People :
Author : Murray Bookchin
Text :
In the wake of the Commune, French socialism would never be the same. The Jacobin mystique, which had lingered among workers and radical intellectuals for so many decades, disappeared almost completely, and the antiroyalism and andclericalism that had formerly been the province of the Jacobins were absorbed by the more conventional republican parties— notably the so-called Radicals—who commanded a considerable following among shopkeepers, professionals, well-to-do peasants, and even workers. Proudhon’s individualistic “mutualism,” with its hostility to associations, strikes, and even trade unions, also lost its popular following, to be replaced by syndicalism—an explicitly collectivistic form of federalism structured around trade unions and the most sweeping of working-class initiatives, the general strike. This shift, as we have seen, had been under way well in advance of the Paris Commune. As G.D.H. Cole observes,
against the Proudhonists in the French Trade Union movement were ranged the “collectivists,” headed by Eugene Varlin; and by 1871 the collectivists were the dominant group in the Paris area, as well as at Lyons and Marseilles. Varlin, no doubt, had at bottom a great deal more in common with Proudhon than with Marx; but on the issue that was uppermost in the 1860s he and his group found themselves on the same side as Marx because they favored collective ownership of the means of production.
Varlin, as we have seen, also advanced a program that was distincdy communalistic, with its emphasis on confederations of municipalities, as well as syndicalistic, opening a new vista for libertarians who had formerly been focused on individualistic forms of action. But Varlin and his associates were by no means “collectivists” in the sense of standing for State ownership of land and other means of production. They wanted the land and the instruments of large-scale production to be owned by the local Communes, or when necessary, by federal agencies set up by the communes. They wanted the actual operations of production to be carried on as far as possible by Cooperative societies emanating from the Trade Unions;... the Trade Unions were thus of fundamental importance in their vision of the new society, indeed they tended, although not very explicidy, to think of the Commune of the future as resting rather on the federated syndicate [trade unions] of the locality than on any political foundations.[574]
Tragically, however, Varlin was only thirty-two when he was murdered by the Versaillais. Had he lived for another thirty years, this immensely gifted man—in view of his level of insight and his personal popularity with workers—might have had an incalculable effect upon the trajectory of European socialism, possibly pushing it toward a communalistic development as well as a syndicalist one.
Significandy, most of the interpretations of the Commune—the “lessons” that the revolutionary theorists of the day derived from it—were institutional rather than economic. The Blanquists pointed to its failures as evidence of the need for a highly centralized, indeed dictatorial, type of regime to ruthlessly crush the bourgeoisie, and they were still enamored of the idea of a Committee of Public Safety. Anarchists, for their part, emphasized the federalist orientation of the Commune and criticized its statist “deformations,” as they saw them—namely, its system of representation, as distinguished from a mass democracy—and in varying degrees, Bakunin and Kropotkin lamented its failure to take more socialistic economic measures.
But the Commune’s anarchist supporters seemed to understand that Paris had made a clearly communalist revolution in the spring of 1871. Despite its failure to place a strong emphasis on class differences, its hazy celebration of republicanism, and its appeals to patriotism, the Commune, taken as a whole, was as close to a “libertarian municipalist”[575] phenomenon as Paris had come since the heyday of the sectional democracy in 1793. The April 20 program, as we have seen, asserted the right of French communes to function autonomously based on the “contract of association” to “secure the unity of France”; it affirmed the “inherent rights” of the Paris Commune to vote its own budgets and taxes, and to create its own administrative, judicial, and police apparatus; not only would elections be free, but voters would also have “the permanent right of control and revocation” of all magistrates—in short, the mandat imperatif, in which delegates were subject to recall if they failed to follow the wishes of their electors. Citizens were to enjoy the right of “permanent intervention into Communal affairs by the free manifestation of their ideas and the free defense of their interests.”[576]
Marx’s appraisal of the Commune in The Civil War in France, while understandably supportive of it against the imprecations rained upon it by the international bourgeoisie, was anomalous in his work as a whole, at least in terms of its attitude toward state power. These writings, which he prepared for the London bureau of the International (and which form most of the Civil War book), tend to downplay state power.
The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the Administration. From the members of the Commune downward, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of State disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State was laid into the hands of the Commune.[577]
Marx was careful not to claim that the Commune had abandoned all the functions of a state—quite to the contrary, he took note of its statist features— but the libertarian ambiance of his description is evident, contrasting sharply with his normally centralistic statist views. So deprecatory of the state generally was this book, however, and so ebullient was it about the Commune’s anarchistic demand for communal liberties that James Guillaume, Bakunin’s closest collaborator in the International, ironically regarded it as evidence of a capitulation to anarchists in the IWMA Later Marxist leaders even cited Marx’s description of the Commune as the model par excellence of a proletarian dictatorship.
Actually, what Marx regarded as important about the Commune was not that it had eliminated the state as such but that it had completely smashed the bourgeois state, with its huge bureaucracy, its military and judicial institutions, and its executive and legislative apparatus, replacing it, so he believed, with a more or less working<lass state based on broad popular involvement. What he heralded in the Commune was not any antistatism but in fact a new statist dispensation, one in which the working class and its supporters acquired sweeping political rights and authority—or what he called “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”[578] What makes Marx’s praise of the Commune in The Civil War in France anomalous is that he appears to have envisioned this “dictatorship” as institutionally communalistic rather than republican, for in nearly all his earlier writings on the state, the “workers’ state” was to be marked more by republican features than by quasi-anarchistic, communalistic, and confederalistic ones.
