Here we provide an overview of anarchism and trade unions. While this issue has been addressed An Anarchist FAQ (see, for example, section H.2.8), we thought it wise to expand on the matter given how anarchist ideas on trade unions have been distorted over the years. As will become clear, Kropotkin was right to note in his justly famous entry on “Anarchism” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica
the anarchists refuse to be party to the present State organisation and to support it by infusing fresh blood into it. They do not seek to constitute, and invite the working men not to constitute, political parties in the parliaments. Accordingly, since the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864-1866, they have endeavoured to promote their ideas directly amongst the labour organisations and to induce those unions to a direct struggle against capital, without placing their faith in parliamentary legislation. (“Anarchism”, Direct Struggle Against Capital, 165)
Some ignore this. The fact that Proudhon, the first person to proclaim themselves an anarchist opposed strikes and unions is often mentioned by Marxists seeking to discredit anarchism. That he was the only major anarchist thinker to do so seems an irrelevance to such writers, who generally fail to mention this awkward fact before moving onto other anarchists in their very selective, hypocritical and distortive diatribes (we say hypocritical for while Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s racist prejudices are rightly denounced those of Marx and Engels are never mentioned, to take an obvious example). Yet even if he rejected unions and strikes, Proudhon did think that the working class would emancipate itself by means of producer, credit and consumer co-operatives.
As we will show, later anarchists rejected Proudhon’s opposition to unions while retaining his view that the workers had to emancipate themselves by their own efforts and organisations. To do this, we concentrate on influential figures associated with the various revolutionary schools of anarchism – that is to say, collectivism and communism – drawing out the links and similarities between the two. In addition, we will touch on the differences between these and anarcho-syndicalism, the anarchist school most associated with the unions (for obvious reasons – see section J.3.8). It should be noted that we will not be discussing Individualist Anarchist (see section G) perspectives on unions beyond noting that many leading figures in that movement were trade unionists (Joseph Labadie) and even syndicalists in terms of strategy (Dyer Lum). While undoubtedly a useful summary to produce, time precludes doing so now.
It must be stressed that we are discussing unions which are organised in a libertarian manner rather than mainstream reformist and bureaucrat trade unions. Anarchists are well aware that the reformist unions are more to do with controlling workers than workers’ control. As Errico Malatesta pointed out in the 1899:
The big disadvantage of workers’ societies is that the vast majority of members do not take any part in their social life, beyond the appointment of leaders, and payment. Thus they are a small-scale reproduction of the system of government that afflicts us in wider political society. Everybody pays, and then allows themselves to be guided, exploited, betrayed… in addition with the illusion that they are the ones in charge, because they are the ones who vote.
Therefore the first task of anarchists within workers’ societies is to rip the members out of their passivity, excite their initiative, and see to it that they live and battle with the active endeavors of all, and thereby come to understand the uselessness and harm done by presidents and committees with authoritarian assignments and lavish stipends, and eliminate them. But how can anarchists ever induce others to play an active part in the business of their unions, if they are the first to lose interest, and do not even go to meetings?
Authority is not destroyed by talk, but by actions. When... it is based on the acquiescence and apathy of those who are subjected to it, it is necessary -- and there is no other method -- to provoke a rebellion of consciousness and activity among all. (“The anarchists and workers’ societies”, The Complete Works of Malatesta [Chico: AK Press, 2019] IV: 106)
A British syndicalist newspaper made the same point years later:
The attitude of a large number of prominent officials more resembles that of a manager of a limited liability company than an elected official of a working-class organisation. It happens far too often that the unionist has to fight not only the tyranny of the boss, but also the bureaucracy of his own union officials. (Solidarity, September 1913)
Still, such trade unions do organise workers and to some degree defend their interests (as wage-slaves), so anarchists do not ignore them and have various views on how best to work within them to build a libertarian alternative. However, the focus here is squarely on anarchist views on militant unions organised by and for the rank-and-file membership and the role they have in anarchist theory.
Anarchists are well-aware that a free society will be the product of a mass movement rather than something that appears from nowhere. As Kropotkin summarised, “without the masses, no revolution” and so anarchists had to be “where the masses are”. (“The action of the masses and the individual”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 3, 61) Revolutionary anarchists, as discussed in section J.1, recognise the need to work within popular movements, organisations and struggles to promote the “spirit of revolt” (to use Kropotkin’s term) and create the possibility of a social revolution. As Errico Malatesta put it:
To become a convinced anarchist, and not in name only, he must begin to feel solidarity that binds him to his comrades, to learn to co-operate with others in the defence of common interests and, fighting the bosses and the government that supports them, he realises that bosses and governments are useless parasites and that the workers could run the apparatus of society themselves. And when he understands this, the worker is an anarchist even if he does not use the title.
Besides, the encouraging of all kinds of popular organisations is the logical consequence of our fundamental ideas and should therefore be an integral part of our programme… we anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves. We do not believe in the good that comes from above, imposed by force; we want a new social order to emerge from within the people and to match the degree of development reached by men and to progress as men move forward. (“Organisation”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 2., 102)
For anarchists like Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin and Goldman, the labour movement was viewed as an important arena for anarchist activity as working-class people learn how to manage society by managing their own organisations and struggles – whether these organisations are called unions, workplace committees or workers’ councils is not important, it is how they are structured and run which fundamentally matters. Ultimately, the federation of strikers’ assemblies and committees formed in the class struggle will become the federation of producers running the economy in a free society. Unions (or equivalent bodies such as workers' councils or factory committees) are viewed as instruments in the immediate struggle against capital and the State and as the instruments for the abolition of both and the basis of a free federation of producer groups which would manage economic activity in a free socialist society.
Given the key role workers’ struggle and organisation had played in anarchist theory both in terms of what anarchist do today and how they envision social revolution tomorrow, it makes sense to discuss these ideas and their evolution. Once that is done, it becomes obvious why the anarchists took the black flag as its symbol for – as Louise Michel said –the “black flag is the flag of strikes”. (The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, 168)
The International Workers’ Association (then called, in English, the International Working Men’s Association, or IWMA) was founded in 1864 by British and French trade unionists at a conference in London. The debates of its initial Congresses reflected the ideas of the many mutualists (followers of Proudhon) in the Association in France and Belgium but soon these were developed in the face of the dynamics of the labour movement and struggle towards a more trade union position, namely waging and supporting strikes. The shift in perspective came to the fore in 1868 and afterwards.
The Brussels Congress of September 1868 saw the Brussels section submit a lengthy report on the need to build trade unions (“resistance societies”) which concluded as follows:
there is no middle ground between wage-labour and association. Already in the major strikes that have broken out in recent years a new tendency is quite clearly beginning to emerge: the strike must lead to the production society. That has already been said during the strike of the association of joiners and carpenters in Ghent, as during the strike of tailors in Paris. And that will happen, because it is in the logic of ideas and the force of events… the production associations derived from the unions encompass entire trades, invade large industry and thereby form the NEW CORPORATION; a corporation that bourgeois economists will gladly confuse (we know) with the old guilds, although the latter was organised hierarchically, based on monopoly and privilege, and limited to a certain number of members (just like our current small production associations), while the former will be organised on the basis of equality, founded on mutuality and justice, and open to all. (“Report of the Brussels Section”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol 2. No. 2, 17-8)
It should be noted that “corporation” (corporatif) was originally the French word for craft guild and was popular in the nineteenth century French labour movement to refer to the associations which would replace wage-labour (Proudhon, for example, reflected this use in his General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century). William H. Sewell discusses this in his book Work and Revolution in France: The language of labor from the old regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). It should be not confused with capitalist corporations or corporatism but rather considered as a federation of self-managed industrial association. In other words, that the bodies created by workers to defend their interests under capitalism (“resistance societies” or unions) would become the means by which they would control their own work and workplaces in a free socialist society.
