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Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers' self-management. It is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownership and from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property. Broadly defined, it includes schools of both anarchism and Marxism, as well as other tendencies that oppose the state and capitalism.
Syndicalism is a revolutionary current within the labour movement that, through industrial unionism, seeks to unionize workers according to industry and advance their demands through strikes, with the eventual goal of gaining control over the means of production and the economy at large through social ownership. Developed in French labor unions during the late 19th century, syndicalist movements were most predominant amongst the socialist movement during the interwar period that preceded the outbreak of World War II.
Anarcho-syndicalism is an anarchist organisational model that centres trade unions as a vehicle for class conflict. Drawing from the theory of libertarian socialism and the practice of syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism sees trade unions as both a means to achieve immediate improvements to working conditions and to build towards a social revolution in the form of a general strike, with the ultimate aim of abolishing the state and capitalism. Anarcho-syndicalists consider trade unions to be the prefiguration of a post-capitalist society and seek to use them in order to establish workers' control of production and distribution. An anti-political ideology, anarcho-syndicalism rejects political parties and participation in parliamentary politics, considering them to be a corrupting influence on the labour movement. In order to achieve their material and economic goals, anarcho-syndicalists instead practice direct action in the form of strike actions, boycotts and sabotage. Anarcho-syndicalists also attempt to build solidarity among the working class, in order to unite workers against the exploitation of labour and build workers' self-management.
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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.
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Anarchism in Egypt refers both to the historical Egyptian anarchist movement which emerged in the 1860s and lasted until the 1940s, and to the anarchist movement as it has re-emerged in the early 2000s. Anarchism was first introduced to Egypt by Italian immigrant workers and political exiles in the 1860s. The Italian community in Egypt was one of numerous such communities of expatriate workers whose presence in Egypt dated to the modernisation programme of Muhammad Ali, Wāli of Egypt from 1805 to 1849, as part of which the immigration of foreigners with useful skills was encouraged. This process was accelerated under Ali's successors, in particular with the construction of the Suez Canal in the 1850s.
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Taiji Yamaga (1892-1970) was a Japanese anarchist and Esperantist. Taiji Yamaga was born in 1892 to a printing family in Kyoto. Yamaga moved to Tokyo, where he studied Esperanto with historian and Esperantist Katsumu Kuroita. At age sixteen, Yamaga served as the secretary of Kuroita's Japan Esperanto Society. In 1911, Yamaga was introduced to anarchist Sakae Osugi. Yamaga became an assistant to anarchist Osugi. At Osugi's request, Yamaga visited Chinese anarchist Liu Shifu and his comrades in Shanghai. He stayed at Shifu's headquarter for several weeks. Shifu invited Yamaga to help him publish the journal Minsheng.
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Mário Castelhano (1896–1940) was a Portuguese anarcho-syndicalist, railway worker and journalist. During the time of the First Portuguese Republic, he began organising strike actions within the General Confederation of Labour (CGT). He edited the organisation's various newspapers, including that of the railway workers' union, during the early 1920s. He was elected general secretary of the CGT after the establishment of the National Dictatorship and was arrested for his part in the February 1927 Revolt, following which the CGT was banned. Exiled, he went on to participate in the Madeira uprising and later clandestinely returned to Portugal, where he organised the Portuguese general strike of 1934. He was again arrested and deported, later dying in Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde. His memoirs about his exile in Angola, in which he clearly expressed his views on anti-colonialism and anti-racism, were published posthumously in 1975.
The history of anarcho-syndicalism dates back to the anti-authoritarian faction of the International Workingmen's Association. Revolutionary syndicalism as a tendency was constituted in the 1890s by the French General Confederation of Labour (CGT), which became a model union for other syndicalist organisations to base themselves on. Anarchists were involved in the syndicalist movement from the outset and a specific anarchist tendency developed within the movement over the subsequent decades.
References
- ↑ Wits News, 6 May 2010, 'Wits Scholar Lucien van der Walt Wins CODESRIA Award', https://lucienvanderwalt.wordpress.com/2017/05/27/press-wits-scholar-lucien-van-eer-walt-wins-codesria-award/
- ↑ "The Global Labour University: The GLU Partner Network". Archived from the original on 4 December 2018. Retrieved 3 December 2018.
- ↑ "Professor Lucien van der Walt". 16 July 2012.
- ↑ Dale McKinley, 2010, Transition's Child: The Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), Johannesburg: South African History Archive, p. 111, available at http://www.saha.org.za/publications/anti_privatisation_forum.htm