Another consequence of the Commune’s defeat was that it opened the way for the introduction of Marxism into France, although it did not take a firm hold among the working class for several generations. And perhaps no single individual contributed more to its dissemination in the country than Jules Guesde, who edited the newspaper Les Droits de l’homme in 1870–71. Because his newspaper had expressed support for the Commune, Guesde was obliged to take refuge in Switzerland after its defeat There he initially became an anarchist, but he was soon won over to Marx’s ideas of socialism and became one of its most zealous proselytizers. Indeed, although Marx had a coterie in France that dated back to the beginnings of the International (including two sons-in-law, Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet), it was Guesde who ultimately gave the French labor movement a strong Marxist imprint Starting in 1877, as soon as he returned to France, he began publishing a periodical, L’Egalite, which gradually evolved from a politically hybrid journal influenced by Blanquism, anarchism, and reformist socialism to a Marxist one. After visiting Marx and Engels in London in 1880, he returned to France determined to build a centralized, unified Marxist party modeled entirely on the German Socialist Workers’ Party, and within five years he managed to pull together the centralized, even authoritarian Parti Ouvrier Frangais (French Workers’ Party). Although a centralized political party was alien to the markedly decentralistic spirit of the French working class, the Parti Ouvrier prospered, and the Guesdists became a major force on the French revolutionary socialist landscape.
Finally, the Commune was instrumental in bringing about the end of the 1WMA With the suppression of the Commune, the revolutionary elements in the French working class were either massacred, imprisoned, or sent into exile, where they remained for most of the 1870s. Their absence from the International immensely weakened the federalist influences within it, and the balance of forces shifted markedly in Marx’s favor. He made the most of it—in a manner that was far from laudable—to expel his Bakuninist opponents.
This confrontation occurred at the International’s last united congress, which met at the Hague in September 1872. Breaking with precedent, Marx personally attended the Hague Congress and, with Engels’s support, dredged up gossipy allegations that Bakunin had used fraudulent methods to gain money. Nor did he dissociate himself from unsavory rumors that the Russian had been a secret czarist agent. Marx was now able to use the very power that the Basel Congress had granted to the General Council—ironically, with Bakunin’s ardent support—to decide what organizations could legitimately belong to the International. Single-mindedly determined to have Bakunin expelled, Marx and the Blanquists (in a completely unholy and short-lived alliance) outmaneuvered the anarchist patriarch and succeeded in expelling him from the International, together with his supporter James Guillaume. (The majority that Marx mustered against Bakunin included the votes of five delegates from specious organizations who represented nothing but themselves.) Thereafter, in a deliberate attempt to kill off the International, which had been threatening to drift toward Bakunin’s anarchism, Marx gained the Congress’s assent to move the General Council to the United States, where eventually, as he had expected, the IWMA faded into oblivion.
If this measure essentially ended the International, it did not put an end to the conflicting tendencies in socialism that followed upon the failure of the Commune. To the contrary: Marx’s renown as the “Red Terrorist Doctor” (as he was called in the British press) was now assured. Bakunin’s supporters, in turn, tried to create a more decentralized “Antiauthoritarian International” on the continent. Shordy after the Hague Congress, the new International convened at SL-Imier in Switzerland, composed not only of anarchists and anarchist sympathizers but moderate British trade unionists, united primarily by their enmity for the General Council. Unlike the Council-dominated IWMA, the successor St.-Imier International was intended to be a voluntary federation of autonomous national federations, each of which was free to follow the policy it preferred. In time, the British moderates drifted away, leaving the anarchists almost entirely on their own.
The last essentially anarchist congress, held a year after Bakunin’s death in 1876, was marked by the ascendancy of Kropotkin’s anarchist communism. In contrast to Proudhon and Bakunin, with their tolerance for nonexploitative forms of private property, Kropotkin’s tendency called for the complete socialization of the means of production and adopted the old communist maxim “From each according to ability, to each according to need.” The individualistic artisanal socialism of Proudhon and the collectivistic artisanal socialism of Bakunin thus gave way among many anarchists to libertarian communism.
What is significant about this shift is that Kropotkin’s libertarian communism expressly or implicitly presupposed a technologically advanced society. Its underpinning was the conviction that industry and science had advanced sufficiendy to allow the distribution of goods to be guided by needs rather than by the amount of work individuals contributed to society. Anarcho- communists, as they came to be called, no longer thought in terms of the private ownership and association of small-scale enterprises (although Kropotkin himself was a strong proponent of a human scale in all things, from machines to communities); rather, they held the view that the distribution of goods in a communistic society would require advanced technologies, at the very least, and did not oppose the establishment of factories and mass production, with which Proudhon and to some extent Bakunin had been uncomfortable. In short, Kropotkin’s version of anarchism made it possible for anarchists to adapt themselves to the new working class, the industrial proletariat, and even hoped to play a leading role in its activities. This adaptation was all the more necessary because capitalism was now transforming not only European society but the very nature of the European labor movement itself.
In 1870 France and Germany, as we have seen, were both still structured around a predominandy artisan and peasant economy, like the French artisans, the majority of German workers were either masters who owned small workshops or else journeymen who learned their crafts by going from town to town in what was an essentially preindustrial economy. During the 1870s, however, new enterprises were expanding enormously in both countries. Following the Franco-Prussian War, German industry leaped forward at a dazzling pace, so that within only a matter of decades, Germany was the industrial giant of the European continent— followed by French industry as a laggard cousin.
A comparison of the industrial growth in both countries is basic to assessing not only their respective economies but their respective labor movements and social ideologies. In 1870 Germany produced only slighdy more pig iron (1.2 million tons) than France (1.1 million), although it was still only about a fifth of Britain’s output (nearly 6 million). But by 1913, German pig iron production had vasdy outstripped not only French production (16.7 million tons compared with 5.1 million) but British (10.2 million) and was exceeded only by American production (nearly 31 million). Germany also took the lead throughout Europe in the production of the new dyes and chemical compounds that were becoming indispensable to modem industrial production, and soon led the continent in production of electrical goods. By 1913, German concerns produced approximately three-quarters of all the dyes used in the world, as well as new medicinals. Of huge importance in this economic tableau was the size of the German industrial enterprises and their degree of capital concentration. As pig iron and steel production soared, the number of enterprises that produced them became smaller, while those few grew ever larger in plant size and number of workers employed. Although the number of blast furnaces declined over time, between 1880 to 1912 their output rocketed from 11,000 to 50,000 tons per furnace—a nearly fivefold increase in productivity. Similar developments occurred at varying paces throughout most German industrial enterprises as a whole. The number of German workers in factories employing 51 or more increased from 1.5 million in 1882 to nearly 5 million in 1907, while the number employed in smaller enterprises (up to 50 persons) remained substantially the same.
