Abstract
Syndicalism is an anti-statist revolutionary strategy rooted in the anarchist tradition. It argues that revolutionary labour unions, built through daily struggles, radically democratic practices and popular education, provide an irreplaceable force for defending and extending gains and rights for the working class and crucial levers for social revolution. It involves prefigurative mass organising and immediate struggle, to build a revolutionary counter-power and counter-culture to abolish capitalism, the state and oppression. Direct action and solidarity, self-activity and the development of political and technical knowledge are means to enable the accumulation of individual and organisational capacities for a revolutionary general strike (or ‘general lockout’ of the capitalist class) in which working people occupy workplaces, take control of the means of production and construct a stateless, socialist order based upon self-management, planning through interlinked assemblies and councils, and production for need, rather than the profits or power of a ruling class minority.
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Notes
- 1.
W. Thorpe, ‘The Workers Themselves’: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–23 (Dordrecht, Boston, London/Amsterdam: Kulwer/IISG), 319–320.
- 2.
R. Rocker, Anarcho-syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, [1938] 1989), 88–89, 111–113.
- 3.
W. Thorpe, ‘The Workers Themselves’, 324.
- 4.
D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).
- 5.
Key texts include P. Cole, D. Struthers & K. Zimmer (Eds), Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto, 2017); S.J. Hirsch & L. van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2014); V. Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century (Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2009); Thorpe, op. cit., Ref. 1; W. Thorpe & M. van der Linden (Eds), Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Otterup/Aldershot: Scholar/Gower, 1990); D. Berry & C. Bantman (Eds), New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, The National and the Transnational (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010); R. Darlington, Radical Unionism. The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).
- 6.
L. Trotsky, ‘Speech on Comrade Zinoviev’s Report on the Role of the Party’, in L. Trotsky (Ed), The First Five Years of the Communist International, volume 1 (New York: Pioneer, [1920] 1945), 97–99.
- 7.
S. Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: SUNY, 1989), 6.
- 8.
1883 Pittsburgh Manifesto, in P. Avrich (Ed), The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 75.
- 9.
E. Pouget & E. Pataud, How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth (London: Pluto, [1909] 1990).
- 10.
On recent developments, see Alternative Libertaire, ‘Espagne’: La CGT s’affirme Comme la Troisième Organisation Syndicale (November 2004); I. Ness (Ed), New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014).
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van der Walt, L. (2019). Syndicalism. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_14
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