Anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian communism

fwiw, this is very close to my thoughts on all this. I'd not join either solfed or the IWW (for reasons I've discussed before), but I would be interested in a 'minority network of pro-revolutionaries'.

WetheYouth:

well, historically anarcho-syndicalists have had different views about this. The idea that you should combine the mass economic organization and political organization together is what some people have called the theory of "unitary" organization. As Jacque points out, the old FORA of the early 1900s was a classic example of an organization that had this view. There have been some anarcho-syndicalists historically who saw the need to have both mass worker economic organizations and also specific political organizations, that they had different functions, and this has been called the theory of "dual organization."

WSA holds to the "dual organization" view. Jacque's assertion that this means we think workers are too dumb to see the need for revolution or something to that effect, in addition to being rude, is an obvious strawman fallacy since we advocates of the "dual organization" view have no such opinion. Just because a worker is today not revolutionary in his or her conceptions doesn't mean that person is dumb.

Within the early IWW there was a debate about the need for a specific organization and it was decided to table this because it was found that it led to sectarian infighting between advocates of different political organizations, especially between the SLP and the Socialist Party. In practice the early IWW worked as a day to day alliance of anarchists and people from the left-wing of the Socialist Party. in the early 1900s the American Socialist Party's leftwing was syndicalist. They envisioned a revolution in terms of the workers taking over the means of production, perhaps through a revolutionary general strike, and they thus conceived of socialism in terms of direct worker management, not state management. Conventional state socialist concepts were more prominent in the more conservative wing of the American Socialist Party.

After the Russian revolution, the split in the Socialist Party also split its left wing. the attempt by the Communist Party to capture the IWW in 1924 was basically defeated by an alliance of left Socialists and anarchists, with the support of unaffiliated militants.

The workers must defend themselves!

You joke, but the Wobs keep heading down the path of being a representation organization in their quest for legitimacy while mainstream unions are trying to shed themselves of it. The self-made 3rd party in nearly all IWW communications just strikes me ass strange and at odds with the politics of Wobs I know and respect.

jacque:

well, that's the revolutionary aim. but anarcho-syndicalism isn't just the aim but is supposed to also be a strategy for how to get there. in fact anarcho-syndicalism cannot be differentiated from some other libertarian socialist viewpoints unless you look at the strategy. the strategy, as I've always understood it, is that we develop, in the here and now, mass worker organizations of struggle that are self-managed by the members, because this foreshadows the society we aim at.

but if we require agreement with the revolutionary aim, we find that we can't organize sigificnant mass organizations in the USA today. but we also want to spread the idea of the revolutionary aim, and develop more activists with that view, and build a base of support for this within the working class. i can't see how to do this without a specific organization. especially since any genuine mass organizations that could exist in contemporary USA are not going to have adherence to that revolutionary aim, even if they agree with us about worker self-management of the organization and autonomy from the political parties and the bosses.

this is why i think the "dual organization" view is the only practical view for the USA today.

well, i understand prefigurative politics ("building the new society in the shell of the old") somewhat differently. You can't actually build the structure of the new society until the working class becomes revolutionary, and has developed the mass movement that can actually create that structure.

as i see it, what we need to do is to develop the consciousness and habits of organization that will tend to lead towards that revolutionary aim. this is why we focus on the idea of developing self-managed mass organizations.

No, it's not bullshit at all.

Much as Spikey Mike outlined in that post, I don't think either the IWW or an anarcho-syndicalist union is a viable proposition in the present day UK, I've gone into this before on other threads in more detail, might do so more after reading the rest of the thread. That doesn't mean I think the IWW or solfed don't have good individuals involved, but I think the extent to which you're trying to set up mass organisations is the extent to which both organisations fail (in addition to the historical baggage carried by both).

So, although I think in terms of practical activity in workplaces both might function as a 'network of militants', rather than unions or proto-unions, that baggage prevents me getting involved with either group or having much optimism (fwiw I think the IWW is worse on this, claiming to be a union, than solfed, who accept it's not going to happen for a while, but the end goal isn't so very different).