Craft manufacturing, by the same token, declined precipitously. In 1875 the number of German woolen handloom weavers numbered 47,000, but by 1907 it had declined to only 19,000. (By contrast, in 1903 French handlooms still outnumbered French power looms by 50,000 to 38,000.) Thus, although German artisans were still a presence in the years immediately preceding the First World War, they were dwarfed in numbers and importance by industrial proletarians, who were now becoming predominant in the European working class as a whole.
France’s development was more complex. Small-scale French manufacturing tenaciously held on to its traditional ground and its artisanal labor force remained sizable. The lead that France retained in quality luxury goods and artistic works gave the country cultural hegemony over other industrial countries, but it now lagged behind in economic power. Doubtless geographical factors militated against the expansion of French steel production: although France was very rich in iron ore, the lack of good coal from which to produce coke and the considerable distances that lay between iron and coal mines made French steel production less profitable than German. France thus tended to export her excellent ores rather than smelt them and was obliged to turn to Belgium and Germany for a large part of her coal. Thus, even as the nineteenth century drew to close, a two-tiered economy still persisted in France with relatively litde change. To some extent French peasants drifted from the land to cities and industrial centers, as rural people did throughout Western Europe, but the number of food cultivators did not decline significandy: from 48 percent of the French population in 1866, they fell to only 41 percent in 1911—that is to say, a mere 7 percent decline in about half a century of hectic change in most of Western Europe. The number of small landholdings actually increased between 1892 and 1908, from 28.6 million to 31.5 million acres, and traditional rural constraints on the expansion of the domestic market were still very much at work, albeit less tenaciously than in past years.
But the French economy was gearing up to produce an appreciable number of industrial proletarians. By the turn of the century, mechanization almost completely replaced handwork in the manufacture of most fabrics (although the silk industry still used a large number of handlooms), giving rise to large textile factories. In Normandy, for example, the production of cotton cloth, from spinning to weaving, was performed completely by machines, as were woolen fabrics in mills in various parts France. The number of steam engines more than tripled between 1870 and 1913, from 27,000 to 81,000. The giant steel—and armaments—plants in the center of the country, such as the Le Creusot works, as well as the textile plants in the west and the rich iron-ore mines in French Lorraine, involved very large-scale operations. Although France uniquely retained its tier of relatively small workshops and a patronal form of capitalism, the country nonetheless ranked second on the continent as an industrial power and fourth in the world in terms of economic strength.
The lead on the continent in all these fields fell to Germany, whose giant steel plants, machine shops, and chemical and electrical enterprises by far overshadowed those of France and England. In the years leading up to the First World War, Germany, united into an immense empire by the Hohenzollem monarchs of Prussia, became the greatest industrial power in the world after the United States. Her industries were not only highly concentrated but highly rationalized, equipped with the most advanced technologies. By the same token, the German industrial proletariat was proportionately larger, with respect to the rest of the population, than was the French, where industrial workers were still a minority. Thus, within the span of little more than a generation, a new economy had emerged, and with it a new working class—an unskilled proletariat that brought nothing but its own labor power (or capacity to work) to the service of a new kind of bourgeoisie— the owners of large capital-intensive factories, whose operations were based on a narrowing division of labor in which mechanization replaced skills. In this mutually interdependent industrial machine, it became impossible to identify the specific contribution of the worker to the making of a finished product, in contrast to the artisanal worker. Moreover, the industrial worker had no independent means of obtaining an income apart from factory earnings, in contrast to the traditional artisan, who often owned his own workshop and marketed his own products.
The personal independence of the skillful artisan, the deep sense of selfworth that comes with the possession of tools and handworked machines, and the pride and dignity of the self-sustained craftsman all but disappeared from the sensibility of the unskilled modem industrial worker. Where the artisan was able to encounter his own kind in favored cafes frequented by men of his own trade, and where he possessed an extraordinary degree of literacy that made radical ideas accessible to him, the proletarian commonly frequented a tavern where alcohol was a source of solace rather than the occasion for sociability. Neglected by society, even viewed haughtily by skilled artisans, the industrial worker was woefully uneducated, often even rustic—uncomfortable with industrial lifeways and their rhythms.
This growing shift from an artisanal to an industrial economy gave rise to a gradual but major shift in socialism itself. For the artisan, socialism had meant producers’ cooperatives composed of men who worked together in small shared collectivist associations, although for master craftsmen it meant mutual aid societies that acknowledged their autonomy as private producers. For the industrial proletarian, by contrast, socialism came to mean the formation of a mass organization that gave factory workers the collective power to expropriate a plant that no single worker could properly own. These distinctions led to two different interpretations of the “social question” or, in the language of 1848, the nature of a “democratic and social republic.” The more progressive craftsmen of the nineteenth century had tried to form networks of cooperatives, based on individually or collectively owned shops, and a market knitted together by a moral agreement to sell commodities according to a “just price” or the amount of labor that was necessary to produce them. Presumably such small-scale ownership and shared moral precepts would abolish exploitation and greedy profit-taking. The classconscious proletarian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, on the other hand, thought in terms of the complete socialization of the means of production, including land, and even of abolishing the market as such, distributing goods according to needs rather than labor.
It was partly in adaptation to the industrial worker, engaged in mass production by the thousands in single plants, that the new kinds of socialism were formulated. They advocated public ownership of the means of production, whether by the state or by the working class organized in trade unions. A socialist movement that tried to advance this program to workers necessarily had to create a mass organization, such as a trade union, party, council, or all of these to one degree or another. It would have been difficult, albeit not impossible, to address thousands of industrial workers, let alone mobilize them in loosely organized local societies, clubs, or mutual benefit societies of the kind that existed among artisans. But such mass organizations tended to become breeding grounds for bureaucracies, whose functionaries often had professional interests that stood at odds with those of the workers they were supposed to service, and statesmenlike leaders who often resembled in mentality and behavior the very bourgeois politicians they were expected to oppose. Thus it was capitalism itself that was changing both the scale and the visions on which socialists of all kinds—revolutionary anarchists and Marxists as well as moderate socialists—based their social theories and organizing practices.
