In this

field also the workers have every means in their hands, if only they

possess the desire and the moral strength to use them.

Above all it is necessary to cure the labour movement of its inner

ossification and rid it of the empty sloganeering of the political

parties, so that it may forge ahead intellectually and develop within

itself the creative conditions which must precede the realisation of

Socialism. The practical attainability of this goal must become for the

workers an inner certainty and must ripen into an ethical necessity. The

great final goal of Socialism must emerge from all the practical daily

struggles, and must give them a social character. In the pettiest

struggle, born of the needs of the moment, there must be mirrored the

great goal of social liberation, and each such struggle must help to

smooth the way and strengthen the spirit which transforms the inner

longing of its bearers into will and deed.

Chapter 6. The Evolution of Anarcho-Syndicalism

Revolutionary Syndicalism in France and its Influence on the labour

movement in Europe; The Industrial Workers of the World; Syndicalism

after the First World War; The Syndicalists and the Third International;

The founding of the new International Workingmen’s Association;

Anarcho-Syndicalism in Spain; In Portugal; In Italy; In France; In

Germany; In Sweden; In Holland; In South America.

The modern Anarcho-Syndicalist movement in Europe, with the single

exception of Spain where from the days of the First International

Anarcho-Syndicalism has always been the dominant tendency in the labour

movement, owes its origin to the rise of revolutionary Syndicalism in

France, with its field of influence in the C.G.T. This movement

developed quite spontaneously within the French working class as a

reaction against political Socialism, the cleavages in which for a long

time permitted no unified trade union movement. After the fall of the

Paris Commune and the outlawing of the International in France the

labour movement there had taken on a completely colourless character and

had fallen completely under the influence of the bourgeois Republican,

J. Barberet, whose slogan was: “Harmony between capital and labour!” Not

until the congress in Marseilles (1879) did any Socialist tendencies

again manifest themselves and the Fédération des Travailleurs came into

being, itself to come quickly and completely under the influence of the

so-called collectivists.

But even the collectivists did not long remain united, and the congress

of St. Etienne (1882) brought a split in this movement. One section

followed the school of the Marxist, Jules Guesde, and founded the Parti

Ouvrie Français, while the other section attached itself to the former

Anarchist, Paul Brousse, to form the Parti Ouvrier RĂ©volutionare

Socialiste Français. The former found its support chiefly in the

Fédération Nationale des Syndicats, while the latter had its stronghold

in the Fédération des Bourses du Travail de France (Federation of Labour

Exchanges of France). After a short time the so-called Allemanists,

under the leadership of Jean Alleman, broke away from the Broussists and

attained a powerful influence in some of the large syndicates; they had

given up parliamentary activity completely. Besides these there were the

Blanquists, united in the Comité Révolutionaire Central, and the

independent Socialists, who belonged to the SociĂ©tĂ© pour L’Economie

Sociale, which had been founded in 1885 by Benoit Malon, and out of

which came both Jean JaurĂšs and Millerand.

All of these parties, with the exception of the Allemanists, saw in the

trade unions merely recruiting schools for their political objectives,

and had no understanding whatever of their real functions. The constant

dissension among the various Socialist factions were naturally carried

over to the syndicats, with the results that when the trade unions of

one faction went on strike, the syndicats of the other factions walked

in on them on strike-breakers. This untenable situation gradually opened

the eyes of the workers eyes, on awakening to which the

anti-parliamentary propaganda of the Anarchists, who since 1883 had a

strong following among the workers in Paris and Lyons, contributed not a

little. So the Trade Union Congress at Nantes (1894) charged a special

committee with the task of devising ways and means for bringing about an

understanding among all the trade union alliances. The result was the

founding in the following year at the Congress in Limonges, of the

C.G.T., which declared itself independent of all political parties. It

was the final renunciation by the trade unions of political Socialism,

whose operations had crippled the French labour movement and deprived it

of its most effective weapon in the fight for liberation.

From there on there existed only two large trade union groups, the

C.G.T. and the Federation of Labour Exchanges, until in 1902, at the

Congress of Montpellier the latter joined the C.N.T. With this there was

brought about practical unity of the trade unions. This effort at the

unification of organised labour was preceded by an intensive propaganda

for the general strike, for which the congresses at Marseilles (1892),

Paris (1893), and Nantes (1894) had already declared by strong

majorities. The idea of the general strike was first brought into the

trade union movement by the Anarchist carpenter, Tortelier, who had been

deeply stirred by the general strike movement on the U.S.A. in 1886–7,

and it had been later taken up by the Allemanists, while Jules Guesde

and the French Marxists had emphatically pronounced against it. However,

both movements furnished the C.N.T. with a lot of its most distinguished

representatives: from the Allemanists came, in particular, V.

Griffuelles; from the Anarchists, F. Pelloutier, the devoted and highly

intelligent secretary of the Federation of Labour Exchanges, E. Pouget,

editor of the official organ of the C.G.T., La Voix du Peuple, P.

