After 1890, anarchists made huge inroads into the unions, especially in the Latin American countries, developing an anarchist form of syndicalism called anarcho-syndicalism. This movement became very large and powerful, and for a time played a leading role in workers’ movements and social struggles. It had repercussions and impacts on the entire union movement in many countries. Except for the case of Spain, where the CNT remained active until the civil war, anarcho-syndicalism constituted a major force until its decline with the First World War.
The workers’ movement began to reorganize itself in Europe in the nineteenth century. Labor organization was rethought, and its practices repositioned in light of the new political, social, and economic conditions established through the Industrial Revolution. Numerous conceptualizations of syndicalism were advanced, often concurrently: reformist or revolutionary, linked to a political party or apolitical, internationalist or not, and so on. For example, the communists unsurprisingly wanted a syndicalism that was, according to Lenin, “a conveyor belt of party directives.”
Anarchists remained outside these debates for some time. In their view, the ad hoc and reformist nature of union struggles made them immediately incompatible with anarchist goals. Isn’t demanding a wage increase an implicit recognition of the right to hire and thus a perpetuation of wage slavery, as it was then commonly called? Isn’t demanding reform an implicit acknowledgment that the authorities have the right to grant it? If union action was only about seeking better working conditions and salaries, anarchists refused to enter into this logic. Moreover, syndicalism linked to a political party, even a socialist party, in their view inevitably degenerated into parliamentarianism and bourgeois and reformist policies.
However, a decision to get involved in the unions was made at the beginning of the 1890s. One of the most brilliant defenders of this position was Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901), who died of exhaustion at age thirty-two. He remains, along with Émile Pouget and Rudolf Rocker, one of the most important activists and theorists of anarcho-syndicalism.
Pelloutier was convinced that anarchists should be active in the unions. Two things encouraged this course of action. The first was the failure of “propaganda by the deed,” which most workers and anarchist activists condemned. The second was that the split of the socialist ranks into diverse currents lent increasing credibility to an apolitical concept of syndicalism, opposed to any collaboration with the state. This was precisely the position promoted by the anarchists. Pelloutier was at first involved in the Bourses du travail (labor exchanges), created in 1893. These were meant to be a kind of workers’ equivalent to chambers of commerce, uniting all workers within a given territory. The labor exchanges were to become a space to learn direct action and self-liberation; they aimed to “monopolize all services for bettering the lot of the working class.” In addition to all the services directly related to work, there was a magazine, L’Ouvrier des deux mondes (The Worker from Two Worlds), and open universities. Pelloutier was in fact a great believer in education, stating that syndicalism should “educate to revolt” and provide the worker with “the science of his unhappiness.”
In 1895, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT; General Confederation of Labor) was founded at a congress in Limoges. Eighteen labor exchanges participated. Gradually a revolutionary concept of syndicalism gained ground, based on a double structure of unions uniting workers from the same sector at the national level, and the labor exchanges uniting workers from the same city. The CGT’s Ninth Congress adopted the famous Charter of Amiens (1906), which set out the principles, goals, and means of this direct-action syndicalism, rejecting the necessity and expediency of having intermediaries between bosses and workers. These free associations of free producers aimed to bring about the social revolution outside party politics. While they sought an improvement in the conditions of their members, this was only an aspect of their work. The ultimate goal of the unions was “the disappearance of the salary system and of bosses.” They believed that “the complete emancipation of workers can only be achieved by expropriating the capitalists.” After this expropriation, these groupings of struggle and resistance were destined to become “groupings of production and redistribution, the basis for social reorganization.” At that point, union members would naturally be “anti-vote” and “antiwar.”
The recommended means were sabotage (badly done work, breaking machines, etc); the oft-adopted practices of boycott and labeling (a symbol granted to an employer by a union in return for his commitment to social conventions); and striking, leading up to a general strike, the instrument of revolution. Pelloutier was able to cite Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin in support of anarcho-syndicalism. However, other anarchists remained hostile or at least reserved. During a famous debate between Malatesta and the young Pierre Monatte in Amsterdam in 1907, Malatesta proclaimed, “We must be wary of any unilateral action. Syndicalism, however excellent it may be for motivating the working class, can never be the sole method of anarchism.”
The conceptions and practices of revolutionary syndicalism greatly fueled the union movement in its beginnings, later losing out to reformist strategies. However, with the increasingly noticeable integration and institutionalization of the big labor confederations, wage earners are rediscovering the ideas and practice of direct-action syndicalism from the beginning of the century. This is owing to new tools of struggle, such as the coordinations of the 1980s (rail workers, nurses) and alternative unions (the SUD and CGT in France, the Cobas in Italy, the CNT in Spain, etc.).
~Order Without Power- An Introduction to Anarchism: History & Current Challenges -by- Normand Baillargeon
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