Syndicalism was born in the French trade union movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Industrial trade unions developed alongside socialism. Unlike the earlier craft unions, which represented workers with a shared set of skills, industrial unions were organized to represent large numbers of workers within a specific industry or region—skilled and unskilled, employed or unemployed. Like socialist parties, such unions were motivated by a clear sense of class consciousness, in the Marxist sense, and the desire to improve the lives of workers.
Despite their similarities, trade unions and socialist parties differed in how they worked for change. The unions’ goals were immediate and practical: higher wages, shorter hours, the eight-hour day, better working conditions. Trade unions relied on economic, rather than political, methods. Their primary tools were collective bargaining power, their ability to supply aid to their members, and, as a last recourse, the strike.
Class Consciousness
* * *
The syndicalist idea of the “conscious minority” was related to the socialist idea of “false consciousness.” The conscious few must work on behalf of an unconscious majority who support a system that is against their interests. There is an inherent contradiction in syndicalist thought between the idea of the conscious minority and the central role of the general strike.
* * *
Syndicalist-run unions, like other trade unions, used the tactics of collective bargaining and limited strikes to win immediate benefits for their members. Unlike mainstream trade unions, the principal function of the syndicalist trade union was not winning economic gains for its members but undermining the political order by means of direct action led by a “conscious minority.”
Syndicalism and Anarchism
French trade unions were breeding grounds for anarchism from the beginning. Proud of the French revolutionary tradition, workers were suspicious of both government and industry. Many rejected social democracy as corrupt, ineffective—and German. When trade unions were made legal in France in 1884, the bulk of the members were anarchists in the Proudhon tradition.
In its purest form, anarchism is opposed not only to the state but also to all types of hierarchy and authority. Anarchists prefer small groups, from revolutionary cells to producers’ cooperatives, linked together in a decentralized federation.
The marriage between trade unions and anarchism was uncomfortable. The small groups that anarchists preferred made ineffective trade unions. Some anarchists even feared that the large industrial trade unions would create powerful interest groups in a new society.
Like anarchists, syndicalists rejected organized government and the coercion of the state. They believed power could and should be achieved by the workers themselves, rather than through political parties and the state. Unlike anarchists, syndicalists considered that the basic building block of the ideal society would be trade unions rather than small local communities.
THE FEDERATION OF LABOR EXCHANGES
Shortly after trade unions were legalized in France in 1884, the government of Léon Gambetta created an institution to help connect employers with laborers seeking work: the labor exchanges (bourses du travail). The first exchange opened in Paris in 1887 in a building donated by the local municipal council. Parisian workers demanded the right to run the exchanges themselves. By 1907 there were 150 labor exchanges in cities across France.
Most of the exchanges were founded with the help of local municipalities and began as places where workers could present themselves for hire. In the hands of the trade unions, the labor exchanges developed into much more, combining the function of workers’ club, placement service, and mutual aid society. Unions used the exchanges to steer job seekers away from centers of labor disputes, preventing them from becoming strikebreakers. Exchanges served as local labor councils that included all the unions of different trades in a given city. Many exchanges became institutions for working-class education: setting up libraries, museums of labor history, technical colleges, and schools for the education of workers’ children.
In 1892 French municipal labor exchanges came together to form the Federation of Labor Exchanges, effectively creating a collective bargaining unit for their organizations. Under the leadership of Fernand Pelloutier, the Federation became an incubator for syndicalism.
FERNAND PELLOUTIER AND THE FEDERATION OF LABOR EXCHANGES
Although syndicalism had no obvious founder, Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901) was the first person to clearly articulate syndicalist ideals. Pelloutier was involved in the anarchist movement for several years before he became operating secretary of the Federation of Labor Exchanges in 1895. Under his leadership, the exchanges took on additional functions, such as providing information on how to find work, how to join unions and cooperatives, and how to go on strike; where possible, exchanges were encouraged to publish their own newspapers and provide information about labor markets to interested proletarian organizations. The membership rose to more than 250,000.
Like Proudhon before him, Pelloutier believed that workers could be emancipated only by their own direct action. He went further than Proudhon by insisting that when the proletariat tried to protect its interests within the framework of the state and socialist political parties, the natural tendency to reach compromises would undermine its moral fiber. Instead, the working class needed to work toward the revolution through its own institutions: the trade unions and labor exchanges.
A New Education System
* * *
Pelloutier hoped that workers who were educated in schools created by the labor exchanges would build a new system of values in which technical skill and discipline were valued over wealth, comfort, and leisure. Like Saint-Simon, he believed that the new leaders of the producing class would form a technical elite.
