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Title: Why Revolutionary Syndicalism? Author: Tom Wetzel Date: October 31, 2012 Language: en Topics: revolutionary syndicalism Source: Retrieved on 12th October 2020 from http://ideasandaction.info/2012/10/why-revolutionary-syndicalism-2/
Capitalism is at its heart an oppressive and exploitative economic
system. The core is the class structure, in which the majority are
dispossessed of the means of production of goods and services, and must
submit to bureaucratic production regimes. These regimes control our
labor so as to pump out wealth privately accumulated by the plutocrats
at the top of the heap (and paying high salaries to the bureaucratic
class of managers and high-end professionals), and backed up by the
coercive force of the state. Working people are thus an oppressed class,
although it is also internally quite heterogeneous and various
sub-groups are oppressed in various diverse ways.
The working class can’t be free and can’t ultimately ensure well-being
for itself unless it can take over the control of the process of
production (which includes transportation and distribution and
production of services), and the land and all the means of production,
becoming masters of production, in control of our own work of and
technological development. To do this means dismantling the
institutional power of the bureaucratic/managerial and capitalist
classes, so that we are not subordinate to any dominating class. As
Ralph Chaplin put it in “Solidarity Forever”:
All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
Workers self-management of all of social production is thus a necessary
condition for working class liberation. If we don’t control production
some other class will, and then we’re not free. This means there must be
a mass worker movement that has the capacity and aspiration to take over
the means of production, and continue social production under direct
worker’s management. This takeover of production is not all there is to
social emancipation but this is very basic in that the working class
cannot liberate itself if it doesn’t do this.
Also, by “takeover of production” I do not mean that the existing
workplaces and techniques of production are continued without change,
but with workers replacing management. I also mean that the working
class then sets up a system of working class control that re-organizes
social production, works to change technology, works to develop worker
skills to break down hierarchical divisions of labor, changes production
to ensure our species survival through a change in ecological impacts,
and in general works to make social production more socially beneficial.
Breaking down the present class division between subordinate workers and
middle management and professionals also requires major changes in the
educational system and the way that learning is linked with social
production.
But to achieve its liberation the working class needs to have a
strategy. Part of the point to the focus on the struggle between workers
and bosses is that this provides a lever for changing society. Workers
have the potential to exert power here because the flow of profits to
the capitalists requires our cooperation in production. Thus the ability
to bring production to a halt is a potential form of power the working
class has. Again, to quote Ralph Chaplin:
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.
The British writer R. H. Tawney once described capitalist management as
“autocracy checked by insurgency.” The economic and legal structures of
capitalism create a form of workplace despotism but workers can develop
forms of social power — power to counter the employers — through
collective action and organization. Collective organization and action
uses the power of numbers to increase our social power, and thus our
ability to bend the will of the employers.
Revolutionary syndicalism emphasizes collective direct action such as
strikes for two reasons. First, because of the potential power we have
when we disrupt “business as usual” and, secondly, because this is a way
to fight for change that we can get our hands on directly.
We see this as the way to fight for enhancements in our life, our
dignity and safety, and for social justice. This is a political stance.
Revolutionary syndicalism is political because it offers a different
type of political strategy for the working class than a politics that
emphasizes reliance on political parties and electing government
officials.
Sometimes revolutionary syndicalism is accused of being “apolitical.”
And there are some American syndicalists who talk this way, such as
those members of the Industrial Workers of the World who say they want
to “keep politics out of the union.” But this is not an accurate picture
of the IWW’s history since the IWW’s revolutionary direction, its
emphasis on self-managed class unionism, and its resolute independence
of political parties is a type of labor politics. In the early 20^(th)
century syndicalists who said they were against “politics” meant they
were against a labor politics that relied on political party leaders and
looking to elections of Left politicians for social change. But the
politics of political parties and electing politicians is not the only
sort of politics there is. There is also a politics of direct
participation, direct protest, of mass struggle.
The development of worker social or collective counter-power is crucial
to the process that Marxists call “class formation.” This is the more or
less protracted process thru which the working class develops from an
objectively oppressed and exploited class into a class that has
developed the capacity, will and aspiration — the forms of organization,
practices of solidarity, and political insights — to effectively
challenge the dominating classes, and pose the real possibility of
replacing capitalism with self-managed socialism. To put this another
way, the objective oppression and exploitation of the class does not
automatically generate a subjective aspiration for change or the
organizational capacity to bring that about.
