A thread devoted for the bourgeois politics of syndicalism, its anti-communist history and grand failures.
Rosa's Reform or Revolution helps to explain it along with Lenin's What is to be Done.
Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a clear theoretical understanding–or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding–of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life…in order to become a Social-Democrat, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real "inner workings"; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected. -Lenin
"ᴉuᴉlossnW is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. -Georges Sorel"
Sorel on Violence
(1916)
Sorel and his book represent in miniature the fate which has long been that of Marx and Das Kapital. Like Marx, Sorel became the representative of a great popular movement, notwithstanding the fact that he was not essentially a popular leader, and spoke a language hardly understood by the great majority of his followers. Like Das Kapital, Sorel’s Reflections on Violence[1] became “The Bible” of a popular movement, to be often referred to but very little read. And both men as well as both books have been so little understood by most of their respective friends and foes as to be often praised and even more often abused for things which were not in them.
In this country, Sorel is perhaps even more of a stranger than Marx. Which is perhaps not surprising when we consider that Sorel is, comparatively speaking, a new-comer into the politico-social sphere of interests; and that he as well as the movement which he represents, while undoubtedly of great proportions when standing alone, dwindle into comparative insignificance when ranged alongside of Marx and the movement he represents. And the movement which Sorel represents, the Syndicalist movement, although much spoken of of late years, is practically as much of a stranger to us as Sorel himself. This is best shown by the fact that Reflections on Violence, the chef d’oeuvre of the man and “The Bible” of the movement, had to wait these many years for an English translation and an American edition, although it has none of the drawbacks which Das Kapital offers to either translator or publisher.
As a result, both the man and the movement have been a series of surprises to us. To mention but two: When the report reached us, a few years ago, that Sorel had joined the extreme reactionary political group in France, the so-called camelots du roi, we were shocked. And when we learned at the beginning of the Great War that the French Syndicalists had become war-mad and turned chauvinists, we stood aghast. The things seemed incomprehensible to us.
And yet there was nothing inherently improbable or even surprising in these things. In fact, when the man and the movement are thoroughly understood, the events that surprised us so much will appear perfectly natural, and, if not exactly to be expected, at least within the range of probability. For Sorel and the movement which he represents are thoroughly reactionary and highly militaristic in general outlook,— as a reading of the Syndicalist “Bible”, which is now offered in a very attractive garb by the American publishers, will easily demonstrate.
It is, of course, impossible to enter upon a comprehensive discussion of the Sorelian philosophy within the limited space of a book review like the present one. And I shall not attempt the impossible. But I want to warn my readers that by characterizing Sorel’s philosophy as thoroughly reactionary I did not mean to imply that it was on that account the less interesting, or less worthy of our careful study and consideration. On the contrary, it is highly interesting, both on its own account, and as a historical document. For in order to be fully understood and appraised at its true worth the Sorelian philosophy must be considered as a part of the general reactionary trend which has in recent years been manifesting itself in science, philosophy, and art. The book now under consideration is, therefore, interesting, not only because it gives us a consistent philosophy of the Syndicalist movement,— a philosophy which enables us to understand its anti-parliamentarism as well as its chauvinism;— but also because it shows the reflection on the labor movement of such reactionary manifestations of bourgeois life and ideology as Bergsonism-Pragmatism in philosophy; Neo Catholicism in religion; mysticism and sex-obsession in literature; and the revival of the monarchical cult in politics.
There is one aspect, however, of the general reactionary character of the Sorelian philosophy upon the consideration of which I must stop for a moment — its militaristic quality. Partly because of the timeliness of the subject, and partly because we are so used to associate in our minds Syndicalism with anti-militarism that my ascribing a militaristic quality to the Sorelian philosophy must challenge instant contradiction. But a careful reading of the book now under consideration will show that the anti-militarism of the Syndicalists has a very limited significance,— namely, that the Syndicalists are not interested in maintaining the present State. The Syndicalists are anti-militaristic in the same sense that they are anti-parliamentarian; they believe that both the parliamentary and the military systems are devices by which the ruling class seeks to perpetuate the present state, and they therefore oppose both. But that does not mean that they may not occasionally, and for temporary purposes, use either or both. Besides, the Syndicalists’ anti-militarism is a home policy, not a foreign policy; they are anti-military-service, not anti-war.
On the contrary, their entire philosophy breathes the martial spirit, in the true militaristic sense of that phrase; a glorification of force and the so-called martial virtues, and an utter contempt for the weak, the peaceful, and the accommodating.