* * *
Pelloutier envisioned the labor exchanges as the beginning of a new proletarian civilization centered on trade unions. Once workers gained control of the methods of production, unions and labor exchanges would play different roles in society.
The local trade union would be the basic unit of society, with the job of producing goods and services. Individual unions would coordinate production within a specific sector of the economy, defined either by region or industry. Unions would be linked together in a loose federation of the type visualized earlier by Proudhon.
Unions would send representatives to the labor exchanges, which would be responsible for coordinating efforts between the different sectors of production. The labor exchanges would function as decentralized planning bodies. They would gather and disseminate information on production matters and consumer interests, giving the unions an overarching view of the production process.
After Pelloutier’s death in 1901 the Federation of Labor Exchanges merged with the Federation of Trade Unions to create the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), which was dominated by syndicalism until 1921.
GENERAL STRIKES
The idea of the general strike was based on the belief that the industrial economy cannot survive even a short disruption of basic services. (Anyone who has been in a major city when the garbage collectors go on strike will understand the concept.)
British radical William Benbow first proposed the idea of a month-long general strike in 1831, euphemistically calling it a “Grand National Holiday.” Bakunists also considered a “Sacred Month” of collective work stoppage.
In the 1890s French syndicalists expanded the idea of the general strike. Earlier socialists had envisioned the general strike as an act of noncooperation designed to win a concession from government or business. In syndicalist thought the general strike became a “revolution of folded arms”: a tactic for overthrowing the government by bringing the economy to a halt.
Some syndicalists argued that every small strike was a skirmish in the larger class struggle. At least in theory this meant that it didn’t matter whether a “partial” strike for higher wages or an eight-hour day succeeded or failed because the very
act of striking was a blow against the capitalist system.
During the heyday of syndicalism, between 1900 and 1914, syndicalist groups attempted general strikes in Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Sweden, usually at the cost of violent response by the governments.
Syndicalism Put to the Test
In 1906 the CGT scheduled a nationwide strike for May 1. Many hoped that it would prove to be the general strike that would bring down the government.
The strike was triggered prematurely on March 10 by a coal mine disaster at Courrières. A gas explosion killed between 1,060 and 1,300 miners. Rescue operations were slow, made more difficult by an unseasonable snowstorm. (The last thirteen survivors were recovered twenty days after the explosion.) More than 15,000 people attended the first funerals, creating an explosion of another sort. By March 13, 61,000 miners were on strike.
Miners’ Fund
* * *
Funds collected for the miners became part of an official fund set up by law within four days of the explosion. Together, the various efforts collected 750,000 francs. (The daily wage for a miner was less than 6 francs.) Mine owners donated more than half the amount raised.
* * *
The Courrières explosion was one of the first disasters reported in the French popular press. Reporters from across the country competed for news from the mine and published appeals for humanitarian aid for the victims and their families. Newspapers couldn’t print photographs, but picture postcards of the disaster and the survivors spread across the country. With public sympathy engaged, the CGT called for the planned strike to begin on March 18; hundreds of thousands of strikers joined the miners’ demonstrations in Pas-de-Calais and Nord.
The minister of the interior, Georges Clemenceau, reacted quickly to suppress the strikes, flooding the region with troops and arresting seven hundred union leaders.
The Charter of Amiens
The ferocity of the government’s response left many union members shaken. When the CGT Congress met at Amiens later that year, several argued that the unions should abandon the idea of direct action, follow the lead of the democratic socialists, and lobby for change through the political system. The proposal was rejected. Representatives at the Congress passed a resounding vote of support for syndicalist ideas. The broad resolution, known as the Charter of Amiens, is perhaps the clearest and most influential statement of syndicalist ideals:
In the daily fight, Syndicalism pursues the co-ordination of workers’ struggles, and the increase of working class welfare through the achievement of immediate reforms such as a decrease in the hours of the working day, increased salaries, etc….But this task is only one aspect of Syndicalism, which also prepares the ground for complete emancipation. This can only be realized by the expropriation of the capitalists through the General Strike. The trade union, which today is a defensive institution, will be, in the future, the basis of production, distribution and the re-organisation of society.
SOCIALISTS IN WORLD WAR I
The End of the Second International
In the summer of 1914 socialism seemed to have reached the acme of power. Socialists were members of parliament in France and Germany, holding significant blocs of votes. The socialist movement in Great Britain was growing in strength; even in the United States organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World, a syndicalist organization strongly influenced by socialist ideology, had enrolled thousands of workers in their ranks.
