International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Anarchosyndicalism is the term for the anarchist labor union movement (a labor union is called a syndicat in French, or a sindicato in Spanish). Powerful anarchosyndicalist organizations included the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (founded 1901), the Industrial Workers of the World (founded 1905), the Confédération Générale du Travail (founded 1906), and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (founded 1910). These unions were distinguished from their conventional counterparts not only by their radical goals – the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of a system of generalized self-management – but also by their decentralized structure and willingness to engage in direct action, including extralegal tactics such as sabotage. While anarchists had always placed great emphasis on the self-organization of workers at the point of production and on what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) called “the political capacity of the working classes” as agents of revolutionary change, their attitudes toward unions as vehicles for collective bargaining and toward strikes as a tactic had been more ambivalent for a number of reasons. Proudhon, indeed, saw strikes as futile. Moreover, since trade unions lacked full legality under most governments during the early period of the anarchist movement, their utility was limited. With the legalization of unions, a number of anarchists ... log in or subscribe to read full text