Syndicalism / councilism

how is that shit talking? anarchism is better when its not intertwined with it. punks are allowed to be anarchists, but the influence of subculture upon politics should be prevented.

pussy riot beign punks doesn't somehow make punk responsibe for their action. russia is a special case where the police / fash / organised crime are really dangerous so any alright kids have to band together in antifa-ish subculture with accompanying self-organised security if they want to do stuff independently. thats why so many of them are punks and skins because their social stuff is oriented around these scenes which are necessary in the context of such a fucked up country. its not punk that gives them the agency to do stuff.

anyone worth their salt around in the 80s supported the miners strike. crass politics were terrible (they were pacifist and non class struggle) and included living in a commune in epping forest. why are they held up as pariahs of anarchism, IMO they were a fucking terrible influence that drew anarchism away from its roots as a working class movement in the first half of the century.

also crass music was shit. wire, and the nips were way better.

What you say is more or less correct but I was not alluding to work as a semantic category or a psychological phenomenon but as a practical, economic activity.

In that sense it is improper and inaccurate to say "the abolition of work". Instead, it is more explicit and true to say "abolition of wage labor' or, more succinctly, "abolition of wages".

Read Marx to clarify that confusion.

that's a ridiculously arrogant and dismissive post.

And importantly without any basis. I have read a fair bit of Marx, thanks. And just saying "read Marx" is an entirely unhelpful comment anyway. Which Marx? Will Capital volume 2 shed any light on this particular issue?

The problem here seems to be more that you seem to be unable to remember back a couple of posts. The first mention of the "abolition of work" was not by you but was by another poster. You did not understand his/her comment and then went on an ill informed strawman rant. And stated that the abolition of work was not possible. So I explained to you how it was, in a way that you now accept. I corrected your erroneous statement, so you telling me to read an author is not an appropriate response to that.

I apologize if I said something to offend you. It wasn't my intention.

My intention was to point out without rancor or invective why I believe that the slogan "the abolition of work" is an absurd slogan that could confuse people into thinking that the useful economic activity we call work should cease to exist.

As you correctly point out, communism will transform work into a pleasant, joyful activity that everyone will love to engage in because it will no longer possess the vices of servitude and exploitation and will be voluntarily entered into by everyone capable of performing useful occupations that will benefit them and their communities.

Here's a slightly better and far less absurd slogan than the one you seem to support: "the liberation of work!"

Getting back to some of the discussion around the original post, I've been making my way through that Dauve & Authier Communist Left in Germany, 1918-21, and it's been fascinating read, as well as informative to familiarize myself with all the German acronyms being thrown around.

This chapter in particular touches on some of the subjects covered in above posts: http://libcom.org/library/chapter-9-revolutionary-syndicalism-unionism

There are some digs at the IWW that I haven't seen before, such as:

And against Rocker and the "old syndicalists" ...

But then we get a bunch of interesting stuff like this...

I saw the original post just before I was away from a computer for a while, and meant to reply before it got off on tangents in other directions.

So I've found this to be a really interesting text all around, and I think really relevant to the question raised in the op and some of the stuff being talked about lately.

First of all, claiming intellectual property? Really?

Second, do you get a cool badge for being the ideology police? Seriously though, what is this ultra-left tendency you're referring to?

It's not about intellectual property, it's about common decency. It's not like they have copied an article from the Telegraph which they are acting as if it is their own, it's one by another anarchist.

Why does it matter?

Abolish pleases and thank yous!

I have a hard time believing they would be protesting by playing punk songs if they weren't punks...

Sorry to say that Russia ain't the only place that's the case, and that if you think it is, then you've spent very little time in working class ghettos. For future reference, I would rather not be talked to as if I do not understand what it's like to live in a place where organized crime and the state are so dangerous that people must band together. If punk as a subculture is providing a grounds for organizing and community that isn't available through the mainstream culture then it at least seems like a pretty good influence in that sense.

That's fine, but Crass (and honestly, probably too much credit does go to them,) or rather punk broadly, has probably given us more anarchists lately than pamphleteering, regardless of what you think of their music. I can introduce you to people who would have zero interest in Anarchism if it weren't for punk.