Many commentators remarked that that summer was the most perfect in memory.
But in June a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife while they were visiting the Serbian town of Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the empire’s rulers demanded that Serbia be annexed to the empire. Serbia appealed for support to Russia, with which it had a treaty of protection. Germany announced its support of Austro-Hungary, while Britain and France sided with Russia. By August 1914 guns were sounding all over Europe. The First World War had begun.
THE GERMAN CRISIS
In the run-up to the war the deputies to the Reichstag who were members of the Social Democratic Party announced that they would not support war credits and would vote against any move by the government to go to war. However, with the outbreak of war they reversed their position and voted in favor of the government’s request for war credits.
Karl Liebknecht
* * *
Among the socialist members of the Reichstag was Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, cofounder of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Karl was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against war credits (110 members of the SPD at that time occupied positions in the Reichstag). After the war Liebknecht formed the Spartacus League with several other left-leaning socialists, including Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919). In the chaos following the end of the war, they attempted to launch an uprising against the new German government. The uprising was suppressed with the aid of right-leaning militias called Freikorps. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested by members of the Freikorps and swiftly murdered.
* * *
The nationalist turn of the German SPD was mirrored by the French adherents of the International. For all intents and purposes, the Second International was now dead, since its members were literally shooting at one another from the trenches that crisscrossed France. There was an attempt to revive its spirit at a conference in Zimmerwald in neutral Switzerland in 1915, but it failed to accomplish much.
THE ZIMMERWALD MOVEMENT
The Zimmerwald Conference of 1915 was only the first of several efforts to unite those members of the various socialist parties in Europe who still believed in internationalism and opposed participation in World War I. Although unsuccessful, it did clearly demonstrate the differences between revolutionary and gradualist tendencies in the International.
Among those attending the first conference was Grigory Zinoviev on behalf of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. Representatives were also present from the Mensheviks, the Italian Socialist Party, and the Polish socialists. Lenin did not take part in the proceedings, although he drafted several resolutions for consideration by the conference. Trotsky took part in the conference in a position halfway between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
Trotsky—Half and Halfway
* * *
To Lenin’s extreme annoyance, Trotsky continued to try to balance between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. Although he often leaned left, as he did at Zimmerwald, he never fully committed to Lenin’s side. This maneuvering continued right up until early 1917, when Trotsky, having returned to Russia, finally joined the Bolsheviks.
* * *
The Conference quickly divided between those who wanted to denounce the war, those who had voted for it and supported it, and those who wanted to take a more moderate stance. In the end the Conference formed an International Socialist Commission, which functioned as a kind of clearinghouse for those members of the Second International who did not support the war. The final resolution passed was so watered-down as to be meaningless.
Lenin’s View
Lenin regarded the Zimmerwald Movement as evidence that the old social democratic structure was dead and needed to be replaced. A new international organization was needed, in his opinion, and he and Zinoviev would act on this in 1919 by founding the Third (Communist) International.
Many Internationals
* * *
As discussed later, the Third International lasted until the Second World War, when it was reorganized as the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). Followers of Trotsky organized a Fourth International in 1938, but it remained relatively small, and split on several occasions.
* * *
THE BEGINNING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
1905 and February 1917
Marx predicted that the end of capitalism would begin in mature industrial societies. The merciless dialectic between capital and labor would br
ing the internal conflicts of capitalism to the breaking point, and outraged labor would revolt against their misery. Instead, the first avowedly Marxist revolution took place in Tsarist Russia, where the proletariat formed only a small portion of the population, but there was plenty of misery to go around.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE IN RUSSIA IN 1900?
In 1900 Russia looked disturbingly like France in 1789. Tsar Nicholas II (1894–1917) and the Orthodox Church still believed in the divine right of kings. Nicholas was the last of Europe’s absolute monarchs: unfettered by constitutional restraints or parliamentary institutions. The population was largely divided between wealthy aristocrats and struggling peasants, with only a small middle class in the cities. The gulf between rich and poor was enormous. But things were starting to change.
Russia Begins an Industrial Revolution
Russia took its first steps toward industrialization in 1856, after the Crimean War made it clear that modern wars were won with railroads and industrial capacity. The process was slow at first, but by the 1880s Russia was finally in the grip of the Industrial Revolution, with a few peculiarly Russian twists.
In Western Europe the Industrial Revolution began with small workshops. Enterprises grew larger over time as a new industrial class emerged and accumulated both the capital and the knowledge for economic development.
Socialism 101 Page 9