Delesalle, G. Yvetot, and many others. One often encounters in other

countries, the widely disseminated opinion, which was fostered by Werner

Sombart in particular, that revolutionary Syndicalism in France owes its

origin to intellectuals like G. Sorel, E. Berth and H. Lagardelle, who

in the periodical, Le Mouvement Socialiste, founded it 1899, elaborated

in their own way the intellectual results of the new movement. This is

utterly false. These men never belonged to the movement themselves, nor

had they any mentionable influence on its internal development.

Moreover, the C.G.T. was not composed exclusively of revolutionary trade

unions, certainly half of its members were of reformist tendency and had

only joined the C.G.T. because they recognised that the dependence of

the trade unions on the political parties was a misfortune for the

movement. But the revolutionary wing, which had the most energetic and

active elements in organised labour on its side and had at its command,

moreover, the best intellectual forces in the organisation, gave to the

C.G.T. its characteristic stamp, and it was they, exclusively, who

determined the development of the ideas of revolutionary Syndicalism.

With it the ideas of the old International wakened to new life, and

there was initiated that storm-and-stress period of the French labour

movement, whose revolutionary influences made themselves felt far beyond

the boundaries of France. The great strike movements and the countless

prosecutions of the C.G.T. by the government merely strengthened their

revolutionary verve, and caused the new ideas to find their way also

into Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Bohemia, and the

Scandinavian counties. In England also the Syndicalist Education League,

which had been brought into existence in 1910 by Tom Mann and Guy

Bowman, and whose teachings exercised a very strong influence,

especially among the rank-and-file of the transport and mining

industries, as was revealed in the great strike movements of that

period, owed its existence to French Syndicalism.

The influence of French Syndicalism on the international labour movement

was strengthened in great degree by the internal crisis which at that

time laid hold of nearly all the Socialist labour parties. The battle

between the so-called Revisionists and the rigid Marxists, and

particularly the fact that their very parliamentary activities forced

the most violent opponents of revisionism of natural necessity to travel

in practise the revisionary path, caused many of the more thoughtful

element to reflect seriously. Thus it came about that most of the

parties found themselves driven by the force of circumstances, often

against their will, to make certain concessions to the general strike

idea of the Syndicalists. Before this Domela Nieuwenhuis, the pioneer of

the Socialist labour movement in Holland, had brought up in the

International Congress of Socialists in Brussels (1891) a proposal for

warding off the approaching danger of a war by preparing organised

labour for the general strike, a proposal which was most bitterly

opposed by Wilhelm Liebknect in particular. But in spite of this

opposition almost all national and international Socialist congresses

were subsequently obliged to concern themselves more and more with this

question.

At the Socialist congress in Paris in 1899, the future minister,

Aristide Briand, argued for the general strike with all his fiery

eloquence and succeeded in having an appropriate resolution adopted by

the congress. Even the French Guesdists, who had previously been the

bitterest foes of the general strike, found themselves obliged at the

congress in Lille (1904) to adopt a resolution favouring it, as they

feared they would otherwise lose all their influence with the workers.

Of course nothing was gained by such concessions. The see-saw back and

forth between parliamentarism and direct action could only cause

confusion. Straightforward men like Domela Nieuwenhuis and his followers

in Holland, and the Allemanists in France, drew the inevitable inference

from their new conception of things and withdrew entirely from

parliamentary activity; for the others, however, their concessions to

the idea of the general strike were merely lip service, with no clear

understanding behind it. Whither that led was shown nicely in the case

of Briand, who, as a minister, found himself in the tragic-comic

situation of being obliged to prohibit his own address in favour of the

general strike, which the C.G.T. had distributed in pamphlet form by the

hundred thousand.

Independent of European Syndicalism there developed in the U.S.A. the

movement of the Industrial Workers of the World, which was wholly the

outgrowth of American conditions. Still it had in common with

Syndicalism the methods of direct action and the idea of a Socialist

reorganisation of society by the industrial and agricultural

organisation of the workers themselves. At its founding congress in

Chicago (1905) the most diverse radical elements in the American labour

movement were represented: Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, Charles Moyer,

Daniel De Leon, W. Trautmann, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons and many

others. The most important section for a time was the Western Federation

of Miners whose name was known everywhere for its devoted and

self-sacrificing labour fights in Colorado, Montana and Idaho. Since the

great movement for the eight-hour day in 1886–7, which came to its

tragic conclusion with the execution of the Anarchists, Spies, Parsons,

Fletcher. Engel and Lingg on November 11, 1877, the American labour

movement had been completely bogged down spiritually. It was believed

that by the founding of the I.W.W. it might be possible to put the

movement back on its revolutionary course, an expectation which has thus

far not been fulfilled. What chiefly distinguished the I.W.W. from the

European Syndicalists was its strongly defined Marxist views, which were

impressed on it more particularly by Daniel De Leon while European

Syndicalists had conspicuously adopted the Socialist ideas of the

libertarian wing of the First International.

