Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:
Many anarchists and anarcho-syndicialists, especially in France and the United States (from the IWW, mostly), rallied to the cause of the Communist International in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. I have attached a letter from Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky to a leading French anarcho- syndicalist, Pierre Monatte, who along with Alfred Rosmer brought some of their comrades to the ranks of the early French Communist Party.
****
Leon Trotsky
The First Five Years of the Communist International
Volume 1
Letter to Comrade Monatte
MY DEAR FRIEND, I take this opportunity to send my warmest regards and to express my personal views on the state of affairs in French syndicalism – views that are, I trust, in complete harmony with the guiding line of the Third International as a whole.
I shall not hide from you that our joy in following the constant successes of revolutionary syndicalism is tinged with deepest concern over the future development of ideas and relations within the French labor movement. Today the revolutionary syndicalists of all tendencies still remain an opposition and are being held together precisely by their oppositional status. Tomorrow, the instant that you conquer the General Confederation of Labor [1] – and we don’t doubt that this day is nigh – you will come up against the fundamental questions of the revolutionary struggle. And precisely here we enter the zone of our grave worries.
The official program of revolutionary syndicalism is the Charter of Amiens. [2] In order to immediately express my thought as sharply as possible, let me say flatly – every reference to the Charter of Amiens is not an answer but an evasion. To every thinking Communist it is perfectly clear that pre-war French syndicalism represented a profoundly significant and important revolutionary tendency. The Charter of Amiens was an extremely precious document of the proletarian movement. But this document is historically restricted. Since its adoption a World War has taken place, Soviet Russia has been founded, a mighty revolutionary wave has passed over all of Europe, the Third International has grown and developed. The old syndicalists and the old Social Democrats have split into two and even three hostile camps. New questions of gigantic proportions have risen before us as practical questions on the order of the day. No answer to these questions is contained in the Amiens Charter. In the columns of La Vie Ouvrieère I am able to glean no answers to the fundamental problems of the revolutionary struggle. Can it possibly be that our task today, in the year 1921, lies in returning to the positions of 1906 and in bringing about the “revival” (réconstruction) of pre-war syndicalism? Such a position greatly resembles, in principle, the position of those political “revivalists” (réconstructeurs) who are dreaming of a return to “pure” socialism, as it existed prior to its fall into sin during the war. Such a position is amorphous; it is conservative and it threatens to become reactionary.
Just how do you envisage the leadership of the syndicalist move-ment, from the moment you obtain the majority of the General Confederation of Labor? The ranks of the syndicates embrace party Communists, revolutionary syndicalists, anarchists, Socialists and broad non-party masses. Naturally, every issue involving revolutionary action must in the last analysis be brought before the entire syndicalist apparatus, embracing hundreds of thousands and millions of workers. But who will sum up the revolutionary experience, analyze it, draw all the necessary conclusions from it, formulate the specific proposals, slogans and methods of struggle, and transmit them to the broad masses? Who will lead? Are you perhaps of the opinion that this work can be carried out through the circle of La Vie Ouvrière? If such be the case, then one can state with certainty that alongside you other circles will arise to challenge your right to leadership under the banner of revolutionary syndicalism. And besides – what about the large contingent of Communists in the syndicates? What will be the relations between them and your group? The leading organs of one syndicate may be dominated by party Communists, while in the organs of another syndicate, revolutionary non-party syndicalists may predominate. The proposals and slogans of the La Vie Ouvrieère group may diverge from the proposals and slogans of the Communist organization. This danger is profoundly real, it may become fatal, and because of it our victory in the syndicalist movement may be followed within a few months by the return of Jouhaux, Dumoulin and Merrheim to power.
