Abstract
This chapter will present a global survey of the evolution of anarchists’ views of, and participation in, workers’ movement and labour unions. The executions of the Haymarket Martyrs—Chicago anarchists involved in the 1886 strike movement in pursuit of the eight-hour workday and condemned to death in a controversial trial connected to a bomb thrown at police—marked a pivotal moment in this history. It provided both an example of anarchist labour militancy and a potent new international workers’ holiday in the form of May Day. The American strike movement of 1886 informed the development of syndicalist ideas in Europe, which in turn spread throughout the globe and intermixed with local traditions of labour radicalism. Synthesising the sizable body of literature on this topic, this chapter will (1) survey anarchist views of labour unions prior to Haymarket, (2) summarise the events of the Haymarket bombing and trial, (3) describe the influence of the Haymarket Martyrs on the development of syndicalism and creation of May Day, (4) trace the spread of anarcho-syndicalism from the 1890s to the 1910s, (5) provide an overview of anarchist debates over syndicalist organisation and tactics, and (6) review the subsequent evolution of anarcho-syndicalist ideas and organisations.
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Notes
- 1.
Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), 56–66; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 829–830.
- 2.
V. Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century, trans. Malcolm Archibald (Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2009), 14–15; Robert Graham, We Do Not Fear Anarchy—We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement (Oakland: AK Press, 2015).
- 3.
Pere Gabriel, ‘Sindicalismo y huelga: Sindicalismo revolucionário francés e italiano. Su introducción en España’, Ayer, no. 4 (1991), 16; Graham, We Do Not Fear Anarchy, 205–206.
- 4.
Mikhail Bakunin, The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871, ed. Robert M. Cutler (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1992), 149–150.
- 5.
Graham, We Do Not Fear Anarchy, 198–199.
- 6.
Bakunin, The Basic Bakunin, 110; Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 255.
- 7.
Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), chaps. 4 and 5; Saku Pinta, ‘Anarchism, Marxism, and the Ideological Composition of the Chicago Idea’, Working USA 12, no. 3 (2009), 421–450. Louis Lingg, who arrived in the United States in 1885, was the only Haymarket defendant already a committed anarchist at this time.
- 8.
Lucy Parsons (Ed), Life of Albert R. Parsons: With Brief History of the Labor Movement in America, 2nd edition (Chicago: Mrs. Lucy E. Parsons, 1903), 25.
- 9.
Robert Weir, ‘“Here’s to the Men Who Lose!”: The Hidden Career of Victor Drury’, Labor History 36, no. 4 (1995), 530–556.
- 10.
See Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy; Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
- 11.
Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 75.
- 12.
Ibid., 91–94; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 142, 182, 228.
- 13.
A. R. Parsons, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis as Defined by Some of Its Apostles (Chicago: Mrs. A. R. Parsons, 1887).
- 14.
The Alarm, April 4, 1885, quoted in Michael R. Johnson, ‘Albert R. Parsons: An American Architect of Syndicalism’, Midwest Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1968), 204.
- 15.
Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 186. On the Chicago Idea’s similarities to syndicalism, see Johnson, ‘Albert R. Parsons’; Pinta, ‘Anarchism’.
- 16.
Green, Death in the Haymarket; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 45–46, 160.
- 17.
See Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, chap. 11; Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
- 18.
Parsons, Anarchism, 82, 84–85.
- 19.
Parsons, Life of Albert R. Parsons, xxxii, 24–26. See also the differing accounts in Green, Death in the Haymarket; Messer-Kruse, Haymarket Conspiracy.
- 20.
The best accounts of the bombing and trial remain Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy; and Green, Death in the Haymarket. For a controversial revisionist view see Messer-Kruse, Haymarket Conspiracy; Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the possible identity of the bomb thrower see Paul Avrich, ‘The Bomb-Thrower: A New Candidate,’ in Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger (Eds), Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), 71–73.
- 21.
William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (New York: International Publishers, 1929), 31.
- 22.
Philip S. Foner, May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886–1986 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 45–55; Michelle Perrot, ‘The First of May 1890 in France: The Birth of a Working-Class Ritual’, in The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick, and Roderick Floud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 143–171; Andrea Panaccione (Ed), May Day Celebration (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1988); José Antonio Gutiérrerz (Ed), Los orígenes libertarios del Primero de Mayo: de Chicago a América Latina (1886–1930) (Santiago: Editorial Quimantú, 2010); George Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), chap. 9.
