Andrew’s Reviews > Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice > Status Update

This chapter traces the development of revolutionary Syndicalism to the Socialist ideas that spread throughout the earliest days of the labor movement. Rocker discusses the impact Robert Owen had on England’s working class of the 1830s. England’s working class, for example, gradually became convinced that little would be gained through the legislative reform efforts of the British middle class. If they wanted real change, they’d have to do it themselves. Trade Unions combined efforts nationally in the form of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union to meet the daily needs of the workers, overthrow the capitalist economy, and replace it with cooperative labor to meet the needs of everyone. Ideas for a general strike emerged, which scared the living daylights out of the ruling, propertied classes. In France, the labor movement had a similar association with revolutionary Socialism. Trade unions went on strike throughout the country and the government, at the behest of the employers of industry, banned workers from combining into trade unions. Nevertheless, trade unionism continued to spread under the guise of mutualités until the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte struck them down. It was not until 1864 that the International Workmen’s Association renewed the ideas of revolutionary Socialism and combined the efforts of the English and French workers. According to Rocket, it declared “that the economic subservience of the workers to the owners … was the source of the slavery which revealed itself in social misery, intellectual degradation, and political oppression.” Economic liberation of the working class was their greatest priority. They brought workers from different countries together so that they could trace their enslavement to the root causes and build networks of working-class solidarity. At the third congress of the International, the congress adopted the resolution that “… the councils of the trade and industrial organizations will take the place of the present government, and this representation of labor will do away, once and forever, with the government of the past.” Out of this resolution, labor councils serve as the political counterpart to the socialist economy.