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Title: Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism Author: Rudolf Rocker Date: 1949 Language: en Topics: class struggle, syndicalist, anarcho-syndicalist, history Source: Retrieved on April 26, 2009 from http://flag.blackened.net/rocker/aasind.htm
Anarchism is a definite intellectual current of social thought, whose
adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all
political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of
the capitalist economic order, Anarchists would have a free association
of all productive forces based upon cooperative labour, which would have
for its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of
every member of society. In place of the present national states 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 interests and arrange
their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.
Anyone who studies profoundly the economic and political development of
the present social system will 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 existing
social maladjustments, which, with every new phase of the present social
conditions, manifest themselves more plainly and more unwholesomely.
Modern monopoly capitalism and the totalitarian state are merely the
last stages in a development which could culminate in no other end.
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 constant repression 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 interests of
human society to the private interests of individuals, and thus
systematically undermined a true relationship between men. People forgot
that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to
insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the
blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is
everything, where labour loses its ethical importance and man is
nothing, there begins the realm of ruthless economic despotism, whose
workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism.
The two mutually augment one another; they are fed from the same source.
Our modern social system has internally split the social organism of
every country into hostile classes, and externally it has broken up the
common cultural circle into hostile nations; both classes and nations
confront one another with open antagonism, and by their ceaseless
warfare keep the communal social life in continual convulsions. Two
world wars within half a century and their terrible after-effects, and
the constant danger of new wars, which today dominates all peoples, are
only the logical consequences of this unendurable condition which can
only lead to further universal catastrophes. The mere fact that most
states are obliged today to spend the better part 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; it 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 co-operation among human
beings. A system which in every act of its life sacrifices the welfare
of large sections of the people, of whole nations, to the selfish lust
for power and the economic interests of small minorities must
necessarily dissolve the social ties and lead to a constant war of each
against all. This system has merely been the pacemaker for the great
intellectual and social reaction which finds its expression today in
modern Fascism and the idea of the totalitarian state. 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. “All for the state; all through the state; nothing without the
state!” became the leitmotiv of a new political theology which has its
various systems of ecclesiastical theology God is everything and man
nothing, so for this modern political creed the state is everything and
the citizen nothing. And just as the words the “will of God” were used
to justify the will of privileged castes, so today there hides behind
the will of the state only the selfish interests of those who feel
called upon to interpret this will in their own sense and to force it
upon the people.
In modern Anarchism we have the confluence of the two great currents
which before 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 of
social life came to see more and more dearly that political
constitutions and changes in the form of government could never get to
the root of the great problem that we call the social question. Its
supporters recognised that an equalising of social and economic
conditions for the benefit of all, despite the loveliest of theoretical
assumptions is not possible as 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 conviction that only by the elimination of economic
monopolies and by common ownership of the means of production does a
condition of social justice become feasible, a condition in which
society shall become a real community, and human labour shall no longer
serve the ends of exploitation but assure the wellbeing of everyone. But
as soon as Socialism began to assemble its forces and become 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 Caesarism and
dictatorship have affected certain factions of the socialist movement.
Meanwhile, two other great currents in political thought, had a decisive
significance on the development of socialist ideas: Liberalism, which
had powerfully stimulated advanced minds in the Anglo-Saxon countries,
Holland and Spain in particular, and Democracy in the sense, to which
Rousseau gave expression in his Social Contract, and which found its
most influential representatives in the leaders of French Jacobinism.
While Liberalism in its social theories started off from the individual
and wished to limit the state’s activities to a minimum, Democracy took
its stand on an abstract collective concept, Rousseau’s general will,
which it sought to fix in the national state. Liberalism and Democracy
were pre-eminently political concepts, and since most of the original
adherents of both did scarcely consider the economic conditions of
society, the further development of these conditions could not be
practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and
still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy with its motto of
equality of all citizens before the law, and Liberalism with its right
of man over his own person, both were wrecked on the realities of
capitalist economy. As long as millions of human beings in every country
have to sell their labour to a small minority of owners, and sink into
the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called
equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are
made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth.
But in the same way there can be no talk of a right over one’s own
person, for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the
economic dictation of another if one does not want to starve.
In common with Liberalism, Anarchism represents the idea that the
happiness and prosperity of the individual must be the standard in 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 adherents have followed this thought to its ultimate
consequences, and wish to eliminate every institution of political power
from the life of society. When Jefferson clothes the basic concept of
Liberalism in the words: “That government is best which governs least,”
then Anarchists say with Thoreau: “That government is best which governs
not at all.”
In common with the founders of Socialism, Anarchists demand the
abolition of economic monopoly in every form and shape and uphold common
ownership of the soil and all other means of production, the use of
which must be available to all without distinction; for personal and
social freedom is conceivable only on the basis of equal economic
conditions for everybody. Within the socialist movement itself the
Anarchists represent the viewpoint that the struggle against capitalism
must be at the same time a struggle against all coercive 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 domination of man over man are inseparable, and each
is the condition of the other.
As long as a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face
one another in enmity within society, 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 administration of economic and social
affairs, or, to speak with Saint Simon: “The time will come when the art
of governing men will disappear. A new art will take its place, the art
of administering things.” In this respect Anarchism has to be regarded
as a kind of voluntary Socialism.
This disposes also 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 the classes
themselves, will dissolve itself and vanish from the canvas. For this
concept, which completely mistakes the real nature of the state and the
significance in history of the factor of political power, is only the
logical outcome of so-called economic materialism, which sees in all the
phenomena of history merely the inevitable effects of the methods of
production of the time. Under the influence of this theory people came
to regard the different forms of the state and all other social
institutions as a “juridical and political superstructure on the
economic edifice” of society, and thought that they had found in it the
key to every historic process. In reality every section of history
affords us thousands of examples of the way in which the economic
development of countries was set back for centuries by the state and its
power policy.
