We and German Syndicalism

I.

In No. 15 of “Kampfruf”, the guidelines were published which were agreed upon in a joint meeting between a commission formed for this purpose from the ranks of the Berlin General Workers' Union and representatives of the syndicalists with regard to a community of action encompassing both organizations. We know that large sections of our members - and they are the best ones - are extremely suspicious of cooperation with the syndicalists and regard the content and tendency of these guidelines - taken as a whole - as completely unacceptable.

Even a superficial examination of the guidelines drawn up for the planned “action community” shows that certain parties were not only thinking of an action community, but were also working towards an ideological rapprochement under the pretext of an action community supposedly desired by both sides. This is already clear from the introductory paragraph of the guidelines, where the strange phrase “ideologically close” organizations is used for AAU and FAU. We must confess that this suddenly discovered ideological proximity comes as something of a surprise to us. Until now we had naively believed that the General Workers' Union was an instrument of class struggle in the service of communism. We were also of the opinion that the Free Workers' Union worked under the banner of syndicalism and believed that there was more likely to be an ideological rapprochement between the intellectual world of the German nationalist “Deutsche Tageszeitung” and Hilferding's “Freiheit” than between communism and syndicalism.

Now, to our great surprise, the ideological rapprochement is suddenly laid down as a fact on the table, so to speak, and the only conclusion that remains is that the fathers of those guidelines have either not yet clearly realized the unbridgeable gulf that separates us from syndicalism, or that they are deliberately heading full sail towards the pasting up of fundamental differences that are not drawn by us, but by history itself.

As proof of this, we quote verbatim from No. 4 of the “Guidelines” the following sentence, which is extremely characteristic or, from the revolutionary point of view, extremely characterless: “Up to now, the most diverse tendencies in the revolutionary workers' movement have placed too much emphasis on what divides them in the foreground of the struggles of opinion, while the unifying factor, which unites all revolutionary tendencies, has been suffocated under the furious fratricidal struggle.”

One cannot well assume that the authors of this sentence were not aware of the ABV of the proletarian class struggle. They know as well as we do that there are only two fronts in the proletarian revolution - seen in broad lines: that of the revolutionary proletarians, who fight for the dictatorship of the working class by all means, and that of the counter-revolution, which includes everything that directly or indirectly opposes the proletarian-revolutionary struggle. In order that these two fronts may be clearly and sharply outlined for every proletarian, and that he may then decide on which side of the barricade he intends to fight, it is necessary to brand the dividers and helpers no less than the spokesmen of the syndicalists for what they are: as lackeys of the counter-revolution, and above all to characterize their theories for what they are: as the attempt, under the guise of the revolutionary phrase, to break off the top of the proletarian class struggle, to contain the will to fight of the revolutionary proletarians, to postpone the revolution - which, like every new birth, does not proceed without bloodshed - into the shoreless. But syndicalism would be one of the worst anaesthetics for the German workers if it were to gain significant power over them.

The apostles of unification would like to emphasize the unifying factor that supposedly links us to syndicalism. They also say straight away what they think the unifying factor is. Namely: “We are united with the FAU by the same hatred of the capitalist world and the burning desire to replace the capitalist economy with a free communist economy.”

Isn't that wonderful? Don't we both want the same thing? Complete agreement on goals - what more could you want? With respect, there is a hole in this complete agreement. For a start, the shared hatred of the capitalist world is nothing more than a shared emotional blurring, which also moves along the negative line. You can't do anything with such a blurred feeling in the revolution. We are more demanding. We need clarity about the nature of the capitalist world, about its laws and internal contradictions, about the relationship of the capitalist economy to its political apparatus of power, the bourgeois class state, in order to draw our lessons from it. But we also do not know, in order to come to the positive side, what the fathers of the guidelines imagine the “free communist economy” to be. This term is obviously deliberately formulated so vaguely that everyone can imagine whatever they like. Anyone who has taken a look at syndicalist literature knows that, according to its theory, the structure of the economy must be fundamentally different from that according to scientific Marxist knowledge, which culminates in the principle of the common economy (collectivism), both as far as production and administration are concerned, while syndicalism can never work towards a common economy as long as it adheres to the principle of autonomy for each production site and in practice would thus have to allow each enterprise to operate in a way that appears to suit its local individualistic interests.

This would never mean a communist economy, but would only be a copy of the present capitalist order, with the difference that instead of the competition of the individual capitalists there would be so-called free competition between the workers employed in one enterprise and the autonomous workers of other enterprises. This is the bourgeois-individualist order in an increased and worsened form.