Anyway, if you want to argue that punk isn't very heavily rooted in a distinctly working class experience with very distinctly working class concerns, you're going to have a hard time. If you want to pull the pop-punk revival of the 90's out as a counter-example that's fine, but one could just as easily pull out all the bourgey college anarchists and Marxists out and say the same of Libertarian Communism ideologically. It's not an exceptionally interesting conversation to have, nor does it particularly matter unless you're interested in alienating a group of would-be allies.

To bring it back to the original points about syndicalism, maybe you're right that punk has somehow moved away from Anarchism of the 20th century, but so has the entirety of society. Like I said before, the IWW will not call for ballot boycotts because of the dynamic between them and the Socialist Party in the early 1900's. That's just silly. If the institutions of syndicalism that I am directly involved with would show some sort of ability to adapt to situations as they change I'd be a little more willing to defend them when someone calls them outdated.

Of course it will. The labour process isn't neutral, it is produced by and is the material constitution of capitalist social relations, and so is necessarily and absolutely capitalist. There is no extra-historical dimension to work, no level ontologically prior to its social context at which it is simply "useful economic activity" which we can "liberate", as if capitalism was something imposed upon our labour from the outside. All you're really saying, in the end, is that somebody from bourgeois society might look at a person in a communist society engaged in some activity and call it "work", but that doesn't mean that this is an accurate or helpful way of understanding it.

The slogan "abolition of work" is useless if by "work" it is meant all individual and collective economic activity aimed at the production of useful goods and services.

Perhaps for you the word "work" is repellent and invokes nightmares of pursuing shovels and monstrous fuming machines gobbling up virginal maidens. I only understand the term in its most literal sense, independent of whatever class definitions you wish to attach to it.

The "abolition of wage labor" is my preferred slogan because it clearly describes what makes work under capitalism most repugnant.

That definition of work is unworkable and wrong.

Example. One can agree that one needs to eat. So, one needs to get and prepare food. One could even call that "production of a useful service", if one wants to. But, if one is making breakfast for yourself and a friend, does it make any sense to call that "work"? And eating it delivering an "necessary service" to yourself - is that work also? If you are on holiday, camping in the wild or whatever, having fun, but also preparing some food and doing dishes now and then, do people think about that as shifting back and forth from "work "(the dishes) to "play", back to "work"(cooking) to ... eating it, which is necessary but hardly "work" in any meaningful sense...?

Work, in essence, is imposed, organized in peculiar things called "jobs" - it is an alienated way of organizing some the necessities of life. Whether an activity is called "work"or not depends on social context. Sex is (hoefully) fun if yo do it for fun; for someone who works as a prostitute, it is "work", a "job". Same activity, different social meaning.

The whole idea that there is a separate sphere called "economic activities" is connected to this alienated way of organizing things. Yes, work - this alienated form of fulfilling our needs - does not need to be liberated, just as prostitution does not have to be "liberated". It has to be abolished.

The simple and straightforward answer is "yes": any activity that entails the expenditure of intellectual or physical effort towards producing a good or a service, be it preparing a meal or typing a response on your keyboard is work, no matter what social system you choose to invent.

What makes work repugnant is not its kinetic quality or its alienation from our subjective notions of idle enjoyment but its condition of servitude and exploitation and its quality as marketable commodity.

What genuine socialist aim to do is to abolish that which makes work an unpleasant, impoverishing and demeaning activity.

You can no more abolish work than you can abolish scrambled eggs, which is what seems to occupy the skulls of too many people on the so-called left.

Thanks for this post! I've skimmed that book multiple times but I like the select quote you pulled out at bottom especially.

Is it really this hard to accept that when people on this board call for the abolition of work, they dont mean the abolition of doing anything at all, but the abolition of the thing they are referring to as work, which is a specific form of activity that can be abolished? Could you engage with that? Otherwise ill start insisting that the workfare program is fulfilling your ideal of the abolition of wage labour by making people work without a form of pay known formally as a wage (because, like, its benefits, not a wage, yeah?)

Also, this made me laugh.

If you think that by falsely accusing me of advancing anti-proletarian credos will suffice to help your slogan gain traction, go ahead; The obscurity of "abolition of work" will likely remain unchanged.

