Why Syndicalism

Everybody works. Or, at least, everybody works when artificial unemployment doesn't exist. And I say "everybody" because I always speak in hyperbole. In any case, the overwhelming majority of people seek work of some sort. Just recently, my mom lost her job, and instead of spending all day sitting on the couch watching Home & Garden television (which she could easily afford to do), she went and got a job that pays her barely anything. People want to be formally occupied by something they believe brings benefit to them and their family, or to society at large. This tendency takes various forms outside the capitalist structure of "employment". Artists create art regardless of whether they get paid for it. People who love cooking spend hours perfecting recipes for no one's enjoyment but their own. In a world that didn't care about "marketable skills" and didn't penalize risk-taking with destitution, people would be able to occupy themselves with whatever work they were naturally inclined to do.

In a capitalist society, where people must balance their desires against the demands of the market, many work jobs they do not enjoy, the most unpleasant of which are usually the lowest paying and most exploitative. Such people should, and historically often did, organize into guilds or unions to demand (and occasionally win) increases in wages, reduction in working hours, and improvements in working conditions. These unions are the perfect place to foment radicalism, since workers are the most exposed to the oppressive and exploitative nature of capitalism, and often suffer the most at the hands of the government once they organize. From a utopian perspective (by which I mean, from the point of view of an imagined future free society) such unions would constitute democratic worker councils in their respective industries, certifying members of professional groups and organizing allocation of work and resources. In the modern world, they are means of resisting capitalist exploitation and social oppression.

Not everyone, of course, is keen on resisting exploitation, because they do not see it as such. Particularly in America the myth (that is, the misunderstanding of economics and probability) that anyone can get rich tricks people into aligning their perceived interests with the capitalist class, and the illusion of democracy allows them to believe that the government exists to support them, rather than to support the capitalist system. They believe that fighting for their own, realistic, interests will jeopardize their chances of ascending the social or corporate ladder on the off chance they come up with the better mousetrap. The refusal to admit the existence of a sharp class division between workers on the one hand and owners and rulers on the other leads them to have disdain for anyone who recognizes, and fights against, it.

The disdain many people have for unions specifically is due to the essentially capitalist trades unions whose leaders often have more in common with the bosses than with the workers, and of course to the stain of Soviet Communism on the entire notion. (The Soviet Union was of course in no way communist, but is rather State Capitalist to the core.) When workers are divorced from the output of their labor, whether by capitalist profiteering or state mandates, the tendency to lose personal interest in their work is increased and reinforced, because the work is no longer theirs, either in methodology or results. To contrast, work done by democratically organized, voluntary worker collectives instills a sense of pride and ownership in the work which produces both better results and stronger communities. It is this aspect of union organizing which leads me to believe that syndicalism — that is, the organizing of the working class into unions based on industry or geography — is the most practicable way of achieving revolution.

Workers, who make up the vast majority of society, are shown the power of democratic organizing, the power of their numbers in the face of capitalist and government oppression, and the dignity and satisfaction to be found in controlling the product of their own labor. I will discuss in a future post why I think syndicalism is the best way of instilling revolutionary consciousness in the working class, but it is definitely not the simplest or most glamorous way. It involves working shitty jobs, taking large personal, financial and health risks, and seeing little progress or huge reversals in fortune. The main point is, though, that many workers do this every day without any political motivation anyway, and the addition of that motivation has been proven historically to be easier and more effective than the creation of entirely new, theory-motivated political organizations.