3. The origins of anarcho-syndicalism

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 [1] 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 Eugène Hins [2] 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 [3] saw in these organisations merely a reform movement, with a socialist dictatorship as their immediate aim.

Ferdinand Lassalle [4] 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 [5] 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 organisation 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 not, therefore, 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 organisation 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 organisation of the International be free, natural and in every respect in accord with those interests and instincts.

“But what is the natural organisation of the masses? It is one based on the different occupations of their actual daily life, on their various kinds of work, organisation according to their occupations, trade organisations. When all industries, including the various branches of agriculture, are represented in the International, its organisation, the organisation of the 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 [6] 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.

[1] The First International (1864–1876) was an organisation which aimed to bring socialist, anarchist and Marxist currents across Europe under one banner. After extraordinary initial success, it sunk under the weight of the divisions in its ranks, most famously between the anarchists, led by Mikhail Bakunin, and the followers of Karl Marx.

[2] Eugène Hins (1839-1923) was an influential freethinker, positivist and founder of the Belgian section of the First International who backed Bakunin during the disputes.

[3] Blanquism, named for Louis Blanqui, advocated the seizure of power by a group of organised conspirators who would then implement socialism. At the time of writing it was sometimes used as an insult aimed at Marxists to illustrate the folly of mixing up the needs of a Party with those of the people.

[4] Lassalle (1825–64) helped popularise a number of social democratic and internationalist ideas in Germany.

[5] The Jura Federation was an influential early anarchist group based in the watchmaking community in Switzerland.

[6] The Paris Commune (1871) represented the first working class capture of a major city of the industrial age. The brutal crushing of the rebels by the army of Versailles and subsequent execution of 20,000 people after two months of self-governance was a pivotal moment which seriously undermined the class struggle movement of the time.