Whether these changes were an improvement over past conditions or a deterioration, their development was inexorable as the nineteenth century phased into the twentieth. But the shift from a predominandy artisan economy to an industrial one should not be permitted to obscure the fact that modem industry—the huge plants and mills as well as the adjunct workshops that were still needed—overwhelmingly employed untrained and often illiterate proletarians, who were engaged in routinized and unskilled labor. In fact, the artisan persisted even within the factory as well as in the specialized workshops adjacent to iL He was usually a skilled metalworker or fabric designer, a maintenance man or a schooled technician—that is, an artisan-proletarian, who shared an independent spirit and a high degree of literacy with the craft masters and journeymen of the old ardsanal economy.
Commonly this artisan-proletarian, who appears in the historical record as early as 1848 under the name of mechanicien in France, was a metalworker who operated complex machinery within the factory, he could also be a printer, furniture maker, leather worker, or similar skilled craftsman. According to Charles Tilly and Lynn N. Lees in their monograph “The People of June, 1848,” surveying those who were arrested and convicted for participating in the June uprising, the artisan-proletarian cohort constituted the second-largest trade group, second only to construction workers.[579] It was principally from these artisan-proletarians that worker militants were recruited, providing both the factory and the neighborhood with their authentic proletarian vanguard. More often males than females (women were rarely permitted to acquire the skills and schooling needed to engage in well-paying, complex productive tasks), they were most susceptible to socialistic ideas and were likely to be consulted by unskilled workers for guidance in demonstrations, strikes, and uprisings as well as to articulate their demands. They would come into their own as the most militant, indeed revolutionary workers by the turn of the century, especially during the Russian and German revolutions between 1917 and 1923.
The ideas of Karl Marx were by no means the only tendency in socialism to provide guidance for a movement appropriate for the industrial proletariat While Marx’s contribution was indeed enormous, other proletarian socialisms coexisted with it until the success of the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 gave sweeping preeminence to Lenin’s version of Marxist ideas over all other movements for proletarian emancipation.
In fact, Marxian socialism never gained a major footing in Great Britain. The English proletariat was drawn to other socialisms, especially to notions of a peaceful transformation to the public ownership of property, ranging from the municipal to the parliamentary level, and commonly structured around cooperatives and associations. British socialist movements largely based their hopes for a new society on legislative means, not on strikes and insurrections. By contrast, in France, proletarian socialism still retained strong federalist and antipolitical tendencies that were antithetical to Guesde’s emphasis on centralism and participation in national elections, slowly giving rise, in the 1880s and 1890s, to a major movement—revolutionary syndicalism—that advanced the general strike as the main weapon for basic social change.
Doctrinally, syndicalists opposed the capitalist system and all its instruments of power, particularly the state, which they viewed as the principal source of society’s ills. They strongly believed it had to be completely dismanded if humanity were to be freed of exploitation and oppression. Eschewing parliamentarism as a corruptive strategy for a revolutionary movement, they condemned political attempts to participate in, let alone reform, the state apparatus, as a way of honoring its legitimacy. Hence they opposed the establishment of political parties and firmly refused to participate in elections. Rather, they called for the collective acquisition of economic power by the proletariat, the outright expropriation of the bourgeoisie, and the management of industrial and agricultural enterprises through democratically elected workers’ and farmers’ committees, all of whose delegates were expected to function according to the mandat imperatif— that is, subject to instant recall. A socialistic society that was structured around syndicalist principles would be one that was managed by industrial, craft, and agricultural workers through confederated enterprises organized into syndicate or trade unions.
Syndicalist unions, in turn, were to be organized in two parallel structures (a Proudhonist scheme) based respectively on geography and industry. Geographically, the syndicates would link together workers’ delegates in a given town, region, and country in administrative confederal labor councils. Industrially, the syndicates would unite the delegates from enterprises within the same trade or industry in a pyramid of industrial confederal councils. Thus the diverse plants in a given region, preferably a municipality, each managed by its own duly elected factory committee, would be linked by one labor council with all the other industries and agricultural enterprises in that area. Simultaneously, each particular factory—say, a steel plant—would be linked to all the other steel plants in the country in a confederal council of delegates from their specific industry. At the apex of this parallel system of confederated unions, there were to be two “chambers” of delegates—one for the geographical confederation, the other for the trade confederadon. Together they would administer a syndicalist society. These bodies at the higher levels of the confederation, syndicalists argued—the municipal, regional, and national councils—would diminish in decision-making authority the farther removed they were from the municipal or local councils. Indeed, all the important policy decisions affecting society would be made by the factories, farms, and shops that formed the economic base of a given area and industry.
How was this confederal syndicalist society, based on trade unions, to be attained? Syndicalists were generally agreed that once the working class—rural as well as industrial—was mobilized into confederal labor unions in sufficient numbers, they would declare a revolutionary general strike that would paralyze the capitalist system. The army would have difficulty attacking the strikers because syndicalist transportation workers would block the movement of troops; the state would be unable to function in other respects because its administration would be brought to a halt by the general strike; and finally the bourgeoisie would be brought to its knees because it would cease to make profit or even acquire the raw materials needed to keep its enterprises working.
Capitalism and the state, in effect, would be paralyzed and therefore compelled to capitulate to a united, purposeful, and revolutionary working class. Few syndicalists were so naive as to believe that this capitulation would be brought about peacefully, almost certainly, the state would try to use every means at its disposal to break the general strike, employing troops wherever it could to forcefully cajole the workers back to their factories. But the workers, simultaneously arming themselves and appealing to the soldiers as “brothers,” could hope to eventually win out by a combination of strikes, propaganda, and where necessary, outright force. At that point the new society would emerge in which the stratified confederations—geographical and trade—would administer all economic and public affairs within their given municipalities, regions, and nations.[580]
This account of syndicalist theory is admittedly highly schematic and even idealized. Syndicalist ideas emerged gradually over the nineteenth century, from the “Grand Holiday” proposed by British workers in 1833, through the multitude of ideas proposed by artisanal socialists, to the use of general strikes against an impending war. Syndicalism was neither predominantly English nor French in origin but developed accretively over the span of nearly a century. It emerged in a transitional period, when there were still enough artisans—and certainly enough of the artisanal tradition—to create a union movement that was localist in its orientation, even expressly decentralistic. At the same time, industrial workers were becoming suffidendy numerous to require a high degree of coordination in their actions, culminating if necessary in regional or even national general strikes.