During the Congress itself, there was a discussion on “Resistance Societies” at which Jean-Louis Pindy argued that the “purpose of resistance societies is to prepare for the future and secure the present; that the grouping of the resistance societies will form the commune of the future, and that Government will eventually be replaced by councils of trades unions”, reflecting the report of his union, the Parisian Society of Bronze-Smiths. (“Discussion on Resistance Societies”, Op. Cit., 21) A “Resolution on Resistance Societies” was endorsed by the Congress:
we conceive of two types of grouping by workers: first a local grouping which allows workers of the same locality to maintain day-to-day relations; next, a grouping between different localities, regions, countries, etc… [The] First type… [of] resistance societies… involves the federation of local societies mutually aiding each other…, organising meetings for the discussion of social questions, taking actions of collective interest together… as industry grows, another grouping becomes necessary alongside the first one… resistance societies must organise themselves internationally… [and] to act in common…
Once these two groupings have been formed, labour is organised for the present and the future, by eliminating wage-labour… The grouping of different trade unions by town and by country… forms the commune of the future just as the other type forms the worker representation of the future. Government is replaced by the councils of the assembled trades unions, and by a committee of their respective delegates, regulating the labour relations that will replace politics. (“Resolution on Resistance Societies”, Op. Cit., 20-1)
This idea became very popular across the International. For example, Eugène Varlin – a leading French Internationalist – reflected it well in 1870:
Unless you want to reduce everything to a centralising and authoritarian state, which would appoint the directors of mills, factories, distribution outlets, whose directors would in turn appoint deputy directors, supervisors, foremen, etc. and thus arrive at a top-down hierarchical organisation of labour, in which the worker would be nothing but an unconscious cog, without freedom or initiative; unless we do, we are forced to admit that the workers themselves must have the free disposal of their instruments of labour… It is to this last idea that most workers who in recent years have been energetically pursuing the emancipation of their class tend to rally. It is this which has prevailed in the various congresses of the International Workers Association…. Workers societies… have this immense advantage of accustoming men to social life, and so preparing them for a wider social organisation. They accustom them not only to reach an agreement and understanding, but also to take care of their affairs, to organise, to discuss, to think about their material and moral interests, and always from the collective point of view… trade associations (resistance, solidarity, union) deserve our encouragement and sympathy, for they are the natural elements of the social construction of the future; it is they who can easily become producer associations; it is they who will be able to operate social tools and organise production. (“Workers Societies”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 1 No. 1, 47)
Michael Bakunin joined the International in 1868 and championed the proto-syndicalist ideas which had developed within it, arguing that the International should be a federation of unions fighting on the economic terrain rather than a body of co-operatives (as desired by the mutualists) or a political party (as desired by the Marxists). This position became known as Collectivism to differentiate it from both Mutualism of Proudhon and the Communism of Marx.
Like other collectivists, Bakunin stressed the importance of direct collective struggle of workers in transforming their ideas and becoming conscious of both their position in society and the need to end it:
in view of the formidable coalition of all the privileged classes, all the capitalist proprietors and all the States in the world, an isolated workers’ association, local or national… can never triumph, and that to stand up to this coalition and obtain… victory, nothing less than the union of all local and national workers’ associations into a single universal association is needed, it needs the great International Association of the Workers of all countries… separate the working masses from all bourgeois politics, it had to eliminate from its programme all bourgeois political programmes… in order to be able to raise, on these ruins of the bourgeois world, the true politics of the workers, the policy of the International [Workers’] Association… there remains to [the workers’ world] only a single path, that of its emancipation through practice… that of the struggle of the workers in solidarity against the bosses. It is trades unions, organisation and the federation of resistance funds…. from the moment that a worker… begins to struggle seriously for the reduction of his hours of labour and the increase of his wages; from the moment that he begins to take an active interest in this entirely material struggle… and that becoming accustomed to rely ever more on the collective strength of the workers, he will willingly renounce help from heaven… It will be the same with his reactionary politics… the economic struggle, by developing and extending ever wider, will make him increasingly know, in a practical manner and by a collective experience that is necessarily always more instructive and broader than isolated experience, his true enemies, which are the privileged classes, including the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the nobility and the State…
The worker, thus engaged in the struggle, will inevitably come to understand the irreconcilable antagonism that exists between these henchmen of reaction and his most cherished human interests, and having reached this point he will not fail to recognise himself, and bluntly present himself as, a revolutionary socialist. (“The Policy of the International”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol 2. No. 2, 27-30)
He correctly predicted the turning to electioneering (“political action”) would not free the workers but rather secure capitalism:
it will be said, workers, becoming wiser by their very experience, will no longer send bourgeois to constituent or legislative assemblies, they will send simple workers…. Do you know what will be the result of this? The worker deputies, transferred into bourgeois surroundings and an atmosphere of entirely bourgeois political ideas, ceasing in fact to be workers by becoming Statesmen, will become bourgeois, and perhaps even more bourgeois than the bourgeois themselves. For men do not make situations, on the contrary it is situations that make men. (Op. Cit., 33)
Thus the initial aim of “giv[ing to] workers’ agitation in all countries an essentially economic character, with the aim of reducing the hours of labour and increasing wages; the organisation of the working masses and the establishment of resistance funds as means.” In this way, it would become “it is a real force, knowing what it must do, and hence capable of taking it in its hands and giving it a truly beneficial direction for the people; a serious international organisation of workers’ associations of all countries, capable of replacing this departing political world of States and bourgeoisie.” (Op. Cit., 34) He reiterated this position in his polemics against the Italian Republican-Nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini in defence of the Paris Commune:
That the oppression and exploitation of which the toiling masses are victims in all countries, being in their nature and by their present organization internationally solidary, the deliverance of the proletariat must also be so; that the economic and social emancipation (foundation and preliminary condition of political emancipation) of the working-people of a country will be for ever impossible, if it is not effected simultaneously at least in the majority of the countries with which it finds itself bound by means of credit, industry, and commerce; and that, consequently, by the duty of fraternity as well as by enlightened self-interest, in the interest of their own salvation and of their near deliverance, the working-people of all trades are called upon to establish, organize, and exercise the strictest practical solidarity, communal, provincial, national, and international, beginning in their workshop, and then extending it to all their trade-societies and to the federation of all the trades,—a solidarity which they ought above all scrupulously to observe and practise in all the developments, in all the catastrophes, and in all the incidents of the incessant struggle of the labor of the workingman against the capital of the bourgeois, such as strikes, demands for decrease of the hours of work and increase of wages, and, in general, all the claims which relate to the conditions of labor and to the existence, whether material or moral, of the working-people. (“The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International”, Liberty, 11 December 1886)
Bakunin stressed time and again the importance of union struggle and organisation as the means of transforming people’s consciousness today and society tomorrow:
the serious, final, complete emancipation of the workers is possible only on one condition, and that this condition is the appropriation of capital, that is to say the raw materials and all the instruments of labour, including land, by the workers collectively… The economic question considered in this extent and embracing both all conditions of labour as well as those of the just distribution of the products of labour, is the real terrain that the worker must never abandon. As soon as he abandons it, he loses himself in metaphysical, juridical, political, theological abstractions…While remaining on the economic terrain, the worker will be all powerful. No siren voice from the bourgeois world can shake his real understanding, his common sense…
The organisation of trade sections, their federation in the International [Workers’] Association and their representation by trade councils not only creates a great Academy where all the workers of the International, uniting practice with theory, can and must study economic science, they even carry the living seeds of the new social order that is to replace the bourgeois world. They create not only the ideas but the very facts of the future. (“Protest of the Alliance”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 1 No. 3, 4)
This vision of the organisations created to fight capitalism – union federations – becoming the framework of the socialist society which would replace it was a common one in Bakunin’s writings as it was in the Federalist-wing of the International:
Workers, no longer count on anyone but yourselves. Do not demoralise and paralyse your rising power in foolish alliances with bourgeois radicalism… You bear within you today all the elements of the power that must renew the world… To constitute a real force, they must be organised… Abstain from all participation in bourgeois radicalism and organise outside of it the forces of the proletariat. The basis of that organisation is entirely given: It is the workshops and the federation of the workshops; the creation of resistance funds, instruments of struggle against the bourgeoisie, and their federation not just nationally, but internationally. The creation of chambers of labour as in Belgium.