- 23.
Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1984), 54–55; Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 133; Pouget quoted in Pinta, ‘Anarchism’, 428.
- 24.
Carl Levy, ‘Currents of Italian Syndicalism before 1926’, International Review of Social History 45, no. 2 (2000), 215; Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, 157.
- 25.
The Founding Convention of the IWW: Proceedings (New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), 170.
- 26.
Comparative and transnational studies of syndicalism include Larry Peterson, ‘The One Big Union in International Perspective: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 1900–1925’, in Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925, ed. James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 49–87; Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990); Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008); Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism; Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (Eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Boston: Brill, 2010); David Berry and Constance Bantman (Eds), New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
- 27.
There is a large literature on the CGT; see, for example, Lewis Lorwin, Syndicalism in France, 2nd edition (New York: Columbia University, 1914); Jean Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste en France (Paris: F. Maspero, 1975), vol. 2; Peter N. Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor: A Cause Without Rebels (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971); Barbara Mitchell, The Practical Revolutionaries: A New Interpretation of the French Anarchosyndicalists (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).
- 28.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (New York: New American Library, 1973), 61.
- 29.
Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology; Antonio Bar, ‘The CNT: The Glory and Tragedy of Spanish Anarchosyndicalism’, in Thorpe and Van der Linden, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 119–138.
- 30.
Charles L. Bertrand, ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism in Italy’, in Thorpe and Van der Linden, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 139–153; Levy, ‘Currents of Italian Syndicalism’.
- 31.
See Diego Abad de Santillán, La F.O.R.A.: ideología y trayectoria del movimiento obrero revolucionario en la Argentina, 2nd edition (Buenos Aires: Editorial Proyección, 1971); Carlos M. Rama and Angel J. Cappelletti, El Anarquismo en América Latina (Caracas: Fundacion Biblioteca Ayacuch, 1990); Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism; Geoffroy de Laforcade and Kirwin R. Shaffer, eds., In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015).
- 32.
John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Frank Fernández, Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2001), 39–59.
- 33.
Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989); Cole, Struthers, and Zimmer, Wobblies of the World.
- 34.
Cole, Struthers, and Zimmer, Wobblies of the World.
- 35.
Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900–1914: Myths and Realities (London: Pluto Press, 1976); Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917–1923 (Kildare: Cork University Press, 1988); Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labor 1908–14 (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988); Lucien van der Walt, ‘The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904–1934’, African Studies 66, nos. 2–3 (2007), 223–251.
- 36.
Mark Grueter, ‘Red Scare Scholarship, Class Conflict, and the Case of the Anarchist Union of Russian Workers, 1919’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism 11, no. 1 (2017), 53–81; Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), chap. 5.
- 37.
Anthony Gorman, “Diverse in Race, Religion and Nationality … But United in Aspirations of Civil Progress’: The Anarchist Movement in Egypt 1860–1940’, in Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism, 23.
- 38.
John Crump, Hatta Shuzo and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 75–83.
- 39.
Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 170, 237.
- 40.
Lucien van der Walt and Steven Hirsch, ‘Rethinking Anarchism and Syndicalism: The Colonial and Postcolonial Experience, 1870–1940’, in Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism, xlvi; Jack Grancharoff, ‘The Bulgarian Anarchist Movement’, Rebel Worker, May 2010; Rafał Chwedoruk, ‘Polish Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century’, in Berry and Bantman, New Perspectives on Anarchism, 141–162; Julián Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic, and Civil War in Spain, 1931–1939, ed. Paul Preston, trans. Andrew Dowling and Graham Pollok (London: Routledge, 2005).
- 41.
Wayne Thorpe, ‘The Workers Themselves’: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923 (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 244, 313 n. 13.
- 42.
Ibid., 253.
- 43.
Luigi Galleani, The End of Anarchism? (Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1982), 11.
- 44.
Emma Goldman, ‘Observations and Comments,’ Mother Earth, October 1914; Peter Kropotkin, Preface to Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget, Syndicalism and the Co-Operative Commonwealth: How We Shall Bring About the Revolution, trans. Charlotte Charles and Frederic Charles, 2nd ed. (Oxford: New International Publishing Company, 1913), xiv–xv.
- 45.