So as a libertarian communist, who isn't an anarcho-syndicalist, I don't agree with these points from your aims and principles, and would have to actively lie in order to join one of your industrial networks via solfed:

I'm also not sure about 'autonomous part of the economy' in this bit, but that might be nitpicking depending on interpretation.

Nor do I think 'the general strike' is the only possible prelude to a social revolution, or even the most likely one.

So as far as I'm concerned, to join Solfed, and hence a relevant industrial network, you do indeed need to be an anarcho-syndicalist who wants to see a revolutionary union set up in the future, otherwise you'd be in a position of not understanding the As and Ps, or lying about agreeing with them. And as SM says, the actual IWA unions don't only have anarcho-syndicalists in them (which brings into question their ability to remain anarcho-syndicalist if they grow rapidly).

Solfed, the IWW (and the AF) all have internal contradictions - I'm sure you could find 3 members from each who have more in common than three members from any one around some fairly fundamental criteria. If you're going to let non-anarcho syndicalists into Solfed, which you just said you would to SpikeyMike, then there's your internal contradictions right there.

A 'network of pro-revolutionary militants', focused purely on workplace activity (and class-based activity outside work potentially), could have very clear objectives - circulating information about strikes both within the group and internationally, acting as a source of advice and collective experience for individual workers, producing leaflets or newsletters about specific measures, or sectors, or workplaces etc. etc. - very much focused on the day-to-day activity of organising, and analysing trends in the class struggle - within an agreed framework of workers controlling their own struggles. It'd be able to do this without the pretense of being a 'real union' like the IWW, or the long game 'this'll eventually be an anarcho-syndicalist union or lead to one' of solfed.

There are a number of issues in this discussion, first is the separation of the “economic” and the “political”

Rather than separating the “economic” and the “political” I don’t even know what this means, or recognise these separate categories, it seems to me it is (some) of the anarcho-syndicalists who are big on categorising things as “the economic” and “the political”.

I don’t know what this means. If we go back to the last big strikes in Britain in the 80s for an example, was this economic? Are we meant to believe that in ’84 - ’85 individual miners sat at home with a copy book, pocket calculator and pen doing cost benefit analysis and that is what informed their choices and actions, outside of their political opinions, sense of solidarity and community, the collective traditions in the community of which they were a part, moral feelings, and class consciousness? And even if ‘homo economicus’ existed, if it were a matter of an individual economic instrumentality, would that not also be a political opinion, a political choice? Moreover would success or defeat of the strike not have been a political question? It certainly was from the point of view of the state.

I’m especially curious as to know what this means: “we have recognised an economic fraternity with the IWW” (Jacque)

The issue isn’t a separation of “the economic” and “the political”.

It is a matter of recognising that a large broad based grouping, has, of necessity, many divergent political opinions, and is something different from a group which has one specific political perspective. For just one example almost any community group, campaign group, alternative union or such in Ireland would almost certainly include people opposed to abortion on demand (excepting obviously groups organised around this or similar goals), I would expect an anarchist political organisation to be agitating for abortion on demand.

This brings us to another issue. We are told an anarcho-syndicalist union is not a union for anarcho-syndicalists, but one all workers can join, but nonetheless the union is anarcho-syndicalist. Essentially the goal is to have something which is both “a large broad based grouping” and “a group which has one specific political perspective”.
We can see how successful this is by reference to the recent history of the I.W.A. - it isn’t even including most anarcho-syndicalists, let alone people outside of anarcho-syndicalism.
An obvious point was made above as to if everyone can join an anarcho-syndicalist union irrespective of politics how long will it remain anarcho-syndicalist?