And when the hour of the revolution sounds, the liquidation of the State and of bourgeois society, including all legal relations. Anarchy, that it to say the true, the open popular revolution: legal and political anarchy, and economic organisation, from top to bottom and from the circumference to the centre, of the triumphant world of the workers. (“Letter to Albert Richard”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2, No. 2, 35-6)
Direct action on the economic terrain – the strike – was seen as the key for numerous reasons. First, “strikes are of enormous value; they create, organize, and form a workers’ army, an army which is bound to break down the power of the bourgeoisie and the State, and lay the ground for a new world.” (Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 384-5) Second, they build class consciousness:
The strike is the beginning of the social war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie... 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. (Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, 304)
Third, they change the ideas of those involved as strikes “awaken in the masses all the social-revolutionary instincts which reside deeply in the heart of every worker, which constitute, so to speak, his socio-physiological existence, but which ordinarily are consciously perceived by very few workers, most of whom are weighed down by slavish habits and a general spirit of resignation. But when those instincts, stimulated by the economic struggle, awaken in the heartened multitudes of workers, the propaganda of social-revolutionary ideas becomes quite easy. For these ideas are simply the purest and most faithful expression of the instincts of the people.” (Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 384)
“The International”, in short, “in placing the proletariat outside the politics of the State and of the bourgeois world, thereby constructed a new world, the world of the united proletarians of all lands.” (Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, 303)
However, this focus on economic struggle and apparent dismissal of wider (“political”) issues should not be taken literally. Rather, it is the initial stage in defining a working-class policy or programme which would be created as a product of the social struggle itself and debated within the workers’ organisations:
But would the International then cease to concern itself with political and philosophical questions? Would the International ignore progress in the world of thought as well as the events which accompany or arise from the political struggle in and between states, concerning itself only with the economic problem?...
We hasten to say that it is absolutely impossible to ignore political and philosophical questions. An exclusive preoccupation with economic questions would be fatal for the proletariat. Doubtless the defense and organization of its economic interests – a matter of life and death – must be the principal task of the proletariat. But it is impossible for the workers to stop there without renouncing their humanity and depriving themselves of the intellectual and moral power which is so necessary for the conquest of their economic rights. In the miserable circumstances in which the worker now finds himself, the main problem he faces is most likely bread for himself and bis family. But much more than any of the privileged classes today, he is a human being in the fullest sense of this word; he thirsts for dignity, for justice, for equality, for liberty, for humanity, and for knowledge, and he passionately strives to attain all these things together with the full enjoyment of the fruits of his own labor. Therefore, if political and philosophical questions have not yet been posed in the International, it is the proletariat itself who will pose them. (Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, 301-2)
Thus political issues and actions would be within the remit of the International but they would be raised by the membership and not imposed from the start. Likewise, it would not take part as an organisation in bourgeois politics (elections) but rather concentrate on action on the economic terrain. “The International,” in other words, “does not reject politics of a general kind; it will be compelled to intervene in politics so long as it is forced to struggle against the bourgeoisie. It rejects only bourgeois politics.” (Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 313)
The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 saw the planned Congress of the International cancelled. However, fearful of what they saw as the spread of Bakunin’s influence, in 1871 Marx and Engels called a Conference in London to turn the International into a grouping of political parties, and so “replaced in the programme of action of the Association the direct struggle of Labour against Capital by agitation in bourgeois parliaments”, to use Kropotkin’s words. (Modern Science and Anarchy, 161) This abuse of power by the General Council provoked the Jura Federation to raise its voice in protest and present the arguments circulating within the International on its role as both fighter against capitalism and its replacement:
The future society must be nothing else than the universalisation of the organisation that the International will give itself. We must therefore take care to ensure that this organisation is close as possible to our ideal. How could an egalitarian and free society emerge from an authoritarian organisation? It is impossible. The International, embryo of the future human society, must from now on be the faithful reflection of our principles of federation and liberty, and reject from its midst any principle tending towards authority, towards dictatorship. (“Circular to all the Federations of the International Workers’ Association”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 2, 39)
At the Hague in 1872, Marx packed the Congress with his supporters and confirmed the decision to turn the International from a federation of workers’ associations into labour parties committed to “political action” and expelled Bakunin and Guillaume. This produced a split in the International, with the bulk of the organisation rejecting the decisions of the Hague Congress and holding a Congress at St. Imier Congress which founded the Anti-Authoritarian or Federalist International. This confirmed the focus on trade union struggle and organisation expounded previously in the International which aimed at:
the establishment of an absolutely free economic organisation and federation, based upon the labour and equality of all and absolutely independent of any political government, and that this organisation and this federation can only be the outcome of the spontaneous action of the proletariat itself, of trades unions and autonomous communes… proletarians of every land must establish solidarity of revolutionary action outside of all bourgeois politics. (“Third Resolution: Nature of the Political Action of the Proletariat”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 2, 52)
And:
the organisation of labour is the indispensable condition for the real and complete emancipation of the worker… leaving the details of positive organisation to the practice of the Social Revolution, we intend to organise and unify resistance on a vast scale. The strike is for us a precious means of struggle, but we have no illusions about its economic results. We accept it as a product of the antagonism between labour and capital, necessarily having the consequence of making workers more and more aware of the abyss which exists between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, strengthening the workers’ organisation, and preparing, as a result of ordinary economic struggles, the proletariat for the great and final revolutionary struggle which, destroying all privilege and all class distinction, will give the worker the right to enjoy the full product of his labour, and thereby the means of developing in the collectivity all his intellectual, material and moral powers. (“Fourth Resolution: Organisation of Labour Resistance – Statistics”, Op. Cit., 52-3)
The creation of revolutionary anarchism as a distinct social movement in 1872 saw the idea of workers’ organisations forged in the struggle against capitalism being the means of replacing it at its heart. This echoed the ideas championed by Bakunin who argued that “for the International to be a real power, it must be able to organize within its ranks the immense majority of the proletariat of Europe and America”, with the “international organization of economic conflict against capitalism as the true objective of this association.” Bakunin on Anarchism, 293, 298-9) The following year saw him argue that “the sole means of opposing the reactionary forces of the state” was the “organising of the revolutionary force of the people” and that the proletariat “must enter the International en masse, form factory, artisan, and agrarian sections, and unite them into local federations” for “the sake of its own liberation.” Opposing the idea that workers had to ignore political issues, he pointed to Germany where a section of the movement there had argued workers “were supposed to disengage themselves systematically from all political and social concerns and questions about the state, property, and so forth” but this had “completely subordinated the proletariat to the bourgeoisie which exploits it and for which it was to remain an obedient and mindless tool.” Workers had to organise, discuss and act on the economic terrain and only this would create a revolution which would see “an end to all masters and to domination of every kind, and the free construction of popular life in accordance with popular needs, not from above downward, as in the state, but from below upward, by the people themselves, dispensing with all governments and parliaments – a voluntary alliance of agricultural and factory worker associations, communes, provinces, and nations.” The future socialist society would be based on the organisations created in this fight against exploitation and oppression now, in other words a “federal organisation, from below upward, of workers’ associations, groups, communes, districts, and ultimately, regions and nations”. (Statism and Anarchy, 156, 51, 174, 33, 13)
This was also the message Bakunin stressed in his “Letter to the Comrades of the Jura Federation” written in October of the following year indicating his retirement from politics due to his health:
Above all, now is the time for the organization of the forces of the proletariat. But this organization must be the task of the proletariat itself... The battle that you will have to sustain will be terrible. But do not allow yourselves to be discouraged and know that in spite of the immense material resources of our adversaries, your final triumph is assured if you faithfully fulfill these two conditions: adhere firmly to the great and all-embracing principle of the people’s liberty, without which equality and solidarity would be falsehoods, Organize ever more strongly the practical militant solidarity of the workers of all trades in all countries, and remember that infinitely weak as you may be as individuals in isolated localities or countries, you will constitute an immense irresistible force when organized and united in the universal collectivity. (Bakunin on Anarchism, 352-3)
However, in the years following the labour and socialist movements tended away of the ideas which had predominated within the International towards a parliamentarianism inspired by Marx and expressed – apparently successfully in Germany by the Social Democrats (in the longer term, Bakunin’s warnings were shown to be prescient).
Anarchists across the world sought to apply their ideas in different ways, some developments being less consistent with previous ideas than other, some being a dead-end (attempts at insurrection in Italy, “propaganda by the deed”). The most significant development after Bakunin’s death in 1876 was the development of anarchist-communism, initially in the Italian Federation of the International but soon spreading internationally. This took many years but by 1880 anarchist-communism had more-or-less replaced anarchist-collectivism within the movement (with the notable exception of Spain).
This change from collectivism to communism is often considered to have two main features.
First, in terms of the future free society, it replaced the collectivist notion of distribution of goods by labour expended (to each according to their deeds) with one based on free access (to each according to their needs). Both based themselves on common ownership of the means of production (workplaces, land, etc.) but communist-anarchists extended this to the products of production.
Second, and more importantly for this discussion, the collectivist focus on the labour movement was replaced by one which favoured “propaganda by the deed” (namely, individual acts of violence and a rejection of unions as inherently reformist and bureaucratic.