The I.W.W. had an especially strong influence on the itinerant workers

in the West, but they also gained some influence among factory workers

in the eastern states, and conducted a great many wide-spread strikes,

which put the name of the “Wobblies” in everybody’s mouth. They took an

outstanding part in the embittered battles for the safeguarding of

freedom of speech in the Western states, and made many terrible

sacrifices of life and liberty in doing so. Their members filled the

jails by thousands, many were tarred and feathered by fanatical

vigilantes, or lynched outright. The Everett massacre of 1916, the

execution of the labour poet, Joe Hill, in 1915, the Centralia affair in

1919, and a lot of similar cases in which defenceless workers fell

victims, were only a few mile stones in the I.W.W.’s history of

sacrifice.

The outbreak of the World War affected the labour movement like a

natural catastrophe of enormous scope. After the assassinations at

Sarajevo, when everybody felt that Europe was driving under full sail

toward a general war, the leaders of the C.G.T. proposed to the leaders

of the German trade unions that organised labour in the two countries

should take joint action to halt the threatened disaster. But the German

labour leaders, who always opposed any direct mass action, and in their

long years of parliamentary routine had long since lost every trace of

revolutionary initiative, could not be won over to such a proposal. So

failed the last chance for preventing the frightful catastrophe.

After the war the peoples faced a new situation. Europe was bleeding

from a thousand wounds and writhing as if in the throes of a fever. In

Central Europe the old regime had collapsed. Russia found herself in the

midst of a social revolution of which no one could see the end. Of all

the events after the war the occurrences in Russia had impressed the

workers in every country most deeply. They felt instinctively that they

were in the midst of a revolutionary situation, and that, if nothing

decisive came out of it now, all the hopes of the toiling masses would

be dispelled for years. The workers recognised that the system which had

been unable to prevent the horrible catastrophe of the World War, but

instead for four years had driven the peoples to the slaughter-pen, had

forfeited its right to existence, and they hailed any effort which

promised them a way out of the economic and political chaos which the

war had created. For just this reason they placed their highest hopes on

the Russian revolution and thought it marked the inauguration of a new

era in the history of the European peoples.

In 1919 the Bolshevist party, which had attained to power in Russia,

issued an appeal to the revolutionary workers’ organisations in the

world, and invited them to a congress which was to meet in Russia in the

following year to set up a new International. Communist parties exist at

that time in only a few countries; on the other hand, there were in

Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Holland, Sweden, Germany, England and

the countries of North and South America Syndicalist organisations, some

of which exercised a very strong influence. It was, therefore, of deep

concern to Lenin and his followers to win these particular

organisations, as he had so thoroughly alienated himself from the

Socialist labour parties that he could scarcely count upon their

support. So it came about that, at the congress for the founding of the

Third International in the summer of 1920, almost all of the Syndicalist

and Anarcho-Syndicalist organisations were represented.

But the impressions which the Syndicalist delegates received in Russia

were not calculated to make them regard collaboration with the

Communists as either possible or desirable. The “dictatorship of the

proletariat” was already revealing itself in its worst light. The

prisons were filled with Socialists of every school, among them many

Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists. But above all it was plain that the

new dominant caste was in no way fitted for the task of genuine

Socialist reconstruction.

The foundation of the Third International, with its dictatorial

apparatus of organisation and its effort to make the whole labour

movement of Europe into an instrument of the foreign policy of the

Bolshevist state, quickly made plain to the Syndicalists that there was

no place for them in that organisation. But it was very necessary for

the Bolshevists, and Lenin in particular, to establish a hold on the

syndicalist organisation abroad, as their importance, especially in the

Latin countries, was well known. For this reason it was decided to set

up, alongside the Third International, a separate international alliance

of all revolutionary trade unions, in which the Syndicalist

organisations of all shades could also find a place. The Syndicalist

delegates agreed to the proposal and began negotiations with Losovsky,

the commissioner of the Communist International. But he demanded that

the new organisation should be subordinate to the Third International,

and that the Syndicates in the several countries should be placed under

the leadership of the Communist organisations in their countries. This

demand was unanimously rejected by the Syndicalist delegates. As they

were unable to come to an agreement on any terms, it was at last decided

to hold and international trade union congress in Moscow the following

year, 1921, and to leave the decision of his question to it.

In December, 1920, an international Syndicalist conference convened in

Berlin to decide upon an attitude toward the approaching congress in

Moscow. The congress agreed upon seven points, on the acceptance of

which their entrance into the Red Trade Union International was made

dependent. The most important of these seven points was the complete

independence of the movement from all political parties, and insistence

on the viewpoint that the Socialist reorganisation of society could only

be carried out by the economic organisations of the producing classes

themselves. At the congress in Moscow in the following year the

Syndicalist organisations were in the minority. The Central Alliance of

Russian Trade Unions dominated the entire situation and put through all

the resolutions.

