Anarcho-syndicalism

Great Debates
1

OK, WTF?

I bring this up because I have a very liberal friend - he rented a room in our apartment in NYC in 2000, he is now in Australia and has lived there for about 20 years.

We got along very well when he was living in the apartment, for 6 months. Then he moved out, and that was that. I thought. But somehow a few years later we connected on Facebook. By then he was living in Australia, where he lives today, with his wife and new baby. And I love the guy for his musical and literary taste. And we have been Facebook friends for years, and real friends. If my whole world came crashing down, and I had no other place to go, he would welcome me. (an aside, maybe moving to Australia now would be a good idea(

Anyway, I knew he was very left wing (I’m Liberal) but I didn’t know exactly where he stood. Did he think Lenin was a great guy? Was he a Bolshevik? Thought the Provisonal Government was a good idea? Finallly pinned him down and he said he was an Anarcho-syndicalist.

Now I knew he was an admirer (worshipper?) of Emma Goldman. I love Emma, she was fighting the good fight. But she was an anarchst. No government at all. Yeah that is a realistic view - That we were all just going to get along and govern ourselves. She was, and is, a hero for worker’s rights and women’s rights. But beyond that, she was naive and innocent, and hopeful, believing in the “better angles of our nature.”

But my friend’s political beliefs, to this day in the modern world (it’s getting close to a hundred years!) are based on that.

Anarcho-syndicalism. When you get down to the bone, isn’t it just that the workers own everything? Oh I know there are differences, I’ve just gone to several sites, and I found the difference beween anarcho-syndicalism and pure anarcho communism and a half dozen other varities. It is like getting into a debate about what is expressionism and abstract expressionism

So when my friend says he is an anarcho-syndicalist, is that basically the same as Democratic Socialist, or just pure Socialist, or neither?

And BTW, I was watching Mad Men the other day, and this guy, I can’t remember his name but he was the guy that dated the black woman, he said Marx was the greatest economist who ever lived. Was he? Has Marxism ever happened anywhere in world history. I think it is supposed to go from bourgiese to proletariat, or have I got that backward?

Has anarcho synDICKalism ever been practicted anywhere?

2

The fact that workers’ rights have advanced somewhat since the 19th century proves that some of those ideas have been put into practice, yes, even if you are not living in a communist utopia just yet.

Economic theory has advanced since Marx’s day, like any science, but a book like “Das Kapital” is well-written and well worth reading if you are interested in learning about the fundamentals of capitalism.

Emma Goldman was fired for “naively and innocently” daring to suggest that workers should be paid enough in order to afford to see a movie once a week or buy the occasional novel or ice-cream cone or go dancing, and was inspired to do something about it. Lo and behold, there are such things as workers’ syndicates and safety standards today, even though things are not perfect there is progress. She was also a gifted writer and full of critical observations (including of those who would worship left-wing figures, or right-wing figures for that matter. She was pretty pissed off about the Soviet Union, for example).

3

Non angli, sed angeli.

Syndicalism is just the next advancement of democracy.

4

I suppose when individual education and awareness reaches a certain level within a society, it doesn’t really need a permanent political structure because enough of the citizens have enough of an understanding about enough of the issues to be able to intelligently vote on how they should be handled.

5

“Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I’m being repressed.” Somebody had to say it sooner or later.

6

Bzzzzzzt. Anarchism doesn’t mean no government. It means no hierarchy or any relationships based on power, force, coercion. That, perforce, precludes the notion of “ownership” as a starter, so “isn’t it just when the workers own everything ?” is pretty much not even wrong.

Possibly listen to some actual anarchist theory before opining that it’s dumb, unworkable, naive etc… ? I don’t even mean “come back when you’ve worked your way through the complete works of Proudhon”, something like this easy, digestible primer (which nevertheless is cited and full of further avenues of inquiry) could be a start.
Also, the fact that several large scale anarchist communities have existed and some are still out there to this day kind of puts to rest the idea that “it could never work !”, dontchoo think ?

Sure. Revolutionary Cataloña during the Spanish Civil War was explicitly anarco-syndicalist. Makhno’s stateless state in Ukraine is another well known example, although I suppose the “syndicalist” part could be argued there (*). The Zapatistas of Chiapas would probably dislike being dubbed anarchists but… c’mon guys, you’re a stateless society with full participatory democratic decision making, that’s at least anarchy-adjacent ;).

