Back to the future: revival, relevance and route of an anarchist/syndicalist approach for twenty-first-century left, labour and national liberation movements

ABSTRACT

The failings of classical Marxism, social democracy and anti-imperialist nationalism point to the need for a radical left politics at a distance from the state. This paper examines the impact, revival and promise of the anarchist/syndicalist tradition, a rich, continuous praxis in labour, left, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and egalitarian movements, worldwide, since the 1860s. Outlining its core ideas – anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism, anti-statism, opposition to social and economic inequality, internationalist class-based mobilisation – and critique of mainstream Marxism and nationalism, it highlights the arguments there is a basic incompatibility between state rule, and bottom-up, egalitarian, democratic, socialist relationships. The anarchist/syndicalist project cannot be reduced to an organising style, protest politics or spontaneism: for it, transition to a just, self-managed society requires organised popular capacity for a revolutionary rupture, developed through prefigurative, class-based, democratic organs of counter-power, including syndicalist unions aiming at collectivised property, and revolutionary counter-culture. Success needs formal organisation, unified strategy and anarchist / syndicalist political organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Anarchism
• syndicalism
• unions
• nationalism
• Bakunin
• revolution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lucien van der Walt works at Rhodes University, South Africa. He has published widely on labour and left history and theory, and political economy, and on anarchism and syndicalism. He is actively involved in union and working class education and movements. Notable works include Negro Vermelho: Anarquismo, Sindicalismo Revolucionario e Pessoas de Cor na Africa Meridional nas Decadas de 1880 a 1920 (2014), and Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880–1940 (2010/2014, with Steve Hirsch). He was southern Africa editor for The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (2009). His 2007 Ph.D. on black and white radicals, Anarchism and Syndicalism in South Africa, 1904–1921, won both the Labor History and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) theses prizes. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

Notes

1 I use these terms with caution, aware of their problems.

2 Not paginated.

3 I am expressing the core theses in a precise conceptual language, noting there is no standardised terminology for, and little academic work on, anarchist class theory, for example, Szelenyi and Martin (1988).

4 Expanding Wright’s use of ‘economic ownership’ as ‘control of the overall investment and accumulation process’ (1978, 71).

5 Including de facto ‘owners’ like senior managers.