In conjunction with the thirteenth congress of the F.A.U.D. (Freie

Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands, Free Labour Union of Germany) at DĂŒsseldorf

in October, 1921, there was held an international organisation of

Syndicalist organisations at which delegates from Germany, Sweden,

Holland, Czechoslovakia and the I.W.W. in America were present. The

conference voted for the calling of an international Syndicalist

congress in the spring of 1922. Berlin was selected as the meeting

place. In July, 1922, a conference was held in Berlin to make

preparations for this congress; France, Germany, Norway, Sweden,

Holland, Spain and the revolutionary Syndicalists in Russia were

represented. The Central Alliance of Russian Trade Unions had also sent

a delegate who did his best to prevent the calling of the congress, and

when he had no success in this left the congress. The conference worked

out a declaration of the principles of revolutionary Syndicalism, which

was to be laid before the coming congress for consideration, and made

all the necessary preparations for making the congress a success.

The International Congress of Syndicalists met in Berlin from December

25, 1922, until January 2, 1923, the following organisations being

represented; Argentina by the FederactiĂłn Obrera Regional Argentina,

with 200,000 members; Chile by the Industrial Workers of the World, with

20,000 members; Denmark by the Union for Syndicalist Propaganda, with

600 members; Germany by the Freie Arbeiter-Union, with 120,000 members;

Holland by the National Arbeids Sekretariat, with 22,500 members; Italy

by the Unione Sindicale Italiana, 500,000 members; Mexico by the

ConfederaciĂłn General de Trabajadores, with 30,000 members; Norway by

the Norsk Syndikalistik Federasjon, with 20,000 members; Portugal by the

Confederaçao Geral do Trabalho, with 150,000 members; Sweden by the

Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation, with 32,000 members. The Spanish

C.N.T. was at that time engaged in a terrific struggle against the

dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and for that reason had sent no

delegate, but they reaffirmed their adherence at the secret conference

in Saragossa in October, 1923. In France, where after the war a split in

the C.G.T. had taken place, leading to the founding of the C.G.T.U., the

latter had already joined the Muscovites. But there was a minority in

the organisation which had combined to form the Comité de Défence

Syndicaliste Revolutionaire. This committee, which represented about

100,000 workers, took active part in the proceedings of the Berlin

congress. From France the Federation des feunesses de la Seine were

likewise represented. Two delegates represented the Syndicalist minority

of the Russian trade unions.

The congress resolved unanimously on the founding of an international

alliance of all Syndicalist organisations under the name International

Workingmen’s Association. It adopted the declaration of principles that

had been worked out by the Berlin preliminary conference, which

presented an outspoken profession of Anarcho-Syndicalism. The second

item on this declaration runs as follows:

“Revolutionary Syndicalism is the confirmed enemy of every form of

economic and social monopoly, and aims at its abolition by means of

economic communes and administrative organs of field and factory workers

on the basis of a free system of councils, entirely liberated from

subordination to any government or political party. Against the politics

of the state and of parties it erects the economic organisation of

labour; against the government of men, it sets up the administration of

things. Consequently, it has for its object not the conquest of

political power, but the abolition of every State function in social

life. It considers that, along with the monopoly of property, should

disappear also the monopoly of domination, and that any form of the

State, including the dictatorship of the proletariat, will always be the

creator of new privileges; it could never be an instrument of

liberation.”

With this the breach with Bolshevism and its adherents in the separate

countries was completed. The I.W.M.A. from then on travelled its own

road and gained a foothold in a number of countries which had not been

represented at the founding congress. It holds its international

congresses, issues its bulletins, and adjusts the relations between the

Syndicalists organisations of the different countries. Among all the

international alliances of organised labour it is the one that has most

faithfully cherished the traditions of the First International.

The most powerful and influential organisation in the I.W.M.A. is the

Spanish C.N.T., which is making history in Europe today and is,

moreover, discharging one of the hardest tasks that has ever been set

before the workers’ organisation. The C.N.T. was founded in 1910, and

within a few years counted as members over a million workers and

peasants. The organisation was new only in name, not in objectives or

methods. The history of the Spanish labour movement is shot through with

long periods of reaction, in which the movement has been able to carry

on only an underground existence. But after every such period it has

organised anew. The name changes, but the goal remains the same. The

labour movement in Spain goes back to 1840, when the weaver, Juan Munts,

in Catalonia, brought into being in Barcelona the first trade union of

textile workers. The government of that day sent General Zapatero to

Catalonia to put down the movement. The consequence was the great

general strike of 1855, which led to an open revolt in which the workers

inscribed on their banners the slogan: AssociaciĂłn Ăł Muerte! (The right

to organise or death!) The rebellion was bloodily suppressed, but the

government granted the workers the right of organisation.