We are told that Sol Fed’s internal structures are

you cannot join it unless you are an anarcho-syndicalist and that

So at what point does the anarcho-syndicalist union, or the building blocks of the same, allow workers who are not anarcho-syndicalists into it, and when it does why does the same criticism as that above from We the Youth against “a broad spectrum organisation” not also apply to the anarcho-syndicalist union, or its building blocks. Bearing in mind the “broad spectrum organisation” originally being referred to is of anarchists and communists so in actual fact not very broad at all. Or in other words if you cannot unite with other tendencies of the movement of which you are a part what hope is there for an anarcho-syndicalist union open to all workers?

From reading what Jacque has to say I think his vision of social change is that this anarcho-syndicalist union, which Sol Fed is the incipient form of, gradually gets bigger and bigger and eventually becomes the administrative body of a post-revolutionary society.
Forgive me if I’m wrong in that interpretation.

I can understand the context in which this perspective developed, circa 100 years ago, when there were massive ostensibly revolutionary organisations (the parties and unions affiliated to the Second International for instance), its relevance to Britain circa 2007 seems very limited though.

I would make a number of criticisms of it.

(1) It seems to me to put ’party’ way way before ’class’. In that the active agents in this process are the small groups of anarcho-syndicalists (the “building blocks“) who presumably have to recruit, recruit, and recruit. This is resolved I think on the basis that as all workers can join the anarcho-syndicalist union and it is then apparently an organisation of the class, as opposed to an organisation of a very small political minority within the class.

(2) An anarcho-syndicalist tendency has existed in Britain for how long? Since 1950? Longer? What progress in that time has been made in establishing this anarcho-syndicalist union beyond the various small political groups which are supposed to be its ’building blocks’? Should the answer be very little I would suggest some thought towards developing a strategy geared towards the context we are in now, as opposed to one geared towards the development of something we would like to see, but doesn’t seem very likely in the immediate future. That is, do we actually need ‘building blocks’ for an anarcho-syndicalist union in 2007?

(3) Even at its highpoint in Spain in 1936 and 1937, (which was a specific geographical and chronological context I might add), the CNT didn’t comprise of all workers, as it is supposed to for to be the post-revolutionary administrative body, this fact would suggest to me the need for institutions in addition to anarcho-syndicalist unions.

Jacque also says that he sees no need for a specific political organisation, which begs the question what are you doing as the national secretary of one?

One point which puzzles me is the repitition by Jacque of his definition of Libertarian Communism as being a ''Free Confederation of Workers, Community and Union federations'' which is a purely organisational definition and one very much tied up with the struggle within capitalism, or at best relevant in the transition to a new society. Of course this may qualify as being 'libertarian' but where is the 'communism'??

I have always thought 'communism' to be better defined as being a new society based on:

-social equality and 'from each according to their abillity and to each according to their need'

...involving the end of the wages system, money, the market and exchange relationships of all kinds, indeed the end of 'economics' and 'politics' as such and the creation of a free human community,

or perhaps as the movement/tendency towards this within the class struggle?

I know many (though perhaps not all?) Sol Fed members would agree with that view of 'communism' but it's missing in this discussion.

Other wise I agree entirley with what Terry says above and in particular the failure of anarcho-syndicalists, as represented by Jacque, to comprehend the real changes in capitalism and the context of the class struggle between now and the historic 'hey days' of both the CNT and the IWW.

if we look at actual mass organizations what we see is a wide differences among the participants in the level of active involvement, radical vision, and influence. mass organizations don't "spontaneously" become self-managing. it's helped if there are activists within it who have a specific commitment to developing participatory democracy, skills and self-confidence among the members, to avoid dependence on a minority of people.

Workers Solidarity Alliance believes there's a role for a specifically anti-authoritarian activist group to work in mass organizations to support their self-management. but the aim should not be to impose an "ideological line" on the mass organization, but to develop it as a space of self-management of struggles by rank and file members.

WSA is itself a "specific" organization, not a mass organization such as a union. Our anarcho-syndicalism is our political strategy, it is what we advocate. This means, in our view, helping to develop self-managing mass organizations, and working in mass movements to encourage a self-managing character. In the case of bureaucratic mass organizations like AFL-CIO or Change to Win unions, we advocate rank and file organization independent of the bureaucracy.

