Juan Conatz reviews a new pamphlet by
Solidarity Federation. We’re excited about the new pamphlet. You
can read excerpts from it here.
Fighting for ourselves: anarcho-syndicalism and the class
struggle by
Solidarity
Federation is a relatively expansive document from a
membership-based group (as opposed to a writing group like
Recomposition or
Aufheben).
The pre-layout final draft clocking in at just under 100 pages, this
isn’t merely a one-off position paper on a certain topic, but an
expression of the group’s outlook and how it relates to the past,
present and future.
While there are many articles and books focused on some of the
subjects the pamphlet takes on, here we find them summarized through
an anarcho-syndicalist perspective. Those not familiar with some of
the subjects, events and tendencies will find a useful resource here,
as the pamphlet goes over them in an introductory fashion, while
pointing out where to find more information. Considering this aspect
of the pamphlet alone would make
Fighting for ourselves
valuable. But there’s much more here than that.
The pamphlet is very much worth reading, and I hope SolFed figures
out a way to get the hard copy easily available in North America. And
while some of us who run this blog know members and have paid
attention to the group over the last few years, one doesn’t need to
do that to appreciate or get something out of this pamphlet. It does
help to know that while SolFed is in the process of moving from a
propaganda focused political organization to a revolutionary union,
this is happening within the context of
the
riots last year, massive public sector strikes in response to
austerity and a
recent
explosive student movement.
At the risk of skipping the massive amount of topics and details
in the pamphlet, most of what I’m going to concentrate on in this
review is the conception of the ‘political-economic’
organization. To break that down some, this is something in
disagreement with the usual separation of the economic organization
(such as a union) and the political organization (parties,
federations, etc.). SolFed instead say both functions can and should
be done within the same organization, and that this is their goal.
I find this important and relevant for mainly 2 reasons.
1) The resurgence of anarchism in North America in the last decade
led to the establishment of a few dozen political organizations,
mostly inspired by
platformism
and
especifismo. More
recently, a few small eclectic Marxist groups, centered around a
couple of blogs have also popped up. In many ways, their existence or
function depends on a not insignificant amount of politicized people
‘getting serious’ or ‘getting organized’. But joining a
political organization isn’t the only way to do that.
2) Despite the IWW’s official neutrality in the dispute between
European-based radical traditions (anarchism and party socialism),
the IWW has its own set of politics which can be developed further,
regardless of those who talk of ‘apoliticalism’.
Throughout the pamphlet we see numerous instances of the political
and economic being separated. For the economic TUC [a]
there’s the political Labour Party. For the AFL-CIO, there’s the
Democratic Party.
In Leninism, we see this separation as an
ideological badge of honor, based on the opinion that the working
class can only achieve “trade-union consciousness” and thus need
a Party to lead them past that.
Even in anarchism, a bitter opponent of left wing capitalist
parties and Marxist-Leninism, the separation has been advocated and
practiced. The Italian anarchist
Errico
Malatesta argued to keep syndicalist unions and anarchist groups
separate and said any explicit anarchist union will either stay tiny
or become reformist as it grew. This is still an argument used
against revolutionary unionism. [b] Also,
the
Platform, written by exiled Russian and Ukrainian anarchists
during the late 1920s, also sees a need for a political organization
to keep revolutionary unions from becoming reformist.
The first example of revolutionary unionism we see in this
pamphlet is the
French
CGT. Considered the beginning of syndicalism, in the late 1890s
and early 1900s, the CGT was a union with significant anarchist and
non-party socialist involvement and influence. Yet, officially they
remained politically neutral, which was understood as “standing
outside all political schools and parties but not opposed to them”.
The CGT’s revolutionary aims, though, were apparently expressed
more through the existence of the union’s democratic structures.
When the state and capital started treating them differently (not
just repression), the reformists won out. Soon, they would mobilize
their members for World War I, and later, represent the most
conservative force within the working class explosion of
May
1968.
The pamphlet gives a decent overview of the CGT, but not knowing
much about them it seems somewhat unclear why they ended up the way
they did. Did they have written revolutionary goals and an
organizational strategy to reach them? Or were these written and
espoused by some of their more famous members on a more individual
basis, which just received temporary agreement when the union was in
a specific time and place?
With the IWW, there was also an official political neutrality,
which existed for different reasons than the CGT. Also, the free
speech fights, condemnation of racial and ethnic discrimination and
antiwar stance meant rather than the standard interpretation of
‘apolitical’ syndicalism, the union still expressed political
perspectives and goals. This just didn’t happen by stating
preference for the European radical traditions of party socialism or
anarchism.
From here, we move to British syndicalism, which never saw the
creation of revolutionary unions, but instead saw working through the
TUC unions through rank-and-file networks coming from small groups of
individuals or tiny political organizations. This form of
syndicalism, which sought to work within the reformist unions, was
advocated as well in places like the U.S. and Canada, but in Britain
it was the norm. Even today, with
the
UK IWW’s debate on dual card VS ‘greenfield’ organizing,
this legacy lives on.