“Pacifist” is to Sorel a term of reproach whose contemptuous implications are only exceeded by the epithet “democrat.” A “pacifist,” whether in social policy affecting the class-war at home or in foreign policy affecting war between nations, is always a miserable coward, a degenerate willing to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage. It is because of this that violence is glorified. Not as a means to an end, but as something noble in itself. And Sorel expressly accentuates the fact that it is the brutality of violence that has this ennobling quality. The greatest danger to our civilization lies in the fact that our capitalist class is growing pusillanimous, weak and accommodating, giving in easily to the demands of labor without showing the proper spirit of fight. The manly spirit of fight must be put back into the human breast, if the world is ever to become regenerate. It is this which makes proletarian violence so important.
“The dangers” — says Sorel — “which threaten the future of the world may be avoided, if the proletariat hold on with obstinacy to revolutionary ideas, so as to realize as much as possible Marx’s conception. Everything may be saved, if the proletariat, by their use of violence, manage to re-establish the division into classes and so restore to the middle class (Note: the translator always uses “Middle-class” for capitalist class or bourgeoisie) something of its former energy; that is the great aim towards which the whole thought of men — who are not hypnotized by the event of the day, but who think of the conditions of tomorrow — must be directed. Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of the class war, appears thus as a very fine and very heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world from barbarism.”
And this does not apply only to the class-struggle, but also to the struggles between nations. For the barbarism here referred to, is the barbarism which would result from the effeminacy and humanitarianism of the race.
“Middle class cowardice,” says our author, “very much resembles the cowardice of the English Liberal party, which constantly proclaims its absolute confidence in arbitration between nations; arbitration nearly always gives disastrous results for England. But these worthy progressives prefer to pay, or even to compromise the future of their country, rather than face the horrors of war. . . . We might very well wonder whether all the high morality of our great contemporary thinkers is not founded on a degradation of the sentiment of horror.”
After having thus laughed to scorn the cowardly bourgeois for shrinking from the horrors of war and believing in arbitration, he declares that:
“Proletarian violence not only makes the future revolution certain, but it seems also to be the only means by which the European nations — at present stupefied by humanitarianism — can recover their former energy."
L. B. Boudin.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/boudin/1916/04/sorel-review.htmlThe Trade Union Internationals
(Battaglia Comunista, n.26, 1949)
In the early proletarian movements, the distinction between organizations for the defense of the economic interests of wage earners and the early political circles and parties was not well understood. However already in the inaugural address of the First International, the notion that it’s a World Association of Political Parties is well established. Indeed the address, after recalling the road traveled so far by the working classes in defending their interests against bourgeois exploitation, the ten-hour bill wrested from the British parliament, and the results of the first productive cooperatives, uses such propaganda material in the critical field and emphasizes its rebuttal to the theorists of bourgeois economics who thought production would collapse frighteningly if the extortion of labor from wage earners was reduced by reducing the workday and raising the minimum age of the worker, as it debunks them via the thesis that there can be production without “the existence of a class of masters employing a class of workers” in large proportions according to the precepts of modern science. But soon afterwards the address states that the trade union movement and cooperative labor will never be able to slow down “the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries”. Cooperative work should be done on a national scale and consequently with State means. “Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies”. So the great duty of the working classes is to conquer political power.
The question of political power and the State caused long battles first between Marxist socialists and libertarians, with the split of the First International, then between revolutionary marxists and social-democrats. Lenin gave irrevocable historical proof that “the most characteristic thing about the process of the gradual growth of opportunism that led to the collapse of the Second International in 1914 is the fact that even when these people were squarely faced with this question they tried to evade it or ignored it”. The cornerstones of the Marxist position that Lenin reestablished in “The State and Revolution” as the basis of the doctrine of the Moscow Third Communist International were: violent destruction of the bourgeois State apparatus – revolutionary dictatorship of the armed proletariat for the progressive dismantling of the capitalist social system and the repression of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie – workers’ State system without career politicians, but with workers "periodically called to the functions of control and acccounting” revocable at all times and with a workers’ wage – finally, withering away of the new State apparatus as production takes place on a communist basis.
* * *
The coming together of the workers’ unions into a single international body comes late, as even nationally they regroup much later than the propaganda groups that develop into proper parties. At first, federations are formed by trade and then these unite into national confederations.