Before the rise of the ecclesiastical monarchy, Spain, industrially, was
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 them survived only in the most wretched condition. 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 the country were transformed into deserts. Princely
absolutism in Europe, with its silly “economic ordinances” and
“Industrial Legislation”, which severely punished 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 even now after the horrible
experiences of two world wars, the power policy of the larger national
states proves to be the greatest obstacle to the reconstruction of
European economy,
In Russia, however, where the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat
has ripened into reality, the aspirations of a particular party for
political power have prevented any truly socialistic reorganisation of
economic life and have forced the country into the slavery of a grinding
state-capitalism. The proletarian dictatorship, which naive souls
believe is an inevitable transition stage to real Socialism, has to-day
grown into a frightful despotism and a new imperialism, which lags
behind the tyranny of Fascist states in nothing. The assertion that the
state must continue to exist until society is no longer divided into
hostile classes almost sounds in the light of all historical experience,
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 development of the
Bolshevist bureaucracy in Russia under the alleged dictatorship of the
proletariat — which has never been anything but the dictatorship of a
small clique over the proletariat and the whole Russian people — is
merely a new instance of an old historical experience which has repeated
itself countless times. This new ruling class, which to-day is rapidly
growing into a new aristocracy, is set apart from the great masses of
the Russian peasants and workers just as clearly as are the privileged
castes and classes in other countries from the mass of the people. 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 that which
exists in Russia would be no guarantee against political and social
oppression. Economic equality alone is not social liberation. It is
precisely this which all the schools of authoritarian Socialism have
never understood. In the prison, in the cloister, or in the barracks one
finds a fairly high degree of economic equality, as all the inmates are
provided with the same dwelling, the same food, the same uniform, and
the same tasks. The ancient Inca state in Peru and the Jesuit state in
Paraguay had brought equal economic provision for every inhabitant to a
fixed system, but in spite of this the vilest despotism prevailed there,
and the human being was merely the automaton of a higher will on whose
decisions he had not the slightest influence. It was not without reason
that Proudhon saw in a “Socialism” without freedom the worst form of
slavery. The urge for social justice can only develop properly and be
effective when it grows out of man’s sense of freedom and
responsibility, and is based upon it. In other words, Socialism will be
free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this fact lies the
genuine and profound justification of Anarchism.
Institutions serve the same purpose in the life of society as physical
organs do in plants and animals; they are the organs of the social body.
Organs do not develop arbitrarily, but owe their origin to definite
necessities of the physical and social environment. Changed conditions
of life produce changed organs. But an 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.
The same is true of social institutions. They, too, do not arise
arbitrarily, but are called into being by special social needs to serve
definite purposes. In this way the modern state was evolved, after
economic privileges and class divisions associated with them had begun
to make themselves more and more conspicuous in the framework of the old
social order. The newly arisen 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 for the forcible subjugation and oppression of the
non-possessing classes. This task is the essential reason for its
existence. Its external forms have altered in the course of its
historical development, but its functions have always remained the same.
They have even constantly broadened in just the measure in which its
supporters have succeeded in making further fields of social activities
subservient to their ends. And, just as the functions of a physical
organ cannot be arbitrarily altered so that, for example, one cannot, at
will, hear with one’s eyes or see with one’s ears, so also one cannot,
at pleasure, transform an organ of social oppression into an instrument
for the liberation of the oppressed.
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 any definite final goals for human
development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social patterns and
human living conditions which are always straining after higher forms of
expression, and to which, for this reason, one cannot assign any
definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. The greatest evil of any form
of power is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of
social life into definite forms and adjust it to particular norms. 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 power and a dire omen for our times, for it
shows with frightful clarity to what a monstrosity Hobbes’ Leviathan can
be developed. It is the perfect triumph of the political machine over
mind and body, the rationalisation of human thought, feeling and
behaviour according to the established rules of the officials and,
consequently, the end of all true intellectual culture.
Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas,
institutions, and social conditions. It is, therefore not a fixed, self
enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historical
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 broaden its scope and to affect wider circles in
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 capacities and talents with
which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less
this natural development of man is interfered with by ecclesiastical or
political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human
personality become, the more will it become the measure of the
intellectual culture 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, for political systems are always set upon the
mechanising and not the organic development of social forces. State and
Culture are irreconcilable opposites. Nietzsche, who was not an
anarchist, recognised this very clearly when he wrote: “No one can
finally spend more than he has. That holds good for individuals; it
holds good for peoples. If one spends oneself for power, for higher
politics, for husbandry, for commerce, parliamentarism, military
interests — if one gives away that amount of reason, earnestness, will,
self-mastery which constitutes one’s real self for one thing, he will
not have it for the other. Culture and the state — let no one be
deceived about this — are antagonists: the Culture State is merely a
modern idea. The one lives on the other, the one prospers at the expense
of the other. All great periods of culture are periods of political
decline. Whatever is great in a cultured sense is non-political, is even
anti-political.”
Where the influence of political power on the creative forces in society
is reduced to a minimum, there culture thrives the 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 unescapable contradiction to the creative aspirations of cultural
development, which is always on the quest for new forms and fields of
social activity, and for which freedom of expression, the many-sidedness
and the continual changing of things, are just as vitally necessary as
rigid forms, dead rules, and the forcible suppression of ideas are for
the conservation of political power. 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 power
always 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 social
life into the straitjacket of its rules. Its intellectual expression is
dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of
its objectives sets its stamp on its representatives also, and renders
them often stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed
with the best talents. One who is constantly striving to force
everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and
loses all human feelings.
It was from this understanding that modern Anarchism was born and draws
its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring
about intellectual and social transformations. The art of ruling men has
never been the art of educating 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 brings 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, social and political
oppression, which finds its highest expression in the philosophy of
Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher
social culture and a new humanity.
Anarchist ideas are to be found in almost every period of known history.
We encounter them in the Chinese sage, Lao-Tse (The Course and The Right
Way), and the later Greek philosophers, the Hedonists and Cynics and
other advocates of so-called natural right, and particularly, in Zeno,
the founder of the Stoic school and opposer of Plato. They found
expression in the teachings of the Gnostic Carpocrates in Alexandria,
and had an unmistakable influence on certain Christian sects of the
Middle Ages in France, Germany, Italy, Holland and England, most of
which fell victims to the most savage persecutions. In the history of
the Bohemian Reformation they found a powerful champion in Peter
Chelcicky, who in his work, The Net of Faith, passed the same judgment
on the Church and the State as Tolstoy did centuries later. Among the
great Humanists there was Rabelais, who in his description of the happy
Abbey of Theleme (Gargantua) presented a picture of life freed from all
authoritarian restraints. Of other pioneers of libertarian thinking we
will mention here only La Boetie, Sylvain Marechal, and, above all,
Diderot, in whose voluminous writings one finds thickly strewn the
utterances of a really great mind which had rid itself of every
authoritarian prejudice.
Meanwhile, it was reserved for more recent history to give a clear form
to the Anarchist conception of life and to connect it with the immediate
process of social evolution. This was done for the first time by William
Godwin (1756–1836) in his splendidly conceived work, An Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice and its Influence upon General Virtue and
Happiness (London, 1793). Godwin’s work was, we might say, the ripened
fruit of that long evolution of the concepts of political and social
radicalism in England which proceeds 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. But he
also recognised that human beings can only live together naturally and
freely when the proper economic conditions for this are given, and the
individual is no longer subject to exploitation by others, a
consideration which most of the representatives of mere political
radicalism almost wholly overlooked. Hence they were later compelled to
make constantly greater concessions to the state which they had wished
to restrict to a minimum. Godwin’s idea of a stateless society assumed
the social ownership of the land and the instruments of labour and the
carrying on of economic life by free co-operatives of producers.
