(An abbreviated pamphlet version of this post is available for download and printing here.)

Why should we think about anarchist unionism?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the push towards capitalist reforms in China, self-proclaimed Communist movements the world over have lost their main sponsors and sources of political inspiration and legitimacy. Subsequently, since the early 1990s anarchism has seen a resurgence within social movements in the US. Some movements, like the early anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street, have more foregrounded anarchist ideas, while all social movements have been touched by an increased number of anarchists within them, such as the abolitionist wing of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The labor movement has long been a central part of social movements in the US, sometimes radical and sometimes not, but always touching the lives of millions of people and putting them into varying degrees of action for reform and occasionally towards revolution. While the US labor movement is at a historical nadir in terms of union membership density, the last decade has seen a broad uptick in strike activity and public support.

With this modest resurgence of both anarchism and union organizing, it’s strange that there’s very little overlap between the anarchist movement and the labor movement in the US today. There are very few anarchist-led organizations or prominent anarchists working within the labor movement, and the labor movement has very few prominent leaders or groupings of its own that identify with anarchism. 

From a historical vantage point this is unusual. In the early 20th century anarchism was at times the dominant leftist pole within the international labor movement, with anarchist-led labor federations claiming tens or hundreds of thousands of members and leading large strikes in countries on five continents. However, the repression and precipitous decline of anarchism as an international social movement from the 1930s – 1980s overlapped considerably with the successful assault on the labor movement in the US (and to a lesser degree in other countries) from the late 1940s – 2000s. These movements shriveled up and became increasingly isolated from each other over the second half of the 20th century. 

The time is ripe for bringing these two movements back together. The weaknesses of each movement can be bolstered by the strengths of the other. The contemporary anarchist movement claims anticapitalism as a central pillar but has little organizational basis among the masses of people who are exploited by capital in their workplace every day. Today’s most widely read anarchist theorist and writer, the late and otherwise great David Graeber, is certainly not anti-worker but doesn’t emphasize union struggle in his writings. This is broadly the trend within today’s anarchist theory both in academia and in popular texts. In contrast, most of the leading figures of the anarchist movement at its height from the 1890s – 1930s, from Peter Kropotkin to Lucy Parsons, were passionately committed to building radical unions. This wasn’t incidental, but rather the commitment to worker struggle is part of what made anarchism so powerful. 

The union movement today is weighed down by shallow electoralism, bureaucratic proceduralism, and liberal collaborationism. Not only legislators and judges but mainstream and progressive union leaders alike have pushed workers to abandon democracy, militancy, and radicalism in their dealings with employers. Anarchism contains an unparalleled belief in the power of workers themselves–not sweet-talking politicians, sympathetic lawyers, or savvy union presidents–to create social change directly through their own passions and efforts. Anarchism as a body of theory and legacy of past struggle is best placed to awaken the labor movement from its legalistic slumber.

I’d like to help introduce the current generation to the core ideas and glorious history of anarchist unionism. The core ideas are simple: direct democracy empowers workers to make decisions themselves instead of relying on others to decide for them, and direct action empowers workers to take action themselves instead of relying on others to act on their behalf. By deciding and acting themselves, workers learn to directly lead their own struggles to win reforms, build power from below, and advance towards the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state.

Anarchist unionism from 1868 – 1939 assumed the status of a mass-based social movement in, depending on how you count, a dozen or two countries. But only recently has anarchist scholarship attempted to collect and examine this history more comprehensively, which non-anarchist labor historians have largely ignored. As far as I know, this piece is the first time this history has been collected and presented together in an accessible and semi-comprehensive way in a shorter-than-book-length text.

The membership numbers of anarchist unions in this period were eye-popping to me when I first encountered them. I had read some about the North American IWW and Spanish CNT, but only in researching for this piece the global anarchist movement in these years did I realize how broad and deep the movement was. It was a revelation.

(This is a long blog post, so I’ve made a table of contents to help those who want to skip around or are only interested in select topics.) 

1. Why should we think about anarchist unionism?
2. What are the principles of anarchist unionism?
3. From what conditions did anarchist unionism emerge?
4. What kinds of anarchist unionism are there?
5. When and where was anarchist unionism a major social force?
   1. Spain 1870 – 1874
   2. Cuba 1887 – 1920s
   3. France 1895 – 1914
   4. United States 1881 – 1920s
   5. Italy 1901 – 1920
   6. Germany 1918-1923
   7. Britain 1910 – 1922
   8. What role did race and gender play in these movements?
   9. Argentina 1896 – 1930
   10. Chile 1900 – 1927
   11. Uruguay 1905 – 1923
   12. Brazil 1906-1919
   13. Peru 1905-1930
   14. Mexico 1912 – 1931
   15. Africa and Asia
   16. Spain 1910 – 1939 
6. What did these movements amount to?
7. What were the reasons for the decline of anarchist unionism?
8. Uruguay 1967 – 1973
9. Conclusion

What are the principles of anarchist unionism?

The essential principle of mass anarchist politics is that radical social change can only be meaningful, sustainable, and transformative when it is created from the bottom up instead of from the top down. This principle emerged out of the radical worker movement of the mid-1800s as some socialists became critical of the strategy of taking over the state, either through elections or by force, as a top-down means to weaken and abolish capitalism. Over the following decades this tendency was further theorized and consolidated into anarchism as a distinct wing of the international socialist movement in contrast to the wing that advocated using political parties to seize state power. While both wings are committed to abolition of private property and giving workers control of the means of production, and thus both are rightly considered socialist, anarchists favor building social movements independent of the state to achieve these ends while “state socialists” favor seizing the state.

The anarchist principle of bottom-up change applied to a union context has two main components. First, in workers’ relations to employers and the state, their primary mode of creating change is direct action. Such direct actions include things like all kinds of work stoppages, confrontations with bosses, and other forms of disruption and spreading awareness such as pickets. Direct action is a bottom-up mode of creating social change because it requires workers to act together collectively instead of relying on one or a few specialists, leaders, or elites to act on their behalf. Anarchist unionists support direct action to win reforms in the workplace, the industry, and the wider economy. The kinds of reforms anarchists seek are those that weaken capitalist power, control, and profit and that increase worker power, control, and wages.

Anarchists don’t necessarily oppose, and sometimes support, state reforms, state redistribution of wealth, state protection of rights, and state action against corporations. It’s only that anarchists oppose putting energy into electing and lobbying politicians as the strategy for achieving any kind of positive change. Thus, anarchists support people themselves taking direct action to disrupt the status quo and pressure elites but oppose relying on politicians, lobbyists, or lawyers to fix deep social problems for them. Anarchists support dumping resources into building autonomous social movements to pressure the state from the outside, often pressuring politicians to make concessions via policy or executive action, instead of dumping resources into electing politicians to wield state power from the inside.

While this distinction may seem trivial or academic, for anarchists it is all-important. Building power outside of the state keeps agency in the hands of the people in the form of movement organization controlled by people themselves. The key distinction here is who is given the power to act on their own agency. In giving politicians power by electing them, politicians become powerful and necessarily become part of an elite who as a small group of individuals hold key leverage over decisions in government. In building grassroots social movements, unions and community organizations are given power to take direct action to advance their interests, which sometimes gets exercised in pressuring politicians to follow the orders of the movement. But here, the politicians aren’t given any agency or power by the movement to act independently of the desires of the movement.

For workers to be able to take bottom-up, mass-based direct action they need forms of organization designed to facilitate democratic participation in decision-making. The second component of bottom up change is direct democracy. In workers’ relation with each other, their primary mode of union organization is one where members are making decisions themselves over all aspects of the movement. Just as bottom-up social movements shouldn’t depend on others taking action and building power for them, so should these movements not depend on others or a small subgroup making the main decisions for them. Any separation of authority out of the hands of the main group of people leads to a separation of interests between formal leaders and members that undermines unity, solidarity, and democracy.

A core tenet of anarchist unionism that follows from a commitment to direct democracy is the explicit rejection of union collaboration with or support for political parties, which use a pseudo-democratic institution of representation within a larger capitalist state. Total organizational independence from political parties follows both from anarchists’ commitment to direct action and direct democracy.

Union structures and practices are sought which give workers direct democratic control over their organization and action. In unions, anarchists advocate workplace organizing committees, or for larger forms of decision-making, worker assemblies and delegate assemblies. Each of these structures facilitates participation in decision-making around action and union governance by those directly affected. 

For example, the Spanish CNT was the largest anarchist-led union federation in history with 1.7 million members in the late 1930s and described as follows by brickmaker, writer, and CNT leader Jose Peirats:

“The unions constitute autonomous units, linked to the ensemble of the Confederation only by the accords of a general nature adopted at national congresses… Apart from this commitment, the unions, right up to their technical sections, are free to reach any decision which is not detrimental to the organization as a whole… it is the unions which decide and directly regulate the guidelines of Confederation. At all times, the basis for any local, regional, or national decision is the general assembly of the union, where every member has the right to attend, raise and discuss issues, and vote on proposals. Resolutions are adopted by majority vote attenuated by proportional representation…. This federalist procedure, operating from the bottom up, constitutes a precaution against any possible authoritarian degeneration in the representative committees.” (Cited from pg 221 of Means and Ends by Zoe Baker)

Though most anarchist and anarchist-inspired unions do elect officers to formal leadership positions, their authority tends to be much more constrained in scope and degree compared to similar positions in other left and liberal unions. Key to this is the minimization of a bureaucracy that is a key feature of anarchist unions, with most anarchist unions retaining just one or very few administrative paid positions in contrast to mainstream unions’ legions of paid officers, organizing staff, in-house legal and research teams, and so on. 

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, the Spanish CNT had a union member-to-paid staff ratio around 50,000:1 with its membership of 700,000 in the 1910s. This compares to a member-to-staff ratio in the US as a whole today of 14.4 million total union members to 109,000 total paid union employees, or about 132:1. Certainly, unions today are different than they were in 1910, but this illustrates the bureaucratization of mainstream unions compared to anarchist-led unions as much as anything else.

Some critics of direct democracy accuse anarchists of fetishizing moral principles over political strategy. They claim that direct democracy aligns with people’s abstract values and makes them feel good but sacrifices a more hard-nosed strategic orientation to revolutionary organizing. They claim that trying to make the future society in the present is a distraction from building real power. Some anarchists, including such a broad range as both Errico Malatesta and David Graeber, do emphasize the virtues of this kind of “prefigurative” politics because it emphasizes egalitarian social relations in the present instead of waiting to implement them after the abolition of capitalism. 

While recognizing the value of this aspect of prefigurative politics, I mainly prefer direct democracy for strategic reasons. I think creating organizations that exclude a majority of people from having direct involvement in the important decisions in our social movements creates both passive followers among the masses and ample opportunities for corruption and self-aggrandizing behavior from leaders in positions of authority. This in turn leads to pressures to suppress dissent and conform to leadership expectations in a way that offramps radical social movements into authoritarian deadends (like Stalin’s rise in the Russian Revolution) or mild social democratic reformism (like the German Social Democratic Party). Once movements are run by an internal set of elites, they start to mimic the same behaviors as pro-capitalist economic and political elites. The creation of undemocratic structures in social movements is bad strategy because it is ineffective at sustaining and growing revolutionary organizations towards the abolition of capitalism and the state.

While any successful project, movement, or organization necessarily starts with a smaller number of people and grows to include a larger number, there are stark differences between anarchist and other approaches to movement building. For example, many who claim Leninist politics advocate a vanguard strategy of putting socialists in positions of formal, top-down authority in either the state, in unions, or in any variety of mass- or movement-based organizations. The idea is that from positions of formal authority socialists can grow the movement by allocating resources, planning strategy, and providing direction. 

In contrast, anarchist strategy focuses on creating organizations and meeting spaces where discussion is open and members are themselves given agency over the politics and actions of movement organizations. Building radical spaces and organizing vehicles that emphasize direct democracy is how bottom-up change happens. Establishing direct democracy is necessary but not sufficient for anarchist movement building, which also requires taking direct action, fostering community, developing organization, using persuasion and conducting political education, spreading skills and confidence, and leading by example.

From what conditions did anarchist unionism emerge?