Our basic conception of a social transformation, a revolution is that it is through self-managed mass movements that have the power to get rid of capital and the state and generate a new organization of society that is self-managing. We see the assemblies in both workplaces and the neighborhoods, and federations of these, as the building blocks of a self-managing social order, based on common ownership of the means of production by everyone.

The development of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary ideas within the working class presupposes that people have a sense of their collective power to change things as well as self-confidence in their ability to get together with others to run things collectively. Running their own organizations is part of how that develops. But people also need to develop actual collective power.

spiky:

in what way?

Basically, the view of most anarcho-syndicalists appears to me to be as Terry stated, (in reduced form) that the insipient A/S union formations (like the Sol fed), get big enough to form small unions which in turn compete with the other unions and eventually grow big enough to sustain a general strike, overthrow the state and then form the administrative structure of the new society.

It is what I have referred to elswhere as the 'building blocks' approach to class struggle and social revolution and was the common approach (for understandable reasons) of both Social Democracy and Anarcho-Syndicalism and revolutionary industrial unionism from around the 1890's to around the 1920's.

It seems to me (as it did to those subsequently referred to as Council Communists) that this approach died with the experience of the revolutionary wave in europe and elsewhere between 1905 and 1921 with the final death throes played out in Spain in '36.

More significantly the development of global capitalism post the second world war has demonstrated the impossibillity of combining for any significant time and on any mass scale, independent unions, with conscious revolutionary objectives.

Non of this of course stops pro-revolutionary minorities organising over the longer term on a more permanent basis (though they are also subject to the same degenerative pressures), but militant mass organisations of our class with revolutionary potential would appear to be of an inevitably unstable nature this side of the revolution.

Workplace struggle groups seem a good idea to me, but to the extent they become genuine Union formations they are subject to, the same pressures as other unions and will go the same way to a greater or lessor extent, if they survive.

This is born out even now by some (not all) of the practices of the current IWW in Britain in its attempt to 'represent' groups of workers and by the approach of some of the breakaway unions from the IWA.

I do not deny the good work done by many in the IWW and the IWA (which I have supported from time to time),but they are hampered by an outdated ideology in my opinion.

This debate has been given a pretty good run on other earlier threads on the Union question, so I wasn't going to repeat it in this truncated version here but you did ask!

What I don't get is what the supposed limits within the present are that Spikymike and Catch see, such that mass organization is impossible in the present. I don't see how anyone could possibly know that. And it seems to me the cost of being wrong is higher in saying "impossible" than "possible."

Also Jacque, on the IWW (at least the early IWW) and libertarian communism, in case you're not aware - a lot of early IWW members talked about their ultimate goal as the establishment of a 'co-operative commonwealth.' There's brief discussion of this in an exchange of letters around the Industrial Union Manifesto, prior to the IWW's founding convention (they're reprinted in the convention proceedings). A range of people wrote about the idea - the ones I'm aware of are Debs, DeLeon, Kautsky (DeLeon's people put out pamphlets by Kautsky on the subject), Connolly, and a Danish American socialist named Laurence Gronlund who wrote a book about it in the 1890s. I think Edward Bellamy may have also used the term, and the term appears in the title of Pataud and Pouget's book How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth (which sits unread on my shelf - it has a preface by Tom Mann and Kropotkin. I'm sure many early IWW members were aware of it, I know I've seen references to Pouget in stuff by early wobblies and people in the IWW took Mann pretty seriously).

All this stuff was part of the millieu that at least some IWW members were part of. You could say these figures are problematic (I would say all of them except Pataud and Pouget who I don't know anything about), but the vision of the final society doesn't strike me as the problem - the idea was a self-managed society without a government over an above it, kind of like Marx's remark (I think it was Marx) about replacing government with the 'administration of things'. The pro-union people in those circles (not just the ones around the IWW) saw the union or the industrial union as the vehicle for producing that new society. Among other things, it was a rejection of Marx Lenin etc's idea that the working class was disciplined to and trained for the new society by capitalist production. Rather, the working class train ourselves for the new society in the process of fighting the current society's rulers. Others who weren't necessarily pro-union thought that worker co-ops could be a vehicle for the new society. There was a lot of this in Minnesota, where I live, mainly (I think) among immigrants from northern europe including among radical Finns who ended up joining the IWW.