Godwin’s work had a 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 the young socialist movement in
England, which found its maturest exponents in Robert Owen, John Gray
and William Thompson, that unmistakably libertarian character which it
had for a long time, and which it never assumed in Germany and many
other countries.
Also the French Socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1832), with his theory
of attractive labour must be mentioned, here as one of the pioneers of
libertarian ideas.
But a far greater influence on the development of Anarchist theory was
that of Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), one of the most gifted and
certainly the most many-sided writer of modern Socialism. Proudhon was
completely rooted in the intellectual and social life of his period, and
these influenced his attitude upon every question with which he dealt.
Therefore he is not to be judged, as he has been even by many of his
later followers, by his special practical proposals, which were born of
the needs of the hour. Among 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 artificial social systems, and saw
in social evolution the eternal urge to new and higher forms of
intellectual and social life; it was his conviction that this evolution
could not be bound by any definite abstract formulas.
Proudhon opposed the influence of the Jacobin tradition, which dominated
the thinking of the French democrats and most of the Socialists of that
period, with the same determination as the interference of the central
state and economic monopoly in the natural progress of social advance.
To him ridding society of those two cancerous growths was the great task
of the nineteenth century revolution. Proudhon was not a Communist. He
condemned property as merely the privilege of exploitation, but he
recognised the ownership of the instruments of labour for all, made
effective through 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 member of society. This association based on
reciprocity (mutuality) guarantees the enjoyment of equal rights by each
in exchange for social 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 by labour notes. In this way capital is
deprived of its usurial power and is completely bound up with the
performance of work. Being made available to all it ceases to be an
instrument for exploitation. Such a form of economy makes any political
coercive apparatus superfluous. Society becomes a league of free
communities which arrange their affairs according to need. by themselves
or in association with others, and in which man’s freedom is the equal
freedom of others not its limitation, but its security and confirmation.
“The freer, the more independent and enterprising the individual is the
better for society.”
This organisation of Federalism in which Proudhon saw the immediate
future of mankind sets no definite limitations on future possibilities
of development and offers the widest scope to every individual and
social activity. Starting out from the point of Federation, Proudhon
combated likewise the aspiration for political and national unity of the
awakening nationalism of the time which found such strong advocates in
Mazzini, Garibaldi, Lelewel and others. In this respect he recognised
more clearly the real nature of nationalism than most of his
contemporaries. Proudhon exerted a strong influence on the development
of Socialism, which made itself felt especially in the Latin countries.
Ideas similar to the economic and political conceptions of Proudhon were
propagated by the followers of so-called Individualist Anarchism in
America which found able exponents in such men as Josiah Warren, Stephen
Pearl Andrews, William B. Greene, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin R. Tucker,
Ezra Heywood, Francis D. Tandy and many others, though none of them
could approach Proudhon’s breadth of view. Characteristic of this school
of libertarian thought is the fact that most of its representatives took
their political ideas not from Proudhon but from the traditions of
American Liberalism, so that Tucker could assert that “Anarchists are
merely consistent Jeffersonian democrats”.
A unique expression of libertarian ideas is to be found in Max Stirner’s
(Johann Kaspar Schmidt) (1806–1856) book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum,
which, it is true, passed quickly into oblivion and had no influence on
the development of the Anarchist movement as such. Stirner’s book is
predominantly a philosophic work which traces man’s dependence on
so-called higher powers through all its devious ways, and is not timid
about drawing inferences from the knowledge gained by the survey. It is
the book of a conscious and deliberate insurgent, which reveals no
reverence for any authority, however exalted, and, therefore appeals
powerfully to independent thinking.
Anarchism found a virile champion of vigorous revolutionary energy in
Michael A. Bakunin (1814–1876), who based his ideas upon the teachings
of Proudhon, but extended them on the economic side when he, along with
the federalist wing of the First International, advocated collective
ownership of the land and all other means of production, and wished to
restrict the right of private property only to the 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 to-day in Bolshevism — “I am not a Communist, because Communism
unites all the 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 complete elimination of the
principles of authority and governmental guardianship, which under the
pretence of making men moral and civilising them, has up to now always
enslaved, oppressed, exploited and ruined them.”
Bakunin was a determined revolutionary and did not believe in an
amicable adjustment of the existing conflicts within society. He
recognised that the ruling classes blindly and stubbornly opposed every
possibility for larger social reforms, and accordingly saw the only
salvation in an international social revolution, which would abolish all
institutions of political power and economic exploitation and introduce
in their stead a Federation of free Associations of producers and
consumers to provide for the requirements of their 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 combining all the
genuinely revolutionary and libertarian elements within and outside the
International to safeguard the coming revolution against any
dictatorship or any retrogression to the old conditions. Thus he became
in a very special sense the creator of the modern Anarchist movement.
Anarchism found a valuable exponent in Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), who
set himself the task of making the achievements of modern natural
science available for the development of the sociological concept of
Anarchism. In his ingenious book, Mutual Aid — 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 of
nature, to which man is also subject. In reality this conception was
strongly influenced by the Malthusian doctrine that life’s table is not
spread for all, and that the unneeded will just have to reconcile
themselves to this fact. Kropotkin showed that this conception of nature
as a field of unrestricted warfare is only a caricature of real life,
and that along with the brutal struggle for existence, which is fought
out with tooth and claw, there exists in nature also another tendency
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 the
creator of man, for he inherited from the species 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 as is
shown by the steady retrogression of those species whose tendency in the
struggle for existence is far superior to the first, have no social life
and are dependent merely upon their physical strength. This view, which
to-day is meeting with constantly wider acceptance in the natural
sciences and in social research, opened wholly new vistas to the
prospects concerning human evolution.
According to Kropotkin the fact remains that even under the worst
despotism most of man’s personal relations with his fellows are arranged
by social habits, free agreement and mutual cooperation, without which
social life would not be possible at all. If this were not the case,
even the strongest coercive machinery of the state would not be able to
maintain the social order for any length of time. However, these natural
forms of behaviour, which arise from man’s innermost nature, are to-day
constantly interfered with and crippled by the effects of economic
exploitation and governmental tutelage, representing the brutal form of
the struggle for existence in human society which has to be overcome by
the other form of mutual aid and free co-operation. The consciousness of
personal responsibility and the capacity for sympathy with others, which
make all social ethics and all ideas of social justice, develop best in
freedom.