Anarchist unionism has its origin in the left workers’ movement of the 1860s and 70s. In 1964, the radicals of Europe coalesced and founded the first large-scale anti-capitalist organization, the International Workingmen’s Association (commonly referred to as the First International). It contained a broad mix of ideologies, variously involved in creating worker cooperatives, armed insurrectionary cells, socialist political parties, and radical unions. 

The predecessor to anarchist unionism in most countries was a form of anarchist “mutualism” influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose ideas were prominent in the early years of the First International and spread around the world. Mutualist organizations often focused on forming worker cooperatives and worker associations that spread propaganda and engaged in mutual aid. Unlike anarchist unionists, Proudhon saw anarchist revolution as a mostly moral process of transformation that would lead to the gradual disappearance of capitalism and the state and the rise of worker-controlled institutions. In contrast, anarchist unionists are committed to revolutionary class struggle as a necessary strategy to bring about an anarchist society.

Over the 1860s the First International polarized away from mutualism and more towards a faction of state socialists, of which Karl Marx was the most prominent figure, and another faction of anti-state revolutionary unionists, of which Mikhail Bakunin was the most prominent figure. The state socialists advocated building social movements that contained a wide variety of organizations, including unions, but which were all connected through a centralized political party. The anti-state socialists advocated building social movements that contained a wide variety of organizations, especially unions, but which were entirely independent of all political parties.

In the late 1860s and early 70s the International had upwards of 800,000 members in its affiliated sections and an activist core of 20,000 who were involved in a wide range of political and organizational activities. Held together by a commitment to anti-capitalism, it was an international mass movement. In 1871, top state officials in France and Spain were violently suppressing the International within their own borders and proposed a continent-wide alliance of governments to attack and destroy it. However, Britain, where the First International’s General Council was headquartered and where the unions affiliated to the International were more reformist, refused in favor of a softer approach to co-opting and disciplining its labor movement.

Around the turn of the decade anti-state socialists led the main sections from Italy, Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, and Switzerland, while state socialists were influential in Germany, France, and Britain. Many other sections were smaller or were contested enough to not have played a decisive role in the upcoming schism. Disagreement over different revolutionary strategies saw the First International split in 1872. Anti-state socialists continued on as their own grouping and gradually adopted the term anarchism to describe their views. After the split and the loss of the potential for a united international socialist organization, the competing Internationals gradually lost momentum and became inactive by the late 1870s.

Some have argued that rivalries between these early anarchists and state socialists escalated further than was necessary or helpful. Indeed, Marx’s critique of capitalism has been incredibly influential on many anarchists. Marx and Bakunin’s rivalry and verbal sparring in their correspondences and at the congresses of the First International certainly created the conditions for mutual antagonism based as much in personality and ego as in political theory and strategy. The legacy of this split has led many subsequent anarchists and Marxists to emphasize the contrasts and take partisan stances towards each other. While recognizing unavoidable differences, other anarchists and Marxists have emphasized the continuities and agreements between their movements. Left variants of Marxism in particular have long had an affinity with anarchist theories and practices.

While radical unionism provided the main thrust of early anarchism as a mass movement, by the 1880s insurrectionary methods were ascendant and became dominant. During this period bombings and assassinations of political and economic elites were advocated by many prominent anarchist theorists and organizations. Insurrectionary anarchists thought that reforms under capitalism had only a marginal effect in improving people’s lives and that the only way to make things better was the wholesale destruction of capitalism and the state. They advocated bombings and assassinations to decapitate oppressive institutions and inspire wider popular revolts and copycat actions that could topple states and capitalists.

By the 1890s, the insurrectionary wing had lost favor in the wider anarchist movement as little had been achieved and much repression had been invited by their actions. Many prominent anarchists who previously supported bombings and assassinations, including Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and Errico Malatesta, became more critical of these tactics and focused more on building mass organizations like revolutionary unions.

What kinds of anarchist unionism are there?

Those unions that explicitly endorse anarchism have come to be called “anarcho-syndicalist.” Other unions forefront anarchist practices of direct action and independence from political parties but maintain a more open political posture by not explicitly endorsing anarchism. These unions have come to be called “syndicalist.” Even though syndicalist unions historically have been mostly led by anarchists and have clearly adopted some anarchist precepts, the aim of not explicitly declaring themselves anarchists is to make them more open to unionists of a broader ideological spectrum. Historically, these terms have often been used interchangeably or with even different meanings, but there’s been a recent push to standardize their meanings. Throughout this piece I use the term “anarchist unionism” descriptively for both syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist unions even though not all syndicalists identify as anarchist. 

As a truly global movement, anarchist unionists were often taking the same core ideas and applying them in very different ways and for different reasons in different contexts. Edilene Toledo and Luigi Biondi write: 

“In every country, syndicalism developed in response to specific circumstances. In Italy and Argentina, for instance, it emerged above all as a rejection of the [state] socialists, while in France and Brazil it arose as a union practice that could unify a range of militants.” (Pg 377 of Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 1870-1940)

While at times syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists have co-existed as rivals in the same country, such as in Argentina in the 1910s and 20s, in most countries and periods one or the other has held a clearly dominant position. In the peak years of anarchist unionism from 1895 – 1939, syndicalism was more prominent in roughly the first half and anarcho-syndicalism became more prominent in the second half.

The history section below illustrates a range of ideological orientations and organizational forms within the anarchist union movement internationally. Many more issues have been hotly debated within the sphere of anarchist unionism, and for interested readers I recommend Zoe Baker’s recent book on the history of early anarchist thought, Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States.

When and where was anarchist unionism a major social force?

Before venturing into a historical survey, I should make a couple disclaimers. In attempting an overview of such broad scope I can only provide a bird’s-eye view of this history. I’ve chosen to emphasize the scale and achievements of these movements as well as the pivotal events at the height of their struggles rather than the ideas and actions of individual leaders. For the sake of brevity I’ve highlighted just a few key moments in each of these revolutionary movements, but there were often dozens or hundreds of other strikes and uprisings happening in the same country before and after the key struggles I’ve selectively narrated. In focusing on some of the sharpest moments of conflict, I also don’t mean to emphasize the scale and intensity of these actions over the long hard work that these labor activists spent building up unions and union federations. Rather, the militancy of their actions was a consequence of the hard organizing and organization-building they had done over the preceding years.

I’m basing the accounts below on the books I’ve read and countless articles found online, most of which is secondary source material with varying degrees of scholarly rigor and which often contradicts itself. As a mono-lingual and amateur historian trying to tackle a subject which is itself underdeveloped, the precise details of some of what follows are not things I have the skills, time, or resources to verify through primary sources (please provide corrections with citations in the comments below). The Recommended Reading page on this blog contains links to some of the informative books that cover various parts of the history of anarchist unionism around the world.

I’ve used a loosely geographical and chronological ordering to discuss the trajectory of this movement. Each section is subtitled by country and my rough estimation of the years when anarchist unionism was legitimately a mass-based social movement. Taken together, the histories of these movements can seem repetitive, but that’s part of the point: These are what mass anarchist union movements look like. They certainly contain a lot of variation but also have a lot of common features and themes. And by the 1910s and 20s these movements were seemingly everywhere.

Spain 1870 – 1874

While anarchist unionism first emerged as a coherent politics in and around the First International in the 1860s, it was in Spain in the early 1870s where it first approximated the character of a mass-based social movement. Murray Bookchin’s 1977 book The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 gives the best account of this early movement (which is ironic given Bookchin’s later turn to a brand of anarchism that explicitly downplayed worker struggle). 

Anarchists connected to Mikhail Bakunin founded the Spanish section of the International in 1870, which by 1872 claimed 20,000 members and 516 trade union sections. While not an explicitly anti-state organization, they disavowed participation in electoral politics and anarchists dominated the key elected committees and administrative positions. Union sections were federated from the local up to the national level and decentralization gave sections considerable autonomy. Successful strikes led to further growth and the ability to lead larger strikes. In 1873 they claimed 60,000 members and a popular following of many more, which was the largest of any national section belonging to the First International.

In early 1873, the Spanish King Amadeo of Savoy abdicated the throne in the face of widespread social unrest due to a range of causes, and there followed a series of short-lived republican governments. In early 1874, a military coup led to the re-establishment of the monarchy. All unions were made illegal, worker newspapers were outlawed, strikes were repressed with bullets, and the Spanish International was explicitly targeted with hundreds of arrests. In 1877, one instance of repression saw 66 imprisoned Spanish Internationalists placed in weighted sacks and thrown into the ocean. The movement was crushed.

While short-lived, the Spanish Internationalists’ tens of thousands of members first created the organizational forms and political positions at scale that presaged the emergence of mass movement anarchist unionism in subsequent decades.

Cuba 1887 – 1920s

Anarchist unionism spread beyond Europe early on through political networks, migration, and anarchists often fleeing persecution for their political activism, with sections from Egypt, Turkey, the US, Argentina, and Uruguay affiliating to the later anarchist congresses of the First International. Anarchist ideas started spreading within the Cuban labor movement in the 1870s.

Historian Joan Casanova argues that anarchists became the dominant force in Cuban labor politics in the 1880s after more moderate, reformist labor leaders failed to secure gains with more conciliatory approach to employers, especially on tobacco plantations and in cigar factories that constituted the second largest industry in the country. A strike led by these reformers failed disastrously in 1886, and partly in response “urban labor began to elect anarchists to the most important leadership positions in the labour movement.” The changed politics and tactics of the movement also changed their fortunes: “The big strikes and lockouts that tobacco workers won in 1887 and 1888 in Havana, and in 1889 in Key West (an island off southern Florida, seventy miles from Cuba), showed workers the validity of the anarchists’ approach to class struggle…” 

The union movement receded in the 1890s but saw steadily increasing organizing thereafter. A wave of strikes following WWI provided rich soil for anarchist unionism to sprout again. The Workers’ Federation of Havana (FOH) was founded in 1921 and the National Workers Confederation of Cuba (CNOC) in 1925, which claimed 129 union sections and 200,000 members. The FOH and CNOC were Cuba’s main labor federations, were syndicalist in orientation, and were organizationally and ideologically led by anarchists. Historian Frank Fernandez documents how: 

“the most important accords [of CNOC’s founding congress] were “the total and collective refusal of electoral politics,” the demand for the eight-hour day, the demand for the right to strike, and the unanimous desire not to bureaucratize the newly created organization. Juana María Acosta, of the Unión de Obreros de la Industria de Cigarrería (“Cigar Industry Workers Union”), was elected provisional president of the CNOC — the first time in Cuban history that a woman was named to such a position — and she made the demand, “equal pay for equal work.””

The election to the Cuban presidency of the general-turned-dictator Gerardo Machado in 1925 spelled disaster for the anarchist movement which had had more room to maneuver under the more moderate previous administration. In the next couple years strikes by manufacturing, sugar, and railway worker unions were met with the harshest repression, and most of the anarchist movement’s top leaders and spokespeople were disappeared and executed. The Cuban Communist Party gathered increasing influence within the CNOC and became its leading force by the late 1920s.

France 1895 – 1914

While the earliest Spanish and Cuban syndicalists were immensely influential within their own countries, it was with French workers that radicals the world over first became aware of syndicalism as a mass movement. The General Confederation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail, or CGT) was one of the main labor federations in France that emerged after the legalization of unions in 1894 and was majorly influenced by syndicalists from its beginning. The CGT was politically pluralistic throughout its main syndicalist period from 1895 – 1914. Anarchists never became the majority pole but were the most influential of all the minority factions which also included socialists, communists, and liberals. The CGT’s 1906 Charter of Amiens declared it independent of all political parties with a delegate vote of 830 to 8, and anarchists were repeatedly elected to the top positions of the federation throughout these years. 

Alongside the CGT was an interconnected network of labor centers called the Bourse du Travail, which began as a labor exchange initiative of local governments to replace hyper-exploitative private employment agencies that had provoked worker riots. However, radical labor activists began taking over these labor exchanges and succeeded in turning them into community union halls. The halls typically housed the offices and meeting rooms of major unions in a locale while also containing theaters, libraries, and hosting all sorts of community events. By 1902 the Bourse du Travail had become so intertwined with the CGT that they decided to formally merge.