WSA refers to this process of “class formation” in the following
paragraph in Where We Stand:
“The working class does not develop the capacity to liberate itself
overnight. Through a more or less protracted process, the working class
can break through fatalism and longstanding habits of going along with
hierarchy, overcome internal divisions (such as along lines of race or
gender), and develop the skills and self-confidence, solidarity, and
organizational strength needed to mount a fundamental challenge to the
dominating classes.”
So long as people are isolated and don’t see people supporting each
other and actually exhibiting collective social power, they will be more
inclined to think “You can’t fight City Hall”, “I’m on my own,” and make
decisions accordingly. To the extent that people see more people acting
in solidarity with each other, building links between different
movements and parts of the population, and successfully pushing back,
they will be more open to more ambitious ideas about changes in society.
The extent to which people take the possibility of change seriously
depends on how realistic they think such aims are, and this depends on
the social power they think may be available to fight for such changes.
WSA refers to these changes in mindset thru collective action in Where
We Stand this way:
“The economy would grind to a halt without our work. This is the source
of the collective power of the working class. Large-scale solidarity
such as general strikes builds in the working class a sense of our
ability to change the society.”
The importance of workers acting “in union” with each other, creating
collective organizations for resistance to management, as a way to build
power, is highlighted in another stanza from “Solidarity Forever”:
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.
Looking at the kinds of unions that exist today it can be difficult to
convince people — even committed radicals — that unionism can be a force
for revolutionary change. Here it is important to keep in mind the
historical circumstances that have shaped the kind of unionism that
exists in the USA today, and to look at the range of forms that unionism
has taken in history and in different countries, as this helps to give
us a better picture of what unionism can be.
The basic idea of a “union” is an organization workers form to check
industrial autocracy: to force management to go along with what we want
or to force them to avoid what we don’t want them to do. But there are
two historical tendencies or “souls” to unionism, and these distinct
directions have been expressed at various points in labor history. There
has been, on the one hand, the tendency to autonomous, grassroots
workshop unionism, controlled by workers themselves. And, on the other
hand, the tendency towards bureaucratic unionism, with paid hierarchies
outside the workplace, made up of people who no longer work the job, do
not experience the direct control of management. WSA describes the
development of the American business union form of bureaucratic unionism
this way in Where We Stand:
“After World War II, control of the American unions by a hierarchical
structure of paid officers and staff became entrenched. Unions limited
their focus to narrow economic issues, and routine bargaining, sector by
sector. The general strikes and pitched battles of the years before
World War 2 were a fading memory. The labor bureaucracy’s monopolization
of relations with the employers tended to make the members dependent on
them. Workers came increasingly to regard the union as an external
service agency. There was less emphasis on the workers’ own action “in
union” with each other.”
This type of unionism begin to develop historically once the basic
revolt of workers has imposed the unions on the employers, and forced
concessions, especially ongoing collective bargaining with the employer.
But this type of unionism tends to undermine the counter-power of
workers, since it tends to concentrate control over struggles and
negotiations into the hands of a paid hierarchy, who fear risks to their
organization if workers engage in autonomous, direct struggle that
threatens to go beyond the bounds that are allowed by capitalist
legality. Thus the union bureaucracy is trapped in a contradiction they
can’t solve. They can’t stem the decline of the past 40 years, because
only disruptive mass action such as strikes and direct worker solidarity
could develop sufficient counter-power. As long as they stay within the
legal cage that the laws and courts enforce, they have little power to
reverse their decline.
The alternative is to rebuild worker counter-power through the
re-assertion of the other “soul” or tendency in historical unionism…the
tendency to grassroots, rebel, independent worker organization. I think
one of the first radical thinkers to explicitly lay out this
understanding of the contradictory or “two souls” character of mass
unionism was Antonio Gramsci during his syndicalist years after World
War 1. At that time his Socialist Party Group worked closely with the
anarcho-syndicalist Turin Libertarian Group to build the radical shop
stewards movement in the Turin metal working industry. This was modeled
to some extent on the British World War 1 shop stewards movement — also
a syndicalist movement — and was based on workplace assemblies
independent of the bureaucratized FIOM (Metal Workers Federation) union.