As a result of this gradual development, the specific ideas of syndicalism were highly diverse by the time the doctrine became preeminent among French workers in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Nor was it accepted in a very clear- cut form even by self-avowed syndicalist workers, let alone by the French working class as a whole. Some workers within the syndicalist fold wanted their unions to be concerned exclusively with conventional bread-and-butter issues and simply ignored the goal of the general strike. Other workers were attracted by the movement’s emphasis on localism, reflecting the artisans’ customary orientation toward their own communities. Finally, still others adopted the general strike more as an alternative to political measures than because of its revolutionary implications. They were sufficiendy disenchanted with the Third Republic to be alienated from political action in any form; indeed, at the time when syndicalism emerged, the French government was wracked by internal scandals, monarchist and clerical attacks, an attempt at a Bonapartist-type coup, and the ugly Dreyfus affair, a patent judicial frame-up in which the hated general staff of the French army falsely accused a Jewish officer of performing acts of espionage, for which he was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island.
In 1884 the Third Republic once again legalized the right of workers to form trade unions, which quickly gave rise to the establishment of a wide variety of them. Although the largest unions were controlled by the Church and the employers, two years later, in 1886, French workers established the independent National Federation of Syndicates (NFS), or trade unions, which was quickly taken over by the Guesdists, finally providing Marxists with a tangible base in the French labor movement. Not surprisingly, the NFS became closely associated with the Guesdist Parti Ouvrier.
In addition to trade unions, the late 1880s and the 1890s also saw a revival of the bourses du travail, or employment centers, where workers and potential employers met to negotiate wages and working conditions for jobs. Subsidized by the municipalities, these labor exchanges had been in existence in many towns in France for years, but after the legalization of unions, they expanded their functions enormously, becoming centers where the new unions held meetings, organized educational courses and lectures, established libraries, and disseminated information about jobs and social ideas. They were usually under the control of the various unions in a given trade—such as baking or tailoring—within a particular city. Finally a Federation of Bourses du Travail was set up in 1892, which became the leading syndicalistic rival of Guesde’s National Federation of Syndicates.
The guiding spirit behind the newly expanded bourses was Fernand Pelloutier, a tubercular young intellectual who managed to break away from his stringent Catholic background and bring his talents to the service of working-class causes. Initially a member of the Parti Ouvrier, Pelloutier broke with its injunction against the general strike as a revolutionary tactic and in 1893 became an adherent of Kropotkin’s anarchist communism. More than any single individual, this devoted man promoted the bourses as educational nuclei for a libertarian communist society, indeed, firmly opposing all attempts to turn them into political entities for parliamentary ends. The task of the bourses, in his eyes, was to inform and educate workers, encourage them to take the initiative in fostering social change, and impart to them the skills and knowledge they would need to administer a syndicalist society. Between 1894 and 1902, largely under his direction, the Federation of Bourses du Travail became the largest independent workers’ organization in France. Although Pelloutier was not an insurrectionary, the Federation became the rallying center for militants who favored revolutionary industrial action over the parliamentary strategy of Guesde’s socialists. After Pelloutier died in 1901 at the age of thirty-four, he was to be revered by the French working class, which treasured his memory for generations to come.
Throughout the 1890s, between the syndicalistic Federation of Bourses du Travail and the Marxian-socialistic National Federation of Syndicates, the question of strategy—of direct economic action through the general strike versus strict parliamentarism—was debated intensively. The Marxists, in fact, were no less critical of the syndicalists than the syndicalists were of the Marxists. In a sharp attack on Spanish Bakuninists, Engels had mocked syndicalism as completely unrealistic, because, as he wrote, the workers would quickly use up their strike funds before the capitalists would surrender their control of the economy. Engels, like Marx after him, totally ignored the insurrectionary role that the strike was meant to play. Guesde, for his part, vehemendy opposed the strike as a step toward insurrection, which he felt was no longer feasible in Western societies in view of the sophistication of armaments and military tactics.
Neither Engels nor Guesde, however, were able to lay these differences to rest At the 1892 Congress of the National Federation of Syndicates at Marseille, a bitter conflict erupted between the proponents of the general strike and supporters of parliamentarism, and over the furious objections of the Guesdists, the Congress passed a resolution favoring the general strike. Since 1890, the struggle for support of the general strike within the Parti Ouvrier had been led by Jean Allemane, a worker-Communard who had been deported to New Caledonia after being taken prisoner on a barricade. Along with his supporters, the Allemanists, he figured very significandy in the subsequent syndicalist radicalization of the French trade union movement Although the Allemanists accepted many basic theoretical concepts of the Marxists, they were virtual anarchists in their oudook and consistent revolutionaries. They fought their way to the leadership of the Parti Ouvrier against the Guesdists and the so- called “Possibilists,” led by the former anarchist-terrorist Paul Brousse, who was moving steadily toward a reformist position—advocating local municipal control within the framework of the nation-state.
At length, at a congress in Nantes in 1894, the Guesdists withdrew entirely from the National Federation of Syndicates and tried to form a labor organization of their own. The sentiments of the workers in the NFS, however, remained mainly with the syndicalists. In 1895, the NFS and the Federation of Bourses du Travail merged to establish an entirely new organization, the Confederation General du Travail (CGT) or National Confederation of Labor. It was a complete victory for syndicalism over parliamentarism. As a revolutionary syndicalist federation, the CGT eschewed all reliance on parliamentary measures to advance the interests of the working class and adopted the general strike as its cardinal weapon for the transformation of society.
