Anarcho-syndicalism

Anarcho-syndicalism holds that revolutionary industrial unions are at once the weapon that overthrows capitalism and the structure that replaces it: the union is the embryo of the future society, so — by the principle of prefiguration — its own internal form must already be non-hierarchical, federal, and self-governing.

It fuses the syndicalist strategy of direct action and the general strike with an explicitly anarchist rejection of the state. It refuses to seize state power even transitionally, on the argument that the instrument shapes whoever wields it — that a workers' state produces not workers' rule but a new ruling class, exactly as it accused the Bolsheviks of demonstrating.

Its great historical embodiment was the Spanish CNT, a union of more than a million workers whose members, during the revolution of 1936, collectivized factories, farms, and whole city services in Catalonia and Aragon and ran them through federated committees — the largest anarchist experiment in modern history, crushed between Franco's forces and the Communists.

Rocker's Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938) set it against both parliamentary socialism and Bolshevism: the first defers emancipation to elected representatives, the second to a vanguard party, and both leave workers governed by someone other than themselves. Only self-organization through the union, it holds, escapes that trap.

Its critics ask the perennial question put to all anarchism: how federated unions, refusing any central authority, could coordinate a complex economy or militarily defeat a determined, centralized counter-revolution — the Spanish defeat being, for its opponents, the answer.

It is often collapsed into generic 'anarchism' or generic 'unionism,' but its precise claim is the fusion of the two: that the trade union is not merely a bargaining agent but the seed-crystal of a stateless society.