Syndicalism, like every form of utopian socialism, can only arrive at such intellectual contortions because it is rooted in utopian swampy soil, i.e. because it has carved out an image of the future economy and society in its head, according to which it wants to model reality. It ignores the laws of historical dialectics, or more correctly: it denies them, it denies the basic principles of the materialist conception of history and thus remains completely in the wake of the bourgeois-idealist theory of history. While historical materialism always states economic factors as the ultimate cause of all historical changes and sees the human will in a certain dependence on the respective conditions of production, which the natural one is also able to influence in turn, syndicalism adheres to the bourgeois-ethical view of personal freedom of will and is of the naïve belief that it is enough to want in order to change the nature of the existing society at any time and anywhere.

Here we have exposed the root of syndicalist ideology and thus also the fundamental opposition that exists between utopian syndicalism and scientific communism. Just as great as the contrast between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is the contrast between the bourgeois-idealist and materialist-historical view of the world. From this, the differences in the attitude towards class struggle, the proletarian revolution and the methods of struggle to be used by the revolutionary proletariat arise of their own accord. This will have to be dealt with in detail in a later article.

II.

Although syndicalism stands on the ground of class struggle in theory, from the standpoint of its utopian petty-bourgeois world of thought it is completely uncomprehending of the conditions of class struggle and its historical necessities. It understands the madness and historical unsustainability of the capitalist system, but in accordance with its unhistorical method of thinking, it also denies the harsh necessities of the proletarian-revolutionary struggle aimed at the elimination of capitalism. It has imagined a cultural ideal of the future socialist social order, where the wolves graze peacefully alongside the lambs, and believes that the means by which this ideal is to be fought for must also be peaceful in character. The brutalities of the bourgeois class state lead it to the conclusion that the idea of the state in general, including the proletarian state, is one of those things that must be stamped out. Syndicalism, like us, strives for a classless society and concludes - since it views world events with an ethical rather than a historical eye - that the proletarian state is the same obstacle to the development of a classless society as the bourgeois-capitalist organization of power. It therefore denies the necessity of the proletarian dictatorship, because it sees in the state itself the evil of all evils, without realizing that the respective state system fundamentally changes its character with the changed relations of production, and without realizing that the relations of production can only be changed in the communist sense under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Syndicalism rages with genuine petty-bourgeois moral indignation against the abominations of the proletarian state, but without showing the path that leads to communism without the means of the proletarian dictatorship. The thought that the dictatorship of the working class could also be directed against individual (counter-revolutionary!) sections of the working class is so frightening for the pious syndicalist that he does not realize that the capitalist counter-revolution will always recruit its armies from proletarian elements and that these elements, as parts of the counter-revolution, must be fought with all means.

Accordingly, abhorrence of the state system of coercion as such also determines the methods of struggle. Denial of the state in general means renouncing the conquest of political power. With this rejection of the seizure of political power, syndicalism now considers itself to be who knows how radical and does not realize how the bourgeoisie makes fun of it. The idea of conquering or maintaining positions of economic power without the possession of political power is actually too naïve to make this palpable nonsense particularly clear. The history of the factory occupations that took place in Italy last year under syndicalist leadership has probably proved to every sensible proletarian that the possession of economic power, of the places of production, is an illusion as long as the ruling capitalist class is able, by means of its state apparatus, to stop the production process. In order to make the production process possible, however, it is not enough to take possession of the most important factories, but it is also necessary to wrest from the bourgeoisie the power of disposal over its entire state and administrative apparatus, since otherwise it could perhaps fall back on the idea of reconquering the factories with the help of its armed white guards.

The objection that the bourgeoisie cannot force the workers to work by force is, first of all, only partially correct. It has already accomplished this feat more than once. And furthermore, the principle for the bourgeoisie today, in the context of bankrupt capitalism, is not to build up the economy, but to dismantle it. This means that capital has only a limited interest in regulated production. It is precisely in the stage of bankrupt capitalism that the fact becomes ever more apparent that, as the bourgeoisie's position of economic power declines, its position of political power becomes ever stronger and more threatening every day. This means that the struggle for the means of production represents a struggle for state power to an incomparably greater degree than before. It follows that, in addition to the economic means of struggle, this struggle also requires the use of all political means, including armed insurrection.

Syndicalism, which fundamentally rejects armed insurrection, thus denies the necessities of the proletarian revolution and ends up in the swamp of outright bourgeois pacifism, as the literary collaboration of Helene Stoecker and Armin T. Wegener on “Syndicalist” proves unambiguously enough.