By 1902 the CGT had 100,000 members. In these years the CGT waged most of its strikes without using formal negotiations with employers or even formal contracts. According to one source, six out of every ten strikes ended when “the boss opened the factory gates and upped the wages.” 

In 1904 the CGT adopted a campaign for the eight-hour day which was to focus solely on direct action and eschew electoral and lobbying methods. Preparation for a general strike to begin on May 1st, 1906 included conferences in 80 French cities. On the eve of the strike the President of France moved 60,000 soldiers into Paris to suppress it and arrested 700 union leaders. Nonetheless, 200,000 workers participated with some of the strikers staying out for over a hundred days. Only 10,000 workers decisively won a decrease in their workday hours from their employers, but in response to the pressure of the strike the French government passed a law mandating one day off work per week. 

1912 saw the peak of the CGT’s membership in this period top 600,000, which constituted 40% of all dues-paying union members in France. However, the onset of World War I in 1914 tore the union apart. Some syndicalists along with the majority of the other factions threw their support behind the war against Germany, a considerable proportion of the members were conscripted onto the war’s front lines, the CGT voted to join a French coalition of government, employers, and unions to coordinate the war economy, and many anarchists left to form their own separate labor and anti-war organizations. Syndicalism still remained a lesser force within the CGT for more than a decade but its leading years were over.

United States 1881 – 1920s

In the US the anarchist union movement got its start earlier and peaked later than it did in France. The International Working People’s Association (IWPA) was founded in 1881 at a conference of anarchists in London hoping to restart the First International, though the organization only took root in the US and Mexico.

The origins of the US IWPA came in part from anti-electoral radicals within the US Socialist Labor Party (SLP) who split off in 1881 to form a network of anarchist cells mostly focused on insurrectionary armed struggle. The more radical foreign-born Germans in the SLP didn’t have the vote, were far lower in the social class hierarchy than most of the skilled Anglo-American workers in the SLP, and thus were less convinced that electoral politics was a viable tool to make real change.

In 1883, German anarchist and then-insurrectionist Johann Most immigrated to the US and gave fiery speeches across the country drumming up interest in the IWPA. A confluence of former SLPers and new followers of Most led to the founding of the IWPA section in the US at an 1883 conference in Pittsburgh. While radical unionists coexisted among the insurrectionists, their numbers and influence were marginal in the beginning with neither the words “union” nor “strike” appearing in the IWPA’s Pittsburgh Manifesto that decried the treatment of workers and their exploitation by capitalists.

Of the 26 cities represented at the IWPA’s US founding, the Eastern cities coalesced around Most’s insurrectionary program while the Midwestern cities took on an increasingly unionist tenor. IWPA activists were initially critical of the eight-hour day movement as mere mild amelioration under capitalism, but this shifted as anarchist workers started joining the IWPA in increasing numbers.

Cigar factories in Chicago in the 1870s contained an increasing number of German and Bohemian immigrant workers who had been organizing in the labor movement. These workers had been on a path of increasing radicalization due to violent police repression of their meetings and rallies, on the one hand, and the red-baiting, xenophobia, and reformism of leaders of the mainstream cigar maker unions, on the other. Anarchist unionists in Chicago founded their own Progressive Cigarmakers Union (PCU) in 1883 and adopted the IWPA’s Pittsburgh Manifesto word-for-word as a declaration of their own politics while retaining their unionist outlook.

Upon trying to widen their reach into the local labor movement, the PCU applied for but was denied entry into Chicago’s mainstream labor federation, the Trades and Labor Assembly. The PCU then created its own rival federation, the Central Labor Union (CLU), which by 1884 was joined by local German-majority unions of tanners, tailors, and printers. The CLU’s program stated that “labor created all wealth, that there could be no harmony between labor and capital, and that strikes as presently conducted [by mainstream unions] were doomed to failure. It urged every worker to reject capitalist political parties and to devote his or her entire energy to labor unions in order to resist ruling-class encroachment upon their liberties.”

By 1886, the CLU grew to include 22 unions and represented 20,000 workers in Chicago, more than the Trades and Labor Assembly. As far as I know, this brief moment was the first and only time in US history that anarchist unionists controlled the largest organization of workers in a major US city.

The more mainstream Trades and Labor Assembly and the Knights of Labor had taken up the campaign for the eight-hour day in 1885, drawing large crowds at mass meetings and rallies. However, they saw the demand as consistent with capitalism and advocated a reduction in wages to go along with the reduction in hours to make it more palatable to employers. Their messaging also emphasized the charitable benefits of eight-hour days being that more jobs could then be offered to otherwise unemployed workers. 

The more privileged craft workers in the mainstream labor movement, while working more than eight hours a day, were not so nearly impacted by excessive working hours as unskilled immigrant workers were. Seeing an opportunity to make inroads into the proletarian movement and to outflank the liberal reformist unions, the CLU and IWPA took up the eight-hour day while demanding no reduction in wages to go along with it. They now saw this demand as a way to significantly improve the lives of workers and as a step towards abolishing capitalism.

The mainstream unions held a rally of more than 7,000 in early April of 1886, which the CLU followed up a couple weeks later with a rally of their own that drew 25,000. A general strike supported by all the union federations began on May 1st and drew the participation of 10s of 1000s of Chicago workers, with more than 40,000 winning some kind of reduction in hours by the end of the strike’s first week.

At the same time one of Chicago’s largest employers, the farm equipment manufacturer McCormick Harvester, was engaged in a bitter dispute with its workers. On May 3rd, a fight between locked out workers and scabs and police broke out by the gates of its largest factory resulting in the death of a locked out worker. A response rally the next day drew thousands, and as the event was winding down with only hundreds of demonstrators left, 175 cops descended to clear the square. A bomb was thrown at the police, killing one instantly and injuring many others, which led the police to start firing indiscriminately. Four workers and seven more officers ultimately dying from gunshot wounds.

While the thrower of the bomb was never identified, the government used the event as a pretext to break the back of the anarchist movement. Four anarchists, including August Spies and Albert Parsons who were among the main leaders of the IWPA and committed unionists organizing with the CLU’s eight-hour day campaign, were charged with responsibility for the deaths despite not being present at the time of the bombing. They were found guilty in a sham trial and were executed despite an international solidarity movement to save them. Anarchists the country over were targeted for repression. 

The anarchist movement in Chicago and the US as a whole was decimated and took decades to recover. Despite that, the struggle for the eight-hour day continued among workers, gradually being implemented in a range of industries, by either lawmakers or employers under pressure from workers, over the next 50 years. It should not be forgotten that at the moment of highest struggle and strike activity over this demand, anarchist unionists led the movement. The frame up of anarchist leaders for the bombing became known as the Haymarket Affair and their organizing and dying for the eight-hour day is commemorated annually on May 1st as International Workers’ Day.

The advance of industrialization in the US marched on and soon there was plentiful kindling for a renewed fire in the anarchist labor movement. The syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in 1905 in Chicago as a radical alternative to the mainstream American Federation of Labor and to bring together the far flung and diverse radical unionists of the day. After a power struggle in 1908 by the more Marxist factions of the union to bring it into formal alliance with the Socialist Labor Party failed, many of the state socialists left and the primary ideological influence remained anarchist as it stayed true to its original principle of independence from all political parties.

From its founding through the mid-1920s, the IWW achieved increasing prominence through such fights as the 1912 “Bread and Roses” textile worker strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, large efforts among maritime workers on the Atlantic and Gulf seaboards and especially among dockworkers and sailors in Philadelphia, the five-day Seattle General Strike of 1919 that involved 65,000 workers and in which the IWW played an active role, and mass organizing of Arizona and Montana copper miners, Pacific NW and Southern lumberjacks, and Midwestern agricultural workers. From a peak of an estimated 150,000 members in 1917, the union started to decline sharply in the mid-1920s due to the effects of persistent government repression (in 1918, 101 of the union’s lead organizers were convicted on charges of obstructing US efforts in WWI and most were sentenced to decades in prison), company thugs killing IWW organizers (like Frank Little and Wesley Everest), internal splits, and competition for members from the ascending Communist Party. By the 1930s the IWW was a mere shadow of its former glory and by the 1950s only remnants remained as occasional campaigns flickered in and out of existence until a modest resurgence began in the 1990s and continues to this day.

Italy 1901 – 1920

Italian syndicalism emerged as parts of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) became more and more dedicated to direct action. The legalization of unions in Italy in 1901 and their subsequent explosive growth bloomed into a strike wave in the industrial north of the country in 1904, during which syndicalists vied for leadership with the more electoral and reformist sections of the PSI. This came to a head with syndicalists being expelled from the PSI-aligned and largest union federation in the country, the General Confederation of Labor (CGL), in 1906 and then from the PSI itself in 1908. In the remainder of the decade syndicalism flourished among agricultural workers in Southern Italy.

From the beginning Italian syndicalists took after their French counterparts in taking over local labor exchanges and turning them into radical union centers, which they called the camere del lavoro (Chambers of Labor). Italian syndicalists used these camere less as vehicles for directly organizing unions and more as working class cultural centers and to establish dense networks of union interconnections. For example, when state repression came down on a striking union, the relationships established through the camere were used to call other unions out on strike in solidarity, creating large rolling waves of strikes in periods of heightened struggle and state repression. 

Italian syndicalism only took on its own distinct organizational and political identity with the founding of the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) in 1912 as a coalescing of radical agricultural and industrial worker unions. Like the French CGT, the USI was syndicalist and open to all workers. Unlike the CGT, anarchism was by far the dominant pole within the USI and provided its majority leadership and ideological influence. The USI claimed 80,000 members by the end of the year as some major union sections switched over from the CGL. 

As in France, the syndicalist movement was hugely disrupted by the outbreak of World War I. A debate consumed the USI over whether to intervene in the war which led to a substantial number breaking off to form their own interventionist federation. The remaining anti-war USI itself lost half its membership as a result, going from 100,000 down to 50,000 members at the height of the war. However, unlike the French CGT, the USI survived the war with its syndicalist identity intact and played a major role in the massive social unrest in the country from 1919-1920, known as the Biennio Rosso (the “Two Red Years”).

With the return of soldiers and reconversion of the economy following the war, inflation and unemployment ballooned and a rank-and-file movement among industrial workers in Northern Italy immediately sprung up. This movement was influenced from without by radicals returning from Britain with stories of the Shop Stewards Movement (see below) and from reports of the radical workers’ and soldiers’ councils that played a central role in the Russian Revolution of just a couple years before.

After the war the PSI was mostly reformist in orientation, with the party leadership repeatedly opting against escalating or pledging support to the widening industrial unrest. The PSI-aligned CGL also repeatedly attempted to temper the militancy and ambitions of the movement. However, a left-wing had developed within the PSI around a publication out of Turin, L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), which was run by Antonio Gramsci and others and was the only Marxist group to support the autonomous worker movement. The USI and anarchists in other unions played a large role in spreading militant tactics and grassroots organizational forms in these years. 

The Biennio Rosso started to take off in 1919 with organizing by workers in the FIOM, the CGL-affiliated union of metallurgical workers that formed the heart of Italy’s industrial working class, especially in Turin which was the center of Italy’s automobile production. The national contract agreed to by FIOM leadership in early 1919 secured wage increases but also granted key concessions, including the banning of strikes and an increase in the hours of the work-week. Rank-and-file discontent and militancy led to the sprouting of factory councils throughout Northern and Central Italy. These factory councils came to hotly contest management control over working conditions on the shop floor and frequently led strikes, often in direct defiance of FIOM leadership. 

The FIOM leadership’s repeated attempts to quell the unrest by negotiating deals with capitalists inflamed the membership who proceeded to entirely restructure the FIOM sections in Turin. At the local FIOM’s annual congress in 1919 all leadership and administrative positions were turned into temporary positions that rotated on a six-month schedule, effectively wiping out the bureaucratic layer dominated by PSI-loyalists. USI members were given representation in FIOM congresses and an anarchist was elected to the top administrative position of secretary of the Turin section of the FIOM.

