by Max Barry

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Region: Libertarian Socialist Confederation

Among newer currents of anarchism there is a fair bit of misunderstanding over the nature of anarcho-syndicalism. First of all there is the idea that anarcho-syndicalism is an end goal in itself, a kind of direct-democratic government by the unions; and secondly there is the notion that anarcho-syndicalists limit their ambitions to economic democratisation, such that existing socio-economic processes are merely reorganised around the principle of self-management, and otherwise left as they are. The reality is rather different:

"Anarcho-syndicalists are libertarian communists. Without this communist perspective, anarcho-syndicalism would amount to little more than democratic trade unionism for a self-managed capitalism. Communists recognise that capitalism is not simply an undemocratic mode of management, but a mode of production. Making it more democratic doesn’t make it any more responsive to human needs so long as money, commodity production and exchange persist. Consequently [...] our notion of revolution is not simply the taking over of production in order to self-manage it democratically, but a simultaneous process of communisation – restructuring social production around human need.

This entails not the liberation of the working class envisaged by Rocker, but our abolition as a class and with it the negation of all classes. It also implies not the democratisation of work but its abolition as a separate sphere of human activity. Much activity - waged or not - that is potentially rewarding in itself is reduced to repetitive, alienating work by the requirements of capital accumulation. We don’t want democratically self-managed alienation, but its abolition. Furthermore - and this is of practical import to anarcho-syndicalists – whole sectors of the economy need to be abolished altogether, while those that remain need to be radically transformed in terms of the division of labour and the nature of productive activity itself."

Quoted from 'Strategy and struggle - anarcho-syndicalism in the 21st century'
https://libcom.org/library/strategy-struggle-anarcho-syndicalism-21st-century

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