While the first difference is correct if somewhat exaggerated (James Guillaume, a leading collectivist, had suggested in 1876 that collectivism could evolve towards communism once productive powers had matured enough to allow free access), the second is not. In reality, communist-anarchists did not have a single perspective on the question of strategy. While some in the 1880s, undoubtedly, did express a fascination with ultra-revolutionary rhetoric (“dynamite bluster”) and did dismiss the labour movement, many others – including leading figures like Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta – did not.
Here we concentrate on the latter as they proved to be correct and reflected the mainstream of the revolutionary anarchist tradition before and after this period.
In the years during which communism started to replace collectivism, an orientation towards the labour movement remained as reflected in resolutions passed in August 1877 at a conference of delegates from the French sections in Chaux-de-Fonds:
5th resolution – The French Federation resolves that it will take advantage of all popular movements to develop as far as possible its collectivist and anarchist programme, but it calls upon the groups that make it up not to compromise their forces for the benefit of a victory for a bourgeois party.
6th resolution – In the event that strikes break out in places where the French sections have influence, the sections of the French Federation should take advantage of the circumstance to give the strike a revolutionary socialist character, by urging the strikers to end their position as wage-workers by taking possession of the instruments of work by force. (quoted by James Guillaume, L’Internationale, documents et souvenirs [Paris: Stock, 1910] IV, 248-9)
The Lyons workers’ Congress in early 1878 saw libertarians raise a four-point programme: “the complete separation from all bourgeois politics; the organization of trades unions for revolutionary ends; the creation of propaganda and study groups; and the federation of these trades unions and study groups in order to exploit areas of popular agitation and direct them to revolutionary ends.” (David Stafford, From Anarchism to Reformism [London School of Economics: London, 1971], 112) While the resolutions– Kropotkin, amongst others, helped to prepare them – were not passed (parliamentarianism held sway), the anarchist who raised them (Ballivet) ended his speech with a proto-syndicalist perspective which is worth quoting:
I shall try to say, in a few words, what tactics we would like to see adopted by our fellow workers:
Stay as far as possible outside any expression of bourgeois society;
On the terrain of trade associations, definitively pursue the formation of unions; these unions, however, should not only propose the defence of wages, but the abolition of wage labour, by the collective appropriation of all means of production;
Create everywhere mixed circles of social studies for the propaganda of our principles;
To federate from the bottom up these unions and these circles to extend as far as possible their internal and external means of action to try to immerse us in what is the product of popular activity, attempting to give to its efforts a broad and human goal.
In a word, to produce, in the very heart of today’s society, the organisation of the free society of the future; so that on the day when social development brings about the death of bourgeois society, the new society will be ready to replace it. (Ballivet, “La représentation du Prolétariat au Parlement”, La Vie Ouvrière, 5 May 1910, 533)
While often associated with Peter Kropotkin, in fact the replacement of collectivism with communism started while he was imprisoned in Russia and had gathered momentum by the time he had escaped his prison, went into exile in Western Europe and re-joined the federalist International in 1877. It was two years later before he started to use communism rather than collectivism but the same focus on economic organisation remained for, as he argued in 1879, “the best method of shaking” the State “would be to stir up the economic struggle”. The need was “to awaken... the strength of the people, destroying the old system and at the same time creating a new organisation of society” based on “the free federation of producer groups and the free federation of communes”. As with the collectivists, the revolution was seen by Kropotkin as “not be[ing] merely political, but will be an economic revolution as well and above all" with "the expropriation pure and simple of the present holders of the large landed estates, of the instruments of labour... by the cultivators, the workers’ organisations, and the agricultural and municipal communes. The task of expropriation must be carried out by the workers themselves in the towns and the countryside.” (“The Anarchist Idea from the Point of View of Its Practical Realisation”, Words of a Rebel, 225, 223, 222, 221)
While communist was displacing collectivism within anarchism, within the French labour movement there was also conflict between the anarchists and the Marxists over strategy (the latter also had started to call themselves “collectivists”). As in the International, the Marxists urged workers to take “political action” by means of a political party. For Kropotkin, taking part in elections meant socialists would water down their ideas and, if successful in the election, the workers would send “their best men” to become “stupefied in an environment where they will be unable to do anything”. Instead, socialists should “remain in the ranks of the people, working for the organisation of the workers’ forces, for the propaganda of communism, to revive in the despondent people the feeling of its strength”. A “sincere revolutionary” would not “exchange life amongst the people for the intrigues” of parliament or the municipal council and, by “participating in elections”, they “make themselves accomplices of this grand deception which consists in making the people believe that it is new laws which lead to progress, and that social institutions can be changed by legislators” and that “it is in parliament or in the municipal councils that the lever of the next revolution is to be found, and not in the initiative of the people themselves, in popular revolt.” This meant using the election period to “point out social iniquities and say how to remedy them -- by slaying forever the principle of individual property, as soon as the opportunity is given by the disorganisation of the central power.” They will “provide a glimpse of the possibility, the necessity of anti-authoritarian communism” and “boldly describe the means that the International will use to carry out its programme.” (“Les Élections”, Le Révolté, 25 December 1880)
Kropotkin’s paper, Le Révolté, constantly stressed the need for workers to organise and fight on the economic terrain and argued that “political action” hindered this essential work. For example, looking back to the possibilities of the late 1870s it lamented how the workers’ movement had been diverted into electioneering by Marxists:
Two years ago, an awakening occurred within the masses of the workers in France... We believed then that, once the torpor had been shaken off, a vast workers’ organisation would be set up encompassing everything; trade unions [chambres syndicales], co-operatives [corporations de metiers], unemployed workers, study groups etc., etc. -- a vast organisation animated by a single sentiment, the economic emancipation of the worker, pursuing a single goal, the war on capital in all its aspects!... We therefore dreamt of a strong workers’ organisation, welcoming into its bosom all the exploited and waging war against bourgeois exploitation, widely sowing the ideas of socialism and preparing for the social revolution. We saw the International Workers' Association being reborn everywhere from its ashes, and formidably standing up before the bourgeois world.
It did not happen [because Marxists used the movement to try and get elected]…
It is time, then, to put an end to this dismal comedy. Do French workers want to emancipate themselves from the yoke of capital? Do they want the next revolution to benefit them? Do they want it to be more than just a change of government? That it is a social revolution?
—Let them reconstitute the international -- the international, pursuing the defence of the interests of labour, the International waging war on Capital... in order to abolish it… The International Workers' Association, which inscribes the Social Revolution on its flag and prepares for this Revolution by struggle and action in the economic terrain, the Workers’ International and not a league of politicians. (“Le Parti Ouvrier Français”, Le Révolté, 5 February 1881)
An article written by Kropotkin in the same issue concluded that anarchists had “to organise the workers’ forces—not to make them a fourth party in Parliament but to make them a formidable ENGINE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITAL. We have to group workers of all trades with this single purpose: ‘war on capitalist exploitation!’ And we must prosecute this war relentlessly, every day, by the strike, by agitation, by every revolutionary means.” The workers must be “united into a single union” which would be “waging an unrelenting war on capital” in order to “emerge victorious, having crushed the tyrant of capital and State for good.” The need, he concluded, was to “build our league, the Workers’ League against exploiters of every kind!” (“Enemies of the People”, Words of a Rebel, 234) A few months later the paper urged direct action to secure reduced hours rather than relying on the passing of the ten-hour law:
It is obvious that the great mass of French workers understand perfectly that it is not by laws that work in the factories will be made less excessive. Indeed, it is certain, and the experience of England, the United States, Switzerland, etc., etc., have proved it: it is not by legislation that work hours can be reduced; it is by the strike, when it is supported by a strong national and international workers’ organisation. It is essential for French workers to re-establish a militant organisation, with the purpose of defending the interests of labour. When they lay the first foundations of this organisation; when the workers' organisation sets its the goal, not of making its most active members deputies and senators, impotent and traitors – but the struggle against capital by the strike and by force; and when this organisation is established internally – which, of course, will give a new impetus to the organisation of workers in all countries – then the hours of work will be reduced, and not only to ten, but to nine, to eight; and not only will the hours of work be reduced, but the working masses will have their own organisation, ready to act in the interest of the worker, the day when events bring about the revolution.