Like Bakunin, Kropotkin too was a revolutionary. But he, like Elisee
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’s Mutualism and Bakunin’s Collectivism,
Kropotkin advocated common 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 state of technology no exact measure of the value of individual
labour is possible, but that, on the other hand, by rational direction
of our modern methods of labour it will be possible to assure
comparative abundance to every human being. Communist Anarchism, which
before Kropotkin had already been urged by Joseph Dejacque, Elisee
Reclus, Carlo Cafiero and others, and which is recognised by the great
majority of Anarchists to-day, found in him its most brilliant exponent.
Mention must also be made here of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), who, 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.
Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political
and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the
development of a free humanity. In this sense Mutualism, Collectivism
and Communism are not to be regarded as closed economic 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 every form of a free society of the future different forms of
economic co-operation existing side by side, since any social progress
must be associated with free experimentation and practical testing out
of new methods for which in a free society of free communities there
will be every opportunity.
The same holds true for the various methods of Anarchism. The work of
its adherents is pre-eminently a work of education to prepare the people
intellectually and psychologically for the tasks of their social
liberation. Every attempt to limit the influence of economic monopolism
and the power of the state is a step nearer to the realisation of this
goal. Every development of voluntary organisation in the various fields
of social activity towards the direction of personal freedom and social
justice deepens the awareness of the people and strengthens their social
responsibility, without which no changes in social life can be
accomplished. Most Anarchists of our time are convinced that such a
transformation of society will take years of constructive work and
education and cannot be brought about without revolutionary convulsions
which till now have always accomplished every progress in social life.
The character of these convulsions, of course, depends entirely on the
strength of resistance with which the ruling classes will be able to
oppose 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 new social
changes in the future. For even revolutions can only develop and mature
the ideas which already exist and have made their way into the
consciousness of men: but they cannot themselves create new ideas or
generate new worlds out of nothing.
Before the appearance of totalitarian states in Russia, Italy, Germany
and later in Portugal and Spain, and the outbreak of the second world
war, Anarchist organisations and movements existed almost in every
country. But like all other socialist movements of that period, they
became the victims of Fascist tyranny and the invasions of the German
armies, and could only lead an underground existence. Since the end of
the war a resurrection of Anarchist movements in all Western European
countries is to be noticed. The Federations of the French and Italian
Anarchists already held their first conventions, and so did the Spanish
Anarchists of whom many thousands are still living in exile, mostly in
France, Belgium and North Africa. Anarchist papers and magazines are
published again in many European countries and in North and South
America.
Many anarchists spent a great part of their activities in the labour
movement, especially in the Latin countries, where in later years the
movement of Anarcho-Syndicalism was born. Its theoretical assumptions
were based on the teachings of libertarian or anarchist Socialism, while
its form of organisation was taken from the movement of Revolutionary
Syndicalism which in the years from 1895 to 1910 experienced a marked
upswing, particularly in France, Italy and Spain. Its ideas and methods,
however, were not new. They had already found a deep resonance in the
ranks of the First International when the great association had reached
the zenith of its intellectual development. This was plainly revealed in
the debates at its fourth congress in Basel (1869) concerning the
importance of the economic organisations of the workers. In his report
upon this question which Eugene 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 Robert Owen and the English labour movement of the
1830s.
In order to make a correct estimate of this, one must remember that at
that time the various schools of state-socialism attributed no, or at
best, only little importance, to the trade unions. The French Blanquists
saw in these organisations merely a reform movement, with a socialist
dictatorship as their immediate aim. Ferdinand Lassalle and his
followers directed all their activities towards welding the workers into
a political party and were outspoken opponents of all trade union
endeavours in which they saw only a hindrance to the political evolution
of the working class. Marx and his adherents of that period recognised,
it is true, the necessity of trade unions for the achievement of certain
betterments within the capitalist 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.
In Basel this idea underwent for the first time a thorough critical
examination. The views expressed in the Belgian report presented by Hins
which were shared by the delegates from Spain, the Swiss Jura and the
larger part of the French sections, were based on the premise that the
present economic associations of the workers are not only a necessity
within the present society, but were even more to be regarded as the
social nucleus of a coming socialist economy, and it was, therefore, the
duty of the International to educate the workers for this task. In
accordance with this the congress adopted the following resolution:
“The congress declares that all workers should strive to establish
associations for resistance in their various trades. As soon as a trade
union is formed the unions in the same trade are to be notified so that
the formation of national alliances in the industries may begin. 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 may be replaced by the federation of free producers.
The congress directs the General Council to provide for the alliance of
the trade unions of all countries.”
In his argument for the resolution proposed by the committee, Hins
explained that “by this dual form of organization of local workers’
associations and general alliances for each industry on the one hand and
the political administration of labour councils on the other, the
general representation of labour, regional, national and international,
will be provided for. The councils of the trades and industrial
organisations will take the place of the present government, and this
representation of labour will do away, once and forever, with the
governments of the past.”
This new idea grew out of the recognition that every new economic form
of society must be accompanied by a new political form of the social
organism and could only attain practical expression in this. Its
followers saw in the present national state only the political agent and
defender of the possessing classes, and did, therefore, not strive for
the conquest of power, but for the elimination of every system of power
within society, in which they saw the requisite preliminary condition
for all tyranny and exploitation. They understood that along with the
monopoly of property, the monopoly of power must also disappear.
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. Or, as Bakunin, one of the great forerunners
of modern Anarcho-Syndicalism, put it:
“Since the organization of the International has as its goal, not the
setting up of new states or despots, but the radical elimination 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 of the interests and the instincts of the
people, to the same degree must the organization of the International be
free, natural and in every respect in accord with those interests and
instincts. But what is the natural organization of the masses? It is one
based on the different occupations of their actual daily life, on their
various kinds of work, organization according to their occupations,
trade organisations. When all industries, including the various branches
of agriculture, are represented in the International, its organisation,
the organization of the toiling masses of the people, will be finished.”
And at another occasion: “All this practical and vital study of social
science by the workers themselves in their trades sections and their
chambers of labour will — and already has — engender in them the
unanimous, well-considered, theoretically and practically demonstrable
conviction that the serious, final complete liberation of the workers is
possible only on one condition: that of the appropriation of capital,
that is, of raw materials and all the tools of labour, including land,
by the whole body of the workers ... The organisation of the trade
sections, their federation in the International, and their
representation by the Labour Chambers, not only create a great academy
in which the workers of the International, combining theory and
practice, can and must study economic science, they also bear in
themselves the living germs of the new social order, which is to replace
the bourgeois world. They are creating not only the ideas but also the
facts of the future itself ...”
