AUT: Defending Anarcho-Syndicalism

[Jamal Hannah <jah@xxxxxxx>]

Here is a reply to Bob Black who is one of the strongest opponents of
anarcho-syndicalism in the US.  I hope I made some good points.. please
comment.

This discussion started on the aut-op-sy list where someone using the
alias "guy debord" attacked anarcho-syndicalism.

 - Jamal

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 15:21:46 -0800 (PST)
From: Jamal Hannah <jah@xxxxxxx>
To: Bob Black <>
Subject: Re: Syndicalism vs. Fascism (fwd)

On Fri, 31 Dec 1999 Abobob51@xxxxxxx wrote:

>         I haven't read what "Debord" has to say, but the relationship of
> syndicalism to fascism is a matter of history, not logic.  It is not merely
> that some Italian syndicalists drifted randomly into fascism as others
> perhaps drifted into Communism or Catholicism.  It was a large-scale,
> one-way, usually gradual conversion which included nearly all the movement's
> leaders and theoreticians.

This is completely false, and the pamphlet "Red Years, Black Years"
made it clear that in fact the Italian anarcho-syndicalist movement
was at the forefront of fighting fascism, with all the movements leaders
and theoreticians united against it.. many being imprisoned or murdered by
fascists.

> The tendencies had much in common on which to
> base this transformation.  Both espoused mass direct action, both were
> stridently anti-bourgeois, both were anti-democratic and anti-liberal, both
> espoused "functional" corporatist forms of economic organization, and both
> called for economic development.  Although in theory syndicalism is
> internationalist, really existing Italian syndicalism always had nationalist
> tendencies and always took for granted that the nation-state was its field of
> activity.

But then one can conclude that _all_ anarchists become fascists,
because anarcho-syndicalists are anarchists... perticularly the Italian
USI.

>     Drawing up checklists of fascist and syndicalist attributes to show they
> don't match up is no way to decide if something happened in history.  Marxism
> did eventuate in Stalinism despite the checklists of pious Marxists; the
> religion of Jesus did eventuate in the Papacy and the Inquisition.  The
> checklist approach precludes any genuinely historical understanding because
> it defines away the very possibility off entering into the mentality of
> historical actors.

I think the checklist is valid.  Anyone can call themselves a fascist...
whether they once were an individualist, lifestyle anarchist, autonomist,
or what-have-you.

As for all these movements leading to authoritarianism.. let me point out
to you that we still live in an authoritarian society and this is the
reason that all those movements were co-opted.  The ruling class needs to
win a thousand times... we only need to win once.  If we had won then
those movements would have libertarian forms if they still existed at
all, and this issue would be moot.

>     For syndicalists to turn fascist (and not something else) in some numbers
> may strike you as irrational and immoral, but the historian looks for pattern
> and meaning before dismissing a phenomenon as just one of those crazy things.
>  Given how things turned out, it is reasonable to suppose that some of the
> similarities or affinities between syndicalism and fascism were more
> important than some of the differences.  A study like The Syndicalist
> Tradition and Italian Fascism traces the ideological evolution in great
> detail, and considered in stages the development makes much more sense than
> one would expect.

I disagree, because the real pattern we see is that the people who
consistantly argue that syndicalism led to fascism in fact simply dont
like syndicalism.

>     The denials and defensiveness of presently-day anarcho-syndicalists is
> obviously not disinterested, but their embarrassment is deserved.  For years
> now, as post-leftist anarchists have gained ground on them, leftist rhetoric
> has become increasingly hysterical and defamatory.

It is "lifestyle anarchists", who have, as a whole, become
increasingly hysterical and defamatory... obcessed with attacking
Bookchin and Bekken, two individuals who most "left anarchists"
dont even "follow".

The last 3-4 issues of Anarchy magazine have been exclusivly dedicated to
smearing and attacking everything in the traditional anarchist movement,
Noam Chomsky, anarcho-syndicalism, workers movements, etc.

> In defiance of all that
> makes sense, some of them (such as Murray Bookchin and Jon Bekken) even
> accuse us of fascism!  Quite aside from its indecent dishonesty, this lazy
> choice of invective is tactically imprudent

If you dish something out (you called them fascists first), you should
be able to accept the same treatment.