The essential thing is therefore to begin the grouping of the workers' forces, not in a party of candidates, but in an international party of struggle against capital. (“Les Heures de Travail”, Le Révolté, 14 May 1881)
At the infamous 1881 London Congress which many (incorrectly) link to the rise of terrorism as a tactic within anarchism (which became the definition of “propaganda by the deed” in spite of it originally meaning something quite different), Kropotkin raised the same position his paper had advocated and which reflected the Collectivist-Anarchist views raised in the International:
We believe that, in order for the next revolution not to be conjured away by the bourgeoisie, it must deal a decisive blow to individual property: it must proceed, from the very beginning, with taking possession, by the workers, of all social wealth, to put it in common. This revolution can only be made by the workers themselves: it can only be made when the workers of the towns and the peasants, rebelling against all power, in each locality, in each town, in each village, themselves seize the wealth now belonging to the exploiters… For this it is necessary that the great mass of workers not only constitute itself outside the bourgeoisie, but that, during the period which will precede the revolution, it must have its own action… and this kind of action can only be conducted when there exists a strong workers' organisation… It is the people, only the people, who can overthrow the regime of individual property.
As soon as this is admitted, the character of the organisation which we have to form follows immediately. It is the mass of workers we must seek to organise. We, the small revolutionary groups, must submerge ourselves in the organisation of the people, draw inspiration from their hatreds, from their aspirations, and help them to translate those aspirations and these hatreds into actions. When the mass of workers is organised and we are with them, to strengthen their revolutionary idea, to germinate within them the spirit of revolt against capital – and the opportunities for that will not be lacking – then we shall have the right to hope that the next revolution will not be conjured away, as previous revolutions have been: that it will be the social revolution. (“Le Congrès International de Londres”, Le Révolté, 6 August 1881)
While many delegates advocated workers’ organisations and struggle as a key aspect of anarchism, this position was not reflected in the resolutions passed at the Congress. These, as Kropotkin noted later, where at odds with the perspective he and his paper had advocated and subsequently he put pen to paper to reiterate his arguments in favour of working within the labour movement.
Significantly, he pointed to the example of the Spanish anarchist movement as one to follow:
one hundred and forty solidly organised trades groups and federations… sections of workers of the same trade… inspired by the same hopes, who have a common enemy, the boss, and a common goal – that of liberating themselves from the yoke of capital: in short, real organisations… Faithful to the anarchist traditions of the International, intelligent, active, energetic men… remain within the working class, they struggle with it, for it. They bring the assistance of their energy to the workers’ organisation and work to build this force that will crush capital on the day of revolution: the revolutionary trades union… that… overthrows the State, proclaims the free Commune and simultaneously expropriates all the current holders of social capital. That being the goal of the next revolution, everything that we do before the revolution must lead directly to this end… The enemy we must strike in the next revolution being capital, let us base our entire organisation on the struggle against capital and its supporters…
We therefore cannot recommend too much to French workers that they return, like their Spanish brothers, to the traditions of the International: to organise themselves outside of every political party, by inscribing upon their banner: solidarity in the struggle against capital! (“The Workers’ Movement in Spain”, Words of a Rebel, 237-9)
He returned to the importance of the workers’ movement in a two-part article in December 1881:
To be able to make the revolution, the mass of workers must be organised, and resistance and the strike are excellent means for organising workers. They have an immense advantage over those advocated at present (worker candidates, forming a workers’ political party, etc.), namely not diverting the movement, but keeping it in constant struggle with the principal enemy, the capitalist…. It is a question of organising in every town resistance societies for all trades, to create resistance funds and to fight against the exploiters, to unify the workers’ organisations of each town and trade and to put them in contact with those of other towns, to federate them across France, to federate them across borders, internationally. Workers’ solidarity must no longer be an empty word but must be practiced every day, between all trades, between all nations...
The goal of the revolution being the expropriation of the holders of society’s wealth, it is against these holders that we must organise. We must make every effort to create a vast workers’ organisation that pursues this goal. The organisation of resistance to and war on capital must be the principal objective of the workers’ organisation, and its activity must be directed, not at the futile conflicts of bourgeois politics, but at the struggle, by all the means found useful, against the holders of society’s wealth—the strike being an excellent means of organisation and one of the most powerful weapons in this struggle. (“Workers’ Organisation”, Words of a Rebel, 247-250)
Like Bakunin, Kropotkin stressed that organising on the economic terrain did not exclude discussing political ideas:
The International was born from strikes; at bottom, it was a strikers’ organisation, until the day when the bourgeoisie, assisted by the ambitious, managed to entice a part of the Association into parliamentary struggles. And yet it is precisely this organisation which managed to develop in its sections and Congresses these board principles of modern socialism which today are our strength; for – with all due respect to the so-called scientific socialists – up to now there has not been a single idea uttered about socialism which has not been expressed in the Congresses of the International. The use of the strike did not prevent the Sections of the International from grasping the social question in all its complexity. On the contrary, it helped them as it was used to spread the idea amongst the masses at the same time. (Op. Cit., 249)
He also thought that all genuine socialists — whether anarchist, Marxist or some other school — could unite around economic struggle in spite of differences in views on, for example, taking part in elections, the nature of a social revolution or what a future socialist society would be like (albeit a hope which Marxist dogmatism on the importance of “political action” always undermined):
As for the immediate present, we have a number of areas of common action, on which all groups can already act in accord. It is the terrain of the struggle against capital, and that of the struggle against the supporter of capital — the government. Whatever our ideas on the future organisation of society, there is one point that has been accepted by all sincere socialists: the expropriation of capital must result from the forthcoming revolution. Therefore, any struggle that prepares this expropriation must be supported unanimously by all the socialist groups, to whatever hue they belong. And the more the different groups meet on this common terrain and on all those which similar circumstances indicate to us, the better the common understanding of what to do during the revolution can be established. (“Theory and Practice”, Op. Cit., 185)
Kropotkin’s advocating of anarchist involvement in the labour movement – like his other anarchist writing – came to an end when he was imprisoned after the Lyons show trial in early 1883. That year saw the founding of the anarchist International Working People’s Association (IWPA) in Pittsburgh. Created in part by Marxists disillusioned with the results of “political action”, a resolution was passed which echoed the ideas expounded by European anarchists since late 1860s:
In consideration that we see in trades-unions advocating progressive principles – the abolishment of the wage-system – the corner-stone of a better and more just system of society than the present; and
In consideration, further, that these trades-unions consist of an army of robbed and disinherited fellow-sufferers, and brothers, called to overthrow the economic establishments of the present time for the purpose of general and free cooperation: Be it, therefore (Quoted in Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe [Chicago: F.J. Schulte & Company, 1889], 72)
The IWPA made firm roots in Chicago where militants saw unions as both means to fight and replace capitalism. Albert Parsons wrote that the “International recognises in the Trades Unions the embryonic group of the future ‘free society.’ Every Trades Union is, nolens volens, an autonomous commune in the process of incubation. The Trades Union is a necessity of capitalistic production, and will yet take its place by superseding it under the system of universal free co-operation.” (“The International”, The Alarm, 4 April 1885) Likewise for Lucy Parsons:
“We hold that the granges, trade-unions, Knights of Labor assemblies, etc., are the embryonic groups of the ideal anarchistic society.” (“Lucy E. Parsons on Anarchy”, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, 110)
These ideas were applied in the Central Labor Union and the Eight-Hour movement before being cut short by the repression which occurred when a bomb was thrown at the police breaking up a peaceful rally held to protest strikers being killed by police. While the thrower of the bomb was never identified, eight leading IWPA activists were tried and five were sentenced to death (one committed suicide the day before they were set to be hanged) and three were imprisoned. The trial no more than class justice (“Gentlemen of the jury, convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society” proclaimed the prosecuting attorney) and all defendants were pardoned a few years later.