After the decline of the International and the Franco-German War, by
which the focal point of the socialist labour movement was transferred
to Germany, whose workers had neither revolutionary traditions nor that
rich experience possessed by the Socialists in the Western countries,
those ideas were gradually forgotten. After the defeat of the Paris
Commune and the revolutionary upheavals in Spain and Italy the sections
of the International in these countries were compelled for many years to
carry on only an underground existence. Only with the awakening of
revolutionary Syndicalism in France were the ideas of the First
International rescued from oblivion and inspired once more larger
sections of the labour movement.
Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social
aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and
which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian
wing of the great workers’ alliance. Its development was a direct
reaction against the concepts and methods of political Socialism, a
reaction which in the decade before the first world war had already
manifested itself in the strong upsurge of the Revolutionary Union
movement in France, Italy and especially Spain, where the great majority
of the organised workers had always remained faithful to the doctrines
of the libertarian wing of the International.
It was in France that the opposition against the ideas and methods of
the modern labour parties found a clear expression in the theories and
tactics of revolutionary Syndicalism. The immediate cause for the
development of these new tendencies in the French labour movement was
the continual split of the various socialist parties in France. All
these parties, with the exception of the Allemanists, which later gave
up parliamentary activities completely, saw in the trade unions merely
recruiting schools for their political objectives and had no
understanding for their real functions. The constant dissensions among
the various socialist factions was naturally carried over into the
labour unions, and it happened quite frequently that when the unions of
one faction went on strike the unions of the other factions walked in on
them as strike breakers. This untenable situation gradually opened the
eyes of the workers. So the trade union congress in Nantes (1894)
charged a special committee with the task of devising means for bringing
about an understanding among all the trade union alliances. The result
was the founding in the following year of the Confederation Generale du
Travail at the congress in Limoges, which declared itself independent of
all political parties. From then on there existed in France only two
large trade union groups, the C.G.T. and the Federation des Bourses du
Travail, and in 1902, at the congress of the Montpellier the latter
joined the C.G.T.
One often encounters 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 in
1899, elaborated in their way the intellectual results of the new
movement. This is utterly false. None of these men belonged to the
movement, nor had they any appreciable influence in its internal
development. Moreover, the C.G.T. was not composed exclusively of
revolutionary syndicates; certainly half of its members were of
reformist tendency and had joined the C.G.T. because even they
recognised that the dependence of the trade unions on political parties
was a misfortune for the movement. But the revolutionary wing, which had
had the most energetic and active elements of organised labour on its
side as well as the most brilliant intellectual forces in the
organization, gave the C.G.T. its characteristic stamp, and it was they
who determined the development of the ideas of revolutionary
Syndicalism. Many of them came from the Allemanists, but even more from
the ranks of the Anarchists, like Fernand Pelloutier, the highly
intelligent secretary of the Federation of the Labour Exchanges, Emile
Pouget, the editor of the official organ of the C.G.T. La Voix du
Peuple, P. Delesalle, G. Yvetot and many others. It was mainly under the
influence of the radical wing of the C.G.T. that the new movement
developed and found its expression in the Charter of Amiens (1906), in
which the principles and methods of the movement were laid down.
This new movement in France found a strong echo among the Latin workers
and penetrated also into other countries. The influence of French
Syndicalism at that time on larger and smaller sections of the
international labour movement was strengthened in great degree by the
internal crisis which at that period infected nearly all the socialist
labour parties in Europe. 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 the
Revisionists of natural necessity to travel along the path of
Revisionism, caused many of the more thoughtful elements to reflect
seriously. They realised that participation in the politics of the
nationalist states had not brought the labour movement a hair-breadth
nearer to socialism, but had helped greatly to destroy the belief in the
necessity of constructive socialist activity, and, worst of all, had
robbed the people of their initiative by giving them the ruinous
delusion that salvation always comes from above.
Under these circumstances Socialism steadily lost its character of a
cultural ideal, which was to prepare the workers for the dissolution of
the present capitalist system and, therefore, could not let itself be
halted by the artificial frontiers of the national states. In the mind
of the leaders of the modern labour parties the alleged aims of their
movement were more and more blended with the interests of the national
state, until at last they became unable to distinguish any definite
boundary whatever between them. It would be a mistake to find in this
strange about-face an intentional betrayal by the leaders, as has so
often been asserted. The truth is that we have to do here with a gradual
assimilation to the modes and thoughts of the present society which
necessarily had to affect the intellectual attitude of the leaders of
the various labour parties in every country. Those very parties which
had once set out to conquer political power under the flag of 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. The political power which they had wanted to conquer had
gradually conquered their Socialism until there was scarcely anything
left but the name.
These were the considerations which led to the development of
Revolutionary Syndicalism or, as it was later called,
Anarcho-Syndicalism in France and other countries. The term workers’
syndicate meant at first merely an organization 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, a unified organization
with definite political effort within the modern constitutional state
which seeks to maintain the present order of society in one form or
another, so, according to the Unionist’s view, the trade unions are the
unified organization of labour and have for their purpose the defence of
the producers within the existing society and the preparing for and
practical carrying out of the reconstruction of social life in the
direction of Socialism. They have, therefore, a double purpose:
raising of their standard of living;
and economic life in general and prepare them to take the socio-economic
organism into their own hands and shape it according to socialist
principles.
Anarcho-Syndicalists are of the opinion that political parties are not
fitted to perform either of these two tasks. According to their
conceptions the trade union has to be the spearhead of the labour
movement, toughened by daily combats and permeated by a socialist
spirit. Only in the realm of economy are the workers able to display
their full strength; for it is their activity as producers which holds
together the whole social structure and guarantees the existence of
society. Only as a producer and creator of social wealth does the worker
become aware of his strength. In solidary union with his followers he
creates the great phalanx of militant labour, aflame with the spirit of
freedom and animated by the ideal of social justice. For the
Anarcho-Syndicalists the labour syndicate are the most fruitful germs of
a future society, the elementary school of Socialism in general. Every
new social structure creates organs for itself in the body of the old
organism; without this prerequisite every social evolution is
unthinkable. To them Socialist education does not mean participation in
the power policy of the national state, 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 role of re-shapers of economic life and give them
the moral assurance required for the performance of their task. No
social body is better fitted for this purpose than the economic fighting
organisation 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. At the same time it develops their ethical concepts without
which any social transformation is impossible: vital solidarity with
their fellows in destiny and moral responsibility for their actions.
Just because the educational work of Anarcho-Syndicalists is directed
toward the development of independent thought and action, they are
outspoken opponents of all centralising tendencies which are so
characteristic of most of the present labour parties. Centralism, that
artificial scheme which operates from the top towards the bottom and
turns over the affairs of administration to a small minority, is always
attended by barren official routine; it crushes individual conviction,
kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic
ossification. For the state, centralism is the appropriate form of
organisation, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity of
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 of its supporters,
centralism is a curse which weakens its power of decision and
systematically represses every spontaneous initiative.