I am well acquainted with bias against “parties” and against “politics” prevalent among French workers who have passed through the anarchist school. I completely agree that no single sharp blow can possibly break these moods, which were wholly justified in the past but which are extremely dangerous for the future. With regard to this question I can fully understand a gradual transition from the old state of disarrangement to the complete fusion of revolutionary syndicalists and Communists within a single party. But one must clearly and firmly set himself this goal. If centrist tendencies still obtain within the party the syndicalist opposition likewise has them within it. More education and further ideological purification are necessary among both of them. At issue is not at all the question of subordinating the syndicates to the party, but the question of uniting the revolutionary Communists and revolutionary syndicalists within the framework of a single party; and of all the members of this unified party carrying on harmonious centralized activity within the syndicates, which remain throughout autonomous and independent of the party organizationally. At issue is this, that the genuine vanguard of the French proletariat be welded together for the sake of its fundamental historical task – the conquest of power – and that under this banner it carry out its line within the syndicates, these basic and decisive organizations of the working class as a whole.
There is a certain psychological obstacle blocking a man’s crossing the party’s threshold after he has spent many years in revolutionary struggle outside the party. But to yield to this is to shy away from an outward form while causing the greatest damage to the inner essence. For it is my contention that your entire past activity was nothing else but preparation for the creation of the Communist Party of the proletarian revolution. Pre-war revolutionary syndicalism was a Communist Party in embryo. To return to the embryo would be a monstrous retrogression. Conversely, active participation in the building of a genuine Communist Party means the continuation and development of the best traditions of French syndicalism.
In these years each of us has had occasion to renounce one part of his already obsolete past in order to preserve, develop and assure victory to that other part of his past which did meet the test of events. An inner revolution of this type does not come easily. But only at this price, and at this price alone, can one acquire the right to really participate in the revolution of the working class.
Dear friend! I consider that the present moment will decide for a long time to come the de«stiny of French syndicalism, and, consequently, of the French revolution. In this decision you hold an important place. You would deal a cruel blow to the cause which numbers you among its best workers, were you today, when the choice must be definitely made, to turn your back upon the Communist Party. I have no doubt that this will not happen. I warmly shake your hand and remain devotedly yours.
July 13, 1921
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) is the name of the largest trade union organization in France. In 1921 revolutionary elements actually had the majority in the French labor movement and in the CGT in particular. However, the movement was never won to the banner of Communism and therefore soon slipped back into the hands of Jouhaux and Co., where it remained up to the outbreak of the Second World War.
2. The Charter of Amiens was the programmatic resolution adopted by the French trade unions at their 1906 convention in the city of Amiens. The central point in this resolution was the affirmation of the independence of the labor movement (the trade union movement) and its non-political character.
*******
Syndicalism and Leninism
Spartacist, No. 19, November-December 1970
One surprising effect of the French May-June 1968 events has been a resurgence of anarcho-syndicalism within the U.S. left. In fact, the French events completely reaffirmed the fundamental thesis of Lenin and Trotsky: that the mass reformist (Stalinist or social-democratic) party of the working class can deflect even the strongest spontaneous impulses toward revolution, in the absence of a pre-existing revolutionary party with considerable authority in its own right. Precisely what was lacking to carry the French workers from general strike to taking power was revolutionary political organization—a vanguard party. But the New Left drew the conclusion that spontaneous localism is revolutionary and all centralized parties counter-revolutionary. The glorification of spontaneity fit in with classic New Left biases toward "doing one’s own thing," and variants of syndicalism became the form under which New Left radicals turned toward the working class.
For a syndicalist, the revolutionary process is supposed to take roughly this character: A wildcat strike creates a strong factory committee, which declares its independence from the official union and establishes e.g. the "liberated area of the Metuchen GE plant." When enough such "liberated industrial areas" exist they combine and the system is thus overthrown.
However, the existing relatively centralized union structure is not a plot by bosses and union bureaucrats, but a victory gained by long, bitter struggles. Most syndicalists look back to the thirties as the heroic period of U.S. labor, but fail to realize that the main object of the labor struggles of the thirties was the consolidation of atomized factory groups into strong national unions. The principal goal of the great 1936 GM strike was to establish a single union to bargain for the thirty-odd GM plants. Before this, all bargaining was done at the plant-wide level. Some plants were organized, others not; some had localized unions, others had unions with broader aspirations. It was easy for GM to play one plant off against another or to shift production if one plant was particularly troublesome. The auto workers instinctively recognized they would have to give up a degree of local autonomy to achieve any real bargaining power.