Released from prison in 1886, Kropotkin returned to the movement and continued to write and speak on anarchist-communism. In 1889, he pointed to the example of the London Dock Strike as an example of why anarchist participation in labour movement was so important as a means of producing a revolutionary situation. He also noted the example of the IWPA: “Were not our Chicago Comrades right in despising politics, and saying the struggle against robbery must be carried on in the workshop and the street, by deeds not words?” (“The Chicago Anniversary,” Freedom, December 1891) Repeating his arguments from the 1870s and 1880s, he stressed the importance of the labour movement for anarchist activity:
the chief point to be achieved now, is to make the Anarchist ideas permeate the great labour movement which is so rapidly growing in Europe and America; and to do so by all those means, and only by such means, which are in strict accordance with our own… No one can underrate the importance of this labour movement for the coming revolution. It will be those agglomerations of wealth producers which will have to reorganise production on new social bases. They will have to organise the life of the nation and the use which it will make of the hitherto accumulated riches and means of production. They – the labourers, grouped together – not the politicians. (“Commemoration of the Chicago Martyrs”, Direct Struggle Against Capital, 344)
The class struggle itself created the means by which class society could be ended:
for the achievement of the social revolution it was necessary that the popular spirit find new forms of social organisation – forms which could not be representative government, nor a State… but something completely new arising from the needs of modern production and distribution…. Something that will emerge from the struggle of the workers against capital, from their national and international unions, from the [common] interests which exist amongst the workers of the two worlds, outside of the present political forms, from the ideas germinating in their midst. (“International Congresses and the Congress of London”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 1 No. 3, 65)
Kropotkin argued for “the international union between the workingmen” and that “there remains still the necessity of consolidating that union and of making it a powerful weapon ― both in the conflicts between Labour and Capital, and in international conflicts.” What was “required now is an International Federation of all the Trade Unions all over the World” for “the great struggle between Labour and Capital ― Labour endeavouring to free itself from the yoke of Capital”. This “requires that the labourers should offer to the capitalist a compact mass ― united, not subdivided by their political opinions” so that “the workers all over the world… support each other irrespective of political opinions and nationality, in the direct struggle of Labour against Capital.” (“Letter to French and British trade union delegates”, Direct Struggle Against Capital. 360)
In 1906 he summarised his views for anarchists in Russia:
in the first attempt at the foundation of the future order ― whether in villages, amongst the peasantry, or in a city or province that declares the commune ― the organisation of life and production on general communist principles will be the responsibility of workers’ unions, and that these alone can execute the tremendous task of the reconstruction of industry… anarchists look to the workers’ unions as cells of the future social order and as a powerful means for the preparation of the social revolution, which is not confined to a change of political regime but also transforms the current forms of economic life… it will be the death of the revolution if the peasants and workers are convinced to wait for a change in economic conditions to arrive through parliament and not through their own activities.
It is the responsibility of anarchists to be amongst the workers and to prevent the political parties from exploiting the workers’ movement for the benefit of parliamentary tranquillity. They have to produce revolutionary thought in workers’ circles in order to make the peasant and worker unions into a force that could initiate, in practice and on the spot, a well-planned mass expropriation… workers’ unions are a force for the future organisation [of society], and in the present revolutionary times have proven to be a revolutionary power… the workers’ unions should never become a weapon for political parliamentary parties; that their purpose is the direct struggle with capital and its protectors in the government and not to compromise with them in Parliament. (“The Russian Revolution and Anarchism”, Direct Struggle Against Capital, 467-9)
A few years later, he reiterated his position to comrades in Britain and France to counter claims which suggested he was indifferent to the importance of the labour movement for anarchists:
Workers organisations are the real force capable of accomplishing the social revolution, after the awakening of the proletariat has been achieved, first, by individual actions, then by collective actions of strikes, revolts which are increasingly widened… we see that those anarchists who have always thought that the labour movement, organised by occupation, for the direct struggle against Capital – today in France it is called syndicalism and “direct action” – constitutes real strength, capable of bringing about and achieving the social revolution, by the egalitarian transformation of consumption and production, those of us who have thought in this way for the last thirty-five years have simply remained faithful to the guiding idea of the International” (“Anarchists and Unions”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 3, 72)
Kropotkin returned to this subject in the last book published during his lifetime. He stressed that the “fundamental idea” of “the federalist International” was the “anti-authoritarian organisation of the workers forces for the purpose of the direct struggle of Labour against Capital to achieve the social revolution.” This was because the “labour movement, which permits the workers to sense their solidarity outside the futile agitations of political parties, to gauge their forces and their capabilities in a more effective way than in the fleeting mechanism of elections, contributes greatly to preparing these [anarchist] ideas.” (Modern Science and Anarchy, 157, 174) This creates the social organisation of the future which the State simply cannot be:
Developed in the course of history to establish and maintain the monopoly of land ownership in favour of one class—which, for that reason, became the ruling class par excellence—what means can the State provide to abolish this monopoly that the working class could not find in its own strength and groups? Then perfected during the course of the nineteenth century to ensure the monopoly of industrial property, trade, and banking to new enriched classes, to which the State was supplying “arms” cheaply by stripping the land from the village communes and crushing the cultivators by tax—what advantages could the State provide for abolishing these same privileges? Could its governmental machine, developed for the creation and upholding of these privileges, now be used to abolish them? Would not the new function require new organs? And these new organs would they not have to be created by the workers themselves, in their unions, their federations, completely outside the State? (Op. Cit., 164)
As well as the de-radicalising effects of electioneering, Marxist “political action” also meant “prevent[ing], instead of aiding, the mind of the workers progressing towards the search for new forms of life that would be their own—that is in our eyes a historic mistake which borders on the criminal.” (Op. Cit., 189-90)
This is also why a great number of anarchists, since the beginnings of the International to the present, have taken an active part in the workers organisations formed for the direct struggle of Labour against Capital. This struggle, while serving far more powerfully than any indirect action to secure some improvements in the life of the worker and opening up the eyes of the workers to the evil done to society by capitalist organisation and by the State that upholds it, this struggle also awakes in the worker thoughts concerning the forms of consumption, production and direct exchange between those concerned, without the intervention of the capitalist and the State. (Op. Cit., 169)
Similar ideas were expressed by other anarchist-communists. The leading Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote a summation of communist-anarchist principles in 1884 which reiterated this perspective on labour organisations as means to both fight and replace capitalism and the State:
Strikes, resistance societies, labor organizations… all of these the International approves and endorses… the chief concern of Internationalists… will have to be giving encouragement to the masses to assume direct, immediate possession… of lands, housing, machinery; and every other instrument of labor… The communes… plus the crafts and trades bodies, that is, the gamut of those engaged in the same work, will be the two hubs around which the revolution will revolve, the two factors that will carry out the expropriation and from which the re-organization of production, consumption, and exchange will radiate…
Those assets that must become the whole of humanity’s common inheritance shall be directly under the control of those who are located within their reach – under the control of the commune, if they are consumer goods; under the control of the corporations, which operate them, in the case of instruments of production.
The peasants, who shall be encouraged to organize themselves into farmers’ corporations, shall take possession of the land. Banding together into corporations, workers plying the same trade are to take possession of the machinery, tools, and premises involved in their trade…
The International is made up of many local or trades societies, which generally assume the name sections, but which it might please their members to refer to as circles, groups, corporations, etc.
