Talking about d CL(A)SS W(A)R
MR W.TYLER | 05.12.2001 22:09
I have read with interest the on going debates such as the one on this site with reference to the class debate I feel that the anarcho-syndicists already offer a alternative for the working class as for those that are not working class. Join the SWP as your no use to us. Revolutionary Syndicalism basing itself on the class-war, aims at the union of all manual and intellectual workers in economic fighting organisations struggling for their emancipation from the yoke of wage slavery and from the oppression of the State. Its goal consists in the re-organisation of social life on the basis of free Communism, by means of the revolutionary action of the working-class itself. It considers that the economic organisations of the proletariat are alone capable of realising this aim, and, in consequence, its appeal is addressed to workers in their capacity of producers and creators of social riches, in opposition to the modern political labour parties which can never be considered at all from the points of view of economic re-organisation.
The syndicalist union is committed to direct action and refuses links with political parties, even labour or "socialist" ones. A key idea of syndicalism is that of union autonomy -- the idea that the workers' organisation is capable of changing society by its own efforts and that it must control its own fate and not be controlled by any party or other outside group (including anarchist federations). This is sometimes termed "workerism" (from the French "ouverierisme"), i.e. workers' control of the class struggle and their own organisations. Rather than being a cross-class organisation like the political party, the union is a class organisation and is so uniquely capable of representing working class aspirations, interests and hopes. There is "no place in it for anybody who was not a worker. Professional middle class intellectuals who provided both the leadership and the ideas of the socialist political movement, were therefore at a discount. As a consequence the syndicalist movement was, and saw itself as, a purely working class form of socialism . . . [S]yndicalism appears as the great heroic movement of the proletariat, the first movement which took seriously . . . [the argument] that the emancipation of the working class must be the task of labour unaided by middle class intellectuals or by politicians and aimed to establish a genuinely working class socialism and culture, free of all bourgeois taints. For the syndicalists, the workers were to be everything, the rest, nothing." [Geoffrey Ostergaard, The Tradition of Workers' Control, ]
The syndicalist union is committed to direct action and refuses links with political parties, even labour or "socialist" ones. A key idea of syndicalism is that of union autonomy -- the idea that the workers' organisation is capable of changing society by its own efforts and that it must control its own fate and not be controlled by any party or other outside group (including anarchist federations). This is sometimes termed "workerism" (from the French "ouverierisme"), i.e. workers' control of the class struggle and their own organisations. Rather than being a cross-class organisation like the political party, the union is a class organisation and is so uniquely capable of representing working class aspirations, interests and hopes. There is "no place in it for anybody who was not a worker. Professional middle class intellectuals who provided both the leadership and the ideas of the socialist political movement, were therefore at a discount. As a consequence the syndicalist movement was, and saw itself as, a purely working class form of socialism . . . [S]yndicalism appears as the great heroic movement of the proletariat, the first movement which took seriously . . . [the argument] that the emancipation of the working class must be the task of labour unaided by middle class intellectuals or by politicians and aimed to establish a genuinely working class socialism and culture, free of all bourgeois taints. For the syndicalists, the workers were to be everything, the rest, nothing." [Geoffrey Ostergaard, The Tradition of Workers' Control, ]
MR W.TYLER
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