In April of 1920, a number of FIOM shop stewards at FIAT car factories in Turin were fired and 80,000 workers responded by going on strike. The employers responded in turn with an industry-wide lockout, and workers then broke into the factories and occupied them. The entire Turin labor movement joined in, 500,000 more workers walked out, and the first general strike of the Biennio Rosso was on. One observer wrote: “For eleven days the life of the city and province remained completely paralysed. Tramways, railways, public services and many private businesses stopped work, in addition to the whole of industry.”

But the state wasn’t content to sit this one out. The Prime Minister of Italy sent 50,000 soldiers to the city to lay siege to the occupied factories. One account described the city’s new visitors: “gun batteries stand ready on the hills … armoured cars are roaming the streets; in the suburbs reputed to be particularly rebellious, machine guns are trained on the houses, on all bridges and crossroads, and on the factory gates.” The CGL intervened to negotiate a settlement, effectively ending the strike and sending everyone back to work. In the months leading up to and during this conflict, state forces killed 100 workers.

The unrest led to explosive growth of the unions. From 1918 to 1920, the syndicalist USI grew from 150,000 to 800,000 members and the PSI-aligned CGL grew from 250,000 to 2 million members. Italy’s largest railway and maritime worker unions also were very active in these strike waves and were led by anarchists even though they never affiliated to the USI.

A strike by Alfa-Romeo auto factory workers in the industrial center of Milan in August in 1920 again triggered a lockout by employers and then a wave of factory occupations by workers. Workers seized 280 factories in and around Milan. In early September workers in Turin joined the strike and occupied 185 factories in the city. This time, many of the workers didn’t just sit down in the factories but kicked management out and ran the factories themselves. In Turin the unions were able to coordinate across factories to maintain some of their raw materials and parts supplies, and the anarchist-controlled railway unions defied orders to stop shipments of goods and materials to and from the appropriated factories. Some factories started re-organizing production to supply weapons and goods needed to sustain and defend the ongoing general strike. Factory occupations and appropriations continued spreading all over the country. 

At its peak 600,000 industrial workers had effectively seized the means of production in most of the country’s largest factories. Hundreds of thousands more agricultural workers seized the land they worked to run the farms themselves. Some workers began organizing militias to protect the occupations from both the armed forces of the state and fascist groups. Hundreds of thousands more were participating in strikes and other forms of unrest across the country. Turin remained the center of this revolutionary moment and calls for escalation were being made and debated in all the national left organizations.

By early September 1920 the entire province of Piedmont, of which Turin was the capital, was effectively under worker control. Sections of the armed forces were contested and appeared willing to disobey orders, as when earlier that year soldiers in Ancoma had mutinied rather than depart for their assigned colonialist mission in Albania. Many commentators at the time and since have claimed that this was a truly revolutionary moment where the overthrow of the state and capital seemed within reach. 

The CGL happened to be having its national Congress on September 9th and the discussion was taken up over whether to heed the call coming from Turin for a national general strike. But the PSI leadership was against an expansion of the struggle. Though party leaders formally controlled the largest left organizations in the country, they were not the ones leading the grassroots worker revolt. Seeking to not lose control of the unions any more than they already had and hoping to parlay the gains of the labor unrest into additional seats in parliament, the PSI sent out a referendum to all CGL members on whether to support the Turin movement and push for national strike coordination. With the PSI leadership strongly urging workers to vote down the proposal, CGL members voted 590,000 to 409,000 against it. 

Despite many of the CGL’s rank-and-file participating in the unrest, the full energies of the USI and other anarchists being channeled in that direction, and widespread participation among the Italian working class as a whole, the movement was unable to overcome the leadership of the country’s largest union federation and leftist party moving to roll back the strike wave and factory occupations at such a critical moment. On September 19th the CGL negotiated a settlement that resulted in wage increases but also the abandonment of the factory occupations and management’s regaining control over production.  

Outside of Russia and Spain, Italy in September 1920 was probably the closest a large European country came to a successful worker revolution in the first half of the 20th century. Anarchists and left Marxists were the principal left forces intervening in and amplifying what became a momentous working class revolt that was sadly scuttled by politicians and union bureaucrats in the end. 

The PSI did relatively well in the 1920 elections, but the widespread social unrest of the immediate post-war years had united and radicalized the country’s anti-socialist forces. A section of industrial capitalists and the landowning aristocracy increasingly saw the liberal state as unable to secure their interests and turned to funding far-right groups to combat socialism. A middle-class devastated by war and unnerved by recession and strikes was the lighter fluid that fascism would soon ignite. This jolt to the right reached its conclusion when in October, 1922, 30,000 demonstrators and paramilitaries belonging to the National Fascist Party marched on Rome. Fearing bloodshed and civil war, the King of Italy made Benito Mussolini Prime Minister. Who knows how Italian history might have played out differently if all of the left’s forces had pushed not to retreat but to escalate at the precise moment they had the upper hand just a couple short years before.

Germany 1918-1923

The German Social Democratic Party (SDP) was the most successful socialist parliamentary party in Europe in the pre-WWI era, and its associated unions with millions of members dominated the labor movement. But tensions emerged in one of the SDP-linked unions, the Free Association of German Trade Unions, which took on an increasingly syndicalist flavor in the pre-war years. This led to its merging with other formations into the syndicalist Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD) in 1919 which claimed 150,000 members at its height in 1920 and was centered around militant miners and metalworkers in the Ruhr region of Germany. A Syndicalist Women’s League was founded to discuss, propagandize, and fight around women’s issues in the movement and society.

While not achieving the peaks of pivotal influence in the labor movement as was seen by anarchists in many other countries in this period, the raw union membership certainly qualifies it as a mass movement even if relatively short-lived. The influence of syndicalist-like ideas in Germany in these years is much greater if one also takes into account the activities of the ideologically-adjacent Marxist Council Communists, but that’s beyond the scope of this piece. The waning of revolutionary energy following the repressed German Revolution of 1918-19 and internal disagreements led to the FAUD’s gradual fracturing and decline from a mass-based union movement into more of an anarchist community and cultural organization by the late 1920s.

Britain 1910 – 1922

Historian Ralph Darlington begins his recent book Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14 with:

“The so-called ‘Labour Unrest’ — or what more accurately should be termed ‘Labour Revolt’ — that swept Britain in the years leading up to the First World War between 1910 and 1914 was one of the most sustained, dramatic and violent explosions of industrial militancy and social conflict the country has ever experienced. After some 20 years of relative quiescence in strike activity, there was a sudden and unanticipated eruption….

The strike wave involved a number of large-scale disputes in strategically important sections of the economy. A protracted strike in the South Wales coalfields in 1910-11 was followed in the summer of 1911 by national seamen’s, dockers’ and railway workers’ strikes, as well as a Liverpool general transport strike. There were national miners’ and London transport workers’ strikes in 1912, a series of Midlands metal workers’ strikes and Dublin transport workers’ lockout in 1914. A significant minority of the industrial workforce were involved in 4,600 other strikes for higher wages, better working conditions and trade union organisation. Women workers played an active and prominent role within a number of strikes….

It was not only the scale and diverse range, but also the character of strike action that seemed extraordinary. It was a revolt dominated by unskilled and semi-skilled workers, encompassing both members of established and recognized trade unions, and also workers hitherto unorganized and/or unrecognized who became engaged in a fight to build collective organisation and for union recognition against the hostility of many employers. Action largely took place independently and unofficially of national trade union leaderships whose unresponsiveness to workers’ discontents, endeavours to channel grievances through established channels of collective bargaining and conciliation machinery, and advocacy of compromise and moderation was often rejected by workers in favour of militant organisation and strike action from below. Alarmed by the way in which the initiative often came unofficially from rank-and-file union members, or non-unionised workers, the Webbs referred to ‘insurrectionary strikes’ that were:

‘… designed, we might almost say, to supersede collective bargaining — to repudiate any making of long-term agreements, to spring demand after demand upon employers, to compel every workman to join the Union, avowedly with the view of building up the Trade Union as a dominant force. This spasm of industrial ‘insurrectionism’ was [only] abruptly stopped by the outbreak of [World War I].’”

By membership, the two largest leftist organizations in Britain at the time were the social democratic Independent Labour Party and the revolutionary Marxist British Socialist Party. While there were small factions within each party that professed varying degrees of support for the Labour Revolt, the leadership of both parties was resolutely against the insurrectionary strikes. Both parties attempted to divert the social unrest into parliamentary gains and/or urge the workers to go through the proper bureaucratic union channels to settle their grievances.

The much smaller Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) was, according to Darlington, “Perhaps the most important left-wing organisation to play a role in the Labour Revolt…” Not a union itself but a vehicle through which to advocate and practice direct action, coordinate rank-and-file militancy, and spread radical propaganda from within the mainstream unions and among the broader working class, the ISEL’s methods and politics overlapped most distinctly with and helped shape the character of the Labour Revolt. While never containing more than a few thousands official members, ISEL’s publication reached a peak circulation of 20,000 and union delegates representing 150,000 members of other unions attended its two conferences in 1912. Most crucially, ISEL provided a layer of radical workers across the country who were the only organized group to whole-heartedly encourage the expression of anger and explosion of action boiling over and provide it with political meaning in the form of a truly bottom-up socialism.

Despite the misconception that wildcat actions can’t truly make gains without union or party leadership to anchor them, Darlington’s research shows how a large majority of the strikes during the Labour Revolt were either wholly or partially successful in winning their demands of increased wages, shorter work weeks, the rehiring fired union activists, and union recognition. 

The nationalist fervor surrounding British entry into WWI put virtually the whole militant labor movement on pause, but only briefly as in 1915 a radical Shop Stewards Movement sprang up that was the most active element of the labor movement during the war. It initially centered around skilled engineering workers before spreading to semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Like the 1910-14 Labour Revolt, the Shop Stewards Movement emphasized operating outside of mainstream unions when necessary and emphasized syndicalist direct action and direct democracy. Labor historian James Hinton writes:

“The Clyde Workers’ Committee [of the Shop Stewards’ Movement] originated in the failure of the union Executives, or District Committees, to place themselves at the head of the militancy of a section of the Clydeside engineers. From the Fairfield’s case the more militant of the engineers learned that if the Munitions Act was to be opposed root and branch, it must be opposed by an organisation and leadership able to act independently of the official trade union structures. The February 1915 strike had taught them that this organisation, to be effective, must be a delegate organisation based directly in the factories. Out of this experience the militants formulated and clearly expressed, for the first time, the principle of independent rank-and-file organisation which was to constitute the basis of the shop stewards’ movement.”

The peak of this movement saw a 200,000-worker strike take place among 48 cities and towns in 1917, which helped spawn a syndicalist-inspired, shop steward-based, nation-wide infrastructure operating in parallel to the traditional unions. But the end of the war and the specter of the Russian Revolution led the British government to repress the Shop Stewards Movement with the utmost aggression beginning in 1918. An immense strike wave hit post-war Britain, but a hobbled left didn’t play as large a role in that wave as it did in the struggles from 1910-18. 

Many of the workplace militants of this era, along with virtually the entire left in the UK, participated in the founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920. In its early years the CPGB contained a strong anti-parliamentary and syndicalist strain before the Russian Communist Party came to exercise more firm ideological control over the international Communist movement by the mid 1920s. Syndicalist ideas and practices have since flowed as an undercurrent through the rest of UK labor history and become a social force in particular moments, such as 1.7 million workers walking off the job in the general strike of 1926 and the 1970s labor battles, but there has no longer been any large scale syndicalist organization or movement to ground them.

Following this loosely chronological and geographical thread through syndicalist world history, we will soon pivot to its presence in Latin America, which was no less central than in Europe. The urban working classes of many major South American cities in the early 1900s were mostly recent European immigrants and thus lacked voting rights, making anarchist direct action feel more practical than political parties to many workers. Most of the migration came from Spain and Italy, which had their own strong anarchist labor movements. Anarchist organizers who had been exiled or were fleeing state persecution were among those who arrived in the Western Hemisphere and helped fill the workplaces of these burgeoning capitalist cities. While anarchist union movements outside of Europe were seeded by European immigrants, exiles, and travelers, these movements soon grew local roots and blended with local traditions.

What role did race and gender play in these movements?