Even now, it is the existence of 14 different unions as well as many nonunion shops that has allowed GE to walk all over its workers for so many years. The growth of conglomerates has faced a number of unions with greatly reduced leverage.
Form and Content
The existence of strong working-class institutions under capitalism—unions or parties—necessarily creates the objective basis for privileged bureaucracy. A sure-fire cure for union bureaucratism is not to have unions at all! The corollary, of course, is that the workers are then completely at the mercy of the bosses. There is no mechanical solution to the problem of democracy. The only answer is an aroused and conscious working class which controls its own organizations, whether these be hundred-man factory committees, unions of hundreds of thousands or mass parties numbering in the millions.
Another important aspect of the syndicalist perspective is what form rank and file opposition should take: unionwide caucuses based on a comprehensive radical program, or attempts to undermine the centralized power of the bureaucracy through factory-level organizations? The goal of socialists in unions is not occasional defiance of the bureaucracy, but rather its overthrow to command the tremendous power of the organized working class for revolutionary ends. Strong factory committees and wildcats can be potent weapons in discrediting an incumbent bureaucracy and strengthening internal opposition. But such localized and episodic organizations are no substitute for all-union program-based caucuses, which alone can pose an alternative leadership to the bureaucracy as a whole.
As Marxists, we do not take a fetishistic attitude toward the existing jurisdictional union structure. A bureaucracy may be so entrenched that an opposition cannot gain the formal union leadership regardless of how much support it has. In such a case, an opposition may be forced to split from the official union. The NMU and Amalgamated Clothing Workers were created when militant oppositions split from the official unions. But such splits are justified only if the opposition has gained the unquestioned loyalty of an economically viable section of the work force, leaving the official union an empty shell, not when they mean the voluntary isolation of the most militant and conscious minority of workers, leaving their fellows still under the sway of the sellouts.
Another facet of syndicalism is the belief that the main activity of revolutionaries is to foment trouble in the shops, the more trouble the better. Its fallacy is demonstrated by recent events in Italy. The anarcho-Maoists have made deep inroads among Fiat workers, who have been systematically sabotaging production. Fiat’s giant Milan plant has been operating at 50 per cent of its normal capacity. One way Fiat has reacted is to purchase 30 per cent of Citroen, the French auto firm, and they are quite capable of closing down the Milan plant and shifting production elsewhere, out of Italy altogether, if it is more profitable. Thus militancy for its own sake simply leads to unemployment.
General Strikes and Reaction
A rational syndicalist might agree that atomized militancy can be self-defeating. He would counterpose the syndicalist panacea of a general strike. While a general strike always raises the question of embryonic dual power, it cannot overthrow capitalism in itself. The capitalist state must be smashed in its most concrete manifestation the armed forces. If the army is not defeated or won over politically, it will suppress the general strike.
One of the most important general strikes in history occurred in the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution. It was an explicitly political strike, designed to extract concessions from the imperialist powers. The strike was characterized by a division of labor whereby the Communist Party ran the strike and the national bourgeoisie commanded, the army, through Chiang Kai-shek. When the bourgeoisie reached its compromise with the imperialists, it suppressed the CP and Chiang’s army forced the strikers back to work at gunpoint. The Chinese revolutionaries learned the hard way that control of the labor movement is insufficient for revolution. (The Maoists draw the wrong conclusion—namely, that the labor movement is irrelevant as long as one has an army!) Political and military as well as economic organization is necessary. And winning over the soldiers, who are not subject to the discipline of the labor movement, requires a political party.