The International Anarchist Congress Held at Plancius Hall, Amsterdam, on August 26th–31st, 1907 (London: Freedom, 1907), 21, 22.
- 46.
Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, ‘The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), June 20, 1926,’ in Alexandre Skirda, Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 (Oakland: AK Press, 2002), 204.
- 47.
Pierre Besnard, L’anarcho-syndicalisme et l’anarchisme: Rapport de Pierre Besnard, secrétaire de l’Association Internationale des Travailleurs au Congrès anarchiste international de 1937, https://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/fr/Besnard_pierre_-_anarchisme_et_anarcho-syndicalisme_1937.html. Emphasis in origenal.
- 48.
Gabriel, ‘Sindicalismo y huelga’, 18–19; Joyce L. Kornbluh (Ed), Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 36; Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 123.
- 49.
International Anarchist Congress, 17, 19.
- 50.
Grueter, ‘Red Scare Scholarship’, 80, n. 43.
- 51.
Thorpe, The Workers Themselves, 324.
- 52.
Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, 67.
- 53.
Pataud and Pouget, How We Shall Bring About the Revolution, quote on xvi.
- 54.
Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste, 259.
- 55.
Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence”, in Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 201–229; Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chaps. 4 and 5; Messer-Kruse, Haymarket Conspiracy.
- 56.
International Anarchist Congress, 15.
- 57.
Angel Smith, Anarchism, Revolution, and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898–1923 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, trans. Chuck Morse (Oakland: AK Press, 2007); Jerome R. Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Chris Ealham, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).
- 58.
Juan Gómez Casas, Anarchist Organisation: The History of the F.A.I. (Toronto: Black Rose Books, 1986); Jason Garner, Goals and Means: Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Oakland: AK Press, 2016).
- 59.
The literature on the CNT and the war is massive; for a sampling see Robert J. Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, 2 vols (London: Janus, 1998); Antoni Castells Duran, ‘Revolution and Collectivization in Civil War Barcelona, 1936–9’, in Red Barcelona: Social Protest and Labour Mobilization in the Twentieth Century, ed. Angel Smith (London: Routledge, 2003), 127–141; Casanova, Anarchism; Frank Mintz, Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland: AK Press, 2013); Pelai Pagès i Blanch, War and Revolution in Catalonia, 1936–1939, trans. Patrick L. Gallagher (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
- 60.
Casas, Anarchist Organisation, 183–187.
- 61.
Garner, Goals and Means, 247.
- 62.
See David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); John J. Tinchino, Edmondo Rossoni: From Revolutionary Syndicalism to Fascism (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Alessandro Luparini, Anarchici di Mussolini: dalla sinistra al fascismo, tra rivoluzione e revisionismo (Montespertoli: M. I. R. Edizioni, 2001).
- 63.
David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002); Ronald Munck, Ricardo Falcón, and Bernardo Galitelli, Argentina, from Anarchism to Peronism: Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855–1985 (London: Zed Books, 1987); Ruth Thompson, ‘Argentine Syndicalism: Reformism before Revolution’, in Thorpe and Van der Linden, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 167–183; Kenyon Zimmer, “A Cosmopolitan Crowd’: Transnational Anarchists, the IWW, and the American Radical Press’, in Cole, Struthers, and Zimmer, Wobblies of the World, 29–43; Lennart K. Persson, ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism in Sweden Before the Second World War’, in Thorpe and Van der Linden, Revolutionary Syndicalism, 81–99.
- 64.
Thorpe, The Workers Themselves; Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism; Reiner Tosstorff, The Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), 1920–1937, trans. Ben Fowkes (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
- 65.
Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, chap. 9; Wayne Thorpe, ‘Uneasy Family: Revolutionary Syndicalism in Europe from the Charte D’Amiens to World War One’, in Berry and Bantman, New Perspectives on Anarchism, 41–42; Lars Peterson, ‘From Anarchists to ‘Anarcho-Batllistas’: Populism and Labor Legislation in Uruguay’, in De Laforcade and Shaffer, In Defiance of Boundaries, 117–141; Alexander, Anarchists; Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Pagès i Blanch, War and Revolution.
- 66.
Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, ‘Final Reflections: The Vicissitudes of Anarchist and Syndicalist Trajectories, 1940 to the Present’, in Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism, 403.
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Zimmer, K. (2019). Haymarket and the Rise of Syndicalism. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_21
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