I'm not clear how this relates to the IWW of today in terms of ideology - there's disagreements and so on internally, as you know - but a lot of this does seem to me to still be implied in what the IWW practices or tries to practice.

I agree with Nate. There is no possible way one could know that it is impossible to form self-managed mass organizations at present. In the history of the American labor movement every time there has been a labor upsurge it has been characterized by both changes in existing unions as well as the formation of new, more self-managed organizations. the idea that workers can't form self-managed mass organizations has pessimistic conclusions as far as the possibility of liberation are concerned. the working class can't develop the revolutionary consciousness to get rid of the class system without a more or less protracted process of change in itself. that's because the way the system continues itself year after year is thru the way it shapes the habits and expectations of people, their deference to the order giver/order obeyer dichotomy. both organizations with a more self-managing character, and the experience of collective power are the means to that changed consciousness. but collective power presupposes the organizational strength to develop that power in struggles.

not all anarcho-syndicalists conceive of the process as this "building blocks" approach. it's not necessary to believe that we form today the exact organizations that are the means to social transformation. various organizations can be formed, and old organizations transformed, and come together in alliances in the course of a protracted process of struggles.

I don't think mass organisation is impossible, however I do think that permanent revolutionary mass organisations are impossible, particularly in the UK.

And what happened to those organisations when the upsurge ended? I'd suggest that the changes in unions, and the formations of new organisations were more a result of a general upsurge in class struggle than the cause of it - hence their decline as soon as things cool down.

Catch,

I still don't get some of what you're saying. Why is a permanent mass revolutionary organization impossible in the UK? Maybe I don't understand your terms. What do you mean by permanent organization? An informal network of comrades that support each other is a type of organization and they tend to last longer than many formal organizations, that's like a type of organization. They also are the animating force of most any formal organization - building and sustaining a functioning formal organization is in large part building and rebuilding informal organization.

As for revolutionary organization, do you mean an organization that does things which objectively move the revolution closer? Or do you mean an organization self-consciously tries to do things which move the revolution closer? Or do you mean an organization made up of people who self-identify as revolutionaries?

catch:

The upsurge couldn't have happened without the mass organizations. That's because these give people a sense of collective strength and are the means through which collective struggles are organized.

What happened to the organizations in the course of the protracted labor rebellions is the subject of a book. I'm not going to write a book for you here on the fly.

Not just in the UK Nate, but I have more practical experience and knowledge of the situation here.

On your last point Nate I tend to use the phrase 'pro revolutionary minority' to express the type of organised groups of workers who consciously express a desire for revolutionary change and express that in their theory and practice as best they can. Essentially - political groups or parties.

They cannot actually be revolutionary in the practical sense of overthrowing capitalism and the state since that requires organised mass action.

There are sustained pressures under modern (state and corporate)capitalism which tend to nulify the potential of union type organisation to maintain any independent class basis let alone revolutionary, existence. Traditional unions has always been at best conservative (see recently highlighted Wildcat article in the Library) but the transition from absolute to relative exploitation of labour (the formal to real subsumption of labour) as the predominant world relationship of capital to labour, and the accompanying merger of state and corporate power leave little room for union organisations to develop as radical or revolutionary organisations on a mass basis (as oppossed to temporary and minority organisations). From time to time those minority organisations may of course be quite large compared with the tiny political formations we are used to today.

I appreciate that some A/S's do reject the 'buiding blocks' approach and come closer to a modern Council Communist approach which recognises that the particular forms of radical working class organisation can take many forms in different times and places, rather than being prescribed in advance in the tradition of past
anarcho-syndicalist or industrial unionist ideology.