Shop steward councils were elected that were independent of the union,
and brought together in the assemblies people from the various unions in
the plants into a single united body. This program was then taken over
by the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) (a union formed in 1912 on the
platform of the American IWW) and then extended to Milan, Genoa and
other areas.
At that time the Italian social democratic union federation (CGL) had
already developed a practice of collective bargaining with employers and
had a bureaucracy of paid officials, and Gramsci noted the preoccupation
of these officials at maintaining their ongoing relationships with the
employers, including their tendency to discourage mass direct action and
revolt.
Thus we can understand revolutionary syndicalism as the proposal to
build and nurture the independent, self-managed workshop unionism
tendency, that is, for mass worker organization that is independent,
worker controlled, and works to broaden solidarity.
I use the term “self-managed class unionism” to refer to the type of
worker unionism that syndicalism proposes. By “self-managed” I mean that
workers directly control their struggles themselves, and they directly
control the formal organizations they create. This is what WSA says
about self-managed unionism in Where We Stand:
“For unions to be self-managing, this starts with the importance of the
general meetings of the members to make decisions. To prevent the
organization becoming dependent on a small number of people, executive
committee posts should have term limits. This needs to be combined with
a systematic approach to training members in all the tasks needed in
running a union.
Full-time paid officials no longer suffer the daily indignities of
subordination to the bosses. The often high salaries of union
bureaucrats in the USA separate union officials from the conditions of
life of union members and encourages officials to look at the union as
their personal ticket out of the working class. We believe that the
number of paid officials in the labor movement should be kept to a
minimum. Local unions should avoid paid officers as much as possible. If
workers feel that a paid officer is needed in a particular case, their
pay should be limited to the average wage level of the workers….Genuine
self-management of a union goes beyond the formal structure and also
depends on active participation and education of members.”
Self-managing struggles in some cases has led syndicalists to propose
autonomous forms of organizing a struggle outside the unions. Two
examples of this from Spain are: (1) The 1980s struggle at Puerto Real,
against shutdown of a shipyard, in which the CNT (a revolutionary
syndicalist minority) was successful in persuading the workers to form
an independent assembly and strike committee to conduct the struggle,
independent of the various unions; and (2) the 2006 struggle of the bus
drivers in Barcelona for two-days off per week, which was conducted
through several strikes by an independent assembly and strike committee,
formed on the initiative of the CGT and another “minority union”.
In this latter type of situation the union is a kind of militant
minority organization that works to mobilize the larger mass of
co-workers (including those who may have been less active before) to
engage in a common struggle through directly democratic means.
“Class unionism”, as “Big Bill Haywood defined it, “attempts to unite
all the workers against all the capitalists.”
This form of unionism may be built on struggles of workers against their
employers, but does not limit itself to improving the circumstances of a
particular group of workers at a particular employer, in isolation from
the struggles of the working class in general. Class unionism becomes
visible in situations where unions and masses of people engage in
general strikes against the state, or against all the employers. The
national general strike for the eight-hour day in 1886 was a class-wide
struggle against employers in general, for example.
American business unionism has always consisted of national unions that
tend to be focused on isolated, sector by sector battles of workers. To
the extent they concern themselves with larger class questions, this
tends to get kicked up to the leaders who engage in lobbying and ask
members to vote for Democrats for their solution, not united action with
other members of their class.
WSA hints at this concept of class unionism in Where We Stand in this
language:
“The type of unionism that we advocate is self-managed by the members,
works to spread solidarity and link up with workers in other countries,
encourages mass participation, fights against all forms of inequality
and discrimination, and rejects any idea of “partnership” or “common
interests” with the bosses.”
Class unionism is based on class solidarity, encapsulated in the slogan
“An Injury to One is an Injury to All.” If this is to be real it means
that the injuries that are due to diverse forms of oppression or
mistreatment experienced by various sub-groups (such as along lines of
race, sex, immigration status) of the working class cannot be ignored,
and struggles of people in these groups need to gain support from the
broader movement. To put this another way, the class movement needs to
be anti-racist and anti-sexist.