The first movement of the Spanish workers was strongly influenced by the

ideas of Pi y Margall, leader of the Spanish Federalists and disciple of

Proudhon. Pi y Margall was one of the outstanding theorists of his time

and had a powerful influence on the development of libertarian ideas in

Spain. His political ideas had much in common with those of Richard

Price, Joseph Priestly, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and other

representatives of the Anglo-American liberalism of the first period. He

wanted to limit the power of the state to a minimum and gradually

replace it by a Socialist economic order. In 1868, after the abdication

of King Amadeo I, Bakunin addressed his celebrated manifest to the

Spanish workers, and sent a special delegation to Spain to win the

workers to the First International. Tens of thousands of workers joined

the great workers’ alliance and adopted the Anarcho-Syndicalist ideas of

Bakunin, to which they have remained loyal to this day. As a matter of

fact, the Spanish Federation was the strongest organisation in the

International. After the overthrow of the first Spanish republic the

International was suppressed in Spain, but it continued to exist as an

underground movement, issued its periodicals, and bade defiance to every

tyranny. And when, finally, after seven years of unheard-of persecution,

the exceptional law against the workers was repealed, there immediately

sprang to life the Federaction de Trabajadores de la Región Española, at

whose second congress in Sevilla (1882) there were already represented

218 local federations with 70,000 members.

No other workers’ organisation in the world has had to endure such

frightful persecution as the Anarchist labour movement in Spain.

Hundreds of its adherents were executed or horrible tortured by inhuman

inquisitors in the prisons of Jerez de la Forntera, Montjuich, Sevilla,

AlcalĂĄ del Valle, and so on. The bloody persecutions of the so-called

Mano Negra (Black Hand), which actually never existed, was a pure

invention of the government to justify the suppression of the

organisations of the field workers in Andalusia; the gruesome tragedy of

Montjuich, which in its day roused a storm of protest from the entire

world; the acts of terrorism of the of the Camisas Blancas (White

Shirts), a gangster organisation which had been brought into existence

by the police and the employers to clear away the leaders of the

movement by assassination, and to which even the General Secretary of

the C.N.T., Salvador Segui, fell victim — these are just a few chapters

in the long, torture-filled story of the Spanish labour movement.

Fransisco Ferrer, founder of the Modern School in Barcelona and

publisher of the paper La Huelga General (The General Strike) was one of

its martyrs. But no reaction was ever able to crush the resistance of

its adherents. That movement has produced hundreds of the most

marvellous characters, whose purity of heart and inflexible idealism had

to be acknowledged even by their grimmest opponents. The Spanish

Anarchist labour movement had no place for political careerists. What it

had to offer was constant danger, imprisonment, and often death. Only

when one has become acquainted with the frightful story of the martyrs

of this movement does one understand why it has assumed at certain

periods such a violent character in defence of its human rights against

the onslaughts of black reactionaries.

The present C.N.T.-F.A.I. embodies the old traditions of the movement.

In contrast with the Anarchists of many other countries, their comrades

in Spain from the beginning based their activities on the economic

fighting organisations of the workers. The C.N.T. today embraces a

membership of two and a half million workers and peasants. It controls

thirty-six daily papers, among them Solidaredad Obrera in Barcelona,

with a circulation of 240,000, the largest of any paper in Spain, and

Castilla Libre, which is the most read paper in Madrid. Besides these

the movements put out a lot of weekly publications and possesses six of

the best reviews in the country. During the last year, in particular, it

has published a large number of excellent books and pamphlets and has

contributed more to the education of the masses than has any other

movement. The C.N.T.-F.A.I. is, today, the backbone of the heroic

struggle against Fascism in Spain and the soul of the social

reorganisation of the country.

In Portugal, where the labour movement has always been strongly

influenced by neighbouring Spain, there was formed in 1911 the

Confederacçao Geral do Trabalho, the strongest workers’ organisation in

the country, representing the same principles as the C.N.T. in Spain. It

has always sharply its independence of all political parties, and had

conducted a lot of big strike movements. By the victory of the

dictatorship in Portugal the C.G.T. was forced out of political activity

and today leads an underground existence. The recent disturbances in

Portugal, directed against the existing reaction, are chiefly traceable

to its activities.

In Italy there always existed, from the days of the First International,

a strong Anarchist movement which, in certain sections of the country

retained a decisive influence over the workers and peasants. In 1902 the

Socialist Party founded the Confederazione del Lavoro, which was

patterned after the model of the German trade union organisations of the

country. But it never attained this goal; it was not even able to

prevent a large part of its membership from being strongly influenced by

the ideas of the French Syndicalists. A few big and successful strikes,

especially the farmlabourers’ strike in Parma and Ferrara, gave a strong

impetus to the prestige of the advocates of direct action. In 1912 there

convened in Modena a conference of various organisations which were not

at all in accord with the method of the Confederation and its

subservience to the influence of the Socialist Party. This conference

formed a new organisation under the name Unione Sindicale Italiana. This

body was the soul of a long list of labour struggles op to the outbreak

of the World War. In particular it took a prominent part in the

occurrences of the so-called Red Week in June, 1913. The brutal attacks

of the police on striking workers in Ancona led to general strike, which

in a few provinces developed into an armed insurrection.

