Haymarket and the Rise of Syndicalism

Science & Society, 2015

Marx's first meeting with Mikhail Bakunin in 1847 was amicable. Sixteen years later, however, he crossed swords with Bakunin, who had by then formed his own anarchist current. The setting was the just-founded International Workingmen's Association (IWA) or First International. At the heart of their differences was whether workers should engage in political action, with Marx in favor and Bakunin opposed. While making a forceful case for its position, the Marx party was never able to get Bakunin or his current to openly debate the question in the International. Their conflict focused, rather, on organizational issues. Marx accused Bakunin, with evidence, of having formed a secret center within the IWA, in violation of its norms. The majority of its affiliates agreed and expelled Bakunin's current in 1872, while adopting Marx's political action course, which contained the seeds of the mass working-class political parties in Europe. Bakunin's current passed into oblivion. • G4358Text.indd 153 2/26/2015 4:30:23 PM 154 SCIENCE & SOCIETY interests. "Yet," he writes, in words that resonate today, "the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor." There was only one answer, Marx concluded, to this cold fact: "To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes." And in the opening sentence of the preface to the accompanying rules for the new organization, he wrote: "The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves" (MECW, 20, 5-14). 1 Both claims were at the very core of Marx's political program and the axis around which his work for the next decade in the IWA revolved. They explain why he and his partner Frederick Engels would eventually clash and part company-in international socialism's first most public dispute-with another member of the new organization and the current he led, Mikhail Bakunin and the anarchists. 2 Marx and Engels' Politics before the IWA "Marx," Hal Draper convincingly argues, "was the first socialist figure to come to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the extension of democratic control from below.. .. He was the first to fuse the struggle for consistent political democracy with the struggle for a socialist transformation" (Draper, 1977, 59). The socalled "father of anarchism," Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-often thought of as a socialist although he wasn't-declined Marx's invitation in 1846 to have a civil debate about their differences. When Marx did take him on in his book The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)-a sarcastic play on the subtitle of Proudhon's book, The Philosophy of Povertyhis critique was almost exclusively about the failings of its economic nostrums, exactly because Proudhon's perspective was bereft of any political content. Marx, nevertheless, did make the point that strikes, MARxISM VERSUS ANARCHISM

Contemporary European History, 2006

2009

congress of the FVdG, which morphed into the FAUD, solidarity was expressed with Soviet Russia. But at this same congress R. Rocker took the floor with a report on the principles of syndicalism. His speech and the resulting "Declaration concerning the Principles of Syndicalism" set forth a synthesis of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism on which the ideology of the anarcho-syndicalist movement was based. An adherent of the anarcho-communism of P. Kropotkin, Rocker combined the traditional goals of anarchism (doing away with the State, private property, and the system of the division of labour; creation of a federation of free communes and a diversified economy aimed at the satisfaction of the real needs of people-the ethical basis of socialism) with ideas developed by the German anarchist G. Landauer about a new culture and the creation of the elements of a future free society without waiting for a general social upheaval. Rocker was convinced the social revolution could not be carried through spontaneously, that it must be prepared still within the framework of existing capitalist society and that the better it was prepared, the less trouble and pain there would be in carrying it through. Following the revolutionary syndicalists, he considered the unions (syndicates) to be the organs and elements of preparation for the revolution. The unions, in Rocker's opinion, struggling not only for momentary improvements, but also for revolution, are "not a transitory product of capitalist society, but the cells of the future socialist economic organization. " Rejecting private property as a "monopoly of possessions" and government as a "monopoly of decision-making, " the syndicalists should strive "for collectivization of land, work tools, raw materials, and all social wealth; for the reorganization of the whole of economic life on the basis of libertarian, i.e. stateless, communism, which finds its expression in the slogan: 'From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs!'" Rocker criticized not only the bourgeois State, State boundaries, parliamentarism and political parties; but 68 Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th Century Vadim Damier Monday, September 28th 2009 1919-1920 to assemble a congress in the Netherlands and Sweden were unsuccessful. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks, along with Communist parties and groups in a number of European countries, announced the creation of the Communist International. To many anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists it seemed that this new international association could be the centre of at-66

Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 2006

2001

fevrier. BDIC, FES (microfilm), IISG, GOPB, SAPMO (icpl.), SHC (icpl.), SSA Official Bulletin of the International Labour and Socialist Conference. Publ. by the Press-Committee of the Conference, Bern no. 1-8, 3-12 February. FES (microfilm), IISG, SAPMO (icpl.), SHC (icpl.) Offizielles Bulletin der Internationalen Arbeiter-und Sozialisten-Konferenz. Publiziert vom Presskomitee der Konferenz, Bern, Band 1, Nr. 1-12, 4.-14. Februar 1919. ABA, FES (icpl + microfilm), IISG (icpl), SAPMO, SHC (icpl.), SSA Deuxième Internationale; Second International; Zweite Internationale After the wartime split of the international socialist movement and the foundation of the Communist International, the parties still in the Second International held four Conferences in 1919-20, formally under the auspices of the International Socialist Bureau. Finally, at the Geneva Congress (1920) only seventeen parties were represented, including the British Labour Party, the (Mehrheits-)Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (MSPD) and the social democratic parties of Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Poland. The Congress decided to move the secretariat from Brussels to London. Reports of the conferences in Amsterdam and Lucerne and the resolutions of these conferences are

The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution

Since the early 1990s the world has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of anarchist and syndicalist ideology, organisation, and methods of struggle. This resurgence is generally explained as a response to the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, the impact of increasingly globalized capital, the restructuring of state-society relations, the advent of new forms of authoritarianism and social control, and the collapse of world communism. 1 Rather than signal "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution," the post-Soviet period has been characterised by experimentation, reinvention and rediscovery on the part of progressive movements. 2 Anarchism and syndicalism have been part of this process of renewal. New movements have emerged in areas with little in the way of a revolutionary, libertarian socialist tradition; existing movements in areas of historic influence have revived, and a more diffuse anarchistic influence permeates a number of important social movements. The last two decades have seen new anarchist groups emerge in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Nigeria and Syria. In 1997, for example, several hundred gold miners registered a branch of the Industrial

Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d’histoire

americanreformmovements.com

Monthly Review, 2001

Many among today's young radical activists, especially those at the center of the anti-globalization and anti-eorporate movements, call themselves anarchists. But the intellectual/philosophical perspective that holds sway in these circles might be better described as an anarchist sensibility than as anarchism per se. Unlike the Marxist radicals of the sixties, who devoured the writings of Lenin and Mao, today's anarchist activists are unlikely to pore over the works of Bakunin. For contemporary young radical activists, anarchism means a decentralized organizational structure, based on affinity groups that work together on an ad hoc basis, and decision-making by consensus. It also means egalitarianism; opposition to all hierarchies; suspicion of authority, especially that of the state; and commitment to living according to one's values. Young radical activists, who regard themselves as anarchists, are likely to be hostile not only to corporations but to capitalism. Many envision a stateless society based on small, egalitarian communities. For some, however, the society of the future remains an open question. For them, anarchism is important mainly as an organizational structure and as a commitment to egalitarianism. It is a form of politics that revolves around the exposure of the truth rather than strategy. It is a politics decidedly in the moment. Anarchism and Marxism have a history of antagonism. Bakunin, writing in the late nineteenth century, argued that the working class could not use state power to emancipate itself but must abolish the state. Later, anarchists turned to "propaganda of the deed," often engaging in acts of assassination and terrorism in order to incite mass Barbara Epstein teaches in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz and is working on a book on the underground movement in the ghetto in Minsk, Belarus, during the Second World War.

The Project, 2015

A discussion of Marx's important role from 1864 in the International Working Men's Association and the influence that what became known as the First International had on Marx's thinking and political practice.