This network of economic organization is always quite distinct from party political organization, but an exception to this, often causing confusion in international relations, is the British system of the Labour Party, which accepts memberships from both workers’ political groups and parties and economic Trade Unions. The Labor Party is not and does not even claim to be socialist and Marxist; it does, however, adhere to a political International, in whose successive world congresses in a more or less direct way delegations from the trade union confederations of various countries participated.
If the process of opportunism denounced and confronted by Lenin had its political aspect within the Second International with the abandonment of any serious preparation of the proletariat for revolution, the insertion of the proletariat into the parliamentary system, and finally the final betrayal with the support for the war of the national bourgeoisies in open defiance of the decisions of the world socialist congresses of Stuttgart and Basel, opportunism had no less serious consequences in the trade union field. The leaders of the large trade workers’ organizations and trade union confederations became bureaucratized in a practice of relationships and agreements with bosses’ organisations that led them to increasingly reject the direct struggle of the wage-earning masses against the bosses. As industrialists’ unions were placed in front of workers’ organizations, which taught the bourgeoisie to overcome, for class reasons, company autonomy and competition in a dual monopolistic struggle, directed against the consumer on the one hand and against the workers’ union rank-and-file on the other, the trade union bureaucrats constructed the method of economic collaboration whereby workers, rather than fighting in each company and in the larger field against the boss, would instead gain limited benefits from it on condition that they support the productive enterprise by avoiding strikes and move to the plane of mutual interest in the “productivity” and “yield” of industrial labor.
If parliamentary socialists shamefully betrayed the working class by voting for military credits and entering the 1914 war ministries, union leaders sang a tune worthy of that by proclaiming the duty of industrial workers to intensify work to produce war materiel necessary for the salvation of the fatherland, and lured them into compromise by boasting of obtaining exemptions from military service.
The flurry of crisis and bewilderment that passed over the proletarian movement throughout the war suspended the life of the international workers’ offices, the political office in Brussels, the trade union office in Amsterdam. To top it all, the same confederations dissident from the reformist ones, and headed by anarchists or Sorelian syndicalists, hadn’t even all resisted the seductions of social-patriotism; the classic example being France’s Jouhaux fully throwing itself into chauvinist politics and the union sacreé.
* * *
The renegades and social-traitors who had fiercely fought each other under their respective national flags during the war, came together again after it in the yellow internationals, and the international trade union office in Amsterdam established the best relations with the International Labour Organization founded in Geneva alongside the League of Nations.
Leninist communists thoroughly attacked all of these institutions, expressions of world imperialism and the capitalist counterrevolutionary effort desperately arrayed against the rise of the world proletariat, victorious in the Red, October Dictatorship.
However, the line of trade union tactics of the Communists, who founded the Comintern in Moscow in 1919, must be recalled in essential points in order to be clearly understood. No doubt in the fields of proletarian political organization about the need to break definitively not only with the opportunists of social-nationalism but also with the centrists hesitant before the word for struggle against parliamentary democracy, for revolutionary dictatorship in all countries. Thus, as the Brussels International and the grouping then formed and referred to ironically as the Second and a Half International were repudiated, communists in every nation were urged to break with local socialist parties
In the trade union field, while the declaration of war on the yellow servants of capital in Amsterdam and Geneva, direct material emanation of the monopolist bourgeois States and without any connection with the strata of the working class, was no less clear, the problem of local and national organizations was resolved in a consistent but not formally identical manner.
The question gave rise to more than a few debates among the young communist parties. In more than a few of these there was support for the tactic of abandoning the yellow-led unions and moving onto a split in the economic unions, grouping workers disgusted with the opportunism of Social-Democratic officials. It was felt by these groups, German, Dutch and others, that the revolutionary struggle needed not only an autonomous communist party but also an autonomous trade union network linked with the party.
Lenin’s critique proved that such a view implicitly and sometimes explicitly contained a devaluation of the party’s task and thus of revolutionary political necessity, and that it was related to old workerist worries over falling into right-wing errors. Related to it were the tendencies, also represented in Italy, to devalue the trade and industry unions themselves on a national basis in front of the factory bodies formed among the workers, or Company Councils, which were seen not as organs of struggle embedded in a general network, but as local cells of a new productive order that would replace the bourgeois management while allowing the autonomy of the company to subsist under the direction of its workers. This conception led to a non-Marxist view of the revolution, according to which the new economic model would replace the capitalist one cell by cell with a process more important than taking central power and general socialist planning.