I was more trying to get across the point that getting hung up on your own use of a word and not on what the other person means by the use of that word is daft and frustrating for all involved, as im sure people will agree.

And your use of work to refer to any activity at all is slightly more obscure than its use in the libcom fashion. If i announced to my housemates i was going to work, then went and poured a glass of water and sat on the couch, theyd be confused.

OK, are we all "worked out" now?

I've been exchanging some emails with both German and an American comrade about some of the facts about the FAUD and stuff posted above. I'm waiting for a few more emails and opinions.
But clearly the FAUD is not very nicely painted here. And some of the facts and comments may not be very accurate.

And by the sound of it so would you.

You've misunderstood, im not hating on punk, i was saying that punk subculture as a social base for anarchism can only go so far. As a social base its good, but not so good as an influence (upon anarchism, not wider society). Case in point: in the UK in the 80s DAM was way better than Class War Federation, the latter of which had politics heavily influenced by the punk scene. Doesn't mean there weren't punks and skins in DAM.

ok, but this is anecdotal and i'm not sure there is any way at all to prove this pretty vague assertion that punk has given us more anarchists lately than pamphleteering. its also not me who is choosing to counterpose the nonword 'pamphleteering'. what timeframe is 'lately'? if i were to engage with thing, i'd say that in fact the biggest influx of new anarchists is coming from disillusionment with capitalism due to the current economic crisis, and mass struggle. for SolFed, its been the UK student demos from which we have gained a substantial amount of new members and new local sections. punk subculture can never even hope to compare to this as a tool for anarchism constructing a greater social influence.

i never made this point.

this has already been refuted in detail on this thread. old does not equal irrelevant and automatically outdated.

Nobody who talks about "the industrial republic of labour" gets to accuse others of being obscure.

If this is aimed at my quotes from the Dauve and Authier text, I certainly didn't mean to give a misleading or inaccurate portrayal of the FAUD. The book itself goes into some great detail to talk about the various tendencies within all these various groups, and I read that particular quote to be rather specific to the local grouping around Rocker. Frankly, I don't know a ton on the subject, having only otherwise read rather brief essays from Troploin and Dauve himself, so I'm not exactly getting a varied view here, either. One of these days I'll get to the rest of my bookmarks on libcom regarding the subject.

Those first two quotes from the chapter 9 were quoted because they stuck out for me, and I wondered if others had differing views or info on what is described. Maybe I should have said that more explicitly, but they weren't intended as endorsing the authors' views as I'm certainly not up on the subject enough to attest.

RS, no, not at all actually, but it started with this by Harrison:

And then additional references, And, of course Duave wrote some things which seemed not to sit right with me. I realize his stuff is very partisan.....as i am twoards the FAUD Basically, when you have partisan writers talking about other organizations, I tend to try and get the perspective of those they are criticisng.

Bring the odd bad historian and sticker for detail, the thread in general made me reach out to others who have a better FAUD perspective/kmnowledge then I.

I thought this comment was interestin on a couple of levels, for example. One of my German comrades writes:

More to follow.

i wanted to write something in this thread the whole time but was to lazy, but now i want to make a point or two..
disclaimer: i'm no expert in rocker or the exact history of syndicalism, but i know a little bit about the revolutionary period 1919-1921(ymmv) in germany especially in the ruhr area.

the dauve quote is factually more or less correct, but willful interpreted. to use terms like "united front", "anti-revolutionary", "anti-putchist".. is a bit biased. (but tbh rockers stance toward the revolutionary action in the ruhr area 1920 was unsupportive, and the geschäftkommision (what dauve calls central committee) around the "Syndikalist" in berlin was anti-violence, which was one o the reasons lontime FVGD members like karl roche left the FAUD)

i think it is ok to call rocker an "old syndicalist" he was at that time over 50, he was a representative of the anarcho-syndicalist "orthodoxy" and one of the main reasons that he didn't have a leading role in a syndicalist organization prewar was that he lived up to 1919 outside of germany.

