Sometimes it seems as though that syndicalism was a development independent of anarchism or even socialism in general. What I mean is that I can’t find examples of early syndicalists talking about their own history, of where they trace their own political lineage within socialism. It seems as though it was a completely new idea when it arrived.
Many anarchists today will assert that syndicalism was expressed in the First International and in figures like Bakunin, but I have never read about early syndicalists acknowledging that they descended from that organization’s anti-authoritarian wing or from Bakunin. Less acknowledged is any connection to anarchism. If you read old syndicalist texts, it is mainly espousals of principals and ideas. I don’t get the idea that their part of a shared history.
What i’ve just written above pretty much doesn’t apply to anarcho-syndicalism, which does explicitly link itself to anarchism and the First International. I’m mostly inquiring about revolutionary syndicalism. Perhaps it could be said that syndicalists who do acknowledge those connections and place in history are usurped by anarcho-syndicalism.
syndicalism /ˈsɪndɪkəlɪz(ə)m…
The Bourses du travail…
The Bourses du travail movement which developed into the syndicalist CGT that movement was made up of fractions of the entire preceding French workers' movement from the co-ops to marxists and representations of everyone in between.
The IWW was for a time very large, but at the start it defined its strategy as Industrial Unionism, or even IWWism/Wobblyism. Conolly a former member of the IWW also spends a lot of his writings supporting what would read to us as a syndicalist movement, but I don't believe he ever used the term, I know he frequently used Industrial Unionism or appealed for all Irish workers to join massive industry-wide unions like the TGWU. At some point after the IWW got into contact with other labour unions, it built links mainly with the syndicalists unions of Europe and Argentina.
Again the Wobblies were founded out of a meeting of representatives of all the isms present in the United States and its development often directly coincides with when one or more of those isms like De Leon, the Socialist and Communist party etc leaving it en masse and adopting hostile attitudes towards it.
Ultimately I think your question misses the mark, the first syndicalists adopted syndicalism as a strategy to respond to the circumstances that they faced first, then after it developed and established roots you see the term being used to denote a new orientation, with the links to earlier generations largely being retroactive.
"and by the French social philosopher Georges Sorel (1847–1922),"
Yeah, that's actually impossible Sorel's move to syndicalism was after the formal founding of the CGT which is probably the best candidate for an Ur-syndicalist organisation, and the CGT did not fall from a tree it was founded out of a merger of several other French workers organisations that had been moving in the Syndicalist direction since the 1880s/90s.
After Sorel joined outside of his book on violence he was a marginal figure associating with a group of CGT revisionist marxists and then moved past the CGT to build links with France's early proponents of what became fascism a few years later.
Sorel's influence has been grossly overstated either out of misunderstanding his book meant he was one of the few French CGTers English speakers recognised, or by deliberate policy either by the tiny fascist syndicalist fringe or hostile anti-syndicalist leftists.
Again the Wobblies were…
I get where you are going here but I actually don’t consider the IWW as an example of syndicalism. As you stated before, it considered itself practicing industrial unionism. I don’t define syndicalism broadly enough that it would include industrial unionism.
I’m aware that syndicalists themselves have often argued that their idea was born with workers, that syndicalism was just the theoretical expression of what workers were doing and ought to do. I just find it surprising to hear that those links to earlier generations were largely retroactive as you say. But I don’t really see much of that either.
I am an anarcho-syndicalist but I am more familiar with the writings of anarchist thinkers than revolutionary syndicalists. I’ve really only read a few early 20th century texts from the latter posted on libcom. I haven’t really gotten much of a grasp on early syndicalist history.
Sometimes this can be a bit…
Sometimes this can be a bit of a chicken and egg question. The workers were theorists and the theorists were workers – it's not as if the ideology was cooked up in a lecture hall somewhere and then missionaries converted the workers to it.
The interactions between revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism varied country-to-country. If you take the classic French example, a number of key militants were straightforward anarchists (like Emile Pouget, Delesalle, Yvetot) but others like Griffuelhes were ex-Blanquists and never identified with anarchism wholly. Pelloutier was a former member of the Guesdist party and part of a two-man faction inside of it with the liberal socialist Aristide Briand, who later became Prime Minister.
Revolutionary syndicalism was not wholly new and has direct lineage back to old mutualist societies from Proudhon's era. I'm not confident any of the key revolutionary syndicalists saw themselves as inventors of something totally new. They were not ignorant of their own libertarian pre-history. Pelloutier's history of the Bourses du Travail clearly links the Bourses to the 1st International and before. When James Guillaume emerged from his political hibernation, joined the syndicalist movement and published his memoirs, all the French syndicalists were very interested and identified with that tendency, the one of Guillaume and Varlin and so on.
As Reddebrek said, Sorel is a bit of a red herring. While he wasn't as remote from the movement as people suggest sometimes, he was also very much a marginal figure to the bulk of the movement. The best book to read on this and some of the other "intellectual syndicalists" is Jeremy Jennings' Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas. Very very good book.
"What I mean is that I can’t…
"What I mean is that I can’t find examples of early syndicalists talking about their own history, of where they trace their own political lineage within socialism. It seems as though it was a completely new idea when it arrived."
Pierre Monatte linked revolutionary syndicalism to the Federalist-wing of the International during his speech at the 1907 International Anarchist Conference. Emile Pouget indicated the links in the idea of the general strike to International as well (see his article translated in "Black Flag Anarchist Review" Vol. 3 No. 1 (Spring 2023)). Other made the same point -- if you read Kropotkin between 1879 and 1882, for example, you see him advocating the same tactics as the Internationalists had and the syndicalists would.
As one historian summarises, syndicalists ‘viewed themselves as the descendants of the federalist wing of the First International, personified above else by Mikhail Bakunin.’ (Wayne Thorpe, The Workers Themselves’: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913-1923 [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989] pp. xiii-xiv)
My article critiquing a SWP Academic on syndicalism may be of interest: https://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarchist-studies-syndicalism-anarchism-and-marxism/