The doctrine of the Comintern eliminated all such deviations and specified the importance, in the historical situation of the time, of the economic union in which workers flocked to in all countries in compact masses imposing vast national trade union struggles and setting the stage for political battles. For Marx and Lenin in the deployment of workers’ forces the party is indispensable; if it lacks or loses revolutionary strength, the trade union movement can only be reduced to collaboration with the bourgeois system. But where the situations mature and the proletarian vanguard is strong and decisive, even the trade union moves from an organ to be conquered to an organ of revolutionary battle, and the strategy of the conquest of political power finds its basis in the decisive party influence, possibly even as a minority influence, in the trade union bodies through which the masses can be called to general strikes and major struggles.
The Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, in its trade union theses, among the most expressive, therefore wanted the communist parties to work in the traditional trade union confederations trying to win them over, but in case they could not wrest their leadership from the opportunists, not to draw from this situation any reason to give the workers the order to abandon them and found new trade unions in the national arena.
This tactic had faithful application in Italy, for example, where the Communists took part in all union struggles and did intense work in the factories in the leagues in the Chambers of Labor, many of which they headed, in the trade federations, some of which they controlled although the General Confederation of Labor was in the hands of the anti-Communist reformists Rigola, d’Aragona, Buozzi and the like.
* * *
In the field of international organization, without prejudice to such tactics in individual countries, the Communists founded the Red International of Labor Unions – Profintern – based in Moscow, which brought together national Headquarters headed by Communists, with the Russian trade unions in the forefront. It was the time of the watchword Moscow versus Amsterdam in the workers’ movement.
After a few years this clear-cut method suffered its first backwards adjustment. Having verified, for the reasons of the general situation in the capitalist world which need not be recalled in full here, the retreats and failures of the revolutionary movement in Europe, a pretext was taken from it in relation to the needs of the Russian State to modify international trade union tactics and suppress the Profintern, going so far as to demand that Russian trade unions be accepted as a national confederation in the Amsterdam Yellow Bureau, and called on communist workers to fight for this goal and protest the predictable refusal of opportunists to accept such membership. It was a first step towards the liquidationist path. The policy of popular fronts and the defense of democracy, parallel to the foreign policy developments of the Soviet State, which had now entered the international chessboard of imperialism and aligned itself on the side of the barricade of imperialism, completed the process of liquidating the political and organizational autonomy of the proletariat, beginning with the party and ending with the trade union and other mass organs, and their transformation into instruments of bourgeois conservation and imperialism.
* * *
The problem of the mixing together the political and trade union organs of proletarian struggle in its approach must take into account historical facts of fundamental importance which have occurred since the end of the First World War. These facts are on the one hand the new attitude of the capitalist States towards the existence of trade unions, and on the other hand the very completion of the Second World War, the monstrous alliance between Russia and the capitalist States, and the contrasts between the victors.
From outlawing economic trade unions – a consistent consequence of the pure doctrine of bourgeois liberalism – to tolerating them, capitalism moved onto its third stage: integrating them into its State and social order. Politically, this dependence had already been achieved in the opportunist and yellow trade unions, and had proven itself during the First World War. But the bourgeoisie, for the defense of its established order, had to go further. Since the first time social wealth and capital were in its hands, it has been concentrating them more and more by continually repressing what was left of the traditional classes of free producers into nothingness. From the liberal revolutions onward, the political and armed power of the State was in its hands, and this reached its apotheosis in the most perfect parliamentary democracies, as Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin, demonstrated. In the hands of its enemy, the proletariat, whose numbers grew as accumulating expropriation grew, was a third resource: organization, association, the overcoming of individualism, the historical and philosophical uniform of the bourgeois regime. The world bourgeoisie wanted to wrest from its enemy even this unique advantage it obtained by developing its own internal class consciousness and organization, made unheard-of efforts to suppress the spikes of economic individualism in its core and give itself proper planning. The State has been, from moment one, its organ of deception and police repression; it has been striving in recent decades to make it, equally in its own service, an organism of economic control and regimentation.
Since the outlawing of trade unions would incentivize the independent class struggle of the proletariat, this method went in the opposite direction. The union must be legally incorporated into the State and become one of its organs. The historical path to this result has many different aspects and also many retreats, but we are in the presence of a consistent and distinctive characteristic of modern capitalism.
In Italy and Germany the totalitarian regimes arrived at it with the direct destruction of traditional red and even yellow trade unions.
The States that defeated the fascist regimes in the war moved in the same direction by different means.