thats no correct. the FAU (Freie Arbeiter Union (Syndikalisten)) was founded september 1919 in the rhein/ruhr area as a merger of the regional FVGD, and four local Unionen (Allgemeiner Arbeiter Verband, Allgemeine Arbeiter Union(Essen), Allgemeiner Bergarbeiter(miner) Union and Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiter Union (Düsseldorf)). its programm and name (Union and Syndikalisten) was a compromise. out of this process the FAUD was founded in december 1919. it became at least in the ruhr area one of the revolutionary organizations, an organization in which anarcho-syndicalists/communists, left-communists and a lot of revolutionary workers were organized. after the disastrous defeat of the revolutionary movement in the ruhr area it split (in the following years there were a real lot of splits in the factions and subfactions ofe the german workers movement ). two last points: (1) the AAUD as a "reichs"wide organisation was founded in february 1920. (2) the Unionen movement wasn't a coherent movement with a clear programm, it was inspired by the IWW (hence the name Union) and one of the main differences in the Unionen movement was the "party question". that is the main difference to the (anarcho)syndicalist current, which could depend on its prewar militants and hat disputed but clear programm, represented by rocker.

for a good description of the revolutionary movement in the ruhr area see erhard lucas three volumes "Märzrevolution 1920", because i didn't have them at hand i checked the facts in hans bocks "Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918 -1923".

No writer can completely escape their own perspective, but that Dauvé passage does come off as petty sniping to the point of being misleading.

Calling Rocker an old syndicalist? Well, yes, he was 46 in 1919. Bit petty to have a pop at his age though. And he had been a syndicalist for a while (as well as an anarchist communist and advocate of workers councils). But Otto Ruhle was 45 in 1919, and it would be a pretty big distortion to describe the councillist movement as 'led by ageing parliamentarians' (Ruhle had been an SDP MP, but was expelled for taking an anti-war stance).

Was Rocker a pacifist? I'm pretty sure he wasn't (though I take meinberg's word for it that he opposed the armed insurrection in the Ruhr, which isn't the same thing as pacifism). But according to Damier, 45% of the participants in the 'Red Army of the Ruhr' were FAUD members. Given as the FAUD didn't have a central committee with executive powers, the opinions of a prominent member are just that, personal views. It seems like the 'central committee' misrepresentation serves to allow the FAUD as a whole to be painted as pacifist and opposed to armed uprising/revolution, when in actual fact FAUD members in the Ruhr were heavily involved.

Tbh, it reads like wilful misrepresentation rather than sloppy history. I don't really get it, I mean if you're opposed to something, presumably you're opposed to it at its strongest rather than having to misrepresent it.

yes, I'm with you on that. but for me the problem is, that i think that some points dauve makes are valid, but he destroys that because he uses this terms which can only be used denounce the "enemy" and destroy any possible discussion. but he also is sloppy in some points.

lol.. ok now i understand the problem with "old syndicalist". but i think it is to defensive. for me it stresses the difference between the the faction in the faud around kater, rocker and the "Syndikalist" and nearly all other factions of the revolutionary left. they can use their coherent program and the prewar organizational structure of the fvgd. damier writes: "The revolutionary syndicalists were faced with the necessity of choosing between anarchism and Bolshevism." the berlin central pushes through this decision in the revolutionary period, on the founding congress of the faud in december 1919. its the first clear point of separation between the (anarcho-)syndicalist and the leftcommunist/Unionist/councilist tendencies (and it is the point of seperation in the old fvgd at the same time, after this people like karl roche leave).
in the ruhr area this separation (and the following endless splits and subsplits) comes into effect after the defeat.

but for me the important point is that the faud is the revolutionary mass organization in the ruhr area besides the red army. in both they are different factions, both are insable, chaotic, etc. but the are revolutionary mass organizations.

Is there much in English on the FAUD? I can only think of Dauvé, Damier and the piece by Hans Bock in van der Linden and Thorpe's edited volume 'Revolutionary Syndicalism'.

most of what i know about the faud i read in german, but when i was searching for the article of bock you referenced (is it online?) i found this pamphlet of helge döhring, which (after skimming) seams to be more or less the "official" view of the modern fau on the faud. [url] http://libcom.org/history/syndicalism-anarcho-syndicalism-germany [/url]

I don't think the Bock essay's online, it's 'Anarchosyndicalism in the German labour movement: a distinctive minority tradition' in this book. Ha, should probably have checked libcom's FAUD tag really!