The organisation of Anarcho-Syndicalism is based upon the principles of
Federalism, on free combination from below upward, putting the right of
self-determination of every union above everything else and recognising
only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and
common conviction. Their organisation is accordingly constructed on the
following basis: The workers in each locality join the unions of their
respective trades. The trade unions of a city or a rural district
combine in Labor Chambers which constitute the centres for local
propaganda and education, and weld the workers together as producers to
prevent the rise of any narrow-minded factional spirit. In times of
local labour troubles they arrange for the united co-operation of the
whole body of locally organised labour. All the Labour Chambers are
grouped according to districts and regions to form the National
Federation of Labor Chambers, which maintains the permanent connection
among the local bodies, arranges free adjustment of the productive
labour of the members of the various organisations on; co-operative
lines, provides for the necessary co-ordination in the work of education
and supports the local groups with council and guidance.
Every trade union is, moreover, federatively allied with all the
organisations of the same industry, and these in turn with all related
trades, so that all are combined in general industrial and agricultural
alliances. It is their task to meet the demands of the daily struggles
between capital and labour and to combine all the forces of the movement
for common action where the; necessity arises. Thus the Federation of
the Labor Chambers and the Federation of the Industrial Alliances
constitute the two poles about which the whole life of the labour
syndicates revolves.
Such a form of organisation not only gives the workers every opportunity
for direct action in the struggle for their daily bread, but it also
provides them with the necessary preliminaries for the reorganisation of
society, 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 any government, but only by the unqualified collaboration of the
workers, technicians and peasants to carry on production and
distribution by their own administration in the interest of the
community and on the basis of mutual agreements. In such a situation the
Labour Chambers would take over the administration of existing social
capital in each community, determine the needs of the inhabitants of
their districts and organise local consumption. Through the agency of
the Federation of Labour Chambers it would be possible to calculate the
total requirements of the whole country and adjust the work of
production accordingly. On the other hand it would be the task of the
Industrial and Agricultural Alliances to take control of all the
instruments of production, transportation, etc., and provide the
separate producing groups with what they need. In a word:
of the Industrial Alliances and direction of work by labour councils
elected by the workers themselves;
Chambers.
In this respect, also, practical experience has given the best
instruction. It has shown that the many problems of a socialist
reconstruction of society cannot be solved by any government, even when
the famous dictatorship of the proletariat is meant. In Russia the
Bolshevist dictatorship stood helpless for almost two years before the
economic problems and tried to hide its incapacity behind a flood of
decrees and ordinances most of which 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 power,
Bolshevism has violently destroyed the most valuable organs of a
socialist order, by suppressing the Co-operative Societies, bringing the
trade unions under state control, and depriving the Soviets of their
independence almost from the beginning. So the dictatorship of the
proletariat paved the way not for a socialist society but for the most
primitive type of bureaucratic state capitalism and a reversion to
political absolutism which was long ago abolished in most countries by
bourgeois revolutions. In his Message to the Workers of the West
European countries Kropotkin said, rightfully: “Russia has shown us the
way in which Socialism cannot be realised, although the people,
nauseated with the old regime, expressed no active resistance to the
experiments of the new government. The idea of workers’ councils for the
control of the political and economic life of the country is, in itself,
of extraordinary importance ... but so long as the country is dominated
by the dictatorship of a party, the workers’ and peasants’ councils
naturally lose their significance. They are hereby degraded to the same
passive role which the representatives of the Estates used to play in
the time of the absolute Monarchy.”
In Germany, however, where the moderate wing of political socialism had
attained power, Socialism, in its long years of absorption with routine
parliamentary tasks, had become so bogged down that it was no longer
capable of any creative action whatever. Even a bourgeois paper like the
Frankfurter Zeitung felt obliged to confirm that “the history of
European peoples had not previously produced a revolution that has been
so poor in creative ideas and so weak in revolutionary energy.” The mere
fact that a party with a larger membership than any other of the various
labour parties in the world, which was for many years the strongest
political body in Germany, had to leave the field to Hitler and his gang
without any resistance speaks for itself and presents an example of
helplessness and weakness which can hardly be misunderstood.
One has only to compare the German situation of those days with the
attitude of the Anarcho-Syndicalist labour unions in Spain and
especially in Catalonia, where their influence was strongest, to realise
the whole difference between the labour movement of these two countries.
When in July, 1936 the conspiracy of the Fascist Army leaders ripened
into open revolt, it was by the heroic resistance of the C.N.T.
(National Federation of Labour) and the F.A.I. (Anarchist Federation of
Iberia) that the Fascist uprising in Catalonia was put down within a few
days, ridding this most important part of Spain of the enemy and
frustrating the original plan of the conspirators to take Barcelona by
surprise. The workers could then not stop half way; so there followed
the collectivisation of the land and the taking over of the plants by
the workers’ and peasants’ syndicates. This movement, which was released
by the initiative of the C.N.T. and 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 unions of the Socialist Party in
the U.G.T. (General Labour Union). This event revealed that the
Anarcho-Syndicalist workers of Spain not only knew how to fight, but
that they were also filled with the constructive ideas which are so
necessary in the time of a real crisis. It is to the great merit of
Libertarian Socialism in Spain that since the time 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. It was the passive and lifeless
attitude of the organised workers in other countries, who put up with
the policy of non-intervention of their governments that led to the
defeat of the Spanish workers and peasants after a heroic struggle of
more than two and one half years.
It has often been charged against Revolutionary Unionism that its
adherents had no interest in the political structure of the different
countries and consequently no interest in the political struggles of the
time. 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 principles and tactics, but the form of
this struggle and the aims which it has in view. Revolutionary Unionists
pursue the same tactics in their fight against political suppression as
against economic exploitation. 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 at all overlook the
fact that the efforts of organised labour within the existing political
and social order must always be directed against any attack of reaction,
and constantly widening the scope of these rights wherever the
opportunity for this presents itself. The heroic struggle of the C.N.T.
in Spain against Fascism was, perhaps, the best proof that the alleged
non-political attitude of the Revolutionary Unionists is but idle talk.
But according to their opinion 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
upon them from without. And even their enactment into; law has for a
long time been no guarantee of their security. They 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 one knows how to defend one’s dignity as a human being. This
is not only true in private life; it has always been the same in
political life as well.