But before looking at specific movements in Latin America, looking at the history of race and gender in the international anarchist union movement is necessary. 

Race itself is largely a product of labor and capital flows around the world, much like the radical unionism that accompanies these flows. Anarchist unionists, like those in the US IWW and South African ISL, consistently advocated the creation of unions for all races in contrast to mainstream unions of this period which often advocated or at least practiced segregation in the unions. But it would be a gross overstatement to claim that anarchist unionists overcame or solved the issue of race in its ranks. White supremacy in European and Latin American countries invariably leaked into these social movements and sowed division and prejudice. On the whole, actual multi-racial organizing and solidarity often didn’t live up to the rhetoric.

With much of the history on these movements still being written and with many of the available sources obscure, second-hand, or cursory, there’s much about their relation to race that we don’t know. But in the history we do have there are bright spots as well, where organizers of color took up the anarchist union call and were leaders in the fight against employers and the state. 

While I am mostly avoiding a focus on individuals in this post, when it comes to race I feel it’s worthwhile to focus briefly on some key figures. Personal biographies of organizers of color offer some of the little but suggestive information we do have about racial dynamics of these movements. 

In the US, black longshoreman Ben Fletcher is the most well-known organizer of color in the IWW’s history. Employers on the Philadelphia docks had long divided the workforce along racial lines, which included local blacks, recently arrived black migrants from the Southern US, and migrants from Europe, segregating workers by race on their crews and pitting them against each other in hiring. In the 1910s and 1920s Fletcher had many comrades but was the principal organizer in leading strikes by and unionizing the majority of Philadelphia’s dock workers of all races into the IWW.

The IWW was known, though not always fairly, for larger-scale struggles that burned brightly but not for very long. However, if one were to evaluate IWW organizers on their achievements of creating militant, radical, and sustained union organization, Fletcher might be the most successful IWW organizer of any race in the union’s history. No other of the IWW’s larger-scale unions in its peak years lasted as long as the dock workers in Philadelphia from 1912 to the mid-1920s. These workers pushed employers to give them among the highest wages in the industry at that time, which was especially uncommon for a majority black workforce, and exercised a high degree of worker control on the job.

Some other IWW leaders of color were Lucy Parsons, Rosendo Dorame, Fernando Palomares, and Fernando Verlarde. Other noteworthy organizing efforts by workers of color in the IWW include organizing by lumber workers in the Southern US, Maori shearing workers in New Zealand, and indigenous dockworkers in Vancouver. At a time when recent, often non-English-speaking immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were not yet integrated into white society, the IWW was one of the few unions to reach out to and successfully organize across these ethnic and linguistic lines. Despite the valuable organizing of all of these efforts, most IWW campaigns and branches failed to initiate truly multi-racial organizing beyond their main base of European descendants and European immigrants.

Cuban anarchist Margarito Iglesias was the grandson of black slaves and was the leader of a major syndicalist manufacturing union on the island, the Sindicato de la Industria Fabril Industrial. Iglesias led a series of strikes by these factory workers in the early 1920s before the government declared the union illegal and closed it down. Iglesias then got a job at the local port and continued his organizing there. In 1927, Iglesias was disappeared and executed during a wave of brutal repression against the anarchist union movement conducted under President Machado. After Machado fled the island in 1933 amidst a general strike, the remains of Iglesias and fellow anarchist unionist Alfredo López were exhumed and given proper burial in a mass ceremony.

Mexican anarchism’s prevailing figure is Ricardo Flores Magon. He joined the reformist Mexican Liberal Party in 1900 and along with his brothers soon became one of its leaders. In 1904 Magon fled to the US to avoid persecution and befriended Emma Goldman and other anarchists, leading to an evolution in his own politics. By 1908 the PLM was declaring itself anarchist communist. Magon and the PLM are most well known for their influence on the peasant movement led by Emiliano Zapata, who adopted the PLM’s slogan “Land and Liberty,” but Magon also advocated radical worker organizing. In his 1911 political program for the PLM, he wrote in praise of the revolts underway in Mexico, “There the proletariat has taken possession of the land without waiting for a paternal government to deign to make it happy, for it knows that nothing good is to be expected of governments and that the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves.” Collaboration, mutual membership, and support were commonplace between the PLM and IWW in the 1900s and 10s. 

The anarcho-syndicalist movement in Peru formed close relationships with and soon overlapped with the country’s large indigenous population. The anarcho-syndicalist’s Second Workers Congress, adopted a “indigenous liberation” agenda. Steven Hirsh writes: 

“Provincial migrants played vital roles as both interlocutors for the [Tahuantinsuyo Pro-Indian Rights Central Committee (CPIT)] and indigenous peasants and as intermediaries between them and the anarcho-syndicalist labour movement. Notable figures in this regard were Ezequiel Urviola, Hipólito Salazar, and Francisco Chuquiwanka Ayulo. Urviola, a quechua speaking “Indian-Mestizo” from Azángaro, Puno, epitomized the synthesis of an indigenous and anarcho-syndicalist sensibility. Driven from Puno by gamonales (rural bosses) for organising indigenous self-defence organisations, Urviola would ultimately wind up in Lima in 1920 where he collaborated with the CPIT, the union movement, and the Popular University González Prada.”

These leaders went on to found the syndicalist Peruvian Regional Indian Worker Federation (FIORP) in 1923, and played a role in stimulating peasant revolts in these years. Hirsch shows how the CPIT and FIORP “promoted a class and internationalist outlook, peasant-worker solidarity, direct action, and ethnic pride.”

Fred Cetiwe was a black African revolutionary union organizer and leading figure in the syndicalist Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) in South Africa. In 1918 he was fired from his job for organizing towards a general strike among factory workers in the inland city of Witwatersrand in 1918. He then moved to Cape Town where he built up the IWA on the docks and helped lead a strike for higher wages conducted by 3,000 mainly black dock workers in 1919. He played an important role in the rise of and injection of a strain of syndicalist politics into the politically diverse Industrial and Commercial Union that would reach a peak membership of 100,000 mostly workers of color in the late 1920s.

The early anarchist union movement’s relation to gender was similar in many ways to its relation to race in emphasizing a rhetoric of equality between genders and the importance of unions to women as well as men. But in practice, patriarchy was still a major problem in the anarchist union movement. Many of the essential roles women did play in organizing auxiliary groups, walking picket lines and joining street actions, and performing the vital role of sustaining the homes and families of union households were not much recorded in worker newspapers or validated with recognition or awarded with formal leadership positions. 

I briefly note some women-led organizations and strikes throughout this piece. Perhaps women’s most visible role in this period was as rank-and-file and leaders of textile worker unions which were majority women and were among the most militant of the anarchist union movement. Textile worker strikes were especially important in the anarchist movements of the US, Britain, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Spain. A few of the prominent women organizers in the international movement include Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Helen Keller, Marie Guillot, Luisa Capetillo, Reynalda González Parra, Caritina Piña Montalvo, and Juana Rouco Buela.

Lastly, I want to touch on some points occasionally made against anarchist unionism. One position held both by some liberals and leftists of all stripes is that class is more important than race and gender in politics and society. Some anarchists seem attracted to unionism because they see in it a way to really carry out a class-centered political project of economic struggle. 

I disagree with this position. It is precisely because the workplace is such an crucial place where racism and sexism are shaped and reproduced that I think unionism has revolutionary anti-sexist and anti-racist power in addition to anti-capitalist power. Some try to give class theoretical priority as a “material” phenomena over gender and race as mere “social” phenomena as a way to justify class’s strategic priority, though here too I think that is mistaken. Rather, race and gender are objective phenomena defined in large part by their material causes and effects no less than class is an objective phenomena defined in large part by its social causes and effects. 

Lastly, a commitment to unionism doesn’t necessarily imply a diminution of other fields of struggle. Workers have a particular position within capitalist society that gives them leverage over the capitalist system. But those who are exploited and oppressed in society by institutions beyond just employers have many other tools available to resist their domination. Anarchist unionists have often welded their workplace organizations to neighborhood and other community forms of organization as a way to connect these different fields of struggle. At its best, anarchist unionism can be a key part of an overall movement against all forms of domination.

Argentina 1896 – 1930

While anarchist unions had existed in Argentina since the late 1880s, syndicalism as a social movement first made its larger presence felt in 1896. Two dozen anarchist unions held conferences that year to discuss the prospects for and coordination of larger-scale strike action. The anarchist workers saw their aspirations realized when railway workers on the country’s busiest rail line between Buenos Aires and Rosario struck, which then spread to other rail lines across the country. Anarchist unionists organized sympathy strikes and by early September 25,000 workers across the country were on strike. The strike collapsed days later but the stage had been set for larger union action and organization.

In 1901, 27 unions representing 10,000 workers came together to form the country’s first large-scale organization of unions, the Argentine Workers’ Federation (FOA). The federation was politically pluralistic but its driving ideological influence was unmistakable. The elected ten-person administrative committee of the federation consisted of six anarchists, two state socialists, and two who didn’t declare any particular ideology. Disagreements over the role that Socialist Party members who did not belong to any of the unions could play in the federation led the state socialists to leave and create their own separate union federation in 1903. In 1905, the FOA grew to 56 unions representing 32,000 members, voted to reject political pluralism and adopted an anarcho-syndicalist stance by explicitly endorsing anarchist communism as its goal, and added the word “regional” to their name, now the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA), to signal the organization’s anti-nationalist politics.

There were frequent strikes and brutal repression throughout these years, with many union leaders being deported, many striking workers killed, and the FORA being declared illegal by the government on multiple occasions. The crescendo reached a high point in 1909 when police attacked FORA’s May Day rally and killed eight workers. In response all of the country’s labor federations called an indefinite general strike in which 250,000 workers participated. Many of the country’s main union halls were shut down by the police, 2,000 unionists were arrested, and three more workers were murdered during the unrest. On May 8th the strike ended when the government conceded the release of all of the imprisoned unionists and allowed the union halls to reopen.

In 1914, the main state socialist union federation voted to join the FORA en masse with the intention of forcibly reforming it back to a more syndicalist political pluralism. In 1915 the FORA officially voted to drop anarchism as its official ideology and to again re-adopt the more open syndicalist stance. In response, many of FORA’s unions held a separate congress and voted to split off to form their own federation that retained their explicit commitment to anarchist communism. The syndicalist FORA became known as FORA-IX as it was the ninth congress where pluralism was reinstated, while the anarcho-syndicalist FORA is sometimes called the FORA-V in reference to the explicitly anarchist position taken originally at FORA’s fifth congress in 1905 which was then reclaimed in 1915 after the split. This split can best be seen as a disagreement among anarchists and syndicalists over whether to work closely with state socialists within the same union federation by endorsing a more open syndicalism vs. those anarcho-syndicalists who felt that a rejection of electoralism was a core principle that couldn’t be compromised within their organization and who felt committed to an explicit anarchist program. 

In 1919, workers with loose connections to FORA-V at an iron works factory in Buenos Aires went on strike to demand an eight-hour day. Scabs and police were brought in to break the strike, and at one confrontation the police opened fire and killed four workers. 200,000 workers attended the funeral procession for the slain workers, where the crowd was fired on by police who killed 39 more people that day. A general strike was called by all of the union federations and gun fights broke out across the city between spontaneously formed workers’ militias and the police and the newly organized Argentine Patriotic League, which was formed by business and military leaders to violently suppress the unions. The military itself soon mobilized 30,000 troops into the capital city. The strike subsided on its third and fourth days, and after the dust cleared as many as 700 workers had been killed and 55,000 arrested. The events became known as the Tragic Week. 

Union membership and strike activity had grown steadily through the 1910s in spite of the FORA split and in fact climbed higher in the immediate wake of the Tragic Week, with FORA-IX claiming 70,000 members in 1920 and FORA-V claiming 200,000 members in 1922. Outside of Spain, no other country in the world saw an anarchist labor movement that was as large and lasted as long while solidly in the majority of overall union influence as was seen in Argentina from 1896 through the mid-1920s. But the 1920s saw a slow decline of the power of anarchists and the entire labor movement along with them. 