Before the establishment of a unified French Socialist Party in 1905 under the leadership of Jean Jaures, the socialist parties in France numbered five: Guesdists, Allemanists (who had split from their syndicalistic comrades), Broussists, Blanquists, and independents. Their history, laden with internecine warfare, is too tangled to unscramble in a few sentences, but in 1896 they were at least able to agree that in elections, while they could oppose one another on the first ballot, whichever socialist candidate survived would gain their united votes on the second.
These divisions and the growing parliamentary orientation of the socialists had litde influence on the newly formed Confederation National du Travail. For nearly two decades after its formation, the CGT remained a revolutionary syndicalist union, repeatedly advocating the strategy of the general strike as an alternative to parliamentary socialism. Serious French anarchists—those who were not enamored of terrorism—gained union positions in its growing apparatus and added enormously to its militancy, imbuing the CGT with a spirit of direct action and even sabotage. But the CGT was very loosely organized and marked by considerable local autonomy, its individual syndicats pulling the confederation in many different directions. Its militant, indeed revolutionary appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, the confederation remained a batdeground between reformists and revolutionaries, as well as those who preached a compromise between the two wings, and still others who adventuristically demanded small strikes as a kind of revolutionary gymnastics for the working class.
During its predominantly syndicalist period, the CGT conducted many major strikes that involved hundreds of thousands of workers. As Peter Stearns observes:
Despite important fluctuations, all indices of strike activity showed growing intensity during most of the [pre-World War I] period. The first attempt at a nation-wide strike occurred in 1906; the first effective industry-side strike began with the miners’ rising of 1902. During the two decades before World War I, almost every conceivable method of striking was tried, often for the first time. None of this involved more than a minority of the working dass, but it was a sizable minority. During the whole period from 1899 through 1914, strikes by industrial and transport workers involved a total of 3,304,482 participants. Many workers struck several different times, of course; but it can be assumed that at least a million manufacturing workers went on strike at least once.[581]
Indeed, at its peak membership in 1912, the CGT daimed to have 600,000 members, although only 450,000 paid dues to the organization. During the same years, well over fifty percent of all French unionized workers belonged to the CGT, making it the largest labor organization in the country.
But by no means should this statistic be interpreted as evidence of strong syndicalist sentiment among the French industrial proletariat CGT militancy was undeniably attractive to the growing industrial workforce, as is evidenced by the large number of strikes that swept over the country in 1912; but it is highly unlikely that most CGT members were committed to syndicalism as a sodal doctrine and a revolutionary general strike. In fact, despite the fiery oratory of syndicalist leaders and the resolutions of their congresses, the CGT never tried to stage a revolutionary general strike. Nor, for that matter, did its rhetoric about direct action and calls for sabotage ever amount to much more than a nuisance for the French bourgeoisie. At the turn of the century, French workers were more prudent in dealing with their employers than their artisanal forefathers had been; indeed, many did not accept syndicalism or dse they gave it a nodding acknowledgment Of the strikes conducted by the CGT between 1899 and 1913, by far the greatest number, involving the most workers, occurred early on, in 1900, when French artisans still formed a very large percentage of the working class.
The nearest the CGT militants ever came to conducting a revolution or a initiating a revolutionary general strike was in 1910, when the railway workers on the Paris-Nord system went on strike in October. A strike committee thereupon called for a general strike, hoping that the Paris-Nord action would spread to the western division of the railroad system and finally to all industries in the country. But the strike in the western division was quickly crushed by Prime Minister Aristide Briand, himself a former anarchist and fervent advocate of the general strike who had since become a socialist parliamentarian, and what was even more demoralizing, the workers in the eastern and southern railroad divisions simply refused to join their fellow workers in the west in a strike, even within the railway system. The union’s defeat was thus complete and humiliating.
Finally, as the war approached, the CGT leadership, induding its bureaucratic infrastructure, drifted more and more toward the conventional trade unionism of the British variety. During and after the war the CGT turned into a conventional bread-and-butter trade union, mainly addressing economic issues within the framework of the capitalist economy. Its anarchist and syndicalist components split away and became marginalized within the working class. Following the Russian Revoluuon, the French Communists took control of the union, overloading it with labor bureaucrats and a leadership that warily accommodated itself to changing Communist policies while maintaining a steady, quasi-independent hold of the union’s reins. Syndicalism, which had shown so much promise in the first decade of the twentieth century, receded almost everywhere in the postwar period—except in Spain, where it became the ideology of the country’s huge labor movement well into the civil war of 1936–39.
Although the French proletariat did carry out general strikes later in the twentieth century, even as late as 1995, it did not link them to revolutionary demands on any serious scale. Barricades appeared from time to time, but merely as symbols of protest, not as ramparts of insurrection. Ebullient and aggressive as the French workers remained, they have never again returned to revolutionary action.
Karl Marx did not live long enough to see the profound impact his ideas had upon the world. Nor did he witness the schematization of his ideas into a quasireligious dogma in the years following the Bolshevik seizure of power—a debasement that would certainly have appalled him. After spending about half his life in exile, mosdy in London, deeply involved in organizational as well as scholarly activities, he died in 1883, and the staggering body of then- unpublished manuscripts, notes, and correspondence that he left behind, as well as the works he published during his lifetime, attest to a single-minded and remarkable commitment: to formulate a thoroughgoing critical analysis of social development, particularly of capitalism, and to advance a politics that would provide workers with the guidance needed to replace bourgeois society with socialism.
The value of his endeavor cannot be measured simply by the sheer volume of his work. Proudhon published as much, if not more, in a shorter lifespan. But in contrast to Proudhon, who often leaped into print with any passing idea that occurred to him, Marx usually published his views only after long and careful reflection. His theoretical goal was coherence, and he disdained the patendy incomplete, often hazy, and poorly formulated ideas of his radical contemporaries.