All general strikes create sharp political polarization, in which all sections of society come down for or against the strike. Even major industrial powers such as Japan, Italy and France contain large peasant populations which must be won over to the workers’ cause if the strike is to be successful. The demand for workers’ control of production is not sufficient; enlisting the support of the peasantry requires a program of e.g. reduced taxes and rents, changes in land tenure, easy agricultural credit, etc.—demands which can be put forward convincingly only by a revolutionary party capable of establishing a socialist government.
General strikes and serious industrial disruption create economic hardship for the entire population. It is certainly not true that all those not directly involved in a general strike will oppose it because of the hardships entailed; but such hardships must not be open-ended. Unemployed workers, welfare recipients, peasants and small shopkeepers will support a general strike if they believe it is a step toward creating a revolutionary government with a positive program to meet their needs. But if the strike appears interminable, self-centered and purposeless, these intermediate layers and backward sections of the working masses will turn to reaction.
This is demonstrated by the rise of Italian fascism. Following World War I, the Italian working class, under strong syndicalist influence, engaged in a tremendous but uncoordinated wave of industrial militancy—factory seizures, citywide general strikes. After a few years of this, demobilized soldiers and other unemployed workers, civil servants, small shopkeepers and farmers were prepared to support Mussolini’s "law and order" movement. It has been noted that fascism develops in periods when the labor movement prevents capitalism from operating smoothly but is unable to overthrow it. Syndicalism, to the extent it is successful, creates this very situation—a revolutionary situation without the strategy necessary for assuming control of the state—thus paving the way for the triumph of reaction.
The resurgence of radical syndicalism is a reaction against the economist and class-collaborationist policies of the trade union bureaucracy. But syndicalism is only economism in reverse: accepting the working class’ lack of organization, especially political organization—and refusing to recognize the dialectical character of the bureaucratized workers’ institutions—the contradiction between class-struggle and ruling-class elements which can be resolved only by principled intervention by revolutionaries to replace iron-fisted control by capitalism’s lackeys with working-class leaders armed with a real program of class struggle.
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:
Many anarchists and anarcho-syndicialists, especially in France and the United States (from the IWW, mostly), rallied to the cause of the Communist International in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. I have attached a letter from Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky to a leading French anarcho- syndicalist, Pierre Monatte, who along with Alfred Rosmer brought some of their comrades to the ranks of the early French Communist Party.
****
Leon Trotsky
The First Five Years of the Communist International
Volume 1
Letter to Comrade Monatte
MY DEAR FRIEND, I take this opportunity to send my warmest regards and to express my personal views on the state of affairs in French syndicalism – views that are, I trust, in complete harmony with the guiding line of the Third International as a whole.
I shall not hide from you that our joy in following the constant successes of revolutionary syndicalism is tinged with deepest concern over the future development of ideas and relations within the French labor movement. Today the revolutionary syndicalists of all tendencies still remain an opposition and are being held together precisely by their oppositional status. Tomorrow, the instant that you conquer the General Confederation of Labor [1] – and we don’t doubt that this day is nigh – you will come up against the fundamental questions of the revolutionary struggle. And precisely here we enter the zone of our grave worries.
The official program of revolutionary syndicalism is the Charter of Amiens. [2] In order to immediately express my thought as sharply as possible, let me say flatly – every reference to the Charter of Amiens is not an answer but an evasion. To every thinking Communist it is perfectly clear that pre-war French syndicalism represented a profoundly significant and important revolutionary tendency. The Charter of Amiens was an extremely precious document of the proletarian movement. But this document is historically restricted. Since its adoption a World War has taken place, Soviet Russia has been founded, a mighty revolutionary wave has passed over all of Europe, the Third International has grown and developed. The old syndicalists and the old Social Democrats have split into two and even three hostile camps. New questions of gigantic proportions have risen before us as practical questions on the order of the day. No answer to these questions is contained in the Amiens Charter. In the columns of La Vie Ouvrieère I am able to glean no answers to the fundamental problems of the revolutionary struggle. Can it possibly be that our task today, in the year 1921, lies in returning to the positions of 1906 and in bringing about the “revival” (réconstruction) of pre-war syndicalism? Such a position greatly resembles, in principle, the position of those political “revivalists” (réconstructeurs) who are dreaming of a return to “pure” socialism, as it existed prior to its fall into sin during the war. Such a position is amorphous; it is conservative and it threatens to become reactionary.