For about a decade the Industrial Workers of the World was able to
maintain an organization of workers on the docks in Philadelphia which
was based on an understanding between the white and black longshoremen…a
sharing of control within the worker organization. During World War 1
the IWW also built a single union of white and black workers in the
timber industry in western Louisiana and east Texas — in a region where
this lack of racial segregation was a violation of the law. This
resistance to racism took place at a time when racism was very strongly
entrenched. And this resistance was itself a direct expression of class
unionism.
workers themselves.”
This principle was enunciated by Marx in his draft principles for the
International workingmen’s Association in 1864. Revolutionary
syndicalists accept this principle but in a quite literal way.
For the working class to be able to take over the system of social
production, there needs to be a history, a practice, of struggle of
workers in workplaces that foreshadows this change in control, in the
sense that there is a movement which challenges management for control,
and develops a commitment to collective, democratic decision-making, to
self-managing its own struggles.
In the course of develping this practice, and as part of the motivation
for it, the movement needs to also develop the aspiration to replace the
capitalist system, and its industrial autocracy, with collective
self-management, generalized throughout the society, not limited just to
the workplaces.
Without an organized mass movement of this kind, it’s hard to see where
the social force would come from with the cohesion, aspiration and
capacity to carry out a transformation to a worker-managed economy.
The ambitious change we propose for society is certainly not going to
happen thru a spontaneous rebellion. Even if there were a massiv social
rebellion, without the development of a conscious movement for
self-management and a developed practice of democratic self-management
of organizations, people would be likely to fall back into old habits,
and defer to politicians, “professionals of representation,” new leaders
and bureaucratic systems.
The Spanish revolutionary syndicalist movement in the ’20s and ’30s
placed great emphasis upon preparation and capacitacion – building in
ordinary people the knowledge, the skills, the capacity to run their own
movements, to be organizers themselves, and encouraged the discussions
within the working class about the kind of society we want, how we want
to liv. A key institution that Spanish anarcho-syndicalists built was
theateneo or center for popular education, which conducted literacy
classes, study groups, cultural events and educational activities that
were aimed at building the capacity for being an agent of change.
Class struggle does not only take place at the point of production. The
system of class oppression originates there but extends thru-out the
society — and there are class conflicts that emerge also in areas of
consumption — as against landlords, to defend public services like
public transit and education. Just as worker struggles against employers
have often developed into conflicts with the institutions of the state —
police, courts, etc — this is true also for these other class conflicts
in the broader society. This means that working class politics can’t be
reduced to only the politics of worker unionism in the workplaces.
The struggles in the workplaces, and the culture of worker solidarity
and direct struggle sometimes leads to a mindset called “workerism.” An
objection to syndicalism has been that it tries to reduce class politics
to workerism. Although this has sometimes been a feature of syndicalism
in the past, there have also been situations where syndicalist unionism
has embraced struggles in the broader community, such as the mass tenant
strikes of the CNT in Barcelona in 1931 and of the Mexican CGT in Vera
Cruz in the ’20s.
Moreover, in my description of class unionism I’ve said that it means
that worker unionism needs to seek out wider links in building a
class-wide struggle against the dominating classes and their
institutions. This also means building alliances with organizations in
the community such as in minority communities, tenant organizations or
environmental justice organizations. The revolutionary syndicalist
unions in Spain, CNT and CGT, nowadays put a significant emphasis on
building a larger working class social bloc in the struggles against the
plutocracy and their institutions, seeking out links with ecologists,
housing squatters, and the indignados, the Spanish equivalent of Occupy.
Just as capitalist society has been built up with various forms of
oppression, or systematic inequality, not just the class or economic
structure, an alliance of social movements to transform the society
needs to address all these various forms of social inequality. This
means the mass workers movement needs to fight against racism and sexism
inside and outside the workplaces.
A principle of self-managed class unionism is working class
autonomy…independence from employers, politicians, political parties,
and the government. The problem is that being dependent on elections and
parties tends to get in the way of a working class movement deciding on
and developing its own course, and its own agenda for social change. It
becomes limited by what is acceptable to people in bureaucratic or
capitalist positions in society. The movement tends to become focused
around particular Leaders and their role in the state.
