An Opinionated Definition of Syndicalism

From: m.lepore@genie.geis.com
Message-Id: <199504070447.AA052870048@relay1.geis.com>
Date: Fri,  7 Apr 95 03:42:00 UTC
To: 1-union@lever.com
Subject: Syndicalism
Reply-To: 1-UNION Distribution List <1-union@lever.com>

 
    >    Could someone just summarize for me the gist of syndicalism,
    >    please?   Eva.Durant@mailhost.mcc.ac.uk
 

This is more my opinion than a "definition." Unionism started out as a workers' reflex of self-defense, but wasn't necessarily going anywhere in particular. Unfortunately, unionism has generally ended up accepting capitalism as being permanent. But syndicalism believes that industrial unionism has the potential to function as the road to a new society. Some of us believe that the union should be the initial framework for tomorrow's worker self-management in a new democratic economic system. The union will also be the major vehicle for transferring ownership of the tools of production from the ruling class monopoly to social ownership. That makes the union two things in one, it is the path out of here, and in some ways it is also the objective, the starting point for administering the new society. The union is a means and also an end.

I like to place the following statements side by side, because they show this common root in the conception of the IWW and the conception and the DeLeonist school of Marxism:

From the IWW Preamble, 1905:

"The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggles with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially, we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."

From an editorial written by De Leon in 1913:

"Industrial unionism is the socialist republic in the making; and the goal once reached, the industrial union is the socialist republic in operation. Accordingly, the industrial union is at once the battering ram with which to pound down the fortress of capitalism, and the successor of the capitalist social structure itself."

* * *

It was recommended to take a look at the Paris Commune. If you do that, you may not get a particularly clear picture of how the means of production socety-wide could be managed by workers' councils, but I think a study of the Commune does help to clarify how the workers' revolution doesn't have to end up like the Stalinist dictatorship.

Here are some of Karl Marx's praises of the Paris Commune, from his book The Civil War in France. [I am copying from the ascii version transcribed by K. Campbell - thanks, Ken.]

The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman's wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.

Having once got rid of the standing army and the police -- the physical force elements of the old government -- the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the "parson-power", by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.

The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

* * *

    >    Marxists use the existing political framework "to spread the
    >    word", anarchist start new democratic grassroot
    >    organisations.

In terms of the "political" question, I think a better way to put it would be this... Marxists believe that the state is a weapon being held by the propertied class, and so it is necessary to take the weapon away from them. A working class political party is needed so that we can deprive the master class of the ability to use the coercive forces of the state against the workers. Why? Well, as I personally see it, even if 95 percent of the workers got organized in the new revolutionary network, we would probably have only ten percent of the soldiers in the military branches on our side, and less than one percent of the police officers on our side. Those departments have lots of deadly weapons. They'll shoot you just for stealing a loaf of bread, so imagine what they'll do to you for seizing buildings away from corporations. I believe there is no real alternative but to take control of the political offices which have the power to give instructions and orders to those coercive state forces. I don't believe in the "vanguard party" approach, but I do believe that a political party will be needed only to deprive the parasitic class of the lethal weapons it has in the state. (Because of this disagreement I have with most people who call themselves anarchists, I do not apply the term anarchist to myself.)

Opinion by: Mike Lepore mlepore@mcimail.com