This discussionn perhaps best transferred to the other thread on 'revolutionary organisation' ,

and check out past threads on 'trade uniions' and 'decadence' if you are interested.

For development of Marx's theories on the formal and real subsumtion of labour to the modern world link below:

http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_42_how-capitalism-changed.html

Again spikymike's put it pretty well, so I won't simply repeat his post. Very simply put, the intention of both many members of the IWW and solfed is that they end up with a functioning mass revolutionary union that admits non-revolutionaries who have some affinity to basic principles - it's not hard to find posts along those lines on these forums, so I won't go find them right now.

It's my view that outside a period of mass struggle the following is likely:

1. You will not get a very large number of people who agree with the basic principles of the IWW (or the a-s union that solfed would eventually lead to the formation of). That doesn't mean I think it's impossible for it to be many times bigger than it is now, but not tens or hundreds of thousands.

2. If it does grow rapidly to tens of thousands of members under similar conditions to what we have now, those who are not pro-revolution will by far outnumber those who are - resulting in a rightwards shift in the organisation and it more closely resembling a 'union'.

In a period of mass struggle you might well see a massive increase in membership, but then you'd also have a massively sped up process of self-education and self-organisation in the working class in general, involving mass assemblies,workplace meetings etc. - at that point the IWW functioning as 'a union' (rather than a minority of pro-revolutionaries) would be a break on these new (or even very old) forms of organisation that had sprung up, and would be either irrelevant to events or counter-productive. After the revolution it would no longer exist (unless you're really, really ultra-syndicalist where the union actually is the form of organisation of the new society), and if events subside, then conditions 1 and 2 apply again.

I think that's better put on the revolutionary organisation thread I just started

Assuming that the 'union' role of the mass organisation is inevitable, where does its existence fit in with the appearance of mass assemblies etc.? We can only point to the CNT when we say this, but do you think the mass radicalism of Spain was somehow independent from the work it had be doing? Without it then, where would the Spanish working class and peasantry have been during and before the period leading up to the Spanish Revolution?

I don't think we have any sure-guard way of preventing the rise of a reformist factions and ideas (anyone that did say that would be an 'ultra-syndicalist' in your words) in fact it's probably inevitable as the size and power of the union grows. Of course we can try to prevent it, but likewise we shouldn't assume that everything depends on the organisation itself, that we have faith only in maintaining its structures or, in any sense, respecting its form to the last.

The red and black flags are necessary now, but we might have to ditch them come the revolution!

Thanks for clarifying all. Mike, I'm not convinced about the formal vs real subsumption stuff but I will look at that article. That's one of the categories in Marx that I generally find less compelling. I'd be interested in discussing all that though, I really like discussing Marx actually though I've done little of it on this board.

Catch, I'm not of that ultra-syndicalist type. I think that smaller scale struggles change people, and train people for bigger struggles. Formal organizations are basically little more than that in my view. They're very important. We won't know until after the revolution, though, exactly how important - we won't know until then if the revolution is spontaneous or voluntarist. I also disagree that most people would disagree with radical ideas. I think pursued one way they would. Pursued another, they wouldn't. Starting from someone's own objective self-interest or class interest in a context of struggle we can move people's worldviews, and through continued development people become more revolutionary in outlook. In the way you talk about this stuff here it sounds like people are pro-revolutionary (I like that term, Mike) or they're not. I think a lot of people are in the middle someplace. I think there's a lot of value to organizations (and informal networks) made up of people who are already subjectively pro-revolutionary. I also think that mass organization and the struggles connected with it can make more people become subjectively pro-revolutionary as well as contribute creating upsurges in class-wide struggle.

Well I reckon a lot more people than there are now could potentially become communists given more exposure to ideas and history than there are now, it still wouldn't be that many. However I don't think a revolution is made by more and more people becoming communists until it's a majority then them just deciding to do it one day. There's likely to be minorities actively for and against, and a majority (or sizeable minority) 'passively supporting'.

more later.