The American Labor Movement - A New Beginning
by Sam Dolgoff

"The American labor movement as it exists today, is the result of the interaction, over many decades, of business unionism and revolutionary unionism. Its major defects stem from the former and its constructive tendencies come from the latter. It is necessary to examine the revolutionary syndicalist tradition of the American labour movement, the better to understand the path that must be followed for its regeneration and further progress."

(175K)

Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism
by Rudolf Rocker

"Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions, and social conditions. It is, therefore not a fixed, self enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historical development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to broaden its scope and to affect wider circles in manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is interfered with by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown."

(91K)

Anarchism and the Labor Movement - A Shared History of Conflict and Cooperation
by Brian Oliver Sheppard

"Luigi Galleani wrote that the "anarchist movement and the labor movement follow two parallel lines, and it has been geometrically proven that parallel lines never meet." (Galleani's comments were, I noticed, prefaced with a note by the editors that they "disagree strongly with" some of Galleani's ideas.) While no mathemetician would argue with Galleani's geometry, a historian might: the real history of the anarchist and labor movements can not be framed in terms so simple or absolute."

(17K)

Anarchism and the Workers' Unions
by Fernand Pelloutier

"Suppose now that, on the day the revolution breaks out, virtually every single producer is organised into the unions: will these not represent, ready to step into the shoes of the present organisation, a quasi-libertarian organisation, in fact suppressing all political power, an organisation whose every part, being master of the instruments of production, would settle all of its affairs for itself, in sovereign fashion and through the freely given consent of its members? And would this not amount to the "free association of free producers?"

(22K)

Anarchism in Australia
Revised and Edited by Leigh Kendall

"Anarcho-syndicalists see the workplace and the community intimately intertwined, and organises on the bases of local groups and industrial associations. This is a logical consequence of our dual aim -- to struggle for better conditions within existing structures and to build now the structures necessary for the establishment of an anarchist society. Anarcho-syndicalists clearly see the need to have workplace activity supported in the community, and community activity supported in the workplace. Either without the other is ineffective."

(46K)

Anarcho-Syndicalism
by Rudolf Rocker

"The term "workers' syndicate" meant in France merely a trade union organisation of producers for the immediate betterment of their economic and social status. But the rise of Anarcho-Syndicalism gave this original meaning a much wider and deeper import. Just as the party is, so to speak, the unified organisation for definite political effort within the modern constitutional state, and seeks to maintain the bourgeois order in one form or another, so, according to the Syndicalist view, the trade union, the syndicate, is the unified organisation of labour and has for its purpose the defence of the interests of the producers within existing society and the preparing for and the practical carrying out of the reconstruction of social life after the pattern of Socialism. It has, therefore, a double purpose: 1. As the fighting organisation of the workers against the employers to enforce the demands of the workers for the safeguarding and raising of their standard of living; 2. As the school for the intellectual training of the workers to make them acquainted with the technical management of production and economic life in general so that when a revolutionary situation arises they will be capable of taking the socio-economic organism into their own hands and remarking it according to Socialist principles."

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The Anarcho-Syndicalist Answer to Corporate Globalisation
by Brian Oliver Sheppard

"The capitalist class, through corporate globalization, can disempower workers, and settle in areas where workers have no political voice to affect change. Already the WTO is set to meet in the remote desert nation of Qatar, which is ruled by a monarchy, and where rival political factions and freedom of speech are illegal. In the USA, corporations increasingly rely on the easily exploitable labor of illegal aliens and prison workforces, two segments of the labor force that have no real rights. Direct action is their only recourse. Likewise, oppressed workers in other lands often have no political say. What else can they do but act directly upon what is immediately oppressing them?"

(33K)

Basic Anarcho-Syndicalism (Anarcosindicalismo Basico)
Published by the Local Federation of the CNT-AIT Sevilla

"Anyone can voluntarily belong to the anarcho-union, with the exception of police, soldiers and members of security forces. No ideological qualification is necessary to be in the CNT. This is because the CNT is anarcho-syndicalist, that is, it is an organization in which decisions are made in assembly, from the base. It is an autonomous, federalist structure independent of political parties, of government agencies, of professional bureaucracies, etc. The anarcho-union only requires a respect for its rules, and from this point of view people of different opinions, tendencies and ideologies can live together within it. Ecologists, pacifists, members of political parties .. can be part of the CNT. There will always be different opinions, priorities and points of view about concrete problems. What everyone has in common within the anarcho-union is its unique way of functioning, its anti-authoritarian structure."