Temporarily in their own and conquered territories they have allowed the self-described free unions to act and have not banned and still don’t ban agitations and strikes.
But everywhere the conclusion of such movements flows into a negotiation in the official arena with the exponents of State political power acting as arbitrators between the economically struggling parties, and it’s obviously the bosses who thus play the part of judge and executioner.
This certainly foreshadows the legal elimination of the strike and trade union independence, which has already de facto taken place in all countries, and naturally creates a new approach to the problems of proletarian action.
International bodies reappear as emanations of constituted State powers. Just as the Second International was reborn with the permission of the victorious powers of its day in the form of tamed bureaus, so we have today bureaus of socialist parties in the orbit of the Western States, and a so-called communist bureau of information in place of the glorious old Third International.
The trade unions band together in congresses and councils which can’t prove to have any connection with the working class, and which palpable evidence shows that they’re puppeteered by this or that government.
The salvation of the working class, its new historical rise after tremendous struggles and hardships, is in none of these bodies. It’s on the path that will know how to bring together the theoretical rearrangement of views on the latest phenomena of the capitalist world and the new organizational approach in all countries on a world scale, which will know how to reach a higher plane than the military contrast of the imperialists, putting the war between classes back in the place of war between States.
Behold the power of café coops under the IWW:
Red Emma's has never been a safe spot. I've been assaulted twice by customers and harassed repeately, no reason given, by one staff member of theirs, a Tiffany DeFoe, who'd later smear me with others and with the BCPD. Moreover, one of their founders, an Andrew Byrne, was sexually coercing everyone he could with the line "If you're a TRUE egalitarian, you'll make out with me"- and making vague, domineering remarks to Baltimore School of the Arts kids about things he "could just tell" about people, when in fact he'd been monitoring the internet use on Red Emma's free internet terminals, educating himself thoroughly on the guests. The rest of the staff, including Kate Khatib, John Duda, Abigail "Iris" Kirsch, Suzie, Lanie Thomas, Kevin Blackistone- all didn't want to know any of this (as if illegal things happened there par for course… which, given their no wages policy, could mean "other ways" of making wages…), or were covering it up with recriminative ad hominem accusations.
There was also the matter of my being stalked, intermittently, for years by the same darkhaired laptop user, unnamed- friend of Iris Kirsch and specialist in "wavetable synthesis"- following me to half the net bistros throughout Baltimore and to DC's Union Station. Also, due to my noting these and investigating it, I was covertly assaulted in Sept. 2010, and further harassed at two different workplaces, on til 2013, when I finally left Maryland.
I'm not sure yet if there's a Mafia connection with the Industrial Workers of the World, or if Red Emma's sold surveillance data to various private security companies. Certainly they wouldn't protect themselves in innocent book sales and vegan cuisine service by cell phone stalking and smearing people with the police; as their implicit threats escalated, I should think they had all the more to conceal. But whereever there's spying, there's sexual abuse, there's smear ops, and there's a blight on genuine innovations in art, intellectualism and culture- a cancer on human evolution, to say nothing of continuing the dysfunctional and toxic ideas that Baltimore has about "justice". No, like any pretentious rich people or touring revival preachers, they dance a fine dance and put on a fine show, but have other things going on behind the scenes. Anyone GENUINELY interested in human rights or justice would have more natural sympathy, and would not reserve it strictly for anyone they could prejudge as a "minority".
BUT, Baltimore's prime feminists, relying on a rapey programmer as founder and support worker from 2004-2012, and getting support from local and federal law enforcement in suppressing it. As if Baltimore hadn't enough hypocrisy.
If they're the best of "Worker-Ownership" in the USA, then- either the USA has it all wrong, or the concept is fundamentally flawed.
Yes, it's been a while; I'd had to prepare, after that assault.
>>2301054I don’t mean Syndicalism specifically. I honestly don’t know a whole ton about it, although going off of what of do know, I’d probably be inclined to agree with you.
My larger point is that this site, at least from where I stand, has become very unwelcoming of any real discussion of any ideology that isn’t ML or ML derived. Any time you see Anarchism, Trotskyism, or Democratic Socialism, etc. brought up, it’s in the same tone one uses when describing someone who wears a fursuit in public.
And to be clear, I have no problem with anyone criticizing any of these. But I’m sick of anything that isn’t the current orthodoxy being dismissed as obviously wrong without discussion. In this thread specifically, I was hoping to see people talking about genuine, actually existing examples of Syndicalism as envisioned by its adherents so as to see what it looks like in practice and if it even can exist in practice.