All political rights and liberties which people enjoy to-day, they do
not owe to the good will of their governments, but to their own
strength. Governments have always employed every means in their power to
prevent the attainment of these rights or render them illusory. Great
mass movements and whole revolutions have been necessary to wrest them
from the ruling classes, who would never have consented to them
voluntarily. The whole history of the last three hundred years is proof
of that. What is important is not that governments have decided to
concede certain rights to the people, but the reason why they had to do
this. Of course, if one accepts Lenin’s cynical phrase and thinks of
freedom merely as a “bourgeois prejudice’, then, to be sure, political
rights have no value at all for the workers. But then 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
hardly was necessary to overthrow Tzarism, for even the censorship of
Nicholas II would certainly have had no objection to the designation of
freedom as a bourgeois prejudice.
If Anarcho-Syndicalism nevertheless rejects the participation in the
present national parliaments, it is not because they have no sympathy
with political struggles in general, but because its adherents are of
the opinion that this form of activity is the very weakest and most
helpless form of the political struggle for the workers. For the
possessing classes, parliamentary action is certainly an appropriate
instrument for the settlement of such conflicts as arise, because they
are all equally interested in maintaining the present economic and
social order. Where there is a common interest mutual agreement is
possible and serviceable to all parties. But for the workers the
situation is very different. For them the existing economic order is the
source of their exploitation and their social and political subjugation.
Even the freest ballot cannot do away with the glaring contrast between
the possessing and non-possessing classes in society. It can only give
the servitude of the toiling masses the stamp of legality.
It is a fact that when socialist labour parties have wanted to achieve
some decisive political reforms they could not do it by parliamentary
action, but were obliged to rely wholly on the economic fighting power
of the workers. The political general strikes in Belgium and Sweden for
the attainment of universal suffrage are proof of this. And in Russia it
was the great general strike in 1905 that forced the Tsar to sign the
new constitution. It was the recognition of this which impelled the
Anarcho-Syndicalists to centre their activity on the socialist education
of the masses and the utilisation of their economic and social power.
Their method is that of direct action in both the economic and political
struggle of the time. By direct action they mean every method of the
immediate struggle by the workers against economic and political
oppression. Among these the outstanding are the strike in all its
gradations, from the simple wage struggle to the general strike,
organised boycott and all the other countless means which workers as
producers have in their hands.
One of the most effective forms of direct action is the social strike,
which was hitherto mostly used in Spain and partly in France, and which
shows a remarkable and growing responsibility of the workers to society
as a whole. It is less concerned 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 which the workers
themselves constitute the great majority. Under the present
circumstances the workers are frequently debased by doing a thousand
things which constantly serve only to injure the whole community for the
advantage of the employers. They are compelled to make use of inferior
and often actually injurious materials in the fabrication of their
products, to erect wretched dwellings, to put up spoiled foodstuffs and
to perpetrate innumerable acts that are planned to cheat the consumer.
To interfere vigorously is, in the opinion of the Revolutionary
Unionists, the great task of the labour syndicates. An advance in this
direction would at the same time enhance the position of the workers in
society, and in larger measure confirm that position.
Direct action by organised labour finds its strongest expression in the
general strike, in the stoppage of work in every branch of production in
cases where every other means is failing. 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. The general strike, of
course, is not an agency that can be invoked arbitrarily on every
occasion. It needs certain social assumptions to give it a 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 ludicrous invention of ignorant opponents. The general
strike can serve various purposes. It can be the last stage of a
sympathetic strike, as, for example, in Barcelona in 1902 or in Bilbao
in 1903, which enabled the miners to get rid of the hated truck system
and compelled the employers to establish sanitary conditions in the
mines. It can also be a means of organised labour 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 ail
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 the political prisoners, or the general strike in Catalonia in July
1909, to force the government to terminate its criminal war in Morocco.
Also 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 power by a military uprising, belongs to
this category. In such critical situations the general strike takes the
place of the barricades of the political uprisings of the past. For the
workers, the general strike is the logical outcome of the modern
industrial system, whose victims they are to-day, and at the same time
it offers them their strongest weapon in the struggle for their social
liberation, provided they recognise their own strength and learn how to
use this weapon properly.
After the First World War the peoples in Europe faced a new situation.
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. The
Russian revolution had impressed the workers of every country very
deeply. They felt that Europe was in the midst of a revolutionary crisis
and that if nothing decisive came out of it now their hopes would be
dispelled for many years For this reason they based the highest hopes on
the Russian revolution and saw in it the inauguration of a new era in
European history. In 1919, the Bolshevist party, which had attained
power in Russia, issued an appeal to all the revolutionary workers
organisations of the world and invited them to a congress in the
following year in Moscow to set up a new International. Communist
parties at this time existed only in a few countries; on the other hand
there were in Spain. Portugal, France, Italy, Holland, Sweden, Germany,
England and the countries of North and South America Unionist
organisations, some of which exercised a very strong influence. It was,
therefore, the deep concern of Lenin and his followers to win these
particular organisations for their purpose. So it came about that at the
congress for the founding of the Third International in the summer of
1920 almost all the Revolutionary Unions of Europe were represented.
But the impression which the Anarcho-Syndicalist delegates received in
Russia was not calculated to make them regard collaboration with the
Communists as either possible or desirable. The dictatorship of the
proletariat was already revealing itself in its true light. The prisons
were filled with Socialists of every school, among them many Anarchists
and Unionists. But above all it was plain that the new dominant caste
was in no way fitted for the task of a genuine socialist construction of
life. The foundation of the Third International with its dictatorial
apparatus and its efforts to make the whole labour movement in Europe
into an instrument for the foreign policy of the Bolshevist state,
quickly made plain to the Anarcho-Syndicalist that there was no place
for them in the Third International. For this reason the congress in
Moscow decided to set up alongside the Third International a separate
international alliance of revolutionary trade unions, in which the
Unionist organisations of all shades could also find a place. The
Unionist delegates agreed to this proposal, but when the Communists
demanded that this new organisation should be subordinate to the Third
International, this demand was unanimously rejected by the Revolutionary
Unionists.