When, in following year, the World War broke out, a serious crisis arose

in the U.S.I. The most influential leader of the movement, Alceste de

Ambris, who had all the time played a rather ambiguous role, tried to

rouse in the organisation a sentiment for the war. At the congress in

Parma (1914), however, he found himself in the minority, and, with his

followers, withdrew from the movement. Upon Italy’s entrance into the

war all the known propagandists of the U.S.I. were arrested and

imprisoned until the end of the war. After the war a revolutionary

situation arose in Italy, and the events in Russia, whose actual

significance could at that time, of course, not be foreseen, roused a

vigorous response in the country. The U.S.I. in a short time awoke to

new life and soon counted 600,000 members. A series of serious labour

disturbances shook the country, reaching their peak in the occupation of

the factories in August, 1920. Its goal at that time was a free soviet

system, which was to reject any dictatorship and find its basis in the

economic organisations of organised labour.

In that same year, the U.S.I. sent its secretary, Armando Borghi, to

Moscow to acquaint himself personally with the situation in Russia.

Borghi returned to Italy sadly disillusioned. In the interim the

Communists had been trying to get the U.S.I. into their hands; but the

congress at Rome in 1922 led to an open break with Bolshevism and the

affiliation of the organisation with the I.W.M.A. Meanwhile Fascism had

developed into an immediate danger. A strong and united labour movement

that was determined to risk everything in defence of its freedom could

still have put a check upon this danger. But the pitiful conduct of the

Socialist Party and the Confederation of Labour, which was subject to

its influence, wrecked everything. Besides the U.S.I. there remained

only the only the Unione Anarchia Italiana to rally round the

universally revered champion of Italian Anarchism, Errico Malatesta.

When in 1922 the general strike against Fascism broke out, the

democratic government armed the Fascist hordes and throttled this last

attempt at the defence of freedom and right. But Italian democracy had

dug its own grave. It thought it could use Mussolini as a tool against

the workers, but thus it became its own grave-digger. With the victory

of Fascism the whole Italian labour movement disappeared, and along with

it the U.S.I. and all openness in social life.

In France after the war the so-called reformist wing had gained the

upper-hand in the C.G.T., whereupon the revolutionary elements seceded

and formed themselves into the C.G.T.U. But since Moscow had a very

strong interest in getting this particular organisation into its hands,

there was started in it an unscrupulous underground activity in cells

after the Russian pattern which went so far that in 1922 two

Anarcho-Syndicalists were shot down by Communists in the Paris Trade

Union house. Thereupon the Anarcho-Syndicalists, with Pierre Bernard,

withdrew from the C.G.T.U., and formed the Confédération Générale du

Travail Syndicaliste Revolutionaire, which joined the International

Workingmens’ Association. This organisation has since then been

vigorously active and has contributed greatly to keep alive among the

workers the old pre-war ideas of the C.G.T. The disillusionment over

Russia and, above all, the resounding echo amongst the French workers of

the Spanish fight for freedom, led to a strong revival of revolutionary

Syndicalism in France, so that one can safely count on a rebirth of the

movement within predictable time.

In Germany there had existed for a long time before the war the movement

of the so-called Locolists, whose stronghold was the Freie Vereigung

deutscher Gewerkschaften, founded by G.Kessler and F. Kater in 1897.

This organisation was originally inspired by purely Social Democratic

ideas, but it combated the centralising tendencies of the general German

trade union movement. The revival of revolutionary Syndicalism in France

had a strong influence on this movement, and this was notably

strengthened when the former Social Democrat and later Anarchist, Dr. R.

Friedberg came out for the general strike. In 1908 the F.V.D.G. broke

completely with Social Democracy and openly professed Syndicalism. After

the war this movement took a sharp upswing and in a short time counted

120,000 members. At its congress in Berlin in 1919 the declaration of

principles worked out by R. Rocker was adopted; this was in essential

agreement with the objectives of the Spanish C.N.T. At the congress in

DĂŒsseldorf (1920), the organisation changed its name to Freie

Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands. The movement carried on an unusually active

propaganda and took an especially energetic part in the great actions by

organised labour in the Rhenish industrial field. The F.A.U.D. rendered

a great service through the tireless labours of its active publishing

house, which, in addition to a volumous pamphlet literature, brought out

a large number of longer works by Kropotkin, Bakunin, Nettlau, Rocker

and others, and by this activity spread the libertarian ideas of these

men to wider circles. The movement, in addition to its weekly organ, Der

Syndikalist, and the theoretical monthly, Die Internationale, had at its

command a number of local sheets, among them the daily paper, Die

Schöpfung, in Dusseldorf. After Hitler’s accession to power the movement

of the German Anarcho-Syndicalists vanished from the scene. A great many

of its supporters languished in concentration camps or had to take

refuge abroad. In spite of this the organisation still exists in secret,

and under most difficult conditions carries on its underground

propaganda.