The high point of these struggles in the 1910s and early 20s forced the government to pass a series of positive labor law reforms and forced employers to raise wages in concert with the booming economy of the 1920s. This took some of the wind out of the sails of the more militant wing of the movement, which itself continued to suffer intense state repression and a series of further splits. Political instability accompanying the economic freefall of the early months of the Great Depression emboldened the military to execute a coup in 1930 and install General Uriburu as president, who brutally crushed both the moderate and radical wings of the labor movement.

Chile 1900 – 1927

Syndicalism began to take root in Chile in the 1890s and then started to bloom in the early 1900s with the spread of Resistance Societies. At a time when syndicalist unions were not strong enough to survive intense repression, these societies formed with one foot in the workplaces but also one foot in the surrounding communities and regions in a way that made them more resilient. These were semi-clandestine anarchist groups that mixed a variety of functions, including coordinating direct action at workplaces and spreading strikes, organizing self-defense of workers facing repression by employers and the state, engaging in social struggles outside of the workplace, and spreading radical propaganda. These societies proliferated and often bolstered union struggles before the emergence of more fully-fledged and large-scale union federations. At their peak in 1910, there were more than 400 such resistance societies composed of 55,000 members operating in Chile. 

In 1905, a protest rally with as many as 50,000 people in Santiago against taxes on meat imports was fired on by police, which led to a series of escalations in which a total of 200 people were killed. Anarchists and syndicalists were in the lead of the popular uprising and Santiago’s unions called a general strike and were in control of the city for a couple days before the state’s forces regrouped and crushed the movement, killing as many as 300 more. The events became known as the Red Week. 

Two of the early strongholds of Chilean anarchist unionism were the ports and the nitrate mines, which had seen increasing strike activity and social unrest throughout the first decade of the 20th century. Chile became the world’s leading producer of nitrate and its mining and export were a pillar of the economy despite miners and their families living in slums in remote company-controlled towns.

The situation reached a head in 1907 when nitrate miners in Tarapacá Province called a general strike to demand higher wages and gathered miners from the wider region to march on the port city of Iquique. Contingents of workers arrived in the city each day to join the strike, and the national government began sending military regiments to bolster the armed forces already stationed in Iquique. Eleven days after the conflict began estimates of the number of workers on strike ranged between 10,000 and 30,000. A stand-off ensued and after negotiations had been stalled for days General Silver Renard ordered the army to open fire on the union leaders who were meeting on the balcony of a school that was being used as a gathering center by the workers and their families. One observer of the events described it:

“On the central balcony … stood 30 or so men in the prime of life, quite calm, beneath a great Chilean flag, and surrounded by the flags of other nations. They were the strike committee… All eyes were fixed on them just as all the guns were directed at them. Standing, they received the shots. As though struck by lightning they fell, and the great flag fluttered down over their bodies… There was a moment of silence as the machine guns were lowered to aim at the school yard and the hall, occupied by a compact mass of people who spilled over into the main square… There was a sound like thunder as they fired. Then the gunfire ceased and the foot soldiers went into the school by the side doors, firing as men and women fled in all directions.”

Estimates put those killed at between 2,000 and 3,600, making it one of deadliest industrial conflicts in world history, later to be known as the Santa Maria School Massacre. Despite the state’s willingness to commit mass murder against striking workers, the radical worker movement continued to grow.

In 1912 anarchists formed the Chilean Regional Workers’ Federation (FORCh), which in 1917 merged with and essentially took over the country’s other main labor federation, the Grand Workers’ Federation of Chile. The newly refounded FORCh maintained an anarchist leadership until its displacement by Communist Party leaders in the mid-1920s. A Chilean IWW was founded in 1918 and had 25,000 members by the early 1920s. Inspired by and loosely modeled on but organizationally independent of the IWW centered in North America, the Chilean IWW represented the dockworkers and sailors of most of the country’s main ports. Anarchists and syndicalists provided the primary leadership and ideological influence of the Chilean union movement from 1917-1927, with the movement’s peak union membership reaching 200,000 organized workers in 1925.

In 1927 former Army Colonel Carlos Ibanez won the presidency on a populist platform. He combined mild social reform with brutal repression that smashed both the FORCh and Chilean IWW. While syndicalists were still an active force in the Chilean labor movement after its revival in the 1930s, they never regained the prominence they held from 1900 – 1927.

Uruguay 1905 – 1923

The Uruguayan section of the First International was informally founded in 1872 and had its first congress in 1875 with more than 1,500 workers in attendance. Two years later the Uruguayan section formally affiliated to the anarchist First International congress in Verviers, Belgium which was unfortunate timing as the International was dissolved shortly thereafter. In these early decades of the anarchist union movement in Uruguay, the typographers union was its driving force due in part to its workers being exposed to international politics and news of worker movements in other countries.

Anarchist ideas continued to sprout and grow until it bloomed into its first large-scale federation with the founding of the Uruguayan Regional Workers’ Federation (FORU) in 1905, inspired by the Argentinian FORA. Like the FORA, the FORU declared a more explicitly anarchist politics, with statements of the congress including passages like: 

“Our purely economic organization is different and opposite to that of the political parties, since just as they organize to conquer state power, we organize to destroy all bourgeois and political institutions, until we establish in its place a Federation of Free Producers.” (Translated by Google)

By the end of 1905 FORU had 32 affiliated unions representing 7,000 members and was the sole union federation in the country at the time.

FORU’s most intense episode of struggle centered on its tram workers union in Montevideo that went on strike in 1911. Trams had become the primary form of transportation and the entire economy depended on them to move workers throughout the city. After nine tram workers had been fired for union activity, the more than 600 tram workers in the city went on strike to reinstate them and soon added demands for increased pay and reduction in daily work from more than ten hours down to eight hours. One vignette was recorded as: “One woman publicly called on her husband to join the strike and was assisted by a crowd of onlookers who blocked his trolley until he relented and walked out.” The strike ended eleven days later on May 22nd when some of the demands were met, including a pay raise and a reduction to nine-hour workdays.

However, upon returning to work on May 23rd, the workers discovered that many more union members had been sacked and that they were misled on the demands they thought they had won. The union immediately went back out and the FORU called for a general strike, with more than 50,000 workers from 37 unions walking off the job and into the streets. With the trams as the main form of transportation again halted as well as a number of other key industries, the city was effectively shut down. A permit system was created whereby only vehicles authorized by the unions were allowed on the road, and the unions briefly took control of the city’s food supply. 

Populist president Jose Batlle initially supported the workers in their fight with the foreign-owned tram companies, but once it became clear that the tram companies were unwilling to compromise and foreign pressure was brought to bear on Batlle, he sent troops into Montevideo to attack striking workers and banned public assemblies. The strike remained unbroken and on May 25th the workers agreed to return to work only after the tram companies relented and offered all of the fired workers their jobs back. By 1915, continued agitation led to the passage of a law granting a maximum 8-hour day and legislating one day off work each week.

The FORU grew throughout the 1910s, reaching a peak of 25,000 members in 1917 and 50 affiliated unions in 1919 (though another source gives the FORU a peak membership of 90,000 in 1911). But as happened around the continent, the movement began to fracture and weaken in the early 1920s for similar reasons. The FORU itself split over whether to join the Communist Third International and the ideological pole of the union movement shifted away from anarchism by the late 1920s.

Brazil 1906-1919

In Brazil, the First Brazilian Workers Congress was called by reformist socialists in 1906 and attended by 43 delegates representing 28 unions. The call included the phrase “revolutionary elements being prohibited” as an attempt to keep syndicalists out. But not to be excluded from the possibility of creating the first national organization of workers, syndicalists attended anyway and ended up winning many of the central debates about the political orientation of the congress. For example, the reformists sought to make winning legislation through parliamentary strategy the main priority of the organization while syndicalists favored a direct action approach. The resolution that passed declared “the economically organized proletariat independent of political parties” and that the organization “make use of the means of action that are its own” instead of relying on parties or politicians to act on their behalf.

In 1908 the Congress founded the country’s first stable national union federation, the Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB), which included 50 unions and was centered mostly in the regional federations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The COB’s official newspaper, A Voz do Trabalhador, was unmistakably anarchist in orientation. By 1912, the Sao Paulo unions had 10,000 members and their political orientation was “almost exclusively that of syndicalist direct action.”

The COB unions led a moderate strike wave from 1912-14 that achieved modest wage gains. However, state repression, internal political divisions, and broader divisions of the working class prevented the COB or any other element of the labor movement from achieving the heights of union membership seen in other countries in the region. The COB as a national body was defunct by the time the next strike wave came around.

The peak of class struggle in this period began in 1917 in São Paulo, which was the center of Brazilian industry. A walkout by weavers and cotton workers for a wage increase in June ballooned into a general strike after a police attack on a union demonstration in July killed a worker, and the number of striking workers reached 70,000. With the unions too weak to provide coherence to the movement as a whole and with more moderate political and labor leaders urging workers to call off the strike, anarchists, socialists, and syndicalists hastily organized a Proletarian Defense Committee that generated a list of the movement’s 11 core demands. A few days into the strike, delegates of the Proletarian Defense Committee representing the striking workers agreed to return to work after the industrialists agreed to concede to some of the demands, including wage gains and the cherished eight-hour day, and the government agreed to release imprisoned unionists. Seeing the example of São Paulo, city-wide general strikes erupted and defense committees were organized in a number of other Brazilian cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Pelotas, and Recife, which ended with similar victories. 

While this might have heralded a revitalization of anarchist unionism across the country, shortly after these strikes concluded Brazil entered WWI and intensified its repression, closing down worker newspapers and deporting hundreds of radical leaders abroad. Another strike wave following on the heels of WWI was not enough to reverse the fortunes of Brazil’s labor movement. In 1921 leftist publications were outlawed, and in 1924 many radical union leaders were arrested under new anti-union laws. This included key anarchist leaders being sent to a concentration camp on Brazilians’ remote northern border, where many of them died in the ensuing years of disease, torture, and starvation. Achieving both notable victories and suffering crushing defeats, anarchists and syndicalists provided the primary leadership to the organizations and strikes of the working classes of Brazil between 1906-1919. 

Peru 1905-1930

Seeded initially by middle-class intellectuals steeped in radical European politics, Peruvian anarchism gradually took root in worker-run publications and workplace organizations in the 1900s and 1910s to become the dominant force on the left wing of the country’s nascent labor movement. Anarchist unionists in Peru waged their first big battle when in 1911 they led a strike by 500 workers at a US-owned cotton mill in Lima demanding a wage increase, a reduction in work hours from 13 to 10, and the elimination of the night shift. In its second month the strike escalated into a general strike in the city which only ended when Peru’s president intervened to force the company to grant the union’s demands.

In November, 1918, President José Pardo y Barreda had granted the eight-hour day to women and children in an attempt to placate a worker movement on edge over WWI-caused inflation and huge cost-of-living increases. Not satisfied, in December of 1918 2,900 workers employed at Lima’s nine largest textile factories struck to demand the eight-hour day for all. The next month this too cascaded into a general strike in Lima which only ended on January 15th when the president conceded the eight-hour day for all workers.

In the next few years a number of further large-scale, cross-industry strikes achieved mixed results, leading to intense repression, including the imprisonment and torture of many union leaders. A number of union federations had formed and disbanded over the 1910s and early 1920s as the terrain would rapidly shift one way and then back again for the fortunes of the movement. In the early 1920s the syndicalist movement opted to use more targeted strikes and do more cultural work in spreading access to anarchist-inflected arts and education among working class communities. This fostered a rich mix of counterculture and radical worker politics that sustained the syndicalist movement throughout the 1920s before declining as the Peruvian Communist Party and the social democratic Peruvian Aprista Party became the dominant forces in the labor movement.

Mexico 1912 – 1931

Anarchist unionism had played an active role in the labor movement leading up to and during the Mexican Revolution from 1910 – 1920. Most prominently, the Casa del Obrero Mundial was initially founded as a syndicalist union federation in 1912 and quickly became the sole national labor organization in the country. However, its explosive growth to 50,000 members in 1915 and then 150,000 the following year led to a self-contradictory ideological stew of anarchists, reformists, and militant nationalists, some of whom were even recruited by the Mexican state to take up arms against Zapata’s revolutionary peasant forces. The peak of the Casa’s economic activity was a successful general strike in Mexico City in May of 1916 followed shortly by a defeated general strike in August of the same year, which led to the government banning the Casa and its disappearance shortly thereafter.