Just how do you envisage the leadership of the syndicalist move-ment, from the moment you obtain the majority of the General Confederation of Labor? The ranks of the syndicates embrace party Communists, revolutionary syndicalists, anarchists, Socialists and broad non-party masses. Naturally, every issue involving revolutionary action must in the last analysis be brought before the entire syndicalist apparatus, embracing hundreds of thousands and millions of workers. But who will sum up the revolutionary experience, analyze it, draw all the necessary conclusions from it, formulate the specific proposals, slogans and methods of struggle, and transmit them to the broad masses? Who will lead? Are you perhaps of the opinion that this work can be carried out through the circle of La Vie Ouvrière? If such be the case, then one can state with certainty that alongside you other circles will arise to challenge your right to leadership under the banner of revolutionary syndicalism. And besides – what about the large contingent of Communists in the syndicates? What will be the relations between them and your group? The leading organs of one syndicate may be dominated by party Communists, while in the organs of another syndicate, revolutionary non-party syndicalists may predominate. The proposals and slogans of the La Vie Ouvrieère group may diverge from the proposals and slogans of the Communist organization. This danger is profoundly real, it may become fatal, and because of it our victory in the syndicalist movement may be followed within a few months by the return of Jouhaux, Dumoulin and Merrheim to power.
I am well acquainted with bias against “parties” and against “politics” prevalent among French workers who have passed through the anarchist school. I completely agree that no single sharp blow can possibly break these moods, which were wholly justified in the past but which are extremely dangerous for the future. With regard to this question I can fully understand a gradual transition from the old state of disarrangement to the complete fusion of revolutionary syndicalists and Communists within a single party. But one must clearly and firmly set himself this goal. If centrist tendencies still obtain within the party the syndicalist opposition likewise has them within it. More education and further ideological purification are necessary among both of them. At issue is not at all the question of subordinating the syndicates to the party, but the question of uniting the revolutionary Communists and revolutionary syndicalists within the framework of a single party; and of all the members of this unified party carrying on harmonious centralized activity within the syndicates, which remain throughout autonomous and independent of the party organizationally. At issue is this, that the genuine vanguard of the French proletariat be welded together for the sake of its fundamental historical task – the conquest of power – and that under this banner it carry out its line within the syndicates, these basic and decisive organizations of the working class as a whole.
There is a certain psychological obstacle blocking a man’s crossing the party’s threshold after he has spent many years in revolutionary struggle outside the party. But to yield to this is to shy away from an outward form while causing the greatest damage to the inner essence. For it is my contention that your entire past activity was nothing else but preparation for the creation of the Communist Party of the proletarian revolution. Pre-war revolutionary syndicalism was a Communist Party in embryo. To return to the embryo would be a monstrous retrogression. Conversely, active participation in the building of a genuine Communist Party means the continuation and development of the best traditions of French syndicalism.
In these years each of us has had occasion to renounce one part of his already obsolete past in order to preserve, develop and assure victory to that other part of his past which did meet the test of events. An inner revolution of this type does not come easily. But only at this price, and at this price alone, can one acquire the right to really participate in the revolution of the working class.
Dear friend! I consider that the present moment will decide for a long time to come the de«stiny of French syndicalism, and, consequently, of the French revolution. In this decision you hold an important place. You would deal a cruel blow to the cause which numbers you among its best workers, were you today, when the choice must be definitely made, to turn your back upon the Communist Party. I have no doubt that this will not happen. I warmly shake your hand and remain devotedly yours.