The issue of autonomy of the mass organizations means rejection of the
Leninist concept of direction by a “vanguard party.” After World War 1,
the world’s revolutionary syndicalist labor organizations initially
aligned themselves in support of the Russian revolution. However, when
the Russian Communist Party initiated a new revolutiionary labor
international in 1921, they insisted upon the unions being “transmission
belts” of the party. For this reason, the revolutionary syndicalist
unions left the Communist International and its labor affiliate and
formed a new International Workers Association in 1922. The basic
disagreement was over Leninist opposition to the syndicalist principle
of autonomy or independence of the mass organizations.
The aim of revolutionary syndicalism is a self-managed, libertarian
socialist society, not just worker self-management of workplaces. This
means that the goal of social production is changed from market revenue
and enriching owners to production for use, that is, for direct human
benefit and well-being.
When the Spanish revolutionary syndicalist union organizations
expropriated thousands of companies and put the worker assemblies and
elected coordinating councils in charge in 1936, the aim was not to have
each former firm now be the private property of workers. As Diego Abad
de Santillan said at the time, the CNT was an “anti-capitalist,
anti-proprietor movement” and the worker organizations were not to be
“proprietors” of their workplaces but “only administators at the service
of the entire society.”
Syndicalists reject a strategy of trying to build socialism through the
state. The state is itself inherently an institution to sustain and
protect the interests of a dominating, exploiting class. This is shown
by the way the state itself is structured…the concentration of control
into the hands of a few — the various politicians, judges, prosecutors,
administrators, military and police officials. This bureaucratic class
preside over public sector workers in a manner similar to bosses in the
private sector.
Revolutionary syndicalism provides the working class with a strategy for
directly developing its own counter-power, and a means to build a
movement to take over control of social production, replacing the
dominating classes. But the change in social organization in a period of
social transformation also has to include replacing the state with a new
system of popular governance — a form of direct social self-management
over public affairs, and also a means for coalescing the changes in a
structure that can defend the gains won by the working class in this
transformation.
State socialism in both its social democratic and Leninist forms has
been historically committed to the idea that socialism is to be achieved
through a political party taking control of a state. The social
democratic parties in Europe were originally committed to socialism, but
their emersion in electoral politics diminished their commitment to
fundamental change. By the mid-20^(th) century their politics was
reduced to “managing” capitalism…but leaving the capitalists in control
of the workplaces & their economic assets. Over the past several decades
the capitalist elites have used their assets to engage in a systematic
assault on the working classes and the “welfare states” in the various
countries where social democracy was once dominant in labor politics.
Revolutionary syndicalism rejects the idea of trying to gain control of
state power. A state is an organization that has a top-down structure
that makes it well-suited for protecting the interests of a dominating,
exploiting class. Public sector workers are subordinate to bosses, and
power is concentrated into the hands of a few. In all cases Leninist
parties taking state power have led to new systems of bureaucratic class
domination. The working class remained a subordinate, exploited class.
Nonetheless, in a transformation of society where the working class
takes power over social production, it must also break up the old state
machine and replace it with a new system of direct popular
self-governance. This is also a form of “taking power” in the sense that
the new organization of power does not empower any dominating class,
but, on the contrary, is a taking of power by the masses themselves,
through the organizations of direct democracy, the assemblies in the
workplaces and neighborhoods, and the delegates they elect to delegate
bodies such as congresses or coordinating councils. The aim is a social
structure where people participate in and control decisions to the
extent they are effected by them — generalized self-management.
In my exposition of revolutionary syndicalism here, I am trying to lay
out what meaning revolutionary syndicalism might have at present. A
revolutionary syndicalism for today is not going to be the same as in
the ’30s or the early 1900s. Syndicalism is not a frozen set of
doctrines, but an approach to working class self-emancipation that has
evolved over the decades since its earliest beginnings in the
Internatonal Workingmen’s Association of the 1860s-70s. The ideas of
revolutionary syndicalism were developed historically by self-educated
worker militants, organizers and some labor publicists or journalists.
Certain ideas have remained constant, such as self-managed class
unionism and working class independence and the commitment to the goal
of a form of socialism based on workers self-management, but the
concrete forms of organization or approaches to organizing have varied,
and the understanding of the complexity of capitalist society has also
developed down through the years as well.