>>2301023This is such an absurd claim considering Sorel was probably the most anti-social-democratic socialist thinker of all time, there is no more thorough diatribe against reformism and the foundations it is built upon than exists in Reflections on Violence.
“Against this noisy, garrulous and lying socialism, which is exploited by ambitious people of every description, which amuses a few buffoons and is admired by decadents, stands revolutionary syndicalism… The groups that are struggling against each other must be shown to be as separate as possible; finally, the movements of the revolting masses are presented so as to make a deep and lasting impression on the souls of the rebels… There is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of opposites through the nonsense of official thinkers; everything is clearly mapped out, so that only one interpretation of socialism is possible.”
“The syndicalists do not propose to reform the State… they want to destroy it… On this issue, it is impossible that there should be the slightest understanding between the syndicalists and the official socialists; the latter speak of breaking up everything, but they attack the men in power rather than power itself…”
“Whole pages could be filled with the contradictory, comical and quack arguments… the most absolute intransigence with the most supple opportunism… parliamentary socialists can succeed in imposing themselves upon the public only through their gibberish.”
Sorel did not, like Bolshevist and Social-Democratic Marxists, see political separatism simply as something imposed on the socialist movement by the very structure of society. He went further in regarding political separatism as the morally most appropriate form of social and political organization. Only where a group drew sharply defined boundary lines around itself could it lead a moral life. Only where it regarded itself as bound by no moral obligations to other sections of the population could it perform its moral duty. For moral duty entails, in substance, hostility towards those outside one's own group, not just hidden rancor and bitterness but open aggressiveness. No modern political writer of any intellectual stature has gone further than Sorel in denying the validity of any class collaboration. The very content of moral action lay for him in the aggressive affirmation of the group's integrity and solidarity against an outside group.
All attempts to reconcile differences between groups by compromise and negotiation, by the discovery of common standard, through discussion or by joint renunciation were repugnant to Sorel and contrary to his ethical system. Sorels ethic is diametrically, utterly, absolutely opposed to Social-Democracy, more than any other doctrine that has existed in the history of class struggle, it is the ethic of crisis, it is the ethic of an ever deepening crisis which is resoled ultimately only by an apocalyptic transformation in which everything is totally changed.
Syndicalism as the antithesis of Social-Democracy that a fledgling of that inclination can be seen in the work of Mikhail Bakunin, the great proto-Syndicalist author, in his critique of the parliamentary program of Marx he sought to impose on the International he observes
"The strike is the beginning of the social war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, a tactic that remains within the limits of legality. Strikes are a valuable tactic in two ways. First they electrify the masses, reinforcing their moral energy and awakening in them the sense of profound antagonism between their interests and those of the bourgeoisie. Thus strikes reveal to them the abyss which from this time on irrevocably separates the workers from the bourgeoisie. Consequently they contribute immensely by arousing and manifesting between the workers of all trades, of all localities, and of all countries the consciousness and the fact itself of solidarity. Thus a double action, the one negative, the other positive, tending to create directly the new world of the proletariat by opposing it in an almost absolute manner to the bourgeois world."
Here he identifies the principal action that preceded and indeed birthed the Syndicalist movement, that of the strike, which expanded upon by Sorel in Reflections on Violence is a massively rejuvenating action for both classes, and serves, more than any other action, to revive class struggle. He continues -
"I maintain that if the Marxist party, the so-called Social Democrats, continues along the road of political action, it will sooner or later be forced to oppose economic action – the tactic of strikes – so incompatible are these two methods in reality…"
Here Bakunin identifies a very true and very real dichotomy, that of Syndicalism or Social-Democracy. The strike exists as the beginning and epitome of the class-struggle, and so those who oppose it, and the ideology which takes it as its doctrine, necessarily are or inevitably will be opposed to class struggle in its entirety.
>>2301058Sounds incredible.
The most we had in Britain was 121 bookshop in Railton Road, Brixton (London). The worst anyone said about,I think in the old "alternative london" book. Or it might have been in "City Limits" magazine. it was a review of a co-op cafe they had there:
<erratic serviceAs far as firearms, Albert Meltzer, the anarcho-syndicalist, wrote in his biography that 121 bookshop got robbed a few times with knives. But then they put out the word they were going to defend themselves with the guns as the anarchist movements disposal. Apparently it was a bluff (which worked) ,they didn't have any guns.