From a distance of a century and a half, Marx is difficult to read today pardy because the theoretical standards and literacy characteristic of his era—influenced as it was by the high intellectual level and hopes of the Enlightenment—suffered a steady attrition in the years following his lifetime. Yet the rich insights in his writings are an immeasurable treasure that, for all their failings, thinking people can ignore only at the cost of their cultural and intellectual development
Marx seems to have set himself two principal tasks: the first, to unmask the hidden nature of capitalist exploitation and the trajectory of the capitalist development; the second, to establish the theoretical basis for a consistendy revolutionary practice. Before his writings gained influence, capitalism had successfully fashioned an image of itself as the natural economic framework for a free, juridically egalitarian, and basically just society. Despite the vast and obvious differences in wealth between bourgeois and proletarian, capitalist ideology had considerable success in presenting its economic order as based on a fixed conception of “human nature” rather than on historically conditioned class interests. Society was understood to be guided by a “natural” desire for personal gain, by which every parsimonious and hardworking individual could hope to attain material security, independence, and even wealth, irrespective of the social status into which (usually) he was bom. Bourgeois apologists, in effect, regarded capitalist society not so much as a system of social relations as an agglomeration of competitive individuals, each autonomously capable of making his (or less commonly, her) fortune through free enterprise.
Adam Smith, perhaps the most moralistic of the classical economists, had added to this ideology the notion of an “invisible hand” of competition, in which the self-interest of each individual allegedly redounded to the general good. Capitalism was thus extolled as the rational fulfillment of thousands of years of human development—a truly free society in the sense of finally giving full expression to individual self-interest. Self-interest itself acquired a beneficent and socially constructive form, since the maximization of an individual’s interests was said to ultimately advance the material conditions of life for all, promoting invaluable technological advances that ultimately benefited humanity, and fostering peace and mutual understanding through the worldwide growth of commerce.
Marx shattered this image, not only by decrying the injustices and cruelties of capitalism but by systematically demonstrating its inherent irrationality. Profoundly influenced by Hegel’s historical and developmental way of thinking, he demonstrated that capitalism was neither naturally expressive of a basic human desire for gain nor free of inherent and potentially fatal contradictions. Far from being a classless agglomeration of self-interested individuals, Marx argued, capitalist society was tom by bitter conflicts between the proletariat and the industrial bourgeoisie. These two fundamental classes had irreconcilable interests, and their conflict would result either in the overthrow of the capitalist social order by the industrial workers, opening the way to socialism, or—as Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto— in the common ruin of both classes and, by inference, the breakdown of civilized social life.
Hence, far from being a uniquely natural society that marked the culmination of history, capitalism was historically transitory, a phase (indeed, the closing phase) in humanity’s long attempt to rise from animality to the full realization of its creative powers and consciousness in a rational society—one in which property would be communally owned and the production and distribution of goods would be guided entirely by the satisfaction of human needs.
Had Marx argued for communism in merely ethical terms, he would have been no more or less important than many other socialist and communist thinkers of his day. But his argument was instead far more historical and economic or, as he conceived of it, “scientific,” than those of his socialist contemporaries. Not only did his writings denude capitalism of all its benign but mythic pretensions, showing how it had emerged out of the breakdown of feudalism and how the wealth and property that became socially dominant were accumulated by theft and violence. He further showed that capitalism was far more than merely a system to reward the capitalist with profit for his entrepreneurial abilities. Rather, he said, it was based on the hidden exploitation of the working class. What appeared on the surface to be a fair transaction—the exchange of wages for labor power—actually concealed the expropriation of “surplus” labor, or labor over and beyond that which workers actually required to satisfy their own needs, delivering it unknowingly to the bourgeoisie. It was precisely this objective analysis of capitalist exploitation—as opposed to moral denunciations of injustice or unfairness, intuitive criticisms of capitalism, or various notions about interest as the source of profit, often made by his socialist and Proudhonist contemporaries—that Marx regarded as the scientific component of his analysis.
In unmasking capitalism as a system of exploitation—whose real operations were concealed by myths of personal autonomy, or by the administrative contributions of capitalists to the process of production—Marx tried to show that the success of individual entrepreneurs in a necessarily competitive marketplace inevitably led to the elimination of rival capitalists and, by absorption as well as growth, to the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands. Their “anarchic” competition for an ever greater share of the market not only gave rise to periodic economic dislocations, or crises; it was ultimately destined to produce a general, indeed chronic crisis in the entire system, in which the great mass of proletarianized people would be pitted against ever fewer capitalist magnates. In Capital, in a ringing passage that culminates his chapter on the “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx declared that in the course of capitalist competition,
One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the cooperative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of production only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constandy diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working- class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.[582]
History has yet to render a verdict on all the prognoses that Marx advanced in this passage. But what is arresting is that a book published in 1867, when artisanal production and peasant agriculture still dominated the European economy, contained such an extraordinary insight into the trajectory of capitalism, even its transformation from a relatively localized form into a global economy.
More than any contemporary work of revolutionary socialism, Marx’s prognoses were overwhelmingly premised on the industrial capitalist economy; the centralization and mechanization of industry; the impossibility of managing production except along socialized lines; and the abolition of private property in all major spheres of production. Most contemporary socialist and Proudhonist theorists, by contrast, gained their support from artisans and grounded their ideas within the framework of an artisanal economy. They were unprepared to demand such a sweeping transformation of society, least of all the complete abolition of private property. As we have seen, nearly all so-called “utopian” socialists, even Owen—the most labor-oriented—as well as Proudhon—essentially sought the equitable distribution of property. Very few were prepared to exclude all capitalistic forms of private property ownership from a socialist society. Indeed, at one time or another, many socialists and Proudhonists essentially voiced the aspirations of the small-scale producer in a preindustrial world, even by appealing for collaboration between artisans and industrial capitalists. Marx, however, addressed himself not to artisans (although he often referred to them as “proletarians”) but to the industrial working class. Not surprisingly, the large proletarian parties of the late nineteenth century, like Guesde’s Parti Ouvrier, found his views more relevant than those of any other theorist of the time.
Had Marx confined his work to the critique of capitalism and the sources of class struggle in modem society, his work would still have been of imperishable value. But contrary to the myth that he was only a theorist, Marx was deeply involved throughout his life with the workers’ movements of his day, and he also advanced a concrete practice, or politics. This constitutes what he considered to be his second major contribution to socialism. Unfortunately, his politics was filled with so many ambiguities that after his death it created a mixed legacy for his followers. Indeed, clarifying what Marx had meant became a source of conflict among individuals who shared the name Marxist. As a result, various tendencies within “scientific socialism” were pitted against one another, often with grim effects on the workers’ movement as a whole.