(59K)

The Basis of Trade Unionism
by Emile Pouget

"In the present, the permanent mission of the trade union is to defend itself against any reduction of vitality -- that is to say, against any reduction of wages and increase in working hours. Besides resisting attack, it must play a pro-active part and strive to increase the well-being of the union, which can only be realised by trespassing on capitalist privileges, and constitutes a sort of partial expropriation. Besides this talk of incessant skirmishes, the union is engaged in the work of integral emancipation, of which it will effectively be the agent. It will consist of taking possession of social wealth, now in the hands of the middle class, and in reorganising society on a Libertarian Communist basis, so that the maximum amount of social well-being will be achieved with a minimum of productive effort."

(49K)

Confederal Structure of the CNT
Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo

"Organisation: The base of discussion and decision is the workers assemblies and all decisions come from the base."

(9K)

Direct Action
by Emile Pouget

"Direct Action . . . implies that the working class subscribes to notions of freedom and autonomy instead of genuflecting before the principle of authority. Now, it is thanks to this authority principle, the pivot of the modern world - democracy being its latest incarnation - that the human being, tied down by a thousand ropes, moral as well as material, is bereft of any opportunity to display will and initiative."

(56K)

Fernand Pelloutier and Revolutionary Syndicalism
by Jeremy Jennings

"'Social life', Pelloutier argued, 'can be reduced to the organisation of production'. Freed from poverty and social and political oppression, the workers would develop a completely new morality. Competition and envy would be replaced by co-operation and a sense of social duty. The 'society of the future' would, above all, be characterised by 'the voluntary and free association of producers'. The central question faced by Pelloutier was: how could such a society be brought into existence? The socialist and republican traditions in France offered a range of alternatives. Pelloutier rejected them all and set about developing his own strategy for the emancipation of the working class."

(180K)

The Founding of the Workers' International
by Mikhail Bakunin

"Only individuals, and a small number of them at that, can be carried away by an abstract and "pure" idea. The millions, the masses, not only of the proletariat but also of the enlightened and privileged classes, are carried away only by the power and logic of "facts," apprehending and envisaging most of the time only their immediate interests or moved only by their monetary, more or less blind, passions. Therefore, in order to interest and draw the whole proletariat into the work of the International, it is necessary approach it not with general and abstract ideas, but with a living tangible comprehension of its own pressing problems, of which evils the workers are aware in a concrete manner. "

(24K)

The General Strike
by Ralph Chaplin

"Every intelligent person now realizes that there is something radically wrong with the social system under which we are living. Everyone, excepting the beneficiaries of this system, agrees that something ought to be done about it. The trouble is that people at present seem unable to agree on any common program of action. Some accept their unhappy lot with a patience and fortitude worthy of a better cause, others theorize ineffectually and do little, while still others complain bitterly and strike out blindly. Nearly everyone rushes hither and tither seeking escape but without having any clear-cut objective in view . . . The argument for the General Strike is based on the persistent and very logical working class conviction that the ruling class will refuse to permit itself to be dispossessed by any power weaker than its own and that public opinion, political action and insurrection therefore will not be permitted to be developed or used to any appreciable extent. It is further based on the firm belief that Labor alone can save the world from chaos during and following the period of transition. As long as the production of goods under any system depends on the disciplined solidarity of the producing class it is evident that this solidarity alone is capable of stopping the operations of the old order or of starting and continuing those of the new."

(83K)

Introducing Anarcho-Syndicalism
by Bill Meyers

"Anarcho-syndicalism, properly implemented on a worldwide scale, can increase the supply of necessities to people most in need while reducing the destruction of the earth to the point the earth can heal. Just as important, it can do this in a humane manner that allows individuals and communities greater social and cultural freedom. The question is, can we get there fast enough, or even at all? Can we create an anarcho-syndicalist society before the earth is destroyed by capitalism?"

(78K)

Libertarian Communism
by Isaac Puente

"Libertarian Communism is a society organised without the state and without private ownership. And there is no need to invent anything or conjure up some new organization for the purpose. The centres about which life in the future will be organised are already with us in the society of today: the free union and the free municipality."

(60K)

Making Anarchist Revolution Possible
by Arthur J. Miller

"When the organized power of the people is greater than the organized power of the ruling class then our revolution would take place through a social general strike. That social general strike would be the complete refusal, in industries, communities and in all means, of cooperation with capitalism and the State, and of providing goods and services to capitalism and the State, along with the organized protection of our revolution. Capitalism and the State cannot exist without our cooperation with the ruling class. We feed them, we provide the services they need, our communities are controlled by our cooperation with them, we are everywhere, even in the homes of the ruling class. There is nowhere for them to run, we are everywhere, there is nowhere to hide, we are everywhere. We will starve the ruling class out of existence; let them eat their money and deeds of property. "

(50K)

My Social Credo
by G.P. Maximoff

"I believe that it behooves every honest individual to urge the toiling masses not to let the flames of revolution be extinguished. On the contrary, their orbit should be widened, through a stimulated alertness and independence and the creation of free labour institutions. These should be of a type suitable to take into the workers' own hands, on the overthrow of capitalism, the organisation of a free life upon the just principles of dignified work."