In Sweden there has existed for a long time a very active Syndicalist

movement, the Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganization, which is also

affiliated with the I.W.M.A. This organisation numbers over 40,000

members, which constitutes a very high percentage of the Swedish labour

movement. The internal organisation of the Swedish workers’ movement is

in very excellent condition. The movement has two daily papers one of

them, Arbetaren, managed by Albert Jensen in Stockholm. It has its

disposal a large number of distinguished propagandists, and has also

inaugurated a very active Syndicalist Youth movement. The Swedish

Syndicalists take a strong interest in all the workers’ struggles in the

country. When, on the occasion of the great strike of Adalen, the

Swedish government for the first time sent militia against the workers,

five men being shot down in the affray, and the Swedish workers replied

with a general strike, the Syndicalists played a prominent part, and the

government was at last compelled to make concessions to the protest

movement of the workers.

In Holland as Syndicalist movement there was the Nationale

Arbeeter-Sekretariat (N.A.S.), which counted 40,000 members. But when

this came more and more under Communist influence, the Nederlandisch

Syndikalistisch Vakverbond split off from it and announced its

affiliation with the I.W.M.A. The most important unit in this new

organisation is the metal workers’ union under the leadership of A.

Rousseau. The movement has carried on, especially in recent years, a

very active propaganda, and possesses in Die Syndikalist, edited by

Albert De Jong, an excellent organ. And the monthly Grond-Slagen, which

appeared for a few years under the editorship of A. MĂŒller-Lehning,

deserves also to be mentioned here. Holland has been from old the

classic land of anti-militarism. Domela Neiuwenhuis, former priest and

later Anarchist, highly respected by everyone for his pure idealism, in

1904 founded the Anti-Militarist International, which, however, had

influence worth mentioning only in Holland and France. At the third

anti-militarist congress at The Hague (1921) the International

Anti-Militarist Bureau against War and Reaction was founded, which for

the past sixteen years has carried on an extremely active international

propaganda group, and has found able and unselfish representatives in

men like B de Ligt and Albert de Jong. The bureau was represented at a

number of international peace congresses and put out a special

press-service in several languages. In 1925 it allied itself with the

I.W.M.A. through the International Anti-military Committee, and in

association with that organisation carries on a tireless struggle

against reaction and the peril of new wars.

In addition to these there exist Anarcho-Syndicalist propaganda groups

in Norway, Poland and Bulgaria, which are affiliated with the I.W.M.A.

Likewise the Japanese Jiyu Rengo Dantai Zenkoku Kaigi had entered into

formal alliance with the I.W.M.A.

In South America, especially in Argentina, the most advanced country on

the southern continent, the young labour movement was from the very

beginning strongly influenced by the libertarian ideas of Spanish

Anarchism. In 1890 to Buenos Aires from Barcelona came Pellice Parairo,

who had lived through the time of the First International and was one of

the champions of libertarian Socialism in Spain. Under his influence a

congress of trade unions convened in Buenos Aires in 1891, from which

arose the Federación Obrera Argentina, which at its’ fourth congress

changed its name to FederaciĂłn Obrera Segional Argentina. The F.O.R.A.

has carried on since then without interruption, even though its

efficiency was often, as it is again today, disturbed by periods of

reaction, and it was driven to underground activity. It is an Anarchist

trade union organisation, and it was the soul of all the great labour

struggles which have so often shaken that country. The F.O.R.A. began

its activity with 40,000 members, which number has grown since the World

War to 300,000. Its history, which D. A. de Santiallan has sketched in

his work “F.O.R.A.,” is one of the most battle-filled chapters in the

annals of the international labour movement. For over twenty-five years

the movement had a daily paper, La Protesta, which under the editorship

of Santiallan and Arango, for years published a weekly supplement to

which the best minds of international libertarian Socialism contributed.

The paper was suppressed after the coup d’etat of General Uribura, but

it continues to appear in an underground edition oven today, even if not

quite daily. Moreover, almost every considerable trade union had its own

organ. The F.O.R.A. early joined the I.W.M.A., having been represented

at its founding congress by two delegates.

In May, 1929, the F.O.R.A. summoned a congress of all the South American

countries, to meet in Buenos Aires. To it the I.W.M.A. sent from Berlin

its Corresponding Secretary, A. Souchy. At this congress, besides the

F.O.R.A of Argentina, there were represented: Paraguay by the Centro

Obraro del Paraguay; Bolivia by the Federacion Local de la Paz, La

Antorcha, and Luz y Libertad; Mexico by the ConfederaciĂłn General de

Trabajadores; Guatemala by the Comité pro Acción Sindical; Uruguay by

the FederaciĂłn Regional Uruguaya; From Brazil trade unions from seven of

the ten constituent states were represented, Costa Rica was represented

by the organisation, Hacia la Libertad. Even the Chilean I.W.W. sent

representatives, although since the dictatorship of Ibanez it had been

able to carry on only underground activities. At this congress the

Continental American Workingmen’s Association was brought into

existence, constituting the American division of the I.W.M.A. The seat

of this organisation was at first in Buenos Aires, but later, because of

the dictatorship, it had to be transferred to Uruguay.

