Today’s movement
The Solidarity Federation is a federation of groups and individuals across Britain and Ireland. A non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian solidarity movement, it is organised into “Locals,” groups based on geographical area.
Locals put solidarity into practice, organising and getting involved in local campaigns across a wide range of issues, both in the community and in workplaces. Issues are extensive: defending our natural and local environment and health; opposing racism, sexism and homophobia, anything which defends or contributes to our mutual quality of life.
Direct action is the tool Locals use in all their work. At a basic level, this can be simply the spreading of information through leaflets, local bulletins and public meetings to raise awareness and involvement locally.
However, direct action is not limited to spreading information. It means taking action to defend and promote a better quality of life. Fundamental to direct action is the fact that we can only rely on ourselves to achieve our goals.
While we do take opportunities to fight for improvements to our quality of life now, the movement remains independent from all elites. It does not accept leadership, charity, nor guidance from government or business — the principle of solidarity is fixed with the practice of self-reliance.
Solidarity Federation members who work in the same sector form Networks. Their purpose is to promote solidarity amongst workers and encourage direct action in the workplace to fight for better pay and conditions. Networks and individual members work in mainstream unions as well as outside them, trying to form a basis for a completely new labour movement.
As Locals and Networks grow, they practice community and workers’ self-management. Eventually industries will be run by producers and consumers — by workers in Networks and members of affected Locals, who want the goods and services they provide.
Capitalism is international, so we need to be organised globally to oppose it and build a viable alternative. Nationalism and patriotism lead to pointless and false divisions, used to justify wars between our rulers. SolFed opposes both in favour of a movement built on global solidarity.
Solidarity Federation is affiliated to the International Workers’ Association (IWA). This gives it essential international solidarity and experience from larger sections such as the CNT (Spain) and USI (Italy).
Founded in 1922, the IWA has a long history of solidarity in action; Before World War II, over five million people worldwide were affiliated.
A combination of war, fascism, and Bolshevik “communism” all but destroyed the movement, but after Spain’s CNT re-emerged in the late seventies the IWA had a new lease of life. Today there are sections ranging from a few dozen to thousands of members.
Most labour historians have overlooked the influence and importance of anarcho-syndicalism. Its advocates were ordinary workers and industrial activists, concerned with the day-to-day problems that confronted them. They rejected the idea of theorising as an abstract exercise and did not have the time, or the inclination, to write long academic theses or books which have in the recent past been the mainstay of documenting “history.”
Anarcho-syndicalism has appealed both to workers within existing unions and to unskilled, non-unionised sections of the work force. This influence goes beyond traditional limits of labour history which tends to be written around the history of trade unionism and does not deal with the autonomous history of the working class.
Some academics and middle class theorists have attempted to dismiss anarcho-syndicalism as “confused thinking” by some sections of the working class who cannot adapt to change. Others have seen it as a primitive forerunner to a more “coherent” and “sophisticated” form of socialism — Bolshevism.
Syndicalism’s anti-intellectual stance, “ouvrierism,” rejected outside experts and professional politicians in favour of a reliance on mass working class experience and action.
Therefore anarcho-syndicalist history and theory is not to be found in books in libraries but in the pages of its papers and magazines, leaflets and propaganda and in the collective experiences of those who continue to work within its principles.
A brief timeline
- 1834-1839 Grand National Consolidated Trade Union formed.
- 1864 First International is founded.
- 1871 Paris Commune falls.
- 1876-7 First International falls.
- 1889 Tom Mann leads London dock strike.
- 1893-4 The Torch decries propaganda of the deed, Commonweal urges direct action and labour struggle.
- 1895 French CGT founded.
- 1902 Sam Mainwaring writes General Strike
- 1907 Launch of Voice of Labour Weekly
- 1909 Tom Mann writes The Way to Win and The Industrial Syndicalist
- 1910-14 Industrial Syndicalist Education League and The Great Unrest
- 1911 Syndicalist Railwayman published
- 1914-16 Building Workers’ Industrial Union, Shop Stewards & Works Committee
- 1917 Russian Revolution
- 1920 Second Comintern split
- 1926 General Strike
- 1936-9 Spanish Revolution
- 1939-45 WWII
- 1950-70s Syndicalist Workers Federation
- 1975 Death of Francisco Franco
- 1979-1994 Direct Action Movement
- 1984 Miners Strike
- 1991 Winning the Class War
- 1994 Solidarity Federation
Printed 2015 by the Solidarity Federation