July 13, 1921
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) is the name of the largest trade union organization in France. In 1921 revolutionary elements actually had the majority in the French labor movement and in the CGT in particular. However, the movement was never won to the banner of Communism and therefore soon slipped back into the hands of Jouhaux and Co., where it remained up to the outbreak of the Second World War.
2. The Charter of Amiens was the programmatic resolution adopted by the French trade unions at their 1906 convention in the city of Amiens. The central point in this resolution was the affirmation of the independence of the labor movement (the trade union movement) and its non-political character.
*******
Syndicalism and Leninism
Spartacist, No. 19, November-December 1970
One surprising effect of the French May-June 1968 events has been a resurgence of anarcho-syndicalism within the U.S. left. In fact, the French events completely reaffirmed the fundamental thesis of Lenin and Trotsky: that the mass reformist (Stalinist or social-democratic) party of the working class can deflect even the strongest spontaneous impulses toward revolution, in the absence of a pre-existing revolutionary party with considerable authority in its own right. Precisely what was lacking to carry the French workers from general strike to taking power was revolutionary political organization—a vanguard party. But the New Left drew the conclusion that spontaneous localism is revolutionary and all centralized parties counter-revolutionary. The glorification of spontaneity fit in with classic New Left biases toward "doing one’s own thing," and variants of syndicalism became the form under which New Left radicals turned toward the working class.
For a syndicalist, the revolutionary process is supposed to take roughly this character: A wildcat strike creates a strong factory committee, which declares its independence from the official union and establishes e.g. the "liberated area of the Metuchen GE plant." When enough such "liberated industrial areas" exist they combine and the system is thus overthrown.
However, the existing relatively centralized union structure is not a plot by bosses and union bureaucrats, but a victory gained by long, bitter struggles. Most syndicalists look back to the thirties as the heroic period of U.S. labor, but fail to realize that the main object of the labor struggles of the thirties was the consolidation of atomized factory groups into strong national unions. The principal goal of the great 1936 GM strike was to establish a single union to bargain for the thirty-odd GM plants. Before this, all bargaining was done at the plant-wide level. Some plants were organized, others not; some had localized unions, others had unions with broader aspirations. It was easy for GM to play one plant off against another or to shift production if one plant was particularly troublesome. The auto workers instinctively recognized they would have to give up a degree of local autonomy to achieve any real bargaining power.
Even now, it is the existence of 14 different unions as well as many nonunion shops that has allowed GE to walk all over its workers for so many years. The growth of conglomerates has faced a number of unions with greatly reduced leverage.
Form and Content
The existence of strong working-class institutions under capitalism—unions or parties—necessarily creates the objective basis for privileged bureaucracy. A sure-fire cure for union bureaucratism is not to have unions at all! The corollary, of course, is that the workers are then completely at the mercy of the bosses. There is no mechanical solution to the problem of democracy. The only answer is an aroused and conscious working class which controls its own organizations, whether these be hundred-man factory committees, unions of hundreds of thousands or mass parties numbering in the millions.
Another important aspect of the syndicalist perspective is what form rank and file opposition should take: unionwide caucuses based on a comprehensive radical program, or attempts to undermine the centralized power of the bureaucracy through factory-level organizations? The goal of socialists in unions is not occasional defiance of the bureaucracy, but rather its overthrow to command the tremendous power of the organized working class for revolutionary ends. Strong factory committees and wildcats can be potent weapons in discrediting an incumbent bureaucracy and strengthening internal opposition. But such localized and episodic organizations are no substitute for all-union program-based caucuses, which alone can pose an alternative leadership to the bureaucracy as a whole.
As Marxists, we do not take a fetishistic attitude toward the existing jurisdictional union structure. A bureaucracy may be so entrenched that an opposition cannot gain the formal union leadership regardless of how much support it has. In such a case, an opposition may be forced to split from the official union. The NMU and Amalgamated Clothing Workers were created when militant oppositions split from the official unions. But such splits are justified only if the opposition has gained the unquestioned loyalty of an economically viable section of the work force, leaving the official union an empty shell, not when they mean the voluntary isolation of the most militant and conscious minority of workers, leaving their fellows still under the sway of the sellouts.