The various sections in a given locality normally band together into local federations; the sections and federations from the same region usually band together into regional federations and so on. (“Program and Organization of the International Working Men’s Association”, The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, 58-63)
During his time in Argentina (1885-1889) Malatesta applied these ideas within the labour movement, being involved in strikes and the helping to found the country’s first militant trade union and ensuring anarchism played a dominant role in the labour movement for decades to come. On his return to Europe, he continued to explain the importance of the labour movement in anarchist theory and activity:
The strike and, even more, the strike’s preparations unite workers as brothers, get them used to reflecting upon their conditions, open their eyes to the causes of social wretchedness, and, while uniting them in the pursuit of immediate gains, prepare them for the future emancipation… while they wage the daily struggle of labor resistance, the resistance societies must also aim at a higher and more general target: the transformation of the system of ownership and production. They must prepare the workers for the great fight and equip them to someday perform those functions in the life of society that are carried out today, to the workers’ detriment, by capitalists and rulers. (“Resistance Societies”, Complete Works of Malatesta III: 107)
Anarchists, he constantly argued, had to organise to influence trade unionism to “approach more and more to Anarchism and make the Revolution” otherwise it would “modify itself, assume a bureaucratic character, adapt itself to the claims of capitalism, and become a factor in social conservation.” In the face of this danger, anarchists “must take a more and more active part in the Trade Union movement, strenuously oppose the formation in its midst a bureaucracy of paid and permanent official, propagate our tactics, fight against every idea of conciliation and compromise with the enemy, as well as against every tendency towards the pride and selfishness of individual Trades Unions.” This will “enable Syndicalism to retain its revolutionary character and become an increasingly powerful instrument of emancipation.” (“Anarchists and the Situation”, Freedom, June 1909) As he summarised in 1925:
there is no-one, or almost no-one amongst us who would deny the usefulness of and the need for the labour movement as a mass means of material and moral advancement, as a fertile ground for propaganda and as an indispensable force for the social transformation that is our goal. There is no longer anyone who does not understand what the workers’ organisation means, to us anarchists more than to anyone, believing as we do that the new social organisation must not and cannot be imposed by a new government by force but must result from the free cooperation of all… everyone, or almost everyone, is in agreement on the usefulness and the need for the anarchists to take an active part in the labour movement and to be its supporters and promoters (“Syndicalism and Anarchism”, The Anarchist Revolution, 23)
Unsurprisingly, Malatesta also argued that “the Labour movement can prepare those groups of technical workers who in the revolution will take upon themselves the organisation of production and exchange for the advantage of all, beyond and against all governmental power.” (“Anarchism and Syndicalism”, The Method of Freedom, 338) Hence the “task of anarchists is to work to strengthen the revolutionary conscience of organised workers and to remain in the Unions as anarchists.” (Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, 114)
These ideas were also expounded by Emma Goldman and others associated with Mother Earth in America. Thus we find her regularly lecturing on syndicalism, direct action and the general strike as well as writing on labour issues, including a two-part article on Syndicalism in 1913 which was later issued as a pamphlet:
Syndicalism, like the old trade unions, fights for immediate gains, but it is not stupid enough to pretend that labor can expect humane conditions from inhumane economic arrangements in society. Thus it merely wrests from the enemy what it can force him to yield; on the whole, however, Syndicalism aims at, and concentrates its energies upon, the complete overthrow of the wage system... Syndicalism is, in essence, the economic expression of Anarchism... Like Anarchism, Syndicalism prepares the workers along direct economic lines, as conscious factors in the great struggles of to-day, as well as conscious factors in the task of reconstructing society along autonomous industrial lines... One of the most vital efforts of Syndicalism is to prepare the workers, now, for their role in a free society... so that when labor finally takes over production and distribution, the people will be fully prepared to manage successfully their own affairs. (“Syndicalism: The Modern Menace to Capitalism”, Red Emma Speaks, 91-99)
This means that the notion of Jacqueline Jones that Goldman “expressed little faith in labor unions – indeed, one of her favorite themes was ‘the cancer of trade unionism and the corruption of its leaders’” simply misunderstands anarchist politics. (Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical [New York: Basic Books, 2017], 247-8) Being opposed to certain aspects of reformist trade unionism does not mean opposing unions as such – it would be like saying, for example, that the arguments expressed against the American Federation of Labor by the Industrial Workers of the World (a revolutionary industrial union) means that it is against unions!
As can be seen, much the same can be said of many – if not most – accounts of anarchism created by non-anarchists.
Revolutionary anarchists successfully applied their ideas on the labour movement across the world, building militant and independent unions committed to direct action and solidarity on the economic terrain. In France, revolutionary syndicalism developed in 1890s which eschewed the anarchist label in spite of most of its leading militants being anarchists. From France, its ideas spread and inspired similar radical unions across the globe. As Kropotkin summarised:
The working men at the Congresses of the International... discussed the fundamental question of a revolutionary reconstruction of society, and launched the idea which has since proved so fruitful – the idea of a General Strike. As to the political form which a society reorganised by a social revolution might take, the Latin Federations of the International... pronounced themselves in favour of an organisation based on the federation of free Communes and agricultural territories... The two main principles of modern Syndicalism – “direct action,” as they say now, and the elaboration of new forms of social life based on the federation of the Labour Unions – these two principles were at the outset the leading principles of the International Working Men’s Association. (“Syndicalism and Anarchism”, Direct Struggle Against Capital, 405)
Given the central role unions have played in the development of revolutionary anarchism, in the International and beyond, an obvious question arises – what is the difference between anarchism and syndicalism? We discuss this in section J.3.9 but it is worthwhile going over the main ones again here which relate to whether trade unionism is sufficient in itself.
First, though, it must be noted that not all communist-anarchists supported working within the labour movement. Italian anti-organisationalists, most obviously, rejected this along with other aspects of mainstream anarchist-communism associated with Kropotkin and Malatesta. Likewise, not all those who embrace a syndicalist strategy are anarchists. Marxists, for example, have sometimes advocated syndicalism or industrial unionism (for example, Big Bill Haywood, Daniel de Leon and James Connelly). In addition, some revolutionary syndicalists reject other theories and consider syndicalism as self-sufficient while anarcho-syndicalists are those syndicalists who are also anarchists, seeking a fusion of anarchism and syndicalism and the creation of revolutionary unions based on anarchist ideas and tactics.
So what are the differences between revolutionary anarchism and syndicalism considered in its widest sense as revolutionary unionism?
Syndicalists tended to see the future socialist society organised almost exclusively around the unions. Anarchists tend to see this as just part of a wider-self-managed socialist system. As Kropotkin put it in 1913:
The idea of independent Communes for the territorial groupings, and vast federations of trade unions for groupings by social functions—the two interwoven and providing support to each to meet the needs of society—allowed the anarchists to conceptualise in a real, concrete, way the possible organisation of a liberated society. They had only to add groupings by personal affinities—groupings without number, infinitely varied, long-lasting or fleeting, emerging according to the needs of the moment for all possible purposes—groupings that we already see arising in today’s society, outside of political and vocational groups.
These three kinds of groupings, covering each other like a network, would thus allow the satisfaction of all social needs: consumption, production and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection against aggression, mutual aid, territorial defence; the satisfaction, finally, of scientific, artistic, literacy, entertainment needs. Everything always full of life and always ready to respond with new adaptations to the new needs and the new influences of the social and intellectual environment. (Modern Science and Anarchy, 164-5)
These groupings had their equivalents today, most obviously the trade unions becoming productive associations. However, the community groupings (Communes) would likewise be created in the social struggle in the shape of popular assemblies, like the “sections” of the Great French Revolution which Kropotkin pointed to in his book on it. As for personal affinities, this today would be the anarchist federation amongst others. Yet, even this is not completely distinct as syndicalist unions have organised community struggles such as rent strikes (see section J.5.1) and syndicalists formed groups around specific papers to spread their ideas.
More importantly, syndicalists see labour unions as sufficient in themselves to achieve a self-managed socialist society while revolutionary anarchists considered this as optimistic given the role and nature of unions within capitalism. In other words, both collectivist and communist anarchists saw the need for anarchists to organise as anarchists to influence the class struggle and work within labour organisations to promote libertarian ideas.
Bakunin indicated the need and role of anarchist organisation as follows:
The Alliance is the necessary complement to the International. But the International and the Alliance, while having the same ultimate aims, perform different functions. The International endeavours to unify the working masses, the millions of workers, regardless of nationality and national boundaries or religious and political beliefs, into one compact body; the Alliance, on the other hand, tries to give these masses a really revolutionary direction. The programs of one and the other, without being in any way opposed, differ only in the degree of their revolutionary development. The International contains in germ, but only in germ, the whole program of the Alliance. The program of the Alliance represents the fullest unfolding of the International. (Bakunin on Anarchism, 157)
Unlike working within bourgeois political structures via elections as Marxists argued, unions expressed the class antagonism at the heart of capitalist society and as such could be utilised for socialist ends. As Kropotkin noted:
“When entering Union Life, we certainly can get carried away by our surroundings, as in Parliament.