(39K)

One Big Union
Industrial Workers of the World

"The purpose of the IWW is to establish union democracy in our everyday life on the job. Its practical policies are directed towards that end, and are essential to its achievement. They are determined by two basic principles: solidarity, and democracy within the union. It is necessary to avoid any practises that will interfere with the unity of our class, and it is even more necessary to make sure that the union, instead of running its members, is run by them. To leave democracy out of an organisation such as the IWW would leave it a device for fascism, and tremendous handicap to labour. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Trotsky, Lenin and their heirs and cohorts found it necessary to herd labour into an organisation very much of that sort. The mighty weapon of the One Big Union must be wielded by us, not over us."

(61K)

The Origins of the Union Shop
by Tom Wetzel

"American leftists typically assume that the "union shop" is definitely a valuable asset to workers. It could be argued that this position implicitly accepts the bureaucratic outlook. For, it assumes that the union has a value independent of its usefulness to the workers themselves and that it should be maintained no matter whether the workforce is sufficiently motivated on its own to keep it going. Moreover, the favorable view of the union shop ignores the role that it played in converting the unions into organs of employer discipline over the workers."

(35K)

The Party of Labour
by Emile Pouget

"The Party of Labour is what it says it is, the banding together of the workers into one homogeneous bloc; the autonomous organisation of the working class into an aggregate operating on the terrain of the economy; by virtue of its origins, its essence, it shuns all compromise with bourgeois elements . . . The Party of Labour is a party of interests. It takes no account of the opinions of its component members: it acknowledges and co-ordinates only the interests - be they material or moral or intellectual - of the working class. Its ranks are open to all of the exploited regardless of their political or religious views."

(63K)

The Policy of the International
by Michael Bakunin

". . . there is still too great a difference in the level of industrial, political, intellectual, and moral development among the working masses in various countries for it to be possible today to unite them around a single political, anti-religious program. To suggest such a program for the International and to make it an absolute condition for admission to that Association, would be to establish a sect, not a worldwide association, and it would destroy the International.

(45K)

Programme of Anarcho-Syndicalism
by G.P. Maximoff

"The basic fabric of the future society is composed, in the anarchist view, of three elements. The first is the producers' association of the people, leading, through the syndicalisation of production, to producers' communism. The second is the consumers' association resulting, through the utilisation of cooperatives in consumers' communism. The third is the territorial association of the people, leading through communism to unity in diversity, i.e. the confederation of nations, based on the fundamental principles of Anarchism -- liberty and equality . . . However, the Anarchists do not visualise future society in such a simplified and schematic form. On the contrary, in their eyes it is represented by a far more complicated pattern, in which the basic fabric is interwoven by innumerable threads of varied and constantly overlapping human groupings, producing a great diversity of needs and activities on the part of the individual. in whom society is finally rooted."

(119K)

Trade Union Objections to Anarcho-Syndicalism
by Albert Meltzer

"Trade unionists often regard anarcho-syndicalism as a direct menace, sometimes viewing the Anarchist objections to authoritarian leadership and to the closed shop as equivalent with Conservative attacks on free trade unionism."

(12K)

The Revolutionary IWW
by Grover H. Perry

"The Industrial Workers of the World are laying the foundation of a new government. This government will have for its legislative halls the mills, the workshops and factories. Its legislators will be the men in the mills, shops and factories. Its legislative enactments will be those pertaining to the welfare of the workers . . . These things are to be. No force can stop them. Armies will be of no avail. Capitalist governments may issue their mandates in vain. The power of the workers--industrially organized--is the only power on earth worth considering--once they realize that power. Classes will disappear, and in their place will be only useful members of society--the workers."

(20K)

Sabotage
by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

"For us to discuss the morality of sabotage would be as absurd as to discuss the morality of the strike or the morality of the class struggle itself. In order to understand sabotage or to accept it at all it is necessary to accept the concept of class struggle. If you believe that between the workers on the one side and their employers on the other there is peace, there is harmony such as exists between brothers, and that consequently whatever strikes and lockouts occur are simply family squabbles; if you believe that a point can be reached whereby the employer can get enough and the worker can get enough, a point of amicable adjustment of industrial warfare and economic distribution, then there is no justification and no explanation of sabotage intelligible to you. Sabotage is one weapon in the arsenal of labor to fight its side of the class struggle. Labor realizes, as it becomes more intelligent, that it must have power in order to accomplish anything; that neither appeals for sympathy nor abstract rights will make for better conditions."