>     The syndicalism-vs.-fascism debate is really a surrogate, and not a very
> good one, for what should really concern us, the syndicalism-vs.-anarchism
> debate.  Here again it's the people in glass houses who are throwing stones.
> Anarcho-leftists in general and syndicalists in particular are often quick to
> set themselves up as the arbiters of anarchist orthodoxy.  One needn't always
> stray very far from their specific conception of anarchism to be condemned as
> not truly an anarchist.  They may not distinguish between what is essential
> to anarchism and what is only an incidental historical accretion.

Anarcho-syndicalism is an integral aspect of anarchism, and if all the
anarcho-syndicalists were murdered in their beds tomorrow, as the
lifestylist anarchists seem to wish for, the phenomenon would arise once
again, perhaps with a different name... because the real conditions of the
real world create the need for an anarchist labor movement, and people
would re-create it sponteniously.

>     On the other hand, no matter how indignantly the thesis is received, it
> is an issue of high importance to all anarchists whether syndicalism can
> possibly be a form of anarchism.  That it might not be is not a heresy
> recently concocted by individualist, elitist lifestyle anarchists.

There is clear proof that it is... because the types of attacks
we are now seeing are savage and hysterical, and not based on comradely
disagreements of the past.

> Ever
> since some anarchists entered the trade-union movement, other anarchists have
> doubted whether a syndicalist system could be anarchist.  Impeccably orthodox
> left anarchists like Kropotkin and Malatesta were among the skeptics.  The
> political misadventures of the CNT in the Spanish revolution lent empirical
> support to doubts derived from anarchist theory.

Kropotkin and Malatesta never completely rejected the syndicalist
movement, nor did they attack and slander it in the way that modern
lifestyle anarchists do.

>     Most anarchists have always believed that anarchism cannot be socially or
> economically agnostic -- that not every kind of society can do without the
> state.  Most anarchists, for instance, think that an anarchist society cannot
> be capitalist, although anarchism is not by definition anti-capitalist.  In
> just the same way, some anarchists, especially post-leftist anarchists, think
> that an anarchist society cannot be syndicalist.  True or false, this says
> nothing about the sincerity of anarcho-syndicalists, but neither can we allow
> their hurt feelings to impede so important an inquiry.

I think that anarchism is clearly, by definition, anti-capitalist..
because with capitalism you have bosses and landlords, and restrictive
private property.  These are authroritarian elements and hierarchical
entities, and have nothing to do with anarchism. Some people confuse the
free exchange of goods with "capitalism". This is a mistake.

>     This is not the occasion for a comprehensive anarchist critique of
> syndicalism, but I'll mention a few relevant considerations.  Syndicalism
> would preserve and perpetuate industrialism with its elaborate social
> division of labor and high technology.  The production process is therefore
> controlled by managers and their attendant experts.  Electing the managers no
> more alters their authority roles than electing politicians does.  No
> syndicalist has ever explained why representative democracy in industry would
> be any more free than representative democracy in the polity.  Either way, it
> isn't anarchy.

I disagree. Not all anarchists, let alone human beings, reject technology
or the idea of working - note: I say working, and note wage slavery.  For
example, if I want a new house, I have to build it... this requires work,
or, physical effort.  This is the basic problem with essays like "The
Abolition of Work"... it does not make a distinction between needed
physical effort, and wage-slavery... in fact, I assume it is intentionaly
ambiguous in order to place syndicalists in the category of being "not
anarchists", when in fact they are, and the problem is with the essay,
not the syndicalists.

The fact that most humans, at least in the United States, do not reject
technology or the idea of neccesary work means that either anarchy will
never be achieved, or that legitimate forms of the anarchist movement that
do not reject these ideas will continue to flourish, regardless of how
much lifestyle anarchists slander them in the pages of Anarchy magazine,
or elsewhere.