Another facet of syndicalism is the belief that the main activity of revolutionaries is to foment trouble in the shops, the more trouble the better. Its fallacy is demonstrated by recent events in Italy. The anarcho-Maoists have made deep inroads among Fiat workers, who have been systematically sabotaging production. Fiat’s giant Milan plant has been operating at 50 per cent of its normal capacity. One way Fiat has reacted is to purchase 30 per cent of Citroen, the French auto firm, and they are quite capable of closing down the Milan plant and shifting production elsewhere, out of Italy altogether, if it is more profitable. Thus militancy for its own sake simply leads to unemployment.
General Strikes and Reaction
A rational syndicalist might agree that atomized militancy can be self-defeating. He would counterpose the syndicalist panacea of a general strike. While a general strike always raises the question of embryonic dual power, it cannot overthrow capitalism in itself. The capitalist state must be smashed in its most concrete manifestation the armed forces. If the army is not defeated or won over politically, it will suppress the general strike.
One of the most important general strikes in history occurred in the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution. It was an explicitly political strike, designed to extract concessions from the imperialist powers. The strike was characterized by a division of labor whereby the Communist Party ran the strike and the national bourgeoisie commanded, the army, through Chiang Kai-shek. When the bourgeoisie reached its compromise with the imperialists, it suppressed the CP and Chiang’s army forced the strikers back to work at gunpoint. The Chinese revolutionaries learned the hard way that control of the labor movement is insufficient for revolution. (The Maoists draw the wrong conclusion—namely, that the labor movement is irrelevant as long as one has an army!) Political and military as well as economic organization is necessary. And winning over the soldiers, who are not subject to the discipline of the labor movement, requires a political party.
All general strikes create sharp political polarization, in which all sections of society come down for or against the strike. Even major industrial powers such as Japan, Italy and France contain large peasant populations which must be won over to the workers’ cause if the strike is to be successful. The demand for workers’ control of production is not sufficient; enlisting the support of the peasantry requires a program of e.g. reduced taxes and rents, changes in land tenure, easy agricultural credit, etc.—demands which can be put forward convincingly only by a revolutionary party capable of establishing a socialist government.
General strikes and serious industrial disruption create economic hardship for the entire population. It is certainly not true that all those not directly involved in a general strike will oppose it because of the hardships entailed; but such hardships must not be open-ended. Unemployed workers, welfare recipients, peasants and small shopkeepers will support a general strike if they believe it is a step toward creating a revolutionary government with a positive program to meet their needs. But if the strike appears interminable, self-centered and purposeless, these intermediate layers and backward sections of the working masses will turn to reaction.
This is demonstrated by the rise of Italian fascism. Following World War I, the Italian working class, under strong syndicalist influence, engaged in a tremendous but uncoordinated wave of industrial militancy—factory seizures, citywide general strikes. After a few years of this, demobilized soldiers and other unemployed workers, civil servants, small shopkeepers and farmers were prepared to support Mussolini’s "law and order" movement. It has been noted that fascism develops in periods when the labor movement prevents capitalism from operating smoothly but is unable to overthrow it. Syndicalism, to the extent it is successful, creates this very situation—a revolutionary situation without the strategy necessary for assuming control of the state—thus paving the way for the triumph of reaction.
The resurgence of radical syndicalism is a reaction against the economist and class-collaborationist policies of the trade union bureaucracy. But syndicalism is only economism in reverse: accepting the working class’ lack of organization, especially political organization—and refusing to recognize the dialectical character of the bureaucratized workers’ institutions—the contradiction between class-struggle and ruling-class elements which can be resolved only by principled intervention by revolutionaries to replace iron-fisted control by capitalism’s lackeys with working-class leaders armed with a real program of class struggle.
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