Syndicalism is a radical current in the labor movement that was most active in the early 20th century. Its main idea is the establishment of local worker-based organizations and the advancement of the demands and rights of workers through strikes. According to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, it was predominant in the revolutionary left in the decade which preceded the outbreak of World War I because Marxism was mostly reformist at that time.
Anarcho-syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society. The end goal of syndicalism is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage slavery. Anarcho-syndicalist theory therefore generally focuses on the labour movement.
The Anarchist Federation is a federation of anarcho-communists in Great Britain and Ireland. It is not a political party, but a direct action, agitational and propaganda organisation.
The Solidarity Federation, also known by the abbreviation SolFed, is a federation of class struggle anarchists active in Britain. The organisation advocates a strategy of anarcho-syndicalism as a method of abolishing capitalism and the state, and describes itself as a "revolutionary union". In 1994 it adopted its current name, having previously been the Direct Action Movement since 1979, and before that the Syndicalist Workers' Federation since 1950.
The International Workers' Association is an international federation of anarcho-syndicalist labor unions and initiatives.
Anarchism in the UK initially developed within the context of radical Whiggery and Protestant religious dissent. Both during the English Civil War and the First Industrial Revolution, English anarchist thought developed in the context of revolutionary working class politics and an anti-establishment ethos.
Workers' Solidarity Alliance (WSA) is an American anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian group designed to help establish member-managed organizations in the workplace and community. It was founded in 1984, created from an existing network of groups including the Libertarian Workers' Group. It is based in New York, and produced a print journal called Ideas & Action from 1984 to 1997. On May 1, 2010, the WSA relaunched the Ideas and Action publication in an electronic magazine format.
Anarchism in South Africa dates to the 1880s, and played a major role in the labour and socialist movements from the turn of the twentieth century through to the 1920s. The early South African anarchist movement was strongly syndicalist. The ascendance of Marxism–Leninism following the Russian Revolution, along with state repression, resulted in most of the movement going over to the Comintern line, with the remainder consigned to irrelevance. There were slight traces of anarchist or revolutionary syndicalist influence in some of the independent left-wing groups which resisted the apartheid government from the 1970s onward, but anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism as a distinct movement only began re-emerging in South Africa in the early 1990s. It remains a minority current in South African politics.
Kevin Carson is an American social theorist, economist, and anarchist who has identified at various times as a mutualist, individualist anarchist, left-wing market anarchist and anarchist without adjectives. He works as a Senior Fellow and Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at the Center for a Stateless Society. Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy aims to revive interest in mutualism, in an effort to synthesize Austrian economics with the labor theory of value by attempting to incorporate both subjectivism and time preference.
Anarchism in France can trace its roots to thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who grew up during the Restoration and was the first self-described anarchist. French anarchists fought in the Spanish Civil War as volunteers in the International Brigades. According to journalist Brian Doherty, "The number of people who subscribed to the anarchist movement's many publications was in the tens of thousands in France alone."
Anarchism as a social movement in Cuba held great influence with the working classes during the 19th and early 20th century. The movement was particularly strong following the abolition of slavery in 1886, until it was repressed first in 1925 by President Gerardo Machado, and more thoroughly by Fidel Castro's Marxist–Leninist government following the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s. Cuban anarchism mainly took the form of anarcho-collectivism based on the works of Mikhail Bakunin and, later, anarcho-syndicalism. The Latin American labor movement, and by extension the Cuban labor movement, was at first more influenced by anarchism than Marxism.
Golos Truda was a Russian-language anarchist newspaper. Founded by working-class Russian expatriates in New York City in 1911, Golos Truda shifted to Petrograd during the Russian Revolution in 1917, when its editors took advantage of the general amnesty and right of return for political dissidents. There, the paper integrated itself into the anarchist labour movement, pronounced the necessity of a social revolution of and by the workers, and situated itself in opposition to the myriad of other left-wing movements.
Confederation of revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists is the Russian section of the International Workers Association (AIT). CRAS-IWA is committed to the development of anarchist trade union movement, so as to enable the transition from modern capitalism to statefree communism.
National syndicalism is adaptation of syndicalism to suit the social agenda of integral nationalism. National syndicalism developed in France, and then spread to Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
De Leonism, occasionally known as Marxism–De Leonism, is a libertarian Marxist current developed by the American activist Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader of the first United States socialist political party, the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP). De Leon combined the rising theories of revolutionary syndicalism in his time with orthodox Marxism.
Social anarchism is the branch of anarchism that sees individual freedom as interrelated with mutual aid. Social anarchist thought emphasizes community and social equality as complementary to autonomy and personal freedom. It attempts to accomplish this balance through freedom of speech maintained in a decentralized federalism, with freedom of interaction in thought and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is best defined as "that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry" and that "[f]or every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them", or the slogan "Do not take tools out of people's hands".
The Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL), also known as Workers' Liberty, is a Trotskyist group in Britain and Australia. The group has been identified with the theorist Sean Matgamna throughout its history. It emphasises working-class political independence, radical democracy and anti-Stalinism. The AWL publishes the newspaper Solidarity.
Émile Janvion was a French teacher, an anarcho-syndicalist leader, a founder of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and a leader of the anti-militarist movement. He came to hold national syndicalist views that prefigured fascism. He was anti-Semitic, hostile to freemasonry, hostile to the republic and flirted with monarchism. However his main goal was the nationalization of the land and of the means of production.
The Industrial Workers of the World or IWW (SA) had a brief but notable history in the 1910s-20s, and is particularly noted for its influence on the syndicalist movement in southern Africa through its promotion of the IWW's principles of industrial unionism, solidarity, and direct action, as well as its role in the creation of organizations such as the Industrial Workers of Africa and the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union.