đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș rudolf-rocker-anarchosyndicalism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:43:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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
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
Stirnerâs 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 âwill of Godâ there always lay hidden the will of
privileged minorities, so today there hides behind the âwill of the
stateâ 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 ânatural right,â 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, âThe Net of Faith,â 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 Godwinâs splendidly conceived work, Concerning Political Justice
and its Influence upon General Virtue and Happiness, London, 1793.
Godwinâs 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. Godwinâs 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.
Godwinâs 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 manâs freedom finds in the freedom of others not
its limitation, but its security and confirmation. âThe freer, the more
independent and enterprising the individual is in a society, the better
for the society.â 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 Proudhonâs breadth of view.
Anarchism found a unique expression in Max Stirnerâs (Johann Kaspar
Schmidtâs) 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 â though it was to experience an
unexpected resurrection fifty years later. Stirnerâs book is
pre-eminently a philosophical work which traces manâs 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: âI 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 â 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.â
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 workersâ
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 â 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 lifeâs 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 manâs 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 manâs
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 ĂlisĂ©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, ĂlisĂ©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 âthe social question.â 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
stateâs activities to a minimum, Democracy took its stand on an abstract
collective concept, Rousseauâs âgeneral will,â 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 âall citizens
equal before the law,â and Liberalism with its âright of man over his
own person,â 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 âequality before the lawâ 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 âright
over oneâs own person,â 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: âthat government is best which governs least,â
then Anarchists say with Thoreau: âThat government is best which governs
not at all.â
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: âThe time will come
when the art of governing man will disappear. A new art will take its
place, the art of administering things.â
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
âjuridical and political superstructureâ on the âeconomic edificeâ 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 âeconomic ordinancesâ and
âindustrial legislation,â 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 âproletarian dictatorshipâ 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 âdictatorship of the proletariat,â 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 â which has never been anything but the dictatorship of
a small clique over the proletariat and the entire Russian people â 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 âSocialismâ without
freedom the worst from of slavery. The urge for social justice can only
develop properly and be effective when it grows out of manâs 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:
âNo 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 â if one gives away that amount of reason,
earnestness, will, self-mastery, which constitutes oneâs real self for
one thing, he will not have it for the other. Culture and the state â
let no one be deceived about this â are antagonists: the âCulture Stateâ
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.â
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.
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 manâs
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 âmanufacturesâ had at an
earlier period opened the door for a certain degree of division of
labour â a division which was, however, concerned more with the methods
of applying human labour than with actual technical processes â 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
(1702â1714), 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 Buretâs De la misĂšre 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 âgruesome repetition of the slaughter
of the innocents at Bethlehem.â 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 Godwinâs
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 âpoor
law Bastille.â 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 â in
the textile industries alone more than 80,000 hand weavers had been made
beggars by the modern big plants â 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 âover productionâ which
is so indicative of the real nature of modern capitalism â 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 âhand,â 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 âagitatorâ 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 âmanufactures,â 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 âunlawfulâ organisations of the workers. And parliament
promptly responded to this demand by passing the so-called Combination
Acts of 1799â1800, 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.
âStop him who dares; stop him who can!â was the watchword of the secret
workerâs 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. âA fair daysâ pay for a fair dayâs workâ 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 workersâ 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
1799â1800, 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 âPeterlooâ 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 âCato Street Conspiracy,â 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 workersâ 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 âbread and butter
question,â 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 âfor the protection of persons and propertyâ 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 OâConnor, Branterre OâBrien,
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 Manâs 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 â 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 â 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 â 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 â Taine
reports that between 1781 and the storming of the Bastille nearly five
hundred of these revolts occurred in almost every part of France â 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.
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 Workingmenâs 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 30âs 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 Buildersâ 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 producerâs
co-operatives under the control of the trade unions. The proposals were
adopted, and shortly after this the Buildersâ 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 Manâs Guardian very justly summed up its report of the conference
in these words:
âBut 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 â a change amounting to a complete
subversion of the existing order of the world â is contemplated by the
working classes. They aspire to be at the top instead of the bottom of
society â or rather that there should be no bottom or top at all.â
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:
âAs 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.
âThe 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.
