Syndicalism and revolution

There can be no doubt that social revolution - and we're not talking here about political revolts as they periodically erupt in every country - social revolution will not succeed, and will not lead to a lasting improvement in the situation of the working masses, unless it changes the production and distribution of wealth in such a way that the workers themselves, through their organizations, increasingly dominate production and distribution. And this is precisely what has led us to see, in the trade unions of every country, the forces needed to bring about revolution. They are organized bodies, already capable of production and distribution in each branch, whose collective action could not be entirely replaced by the goodwill of masses of volunteers who would be called to the rescue at the moment of decisive revolt.

But if we recognize all this, we cannot be content as libertarians to work with our best forces in the corporative movement to help workers in every profession to win economic advantages over the bosses - shorter working day, higher wages, etc. - without always having before our eyes our own conceptions of libertarianism. - without always having our communist and libertarian conceptions of society before our eyes, and, for this reason, without maintaining regular relations between anarchist comrades, not only in each town or country, but in all countries. If, after a few years, we do not want to be disillusioned by the steady evolution of syndicalism, we must already now prepare to counteract particularism in our corporate movement. We have to face up to the danger that the more workers succeed in winning certain small advantages over employers in their particular sphere - advantages obtained, if you like, by direct action - the more they will tend to keep what they have won, even against their fellow workers who are less privileged than they are, and even by rallying back to the bosses if need be. In Switzerland, several of the (Iriitli-Vereine are striking examples of what well-to-do workers intend to do in this direction. Among the big American and English trades-unions, the conservative spirit that has slowly taken hold of a large number of workers, and is becoming proverbial, is nothing other than the consequence of this particularism. Little by little, certain organized categories of workers are being transformed into a petty labor bourgeoisie, a kind of fourth estate standing between the third estate of capitalists and landowners with their assistants and civil servants, and the real proletariat. If many workers' unions in the New World and even in Europe are already categorically refusing to work with foreigners, even if they are unionized; if workers in the USA and Australia are opposed to Japanese and Chinese workers; if typographers in France and elsewhere have for many years opposed all work by women and refused to admit them to typographical unions, even when they worked at the same rates as men¹ - it's always the same phenomenon of the conservatism and workers' particularism that we have to reckon with.

It's not enough for us revolutionary communists to say that social evolution itself will eventually topple all the Chinese walls that privileged workers would like to erect around their trades, nor to say that economic crises will arise in several branches of production. If, for example, an economic crisis is brewing in the Swiss watchmaking industry, this means that this industry must increasingly give way to the same industries in other countries, where Switzerland used to send its products and where factories equipped with the latest advances are now setting up. But this in no way means that, for example, in American watchmaking factories or even in the big Swiss factories, we would not have to combat the same spirit of conservatism among certain more privileged categories of workers.

No, as communists and revolutionaries, having before our eyes the necessity of the emancipation of all the working classes and the overthrow of the very foundations of capitalist society, we must right now counterbalance the conservatism of the privileged workers, helping if necessary the fifth state against the fourth. And for this very reason, as revolutionaries, we must no longer be satisfied with action in the workers' unions, however fruitful this may be at present. We also need to reach agreement among anarchists to propagate the idea of grouping anarchist comrades in every town, in every country and in every country in the world. The idea of an international libertarian and revolutionary congress, to be held at the end of August in Amsterdam, is based on no other motive than the need felt by communist and revolutionary comrades in all countries to agree on the main lines of principle and tactics. Of course, their agreement will not be made solely on trade unionism and its action; it will also be made on a number of other points, since trade unionist action, or even economic action in general, does not naturally represent, on its own, all communist and revolutionary action. But since, at present, syndicalist action is undoubtedly that in which the class struggle against capitalists and landowners takes on the most acute form, and seems most likely to draw the real working masses into the fight, it is from the syndicalist point of view that we must first and foremost consider the problem we have just outlined.