(53K)

Sabotage
by Emile Pouget

"Since the day a man had the criminal ability to profit by another man's labour, since that very same day the exploited toiler has instinctively tried to give to his master less than was demanded from him. In this wise the worker was unconsciously doing SABOTAGE, demonstrating in an indirect way the irrepressible antagonism that arrays Capital and Labor one against the other."

(93K)

(Introduction to Pouget's Sabotage)
by Arturo Giovannitti

"Now that the bosses have succeeded in dealing an almost mortal blow to the boycott, now that picket duty is practically outlawed, free speech throttled, free assemblage prohibited and injunctions against labor are becoming epidemic; Sabotage, this dark, invincible, terrible Damocles' Sword that hangs over the head of the master class, will replace all the confiscated weapons and ammunition of the army of the toilers. And it will win, for it is the most redoubtable of all, except the general strike. In vain may the bosses get an injunction against the strikers' funds -- Sabotage will get a more powerful one against their machinery. In vain may they invoke old laws and make new ones against it-they will never discover it, never track it to its lair, never run it to the ground, for no laws will ever make a crime of the "clumsiness and lack of skill" of a "scab" who bungles his work or "puts on the bum" a machine he "does not know how to run."."

(34K)

Syndicalism and the SAC, a Short Introduction
by the Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation

The categories of workers which were attracted to SAC during its first years were made up of road and construction workers, forestry and mine workers, as well as the quarry workers. SAC wasn't then or even later especially strong among industrial workers. Another peculiarity is that SAC organised a larger percent of trades that had a lower prestige and status. In certain cases this low status was combined with low wages while in others, for example railway navvies, they could by being in SAC and using syndicalist methods of struggle raise their material standards to that of the highest paid among the working class.

(51K)

Syndicalism in Myth and Reality
by L. Gambone

"Syndicalism died after WWI. Syndicalism was finished as a revolutionary movement by 1910. Syndicalism was finished off by Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Syndicalism was a primitive millennial movement which evolved into modern social democratic unionism. Or so the academic labour historians will tell you. The purpose of this pamphlet is to show that these conceptions are myths."

(26K)

Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practise
by Emma Goldman

"Of course 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 inhuman 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. Indeed, Syndicalism goes further: it aims to liberate labor from every institution that has not for its object the free development of production for the benefit of all humanity. In short, the ultimate purpose of Syndicalism is to reconstruct society from its present centralized, authoritative and brutal state to one based upon the free, federated grouping of the workers along lines of economic and social liberty."

(27K)

Syndicalism, the Industrial Expression of Anarchism
by George Woodcock

"The syndicate is a form of union which differs from the ordinary trade union in that it aims, not only at the gaining of improvements in wages and conditions under the present system, but also at the overthrow of that system and its replacement by a free society by means of the social revolution based on the economic direct action of the workers. This is not to say that it ignores the day-to-day struggle, but its members recognise that only by a complete destruction of the structure of property and authority can justice and security ever be attained for the workers."

(11K)

Syndicalism: What it is
by Gaylord Wilshire

"Syndicalism is inverted Socialism. The different between Syndicalism and Socialism is the difference between a man and a machine. The man himself controls his own activities; the machine is controlled from without."

(17K)

What is the CNT?
by José Peirats

"The Confederation Naciónal del Trabajo (the National Confederation of Labour) has been a thorn in the side of politicians in Catalonia, and for that matter in the rest of Spain, since its inception (in 1911) right up to the end of the Civil War (in 1939), which was also the end of its open existence. These gentlemen loathed it as a hotbed of organised upheavals in the even tenour of public life, and did not mince their words in choosing the worst epithets they could think of for it."

(45K)

What is the Union?
by Emile Pouget

"The trade union offers itself as a school for the will: its preponderant role is the result of its members' wishes, and, if it is the highest form of association, the reason is that it is the condensation of workers' strengths made effective through their direct action, the sublime form of the deliberate enactment of the wishes of the proletarian class."

(24K)

Why do Anarcho-Syndicalists Oppose Professional Elections?
by the CNT-AIT (France)

"Works Councils have little to do with increased workers' control. They are the mechanism by which management seek to control and pacify the workforce. Participation in Works Councils creates apathy among workers and cannot but lead to the incorporation of the trade union movement into the capitalist system. Furthermore, the Works Councils system has had a highly corrupting effect on the union movement."

(19K)

A Workers' Guide to Direct Action
Industrial Workers of the World

"Direct action is any form of guerrilla warfare that cripples the boss' ability to make a profit and makes him/her cave in to the workers' demands. The best-known form of direct action is the strike, in which workers simply walk off their jobs and refuse to produce profits for the boss until they get what they want. This is the preferred tactic of the ACTU "business unions," but is one of the least effective ways of confronting the boss."

(19K)

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