âThat 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.â
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 workerâs 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. âThe
adults in factories must by unions among themselves make a Short Time
Bill for themselves.â 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
âcriminal purposesâ 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 âunlawful combinations,â and in particular against the
collaboration of workers in different categories in industrial disputes.
Many employers laid before their workers the so-called âdocument,â 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 âexcessesâ 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 1848â49 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 ânew tyrannyâ 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: âLive working or die
fighting!â
As early as the 30âs a lot of these workersâ 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
Workingmensâ 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 dâĂ©tat of Louis
Bonaparte put an abrupt end to this hopeful beginning, as to so many
others.
Only with the founding of the International Workingmenâs 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 workersâ 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 1848â49, 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
workersâ 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 30âs.
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:
âThe 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.â
In his argument for the resolution proposed by the committee Hins
explained that âby this double form of organisation of local workersâ
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.â
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 workersâ
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:
âSine 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.â
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
workersâ 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 Bakuninâs manuscripts
that is highly indicative of Bakuninâs views on this question:
â...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 itselfâ
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 workersâ 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 âas
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.â 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.
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 workersâ alliance. Its present day representatives are
the federations in the different countries of the revived International
Workingmenâs 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
yearsâ activity in all countries.
Participation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought
the labour movement a hairsâ breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to
this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned
to insignificance. The ancient proverb: âWho eats of the pope, dies of
him,â 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 âthe history of European peoples has not previously
produced a revolution that has been so poor in creative ideas and so
weak in revolutionary energy.â
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 âworkersâ syndicateâ 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 ameliorationâs, 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 90âs 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 âpolitics-of-the-day,â 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 Hitlerâs 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 â 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 âMessage to the Workers of the West
European Countriesâ:
âRussia 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
workersâ 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 workersâ and peasantsâ
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 workersâ 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 workersâ and peasantsâ 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.â
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 â whose central organ VorwĂ€rts,
just on the evening before the November Revolution of 1918 warned the
workers against precipitancy, âas the German people are not ready for a
republicâ â 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 workersâ and peasantsâ 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 workersâ 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 workersâ 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
workersâ syndicates of Catalonia âhad accomplished in seven weeks as
much as France did in fourteen months after the outbreak of the World
War.â
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
workersâ syndicates were confronted in the meeting of all these demands.
Of the re-organisation of the whole educational system by the teachersâ
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 â 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 manâs 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.
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 producerâs 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 workersâ
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 Leninâs phrase and thinks of freedom as merely
a âbourgeois prejudice,â 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 âbourgeois prejudice.â 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 Hitlerâs 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 dâetat 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 Papenâs coup dâetat 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 tsarâs 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 âunlawful methodsâ 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: âWe need no men who can think among the
workers; what we need is beasts of toil.â
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 âUtopian.â âThe general strike
is general madnessâ 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 âUtopiaâ 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 âsocial general strikeâ (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 oneâs
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 âunlawful.â 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 âcaâ cannyâ (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
workersâ 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 workersâ 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 âfree labour unions.â
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 soldiersâ 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.
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 Workingmenâs 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: âHarmony between capital and labour!â 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 LâEconomie
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 1886â7,
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 1886â7, 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 âWobbliesâ in everybodyâs 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.âs 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 workersâ 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 âdictatorship of the
proletariatâ 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
Workingmenâs 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:
âRevolutionary 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.â
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 workersâ 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 workersâ 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 workersâ 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 â 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 workersâ 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 farmlabourersâ 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 Italyâs 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
Workingmensâ 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 Hitlerâs 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 workersâ 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 workersâ 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 workersâ 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 FederaciĂłn Obrera Argentina, which at itsâ 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 âF.O.R.A.,â 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 dâetat 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 Workingmenâs 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.
Â
[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 âJack Swingâ and âGreat Enoch,â 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: âAs the Liberty lads
oâer 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!â
[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: âIn 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.â âAs 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.â The well-known anti-Fascist, Carlo Roselli, who
before Mussoliniâs accession to power was Professor of Economics in the
University of Genoa, put his judgement into the following words: âIn
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,
workersâ 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.â 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: âI 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. â
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 âwhite-collarâ worker...I was immensely impressed by the
constructive revolutionary work which is being done by the C.N.T. Their
achievement of workersâ 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 Workersâ 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 Workersâ 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.â And in another place: âThe
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.â