Outside of anarchism and syndicalism, currents like
German
council communism of the 1910s and 1920s also faced the
political-economic organization question. Drawing a lot from the IWW,
the General Workers’ Union of Germany (Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union
Deutschlands – AAUD) was a union that shunned day-to-day struggles
and concerned itself instead with the immediacy of revolution. It was
linked to the Communist Workers Party of Germany (Kommunistische
Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands – KAPD), a non-parliamentary political
party which was thrown out of the German Communist Party for being
too ‘ultraleft’. But despite the KAPD being more of a political
organization than a political party, some militants in the AAUD
thought the division of functions between the two was still not
desirable, and so formed the AAUD-E, which sought to be both the
political and economic organization for the class.[c]
Now we finally get to anarcho-syndicalism, which is what SolFed
identifies with and is the thrust of the pamphlet. There’s a decent
amount on the Spanish CNT up to the point in the Spanish Civil War in
which it started to play a negative role. For those who aren’t
familiar, after beating a fascist uprising off the streets in areas
in which the union was the strongest, it balked when it came to the
question of taking power. The beginnings of a revolution in which
workers took over their workplaces and peasants occupied and
collectivized land was halted in favor of antifascist unity. The end
result was anarchists joining the Popular Front government and
ordering workers back to work during the Barcelona May Days of 1937.
Rather than blaming the supposed intellectual/ideological
shortcomings of anarchism, the personal failings of individual
leaders or the lack of an effective political organization, the
pamphlet takes a different stance. Instead, at fault was its
politically neutral syndicalist structure (‘a union for all
workers’) that allowed many members with no revolutionary aims to
join and shape the union. This is similar to Malatesta’s argument
against revolutionary unionism, but that’s not all. In addition,
the pamphlet says, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), which was
formed to combat reformists in the CNT, created a layer which was
where ‘politics’ happened. So in essence, the political-economic
separation occurred and the trajectory of the union depended on which
faction had the most trust, leadership and power at any one time.
Another anarcho-syndicalist union of that time was the Federación
Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA) from Argentina. They disagreed with
both the CNT’s form of anarcho-syndicalism and separate anarchist
political organization. Rather than being a union for all workers, it
was a union for anarchists. SolFed seem to find inspiration in this.
But it must be pointed out that although the FORA became relatively
large in the 1920s, they suffered a major split that seemed to have
been as much at fault for their near demise as any repression from
the state and capitalists. They still exist today, but have never
regained anything close to their former strength and seem no where as
active as the tendencies they once heatedly criticized.
The most interesting part of this pamphlet for me is the last
chapter, which could actually stand alone as a pamphlet itself. This
is where SolFed get into exactly the way it wished to organize and
why.
Saying that their aim is “not to enroll every worker into the
revolutionary union”, SolFed’s suspicion of what they call
‘neutral syndicalist’ model is gone into numerous times during
the pamphlet. The examples of the mistakes and undesirable
possibilities it might facilitate are explained as well. There’s
definitely something to be said about that, but not having struggle
happen through your organizations opens up some other possible
problems that are worth considering.
By rejecting the ‘neutral syndicalist’ model, SolFed will be
deemphasizing membership, not being a union for all workers, but a
union for anarcho-syndicalist workers.
1) IWW campaigns that have demphasized membership have come across
the problem that co-workers are not as invested and efforts are taken
less seriously.
2) There is a real possibility that having a more restrictive
membership could encourage the downplaying of politics. Doing so can
make the tactics we choose less understandable if there isn’t an
obvious, known, wider reason for it. ‘Getting the goods’ is not
always the reason and the tactics we choose are not always (sometimes
never) the best way to accomplish this, in any case.
I think there’s something to be said about people joining the
IWW and getting their political education through membership.
Although we aren’t the best at this, it does happen. In the best
cases, people join through a drive at their work and then are exposed
to a tradition and to fellow workers that develop their vague
unionist sympathies into anticapitalist class struggle unionism. That
isn’t to say everyone should be signed up, but more restrictive
membership would probably leave political education to either
individual study or external efforts from SolFed.
3) If demphasizing membership and politics happens, the danger
then arises that we do initial ground work for a campaign, at which
point, a reformist union comes in and takes over. This is always
probably going to be a danger for revolutionary unions, but if
membership and politics becomes unimportant, the question of ‘Why
not [insert other union]?’ becomes harder to answer.
4) John O’Reilly
has
written about legitimacy when it comes to IWW campaigns. Similar
questions are going to happen with future SolFed ones. How will they
respond to this if they are portrayed as a small minority of workers
because of demphasized membership?
None of these problems are insurmountable though, and SolFed, or
at least the members who were behind writing this pamphlet, seem to
have a good grasp on being able to adapt and learn from successes and
failures. But there does seem to be a danger, in this conception of
the political-economic, that the political is stressed to a way
greater extent. One wonders what the difference is between SolFed’s
model and the
Sojournor
Truth Organization’s (STO), which was a small Marxist political
organization in the 1970s that went through a period of mainly
workplace organizing.
I’ve skipped over large parts of this pamphlet for this review.
Indeed, if I was to cover everything, while offering my own thoughts,
it could be a pamphlet in itself! The vastness of the years and
material covered, combined with thought provoking propositions for
revolutionary unionism, make this a valuable contribution for
workplace militants to read over and discuss.
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