“Only the difference between a union and parliament is that one is an organisation for fighting Capital, while the other (parliament, of course) is an organisation for maintaining the State, Authority. One sometimes becomes revolutionary, the other never does. One (parliament) represents centralisation, the other (the union) represents autonomy, etc., etc. One (parliament) is repugnant to us on principle, the other is only a modifiable and modified aspect of a struggle that most of us approve of. (“Anarchists and Unions”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 3, 71)
So one of the tasks of anarchists was to organise to help modify the unions to make them revolutionary for this does not automatically happen:
My opinion is absolutely that which Malatesta has expressed… The syndicate is absolutely necessary. form of workingmen’s groups that permits of maintaining the direct struggle against Capital, without falling into Parliamentarism. But evidently it does not take that trend mechanically since we have in Germany, France and England syndicates rallying to Parliamentarism and in Germany orthodox syndicalists who are very powerful, etc. The other element is necessary, the element of which Malatesta speaks and which Bakunin has always practiced. (Kropotkin, “To Luigi Bertoni”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2, No. 3, 160)
Malatesta, as Kropotkin indicated, was the anarchist who argued most frequently on the importance of anarchist groups and that unions are not sufficient to create an anarchist society. As he summarised:
Constant experience in all countries shows that Labour movements, which always commence as movements of protest and revolt, and are animated at the beginning by a broad spirit of progress and human fraternity, tend very soon to degenerate; and in proportion as they acquire strength, they become egoistic, conservative, occupied exclusively with interests immediate and restricted, and develop within themselves a bureaucracy which, as in all such cases, has no other object than to strengthen and aggrandise itself… Syndicalism, in spite of all the declarations of its most ardent supporters, contains in itself, by the very nature of its function, all the elements of degeneration which have corrupted Labour movements in the past. In effect, being a movement which proposes to defend the present interests of the workers, it must necessarily adapt itself to existing conditions, and take into consideration interests which come to the fore in society as it exists to-day. (“Anarchism and Syndicalism”, The Method of Freedom, 338-9)
In short, the “revolutionary spirit must be introduced, developed, and maintained by the constant actions of revolutionaries who work from within their ranks as well as from outside, but it cannot be the normal, natural definition of the Trade Unions function.” (Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, 117) The role of anarchists in the unions was clear:
In my opinion anarchists must not want the Trade Unions to be anarchist, but they must act within their ranks in favour of anarchist aims, as individuals, as groups and as federations of groups… the anarchist groups should not expect the workers’ organisations to act as if they were anarchist, but should make every effort to induce them to approximate as much as possible to the anarchist method… Anarchists in the Unions should struggle for them to be open to all workers whatever their views or party affiliations on the one condition: of solidarity in the struggle against the bosses; they should be opposed to the corporative spirit and any ambitions to a monopoly of organisation or work. They should prevent the Unions from serving as an instrument to be manipulated by politicians for electoral or other authoritarian ends; they should advocate and practice direct action, decentralisation, autonomy, and individual initiative; they should make special efforts to help members learn how to participate directly in the life of the organisation and to dispense with leaders and full-time functionaries.
In other words, they should remain anarchists, always in close touch with anarchists, and remembering that the workers’ organisation is not the end, but just one of the means, however important, in preparing the way for the achievement of anarchism. (Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution, 26-7)
However, this critical perspective on the limitations of unions as revolutionary bodies should not be used to obscure the key point, namely that anarchists support unions, that is workers organising to defend their interests, and seek to apply our ideas within the labour movement. Thus Malatesta, in spite of his criticisms of syndicalism, stressed that he had “never stopped… pushing comrades to the path that syndicalists, forgetting a glorious past, call new, but the first anarchists had already established and followed within the international.” (Maurizio Antonioli (ed.), The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907) [Alberta: Black Cat Press, 2009], 122) It, in effect, was a “syndicalism-plus” strategy – supporting syndicalist tactics (i.e., working within the unions) but recognising their limitations and organising as anarchists to overcome them.
So the similarities and differences between revolutionary anarchism and syndicalism can be seen. Both stress the importance of organising workers and waging the class struggle on the economic terrain, both recognise that the organs created in the struggle against capitalism can replace it, both draw upon the ideas raised by the Federalist-wing of the International. The former, however, sees syndicalism as an aspect of a wider perspective while the latter sees syndicalism as sufficient in itself. The history of labour movements – even syndicalist ones – suggests that the anarchists were right.
More could be written. We may have concentrated here on a few big names but always remember that the life-and-soul of the anarchism has been and is the activists across the globe who create the movements which ensure these people are remembered. It their activity which the famous writers generalise and popularise to a wider audience, it is that which makes anarchy a possibility rather than just a nice idea. Likewise, for space reasons we have ignored other aspects of this issue – such as the general strike (see “Anarchism and the General Strike”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 3 No. 1) or current anarchist strategies within the labour movement (see section J.5.4).
However, enough has been highlighted to show that anarchists think that the State and Capital needs to be replaced by organisations created by and for workers. For Proudhon, these were workplace and credit associations (co-operatives) but revolutionary anarchists – whether collectivist or communist – extended this to unions and similar organisations created in the class struggle (workers’ councils – or soviets, in Russian – or factory committees). This means that there is a significant overlap between revolutionary anarchism and syndicalism, so showing that those Marxists who insist in making a distinction between the two are simply showing their ignorance of the ideas and history of both.
Likewise, the all-too-common notion that “propaganda by the deed” (individual acts of terrorism) is somehow the defining “anarchist” tactic is clearly false. In fact, such acts are very much at odds with the anarchist tactics developed in the international by Bakunin (amongst others) and later propagated by the likes of Kropotkin, Malatesta, Goldman and others. Understanding anarchist views on unions shows the ignorance of statements like this by Lenin allegedly said to Kropotkin:
We do not need individual terroristic attempts and the anarchists should have understood long ago. Only with the masses, through the masses... All other methods, including those of the anarchists, have been relegated to the limbo of history. (Quoted in Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution [New York/London: Verso, 2017], 57-8)
Kropotkin, if this account is correct (which is doubtful), was apparently too polite to point out that Lenin clearly knew nothing of his ideas as he had been arguing precisely this for over five decades and that this reflected the position of Bakunin in the First International. For example, in 1891 (nearly three decades before this meeting) he had stressed against those few infatuated with individual acts that “Revolution, above all, is a popular movement” and “revolutions are made by the people” as “an edifice founded on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of explosives”. For “the revolution not to be conjured away, it is necessary that the anarchist and communist idea should penetrate the masses”. (“Agreement”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 3, 44-5) Sadly, Ali is as ignorant of anarchism as Lenin and felt no need to check his assertions against what Kropotkin actually argued – which is significant and explains why so many critiques of anarchism by Marxists are not worth bothering about as they simply repeat the false claims made before by their ideological leaders.
As proven, at the heart of revolutionary anarchism, indeed the mutualism which predated and influenced it, is collective activity – and awareness that solidarity is strength and that together we can achieve far more than we could ever do acting as individuals. Hence the anarchist support for unions as a means of fighting capitalism and the State and for replacing both.
This does not mean that anarchists are uncritical of unions, far from it. Anarchists have long recognised that they can degenerate into bureaucratic bodies in which the membership is subject to the decisions of a few officials (and how to empower members of such unions has been a constant theme of anarchist activity and analysis). However, this does not mean an opposition to unions as such nor – more importantly – what they represent: workers resisting the power of capital. If anarchists are critical of certain unions, it is because they fail to live up to their potential.
How best to work within unions is subject to much debate, debate which has changed over time as the unions themselves and the environment they operate within change. For example, faced with the tendency for even syndicalist unions to become reformist and bureaucratic and the incorporation of mainstream trade unions into post-war Keynesianism, communist-anarchists have developed their views on strategy within the labour movement accordingly. The recognition of the limitations of unions – as Malatesta stressed – meant an awareness that often workers in dispute are involved in a struggle not only against their exploiters but also against the official trade union structure and its officials (elected or not). This means that anarchists should be union members and take an active part (at the base) in its activities and struggles and combat tendencies which subordinate it to political action or parties:
The anarchist… must assist the daily struggle and agitation against oppressors and prejudices, sustain the spirit of revolt everywhere people feel oppressed and have the courage to revolt.
They must thwart the clever machinations of all parties, formerly allies but now hostile, who work to divert into authoritarian paths movements born as a revolt against the oppression of Capital and State. (Kropotkin, “The Anarchist Principle”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 3, 55)
As such, anarchists aim to work within the current unions to help their fellow members empower and transform themselves by means of rank-and-file groups or industrial networks in the workplace to supplement official actions and structures until such time as they can transform or replace them. The key thing is not unions as such, but rather combat organisations formed by and for workers themselves. It can be unions but it can also be bodies created in the class struggle itself independently or even in opposition to official unions– such as workers’ councils, factory committees and so on. As Kropotkin stressed:
Since Capital and Labour are two hostile camps in continual struggle – one to reduce Labour to submission and the other to free itself from the yoke of Capital – Labour must itself organise its forces, which it can only do by remaining on the terrain of its own struggle. (“Economic Action or Parliamentary Politics”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 1 No. 1, 17
How it does so depends on numerous factors and anarchists have applied our views accordingly in different ways at different times and places. However, the perspective which drives anarchist activity within the labour movement is driven by the same one which inspired anarchists of the past – as summarised by the likes of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta and Goldman.