It was only in 1921 that a more stable, ideologically coherent, and larger-scale syndicalist presence was established with the founding of the Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT) with 50 participating unions in 1921. Founded in opposition to but never larger in membership than the AFL-aligned and reformist Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), the CGT waged strikes of textile, oil, rail, and telephone workers and saw its membership reach 60,000 in the mid-1920s. In 1926, the CGT took on an anarcho-syndicalist ethos and explicitly endorsed anarchism.

However, when the CROM fell out of favor with Mexican President Calles in 1928 and CROM’s president was forced to resign, the CROM disintegrated overnight and many of CROM’s non-radical union sections started to join the CGT. This boosted CGT membership to 80,000 in 1929 but started an inexorable slipping of the CGT’s politics away from anarcho-syndicalism, which in combination with the rise of the Mexican Communist Party’s leadership in the labor movement spelled the end of anarchist unionism as a mass-based social movement by the mid-1930s.

Africa and Asia

Moving out of Latin America, syndicalists played a prominent role in the union movement in South Africa from the 1900s through the 1920s. Radical whites were the large majority of the syndicalist movement early in those years as European sailors brought anarchist literature and ideas to the port cities. Syndicalists’ opposition to white supremacy in contrast to the mainstream labor parties and unions eventually fostered a base of interracial organizing and solidarity. 

The syndicalist International Socialist League was founded in 1915, which helped launch the all-black Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) loosely based on the IWW and the primary union among black dock workers in Cape Town. The IWA then merged with a number of minority white and majority black, coloured, and Indian unions to form the Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU) in 1919. In 1921 the ICU passed a resolution to “dissociate itself from any political body whatever, but solely to propagate the industrial economic and social advancement of all the African workers through the industrial action…” While syndicalists were an active part of the ICU, especially early on, as the union grew it came to house an ideological stew that also included Garveyism, Christian unionism, and African nationalism. Reaching a peak membership of 100,000 in the late 1920s, it collapsed by the early 1930s due to state repression, internal splits, and a lack of unifying strategy and vision.

Scholar Arif Dirlik writes that “Anarchism was the dominant ideology during the first phase of socialism in Eastern Asia.” Mostly, however, anarchism in this region and period emerged as an intellectual and/or anti-imperialist movement before being overtaken by Russian and Chinese Communism. Unionism was overall not a major part of early Asian anarchism with a few exceptions. 

Anarchism in the labor movement reached its highest point in the region as the main ideological force in the 1910s and early 1920s in South China. Syndicalism in Japan acquired a presence in the printworkers’ unions, counting 3,800 members in 1924, with an overall membership in the syndicalist federation of the day reaching more than 8,000 members in 1926. The Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina (UOD) was founded in the Philippines in 1901 and counted as many as 150,000 members a few years later and organized large rallies against US imperialism and occasional factory strikes. While the UOD contained some syndicalist currents, such as claiming Errico Malatesta’s ideas as part of the official political foundation of the movement, on the whole its economic program was mostly moderate and reformist.

Spain 1910 – 1939 

We circle back now to Spain, which provided not only the first but also the last and largest wave of anarchist unionism in this period. The Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was founded in 1910 in Barcelona with 26,000 members as an agglomeration of smaller unions to provide a more radical counterweight to the larger reformist socialist Spanish UGT, which became an occasional partner and occasional foe in the following decades. The CNT’s founding and rise took place in the period of the monarchy of the Bourbon Restoration from 1874 – 1931. The mutual hostility between the CNT and the state led to the CNT being declared illegal and driven underground in the years 1911-14 and 1923-1931, 1933-35. The CNT developed a national presence through the 1910s, though it was always strongest and became the dominant labor presence in Catalonia (the province around Barcelona) and Aragon. 

Numerically, the CNT grew to 700,000 by the late 1910s, shrank in membership in the 1920s due to being driven underground by the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, and had wild swings in membership numbers in the tumultuous years from 1930 – 1936. Organizationally, the CNT’s only paid staff were its national secretary and one secretary for each of the regional sections.

The CNT was infamous for its combative relations with employers. CNT unionists led or helped organize a number of major general strikes, including a national one with the UGT in 1917 that largely failed and in which 71 workers were killed and one in Catalonia in 1919 that resulted in decisive victory and the winning of the eight-hour day.

While never formally declaring itself anarchist, anarchism was the dominant ideological pole within the CNT. Still, a diverse set of views were in constant conflict throughout these years. To survey a few of the range of competing ideologies, in 1927 the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) was founded and played a prominent role in CNT affairs as an explicit anarchist cadre organization that injected more consistent and often harder-line anarchist positions into the CNT. In 1931 a moderate wing calling themselves Treintistas called for partial participation in elections and engagement with the state, and when they failed to win over a majority of the union’s leadership most of them left or were expelled before making peace and re-joining the CNT in 1936. 

Three regional insurrectionary general strikes were carried out by more insurrectionary sections of the CNT in January 1932, January 1933, and December 1933, each of which were partially successful in temporarily taking over large sections of the country and establishing worker control. However, each was ultimately destroyed by state violence and devastated the CNT presence in each region where it was carried out. After the failed attempts, insurrectionary methods lost favor and most CNT unions sought to build through continued organizing and actions but without succumbing to short-term armed outbursts that proved incapable of truly challenging the Spanish state as a whole.

Founded in April 1936, Mujeres Libres was an anarchist women’s organization advocating that women’s liberation needed to be fought for alongside social revolution. The organization was founded to fight back against patriarchy within the Spanish anarchist movement, the CNT included, and for women to provide mutual support and organize around their own interests. Mujere Libres reached a peak membership of 30,000 in 1938.

The center-right and right coalition that governed Spain from 1933-35 was defeated in 1935, creating more space for the CNT to organize openly. However, the right’s electoral loss convinced them that they would only regain power through military means. In July, 1936 fascist General Francisco Franco launched a coup from Morocco. On the eve of the coup, the CNT was the largest union federation in Spain with membership estimates ranging from 550,000 to 1,500,000.

The first days of the coup and resulting uprising involved pitched battles for control of Spain, with about half of the country coming under the control of anti-fascist republicans and leftists and the other half under the control of the fascist generals. The prominence of the CNT in Catalonia led to it being the dominant social force in control of both the major urban center of Barcelona as well as the surrounding countryside.

The Spanish Revolution of 1936, as it is called, provided anarchists with the opportunity to test their theories in a large-scale revolutionary situation. The first theory to be tested was whether workers were capable of truly assuming control of the economy in the face of the collapse of the state and the retreat of capital. Given the harsh conditions of a brutal civil war, the anarchists demonstrated spectacular success in the first year of the revolution in re-starting the economy, appropriating much of the country’s industry and agriculture under worker control, and running it according to their principles. 

The majority of Spain’s industrially-organized production was in Catalonia in 1936, which gave the CNT decisive influence over the country’s economy in the revolution’s initial phase. The majority of industry was collectivized in the weeks and months after the coup, with the highest degree of collectivization occurring under the CNT, though the UGT also conducted a high rate of collectivization. The estimated number of Spaniards who participated in the revolution, the majority of which were involved in economic transformation, given by historians using different criteria and data is variously given as low as 1.5 million to as high as 8 million. For those who want to know what anarchist revolution of production looked like in finer detail, there are a number of large-scale overviews and studies.

One might expect the anarchists themselves to gush about their accomplishments here, so I’ll touch on this subject by quoting non-anarchists. The secretary of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, Fenner Brockway, had this to say about the anarchists in Spain after his visit in mid-1937:

“I was impressed by the strength of the CNT. It was unnecessary to tell me that it was the largest and most vital of the working-class organisations in Spain. The large industries were clearly, in the main, in the hands of the CNT–railways, road transport, shipping, engineering, textiles, electricity, building, agriculture… Their achievement of workers’ control in industry is an inspiration. One could take the example of the railways or engineering or textiles… There are still some Britishers and Americans who regard the Anarchists of Spain as impossible, undisciplined, uncontrollable. This is poles away from the truth. The Anarchists of Spain, through the CNT, are doing one of the biggest constructive jobs ever done by the working class. At the front they are fighting Fascism. Behind the front they are actually constructing the new Workers’ Society. They see that the war against Fascism and the carrying through of the Social Revolution are inseparable. Those who have seen and understand what they are doing must honour them and be grateful to them. They are resisting Fascism. They are at the same time creating the New Workers’ Order which is the only alternative to Fascism. That is surely the biggest thing now being done by the workers in any part of the world.”

A professor from the University of Geneva spoke about his visit to revolutionary Spain:

“As a Social Democrat I speak here with inner joy and sincere admiration of my experiences in Catalonia. The anti-capitalist transformation took place here without their having to resort to a dictatorship. The members of the syndicates are their own masters and carry on the production and the distribution of the products of labor under their own management, with the advice of technical experts in whom they have confidence. The enthusiasm of the workers is so great that they scorn any personal advantage and are concerned only for the welfare of all.”

Certainly, the economic revolution was hardly smooth or even close to complete, but as much large-scale and direct worker control was established then as has existed in any worker revolution in history. However, after the first year of the Spanish revolution the social conditions started to shift and anarchists gradually lost influence over economic and other affairs.

The second test of anarchist theory was the ability to govern society as a whole. Of all the tests, this is where the theory came up shortest. Or rather, as I and most anarchist writers today would have it, many of the CNT leaders abandoned their theories of the state at the precise moment when they were most needed.

Upon the split of the country into roughly two halves, the socialists and republicans declared an anti-fascist Popular Front and set up a provisional shared government. The CNT was invited into the Popular Front government but initially refused at the national level before soon reversing course. A Popular Front government was established in Catalonia with the CNT taking the majority of seats. The establishment of these governments saw the seat of decision-making power in the anarchist movement gradually devolve from the unions and worker militias, where democracy was popular and direct, to a newly created class of elite representatives. The justification of anarchists who supported this was that the revolutionary situation demanded Popular Front collaboration of all anti-fascist forces to win the war. Furthermore, anarchist advocates of the Popular Front argued that these provisional governments were not really states in the sense anarchists were typically opposed to.

However, as junior partners in a national government, anarchists were continually outmaneuvered by those more embedded in elite political networks and those with control over critical resources. The downside of all popular fronts for worker-led movements is having to align politically with bourgeois forces that are often class enemies. For example, some newly appropriated, anarchist-controlled enterprises ran out of money as inflation was out of control and the only way to get credit was through Spanish banks that were often controlled by political rivals on the anti-fascist side who vastly restricted credit access to CNT-controlled production. As their influence waned, anarchists were squeezed out of key ministries. The unions and militias at the grassroots level were slowly brought under the top-down control of the national-level Spanish Republican Army and government economic planning. While a vocal and at times large minority of CNT members opposed their movement’s integration into the state, they were not powerful enough to stop it.

One way the dilemma was framed was whether anarchists should be flexible with their anti-state politics for the sake of winning the war or whether they should stick to their principles. Diego Abad de Santillan was a CNT anarchist leader who entered the Catalan government as Minister of the Economy and later wrote:

“We knew that victory in the revolution was not possible without victory in the war and for the war’s sake we sacrificed everything. We sacrificed even the revolution itself, not realising that this sacrifice also implied the sacrifice of our war aims.” (from Pierats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, V1, pg 177)

The third test of anarchist theory was the ability of anarchists to militarily defeat their enemies. Here it was not so much the theory as the material and social conditions that caused the defeat of the anarchists. In the first days of the revolution anarchists successfully defeated the Spanish military in Catalonia with a fraction of the weaponry and by popular will. They quickly created and mobilized anarchist worker militias to the newly established battle fronts.

Before he went on to write his most famous novels, George Orwell went to Spain to fight in the war against Franco and by happenstance ended up joining the militia of the POUM, a left communist group. The POUM militias had a horizontal structure much like the anarchists did, and Orwell described it thus:

“But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front horrified me. How on earth could the war be won by an army of this type?”

“In practice the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear…. In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment.”