In December, 1920 an international Anarcho-Syndicalist conference
convened in Berlin to decide upon an attitude toward the approaching
congress of the Red Trade Union International, which was prepared in
Moscow for the following year. The conference agreed upon seven points
on whose acceptance the entrance of the Unionists in that body was made
dependent. The importance of those seven points was the complete
independence of the movement from all political parties, and insistence
on the viewpoint that the socialist reconstruction 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 Unionist
organisations were in the minority. The Central Alliance of Russian
Trade Unions dominated the entire situation and put through all the
resolutions. In October, 1921, an international conference of Unionists
was held in Dusseldorf, Germany, and it decided to call an international
convention in Berlin during the following year. This convention met from
December 25, 1922 until January 2, 1923. The following organisations
were represented. Argentina by the Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina,
with 200,000 members; Chile by the Industrial Workers of the World with
20,000 members; Denmark by the Union for Unionist 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 with 500,000 members; Mexico by the
Confederacion General de Trabajadores, Norway by the Norsk Syndikalistik
Federasjon with 20,000 members; Portugal by the Confederacao Geral do
Trabalho with 150,000 members; Sweden by the Sveriges Arbetares
Centralorganisation with 32,000 members. The Spanish CNT at that time
was engaged in a terrific struggle against the dictatorship of Primo de
Rivera and had sent no delegates, but they re-affirmed their adherence
at the secret congress in Saragossa in October, 1923. In France, where
after the war a split in the CGT had led to the founding of the CGTU,
the latter had already joined Moscow. But there was a minority in the
organization which had combined to form the Comite de Defence Unioniste
Revolutionaire, representing about 100,000 workers, which took part in
the proceedings of the Berlin congress. From Paris the Federation du
Batiment with 32,000 members and the Federation des Jeunesses de la
Seine were likewise represented. Two delegates represented the Unionist
Minority of the Russian workers.
The congress resolved unanimously on the founding of an international
alliance of all Unionist organisations under the name International
Workingmen’s Association. It adopted a declaration of principles which
presented an outspoken profession of Anarcho-Syndicalism. The second
item in this declaration runs as follows,
“Revolutionary Syndicalism is the confirmed opponent of every form of
economic and social monopoly, and aims at the establishment of free
communities and administrative organs of the field and factory workers
on the basis of a free system of labour councils, entirely liberated
from subordination to any government and parties. Against the politics
of the state and political parties it proposes the economic organization
of labour; against the government of men it sets the management of
things. Consequently, it has for its object, not the conquest of power,
but the abolition of every state function in social life. It believes
that, along with the monopoly of property, should also disappear the
monopoly of domination, and that any form of the state, including the
dictatorship of the proletariat, will always be the creator of new
monopolies and new privileges, and never an instrument of liberation.”
With this the breach with Bolshevism and its adherents in the various
countries was completed. The I.W.M.A. from then on travelled its own
road, held its own international congresses, issued its bulletins and
adjusted the relations among the Revolutionary Unions of the different
countries.
The most powerful and influential organization in the IWMA was the
Spanish CNT, the soul of all the hard labour struggles in Spain and
later the backbone of the resistance against Fascism and the social
reorganisation of the country. Before the triumph of Franco, the CNT
embraced a membership of about two millions of industrial workers,
peasants and intellectual workers. It controlled thirty-six daily
papers, among them Solidaridad Obrera in Barcelona, with a circulation
of 240,000, the largest of any paper in Spain, and Castilla Libre, which
was the most widely read paper in Madrid. The CNT has published millions
of books and pamphlets and contributed more to the education of the
masses than any other movement in Spain.
In Portugal the Confederacao Geral do Trabalho, founded in 1911, was the
strongest labour organization in the country, and based on the same
principles as the CNT in Spain. After the victory of dictatorship, the
CGT was forced out of public activity and could only lead an underground
existence.
In Italy, under the influence of the ideas of French Syndicalism, the
Anarcho-Syndicalist wing of the Conlederazione del Lavoro left that
organisation on account of its subservience to the Socialist Party and
formed the Unione Sindacale Italiana. This group was the soul of a long
list of severe labour struggles and played a prominent part in the
occurrences of the so-called Red Week in June, 1914, and later in the
occupation of the factories in Milan and other cities in Northern Italy.
With the reign of Fascism the whole Italian labour movement disappeared
along with the U.S.I.
In France the Anarcho-Syndicalists left the CGTU in 1922, after that
organization yielded entirely to the influence of the Bolshevists, and
formed the Confederation Generale du Travail Syndicaliste
Revolutionaire, which joined the IWMA.
In Germany there existed for a long time before the first world war the
so-called Localists whose stronghold was the Freie Vereinigung deutscher
Gewerkschaften, founded in 1897. This organization was originally
inspired by Social Democratic ideas, but it combated the centralising
tendencies of the German Trade movement. The revival of French
Syndicalism had a great influence on the F.V.D.G. and led to its
adoption of pure Anarcho-Syndicalist principles. At its congress in
Dusseldorf, 1920, the organisation changed its name to Freie
Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands. This movement rendered a great service
through the tireless labours of its active publishing house in Berlin
which printed a large number of valuable works. After Hitler’s accession
to power the movement of the F.A.U.D. vanished from the scene. A great
many of its supporters languished in the concentration camps or had to
take refuge abroad.
In Sweden there still exists a very active Unionist movement, the
Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation, the only Unionist organisation
in Europe which escaped the reaction of Fascism and German invasion
during the war. The Swedish Anarcho-Syndicalists participated in all the
great labour struggles in their country and carried on for many years
the work of socialist and libertarian education.
In Holland the Revolutionary Union movement concentrated in the
Nationale Arbeids Secretariat; but when this organisation came steadily
under increasing Communist influence, nearly half of its members split
off and formed the Nederlandisok Syndikalistisch Vakverbond which joined
the I.W.M.A.
In addition to these organisations there were Anarcho-Syndicalist
propaganda groups in Norway, Poland and Bulgaria, which were affiliated
with the I.W.M.A. The Japanese Jiyu Rengo Dantal Zenkoku Kaigi also
joined the ranks of the I.W.M.A.
In Argentina the Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina, founded in 1891,
was for many years the centre of most of the big labour struggles in
that country. Its history is one of the most tempestuous chapters in the
annals of the labour movement. The movement ran a daily organ, La
Protesta, for over twenty-five years and quite a number of weekly papers
all over the country. After the coup d’etat of General Uriburu, the FORA
was suppressed, but it carried on underground activity, as it also did
under Peron. In May, 1929 the F.O.R.A. summoned a congress of all the
South American countries to meet in Buenos Aires. At this congress,
besides the F.O.R.A. of Argentina there were represented: Paraguay by
the Centro Obrero del Paraguay: Bolivia by the Federacion Local de la
Paz, La Antorcha and Luz y Libertad; Mexico by the Confederacion General
de Trabajo; Guatemala by the Comite pro Accion Sindical; Uruguay by the
Federacion Regional Uruguaya. Brazil was represented by trade unions
from seven of the constituent states. Costa Rica was represented by the
organization Hacia la Libertad. At this congress the Continental
American Workingmen’s Association was brought into existence,
constituting the American division of the I.W.M.A. The seat of this
organisation was at first at Buenos Aires, but later, because of the
dictatorship, it had to be transferred to Uruguay.
These were the forces which Anarcho-Syndicalism had at its disposal in
the various countries before the reign of Fascism and the outbreak of
the second world war.