(*) but really, at least as I understand it, the -syndicalist part of anarcho-syndicalism is more about the process or strategy by which the proles could eventually establish anarchy (or at least, how wage labour could eventually be abolished altogether) rather than the specific nature of any post-capitalist, post-coercive, post-hierarchical utopia. That much is for the whole community to decide, communally and freely, when we get there.

7

We’re actually moving away from the point where that’s a sensible proposition, since no matter how sensible and educated a person is, the world is sufficiently complex now that no one person can be across all the issues you might need to make a decision about.

Of course, that applies to politicians too. Particularly since getting educated about the ins and outs of all the issues they may be called upon to make decisions about also has to be packed in around their job of getting re-elected next time…

One solution could be to simply stop insisting that all society’s decisions are made by the same group of people all the time. We could simply divide the kinds of things governments need to decide into a bunch of committees (education, health, defence, trade…) and let every voting citizen join exactly one of them, where they get to make decisions about whatever is the one thing that they themselves have decided is the most important.

I don’t know if that would be considered a form of anarchy too. Definitely anarchy-adjacent

8

Well, *this *anarchist with syndicalist leanings can clearly see you’re here for reasoned debate…

but anyway, the answer is yes.

9

There’s been far too much whoooshing lately. PLEASE add an appropriate emoticon to your sarcastic posts in future.

10

The OP might find the political compass at politicalcompass.org Interesting and useful. Noam Chomsky is close to an anarchist-syndicalist position. As for Marx as an economist, he set out to continue the work of the classical economists, who could not figure out where profit came from in capitalist economies. After he demonstrated that it came from exploiting workers, mainstream economists decided they weren’t going to explore that issue anymore and became uncritical apologists for capitalism. As for “where has anarchism/anarchism-syndicalism ever worked?” you might consider how much of your life is lived without someone compelling you to act in certain ways. As one anarchist put it, every car pool is an example of actually existing anarchism. It’s a stretch, but she had a point.

11

As to the point about the world being too complex to manage, that assumes that the anacho-syndicalist position is that everything should remain more or less the way it is now, only with dramatic democratic input. More accurate would be to reject the concepts of state, nation, corporation, etc. and consider more human scaled societies. We might think “neighbourhood” rather than megalopolis, and federations of smaller communities rather than nation-state. Part of the anarchi-syndicalist critique is about size and complexity as problems themselves. It is perhaps interesting to note that it seems to be more difficult to imagine cooperative democratic small scale societies in our era of instant communication and connections than it was in earlier times.

12

Bloody peasant.

13

There you go, bringing class into it again.

14

well, that’s what it’s all about. If only a few more people would realise …

15

Help, help, I’m being repressed!

16

Thanks for that its been a while since I’ve thought about that site and in the crazy state of today’s politics its nice to have a third party identify me where I think I am. Especially hanging out on the SDMB I feel like a crazy right winger some times but the political compass has me a slightly left leaning -0.13 but very far down on the libertarian scale -5.28.

17

What, again, within ten posts?

(and of course, what better Username/post combination that anything with **Kropotkin **in an anarchism discussion)

18

“Still,” not “again,” because some people are exploiting the workers by hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there’s ever going to be any progress…

19

…some moistened bint has to chuck a scimitar at someone.

And he’s right, because violence is inherent in the system where watery tarts chuck swords around. And also in a system where supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses. Hierarchy of power is a necessary component of all political systems, because all political systems include people who don’t respect the mandate, either occasionally or habitually. And all political systems exist in a world where other systems don’t respect the mandate, also either occasionally or habitually.

And yes, that includes Catalonia in 1936.

The movie Seven Samurai is an exploration of the question of how being exploited might be better than the alternative.

Regards,
Shodan

20

No point in getting into a discussion here, but for those interested in exploring anarchism, you might start with
Anarchy Explained to My Father by Francis Dupuis-Deri, Thomas Deri
Daniel Guerin, Anarchism, is old but useful.
Cathy Milstein, Anarchsim and Its Aspirations and
Ruth Kinna, The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism are new and interesting
James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, is lively. I don’t buy his spirited defence of the petite bourgeoisie, but others might