These are the forces which Anarcho-Syndicalism at present has at its

disposal in the several countries. Everywhere it has to carry on a

difficult struggle against reaction as well as against the conservative

elements in the present labour movement. Through the heroic battle of

the Spanish workers the attention of the world is today directed to this

movement, and its adherents are firmly convinced that a great and

successful future lies before them.

 

[1] The reader will find in the works of Max Nettlau listed in the

bibliography a very well informed hisory of Anarchist doctrines and

movements.

[2] The origin of the word is veiled in darkness. Some trace it to a

weaver by the name of Ned Ludd, but there is no historical basis for

this. In some regions they talked of “Jack Swing” and “Great Enoch,” but

the meaning of all the names was the same.

[3] Lord Byron felt a strong sympathy for the Luddites, as is shown by

one of his poems, the first stanza of which runs: “As the Liberty lads

o’er the sea / Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood, / So we,

boys, we / Will die fighting, or live free / And down with all kings but

King Ludd!”

[4] Here are just a few opinions of foreign journalists who have no

personal connection with the Anarchist movement. Thus, Andrea Oltmares,

professor in the University of Geneva, in the course of an address of

some length, said: “In the midst of the civil war the Anarchists have

proved themselves to be political organisers of the first rank. They

kindled in everyone the required sense of responsibility, and knew how,

by eloquent appeals, to keep alive the spirit of sacrifice for the

general welfare of the people.” “As a Social Democrat I speak here with

inner joy and sincere admiration of my experiences in Catalonia. The

anti-capitalist transformation took place here without their having to

resort to a dictatorship. The members of the syndicates are their own

masters and carry on the production and the distribution of the products

of labour under their own management, with the advice of technical

experts in whom they have confidence. The enthusiasm of the workers is

so great that they scorn any personal advantage and are concerned only

for the welfare of all.” The well-known anti-Fascist, Carlo Roselli, who

before Mussolini’s accession to power was Professor of Economics in the

University of Genoa, put his judgement into the following words: “In

three months Catalonia has been able to set up a new social order on the

ruins of an ancient system. This is chiefly due to the Anarchists, who

have revealed a quite remarkable sense of proportion, realistic

understanding, and organising ability...all the revolutionary forces of

Catalonia have united in a program of Syndicalist-Socialist character:

socialisation of large industry; recognition of the small proprietor,

workers’ control...Anarcho-Syndicalism, hitherto so despised, has

revealed itself as a great constructive force...I am not an Anarchist,

but I regard it as my duty to express here my opinion of the Anarchists

of Catalonia, who have all too often been represented to the world as a

destructive, if not criminal, element. I was with them at the front, in

the trenches, and I have learnt to admire them. The Catalonian

Anarchists belong to the advance guard of the coming revolution. A new

world was born with them, and it is a joy to serve that world.” And

Fenner Brockway, Secretary of the I.L.P. in England who travelled to

Spain after the May events in Catalonia (1937), expressed his

impressions in the following words: “I was impressed by the strength of

the C.N.T. It was unnecessary to tell me that it was the largest and

most vital of the working-class organisations in Spain. The large

industries were clearly, in the main, in the hands of the C.N.T. —

railways, road transport, shipping, engineering, textiles, electricity,

building, agriculture. At Valencia the U.G.T. had a larger share of

control than at Barcelona, but generally speaking the mass of manual

workers belonged to the C.N.T. The U.G.T. membership was more of the

type of the ‘white-collar’ worker...I was immensely impressed by the

constructive revolutionary work which is being done by the C.N.T. Their

achievement of workers’ control in industry is an inspiration. One could

take the example of the railways or engineering or textiles...There are

still some Britishers and Americans who regard the Anarchists of Spain

as impossible, undisciplined, uncontrollable. This is poles away from

the truth. The Anarchists of Spain, through the C.N.T., are doing one of

the biggest constructive jobs ever done by the working class. At the

front they are fighting Fascism. Behind the front they are actually

constructing the new Workers’ Society. They see that the war against

Fascism and the carrying through of the Social Revolution are

inseparable. Those who have seen and understand what they are doing must

honour them and be grateful to them. They are resisting Fascism. They

are at the same time creating the New Workers’ Order which is the only

alternative to Fascism. That is surely the biggest things now being done

by the workers in any part of the world.” And in another place: “The

great solidarity that existed amongst the Anarchists was due to each

individual relying on his own strength and not depending on leadership.

The organisations must, to be successful, be combined with a

free-thinking people; not a mass, but free individuals.”