>     Syndicalism also carries over with industrialism a hierarchy of
> authority.  Industrial society is so far-flung and complex that socially
> strategic decision-making necessarily takes place on many levels, from the
> workplace all the way up to international institutions.  The syndicalist
> system has the representative institutions at each level elevate a smaller
> number of representatives to the next level, and so forth.  Political
> scientists know this system as "indirect elections" and they also know that
> it has always been favored by conservatives because it progressively reduces
> popular influence over policy.

You clearly do not understand anarcho-syndcialism, or refuse to
understand it, because the issues of hierarchy and authority are
adiquitely delt with within it.  Unless your definition of hierarchy and
authority are so broad that they include any form of formal human
interaction, and any form of human social organization, then of course,
your definition of anarchy is incompatible with human behavior, which is
social... even the Unabomber reached out to other people with his writing,
so he can be said to be a social being, and a participant in voluntary
social organization of some form or another.

>     As little impact rank-and-file workers would exert on social policy, the
> majority of the population would lack even nominal power -- even less than
> they have now.  A syndicalist society is a productivist society.  Instead of
> political institutions there are industrial institutions.  Instead of
> citizenship, which was widespread, there is workerhood as the franchise for
> social voting.  The majority of Americans -- children, students, housewives,
> retirees, dropouts, unemployables -- do not work.  If the
> anarcho-syndicalists come through on their promises to rationalize the
> economy, eliminating parasitic jobs only appropriate to wasteful capitalism,
> there will be many millions more out of work.  That leaves a worker oligarchy
> with all formal power, and its mandated and revocable hierarchs with all real
> power.  Everyone else is at their mercy, or rather at the mercy of their
> hierarchy of reresentatives.  In all but name, this is a state, and an
> especially odious state.  Think about it.

The majority of Americans in fact do work.. children work in school as
students... many adults are parents and work to take care of their
children.  Homeless people work by beating the pavement to go from one
meal or handout to the next.  Writers like yourself work by writing texts
and distributing them for others to read.  Everyone is a worker, except
those who gain profit from others through wages or rent and live off that
profit. This does not cheapen or lessen the human experiance... realizing
that work is an integral part of human life affirms that it is we who
recreate the world every day, and if we organize we have social power
that can displace those who depend on or feed off of our work.

Saying that syndicalist society would be worse than present society
ignores the anarchist aspect of syndicalism (or more correctly,
anarcho-syndicalism): legalization of drugs, opening of all prisons, an
end to racism, sexism, and homophobia, an end to the insane work-or-starve
ultimatum (people who choose not to work could easily form mutual aid
societies), as well as an end to the corporate domination and control of
travel, the media, technological production, schooling, etc... all these
things would take on libertarian forms in the revolutionary society.
It would be like the 60's. only a thousand times better.
Anarcho-syndicalism is not simply stale workerism with people in factories
and nothing more.  It does not accept the idea that workers can only
achieve trade union consciousness, as the Leninists do.
Anarcho-syndicalism is only one part of a libertarian movement, which
includes anarcho-communists, mutualists, eco-anarchists, and so on.
The ultimate goal of anarcho-syndicalists is libertarian communism:
stateless liberty.

Perhaps if some people only listened to people like Jon Bekken, they would
get a very negative impression of syndicalism. In Australia there is
another "Jon Bekken" named Mark McGuire. He makes syndicalism out to be
boring, stodgy, and formulaic.. he has alienated many anarchists who ran
bookstores and collective projects from his form of syndicalism and
generally pissed off a lot of people, just like Bookchin has.  You may say
that these 3 people are proof that "left anarchy" is corrupt.. but I have
encountered far more "anarcho-authoritarians" of the "lifestylist" type
than any who are syndicalists (most likely because there simply are more
lifestylist anarchists in the US, though I know there are a huge number
of non-dogmatic anarcho-communist punks here).

So once again, there is no basis for the claim that syndicalism leads to
fascism.  On the contrary, it is fascism which tries to co-opt socialism,
syndicalism, and even anarchy, and no matter what you call yourself, if
you try to reach out to people and talk about freedom, you will find
fascists poking up their heads and trying to take over.  I would suggest
you focus on how to prevent yourselves from slipping towards fascism
rather than accusing people you disagree tacticaly with of being fascists.

 - Jamal Hannah




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