With the outbreak of the First World War, verbal disputes over Marxist politics escalated into major splits in the movement. Within the Marxist fold an immense literature emerged that denounced not only other socialist tendencies but also other Marxists, eventually leading not only to divisions but ultimately to armed struggles between self-professed Marxian movements. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Marxists inflicted repressive actions against those who claimed to provide more authentic versions of Marx’s ideas, not to speak of conflicts with non-Marxist schools of socialism.
The source of the conflict was not Marx’s political writings alone. Marxist movements were by no means insulated from the bourgeois society they opposed—indeed, like the former anarchist Aristide Briand, they easily became integrated into it and eventually worked to countervail the revolutionary milieu from which they had originally emerged. Their decidedly parliamentary orientation made them particularly vulnerable to cooptation by bourgeois society, especially in the years following the defeat of the Paris Commune.
Moreover, contradictory as it may seem, Marx himself strongly favored the further development of capitalism in the nineteenth century, an oudook that excused or fostered in his followers a tendency toward accommodation to the capitalist system. Throughout his life, Marx had advanced a theory of historical development that assigned to capitalism the role of advancing technology, hopefully to a point where it would be possible to free humanity from the demanding “socially necessary” work needed for subsistence. The achievement of socialism—or more properly, its most advanced stage, communism— required that the means of production be developed to a point where human beings could be freed from material scarcity and toil to manage society and cultivate their intellectual and artistic sensibilities. Thus the development of capitalism, particularly its revolutionary role in advancing labor-saving technology, was seen by most Marxists as a historical and economic prerequisite for the emergence of socialism.
During the revolutions of 1848–49, Marx felt that workers were obliged to render critical support for the creation of a bourgeois republic, free of all feudal encumbrances and obstacles to free trade and nationhood. They were even expected to subordinate their own movements in the interest of advancing capitalist development in relatively undeveloped countries. Only later, in the “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” did Marx and Engels call for the establishment of a workers’ party that aimed to establish its own “revolutionary workers’ governments, whether in the form of municipal committees and municipal councils or in the form of workers’ clubs and workers’ committees.”[583] This party, Marx and Engels now believed, should remain independent of all permanent alliances with the bourgeoisie and well- off peasants.
But this document, which became pivotal in decades of disputes among Marxists, was itself a source of ambiguity. It trailed off in programmatic demands to escalate bourgeois-democratic proposals for more equitable taxes, the nationalization of railways and factories, and state debts. No further mention was made of “revolutionary workers’ governments” or workers’ “municipal committees and municipal councils.” Indeed, the workers were abjured from proposing “any direcdy communistic measures.”[584] Thus, except for their writings on the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels advanced the demand for a highly centralized—indeed antifederalist—republic as the political goal of a workers’ party.
Marx’s writings on the Commune, as we have seen, were a further source of ambiguity. At best, they may be regarded as a short-lived flirtation with federalism. And in a letter to Domela Nieuwenhuis that he wrote shordy before his death, Marx dismissed the Commune as a needless and wasteful municipal uprising, “of one dty in exceptional circumstances,” that could have been avoided—and should have been—had the Communards shown better judgment in their dealings with the National Assembly.[585]
To complicate matters further: a cardinal theme in Marx’s praise for the Commune was the need to completely smash the bourgeois parliamentary state. But he later expressed ambiguous views about even that goal and suggested instead that in certain capitalist countries the working class could take power through the existing capitalistic electoral machinery—removing the very need for insurrection. In September 1872, Marx noted that there are different roads by which the working dass could achieve “political supremacy.”
We know that the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries have to be taken into account, and we do not deny the existence of countries like America, England, and ... Holland, where the workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means. That being true we must also admit that in most countries on the Continent it is force which must be the lever of our revolution; it is force which will have to be resorted to for a time in order to establish the rule of the workers.[586]
This ambiguity became even more disturbing when Engels, later in life, added France to Marx’s list. In fact, shordy before his death in 1895, Engels wrote a new introduction to The Class Struggles in France—Marx’s work on the 1848 Revolution—that seemed to deprecate the military feasibility of street fighting by armed workers against trained armies. Others were even more eager to vitiate insurrection: over Engels’s protests, Karl Kautsky, the editor of the German Social Democratic theoretical organ, Die Neue Zeit, watered down the introduction, leaving the impression that insurrectionary measures were completely obsolete—and, by inference, that parliamentary means were the preferred road to “revolutionary” social change. In a remarkably pedestrian interpretation of syndicalist doctrines, Engels, as we have seen, also contended that the general strike was destined to fail as a means for changing society because the workers would run out of strike funds.
There are sufficient passages in their collected works to justify a portrayal of Marx and Engels as either evolutionary or revolutionary in their views about the transformation of capitalism into socialism. Nor can we tell with certainty what kinds of institutions they finally thought would replace the parliamentary system if a workers’ party took power: the equivalent of a workers’ House of Representatives or Chamber of Deputies? Municipal committees and councils? Workers’ clubs (the institutions of choice in Parisian revolutions) and committees? What can be said with certainty is that Marx favored a strongly centralized workers’ state, as distinguished from confederations, to administer economic and social life—and, as his behavior in the International showed, a highly centralized party apparatus to lead the socialist movement.
The Marx-Engels writings provided ample justification for the Guesdist argument that the sole way for the workers to gain state power was by parliamentary methods rather than by a general strike or insurrection, as they also did for Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin’s commitment to an armed proletarian uprising. It is not surprising that, as European Marxist parties were established, they became primarily parliamentary machines for electing candidates to public office in the bourgeois state—leading to bitter disputes with the remaining minority of Marxian revolutionaries who, with growing anguish, felt that their most cherished ideals were being betrayed by reformists.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
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October 22, 2021 : Volume 2, Part 6, Chapter 32 -- Added.
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