Syndicalism

Syndicalism holds that the union, not the party, is the vehicle of working-class emancipation, and that the general strike — not the ballot box or the armed insurrection — is the decisive weapon. Industry is to be seized and run by the workers already organized within it, so that the union becomes the unit of the future society.

Its signature commitment is direct action: workers acting for themselves at the point of production — strikes, sabotage, boycotts, the go-slow — without political intermediaries. The reasoning, sharpened in Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1908), is that delegating power to representatives and parties reproduces the very separation between rulers and ruled that emancipation is supposed to end.

It was a mass force before 1920, not a fringe: France's CGT, Spain's CNT (which counted over a million members), the American Industrial Workers of the World ('the Wobblies'), and the Italian factory movements all carried it. The revolutionary general strike was its horizon — the day the working class simply folds its arms and the owners find they run nothing.

The tradition shades into anarcho-syndicalism where it is explicitly anti-state, and toward ordinary militant trade unionism where the revolutionary aim recedes into bread-and-butter bargaining — a spread that reflects genuine historical variation rather than vagueness.

It was eclipsed after 1920 by the rise of Leninist parties, which offered a faster route through the state, and by the incorporation of unions into collective-bargaining regimes that domesticated the strike. Critics ask how workplace-based unions would coordinate the wider economy or defend a revolution militarily.

It is often filed as simply 'militant unionism,' which misses its real claim: that politics belongs on the shop floor rather than in the legislature, and that the organization workers already have is the seed of the society they want.