“’Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness – on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.”

“… the Anarchist militia, in spite of their [traditional] indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.”

But as the war dragged on and the political situation of the anarchists worsened, so did their military situation. Parallel to CNT co-optation by the state was the resource disparity between the CNT and the rising Communist Party of Spain (PCE). While the PCE was a relatively small organization in early 1936, Stalin calculated that it was in the USSR’s interest to fight a proxy war against Hitler and Mussolini in Spain. Stalin sent guns, food, and supplies that the Popular Front desperately needed as Germany and Italy were arming Franco to the teeth. Stalin and his agents were keen to distribute these resources in such a way to bolster PCE influence and divert them away from the CNT and other rivals. Historians have shown that Stalin never intended to invest enough in Spain to really provide for a victory and rather was aiming to drag the fascists into a drawn-out war that depleted their military capabilities. Exporting not just resources, Stalin’s agents also established a secret police in Catalonia that kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared POUM, union, and anarchist leaders. The liberal governments in Britain, France, and the US declared neutrality in the war, wanting to avoid or at least delay a confrontation with Germany and Italy as long as possible.

The collapse of the revolution and defeat in the war were catastrophic. 100,000 people died in the war itself on the anti-Franco side, and upon achieving victory, Franco conducted a reign of terror to wipe out any vestiges of opposition, with anywhere from 40,000 – 200,000 people killed. More than 500,000 fled abroad.

Was a more successful anarchist revolution possible in Spain? The fortunes of the war at any one moment often depended directly on the degree of financial and military support provided by outside governments to each side. With the motives and degrees of support varying throughout, the tides of war shifted numerous times. For example, Hitler at one point halted aid to Franco and threatened to withdraw further support if he couldn’t be guaranteed trading rights with Spanish mines after the war, but Franco soon granted these rights and retained Nazi support. At one point Britain and France were close to intervening in the war against Franco but backed off in return for Franco promising neutrality in the event of a second World War. If the geopolitics of the wider region had played out slightly differently in any of a dozen ways, the war could have gone the other way.

However, even if the Popular Front did win the war, I think that the powers of liberalism and reaction were too powerful and the larger geopolitical forces would have arrested any anarchist revolutionary moment in those years no matter how closely the anarchists stuck to their ideological guns. If they weren’t defeated by fascists then they would have found themselves cornered by foreign capitalist powers as well as Spanish republicans and Communists. But if the fascists had been defeated at least the movement might have lived on, just as it did before the war. Perhaps the worst of what happened could have been avoided with a more focused and principled anarchist approach, but the best outcome of a regional or worldwide abolition of capitalism and the state was never on the table in 1936.

What if historical events had played out in slightly different order, with the Spanish Revolution happening not after the cratering of the anarchist union movement in the rest of the world by the mid-1930s but at its height in the early 1920s? What would it have looked like if a revolution sparked in one country had mass-based social movements the world over to support it and escalate in their own countries? Such speculation is not worth dwelling on too much. Though if we are pondering the potential of anarchist unionism as a revolutionary force, this gives us something to chew on.

What did these movements amount to?

The fifteen major union movements outlined above all qualify as mass-based social movements and were either anarchist or had anarchism as a primary influence. Further countries could be added to the accounts above but were not included due to reasons of wanting to keep this post a semi-reasonable length, some of them appearing to be smaller in size and thus on the borderline of a mass movement, and/or not having found much information about them. These further countries include Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, and Australia.

To understand the full historical weight and meaning of these union movements, we can ask even larger questions. I should say I’m making many of the claims below without detailed scholarly evidence and academic argument to back them up, and so these should be taken more as hypotheses.

In which countries did anarchist unionist movements go beyond mass-movement status and achieve a degree of hegemony as the primary ideological and organizational force in the labor movement? Excluding those cases where available information is more limited and those earliest labor movements that were still very small, I think we can say Spain, Portugal, France, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico. On a sub-national scale, South China and Chicago also accomplished this. Britain is a borderline case, as syndicalists were themselves small in number and without a mass-based organization of their own but nonetheless played the principal ideological part in the labor revolt from 1910-14.

In which countries did anarchist unionism push the labor movement to a “revolutionary moment” where the overthrow of capitalism and the state was at least temporarily achieved and had the potential to go even further? Italy in 1920 and Spain in 1936 went the furthest. Other countries that saw major general strikes in their largest cities and the momentary loss of state control of much of their populations include Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico. To a lesser degree this also occurred in France, Peru, and Chile.

The famous Communist Party historian Eric Hobsbawm made the following claim: 

“… in 1905-1914, the marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism.”

I think Hobsbawm understates the case, perhaps because a fuller picture of international anarchist unionism has emerged since he wrote those words in 1994. In fact, the height of anarchist unionism on the world stage was probably in the early 1920s. We can now with more confidence claim that anarchist unionism was the dominant ideological pole and largest social force of the global revolutionary left AND the global labor left from roughly 1905 – 1925. 

When we pay homage to our forebears I think there’s some justice in giving them their full due. And when others doubt anarchism’s potential in the labor movement, we’ll do well to remember the scale of what our predecessors accomplished.

What were the reasons for the decline of anarchist unionism?

Anarchist unionism certainly continued after 1939, but the number of, size of, longevity of, and ideological adherence to anarchist principles of these movements was far less significant than those before 1939. Mass movement anarchist unionism became mostly a thing of the past.

I included above brief explanations for the fall of anarchist unionism in the 1920s and 30s in many countries. Altogether, I think the main causes in order of importance were violent repression, the rise of a rival Communist movement, and the capacity of the state to respond to pressure from the working class via reforms and ultimately the erection of the welfare state. 

The grisly details of state violence are tough to read, but I think the scale of violence that the states of the world had to resort to to stomp out their anarchist union movements highlights the anarchists’ effective organizing and popular appeal. States tried desperately to defeat these movements through other means, but in the end it was mass imprisonment, deportation, and murder that they had to resort to again and again in order to put them down.

But neither was state violence alone capable of destroying these movements, as in many cases, such as the IWW in the US and the FORA-V and FORA-IX in Argentina, these movements grew in the immediate aftermath of the most violent waves of state repression. A combination of other forces was also necessary to close the deal.

The rise in the prestige and power of the international Communist Movement in the 1920s and 1930s was a significant cause. With radical unionists enduring so much violence it was hard to keep going, but the example of a supposedly successful revolution in Russia provided the hope that many in the radical movement were desperately seeking (though report backs from anarchists visiting and living in Russia painted a less rosy picture). By the late 1920s and especially by the end of the 1930s, it was hard for anarchists to point to concrete examples of where they had succeeded in the big picture. The more hope Russia provided, the more people joined the Communist movement, which provided more hope, and more joiners. There is a certain polarization effect of ideology within social movements that anarchist unionism certainly benefited from when it was the big show in town, but as Communism rose, so did anarchist unionism suffer from that same effect.

While anarchists have many reasons to be critical of the Communists who came after, I think anarchists can also be proud of what they accomplished. While the abolition of the state and capitalism didn’t come to pass, many of the reforms won by anarchist unionists at their peak, such as the eight-hour day, remained in place for decades and some even to this day. Anarchists can be equally proud that what the Communist labor movements won in the 1930s and 1940s was in a real sense constructed upon the anti-capitalist organizational and ideological foundation of the global working classes that the anarchists had contributed to before them.

Wins around hours and pay as well as reforms to labor law were victories for these movements but also created new challenges. Risking getting fired or shot while on strike is less appealing if you can afford to eat and get a little time to yourself after work. With the coming of the Great Depression in particular, the rise of the welfare state across much of Europe and Latin America created a dependence on the state that didn’t exist before. Labor laws that were salutary in some ways, which made it hard for unions to refuse their benefits, were paired with restrictions on militancy. In its own self-interest, the state created social programs that both more efficiently reproduced the workforce but also created a degree of support for poor and working class people that was new. Social programs and labor law together softened opposition to the state as such and enticed many radicals into electoralism and lobbying as means of advancing their interests. 

It’s not entirely a coincidence that the rise of the welfare state in the 1930s coincided roughly with the final decline of mass anarchist unionism in the 1930s. Also not coincidentally, the attack on social programs with increasing intensity with the advance of neoliberalism since the 1980s in the US has also broadly overlapped with the re-emergence of anarchist ideas since the 1990s. Protective labor laws and government labor boards in the US are also weaker now than they’ve been in 90 years.

With the lack of a strong rival Communist movement and with the broad decline of the welfare state and favorable labor laws today, historical conditions for the reunion of the already growing union and anarchist movements in the US present us with an opportunity. With this newly unearthed history we also have the benefit of being able to learn from the mistakes and successes of earlier anarchist unionists. Not in almost 100 years have the prospects for anarchist unionism been this ripe.

Uruguay 1967 – 1973

Troy Andreas Araiza Kokinis’s remarkable 2023 book, Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay, 1956-76, illuminated in depth for the first time for English-speaking readers the full scope of the Uruguayan anarchist movement in the 1960s and 70s. This is significant because it truly elevates that movement to the claim of being the last truly anarchist union movement of its scope and intensity in world history and the only one since the 1930s.

Beginning in 1956, activists in the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) sought to build a radical, direct action-oriented labor movement by entering the mainstream unions and fighting to make them more militant. First establishing a presence among and leading strikes among rubber workers in the 1950s, FAU organizers gradually built up their forces in unions of bakers, bank workers, public sector workers, and graphic arts workers. In 1964, the FAU was instrumental as a minority influence in founding the National Workers Convention (CNT), which was then the main labor federation in Uruguay and included reformist and radical unions. Within the CNT, the FAU spearheaded the creation of a syndicalist-like coalition called the Tendencia that grew to consist of 71 unions that eschewed electoral politics and practiced direct action. 

While the Tendencia unions were never a majority, about a third overall, within the CNT behind the unions under the leadership of the reformist Uruguayan Communist Party (PCU) and its partners, Araiza Kokinis’s research shows how the Tendencia unions were responsible for more than 70% of the CNT’s major strikes and 67% of the CNT’s workplace occupations in its peak years of struggle. In addition to the unions FAU predominated in, Tendencia-led and -influenced unions included those of textile workers, teachers, gas and electrical workers, beverage workers, sanitation workers, healthcare workers, railway workers, and sugarcane workers. At peak moments of social unrest, many PCU-aligned unions temporarily bucked the more cautious approach of their formal leaders to participate in wildcat strikes and other unauthorized actions led by the Tendencia.

The highest degree of class conflict in this period was 1967 – 1973. To take a look at just one of those years, in June of 1969, the FAU-led bank worker union conducted a campaign of rolling strikes in protest of IMF pressure on the government and in solidarity with a large-scale strike of meat processing workers which also saw the rail workers unions refuse to service the meat processing plants. Araiza Kokinis writes how these conflicts spiraled out into more industries, with “The wave of illegal work actions extended nationwide, including wildcat strikes, sabotage campaigns, vandalism, and censorship defiance.” 500 workers were arrested. 

Later that month 8,500 bank workers initiated their own nation-wide strike at 105 bank locations demanding the nationalization of Uruguay’s financial sector, the right to strike, wage increases amid skyrocketing inflation, and the rehiring of fired union activists. On July 2, the CNT conducted a 36-hour general strike in protest of the violent repression of the striking unions. Two weeks later the Uruguayan Armed Forces occupied all state-owned financial institutions to forcibly open them and conscript the striking bank workers as a way to coerce them either back to work or to prison.

But the bank workers’ strike was unbroken. Both the FAU and other Uruguayan revolutionary organizations had formed armed wings in these years, and in this strike tactics used by workers and their supporters included setting up barricades to stop the flow of people in and out of Montevideo’s main financial district, the firebombing of banks, ransacking of administrative offices, and setting fire to the homes of bank executives. The FAU’s armed wing disavowed assassinations but felt that armed resistance was necessary to give popular movements a boost and to respond to and push back against the state’s brutal repression of worker and popular struggles. 

In August, hospital and textile workers held strikes in solidarity with the bank workers. In September, the Armed Forces were ordered to occupy all private-sector banks as well. A number of the largest meat-packing plants were closed down and operations moved to the country’s interior where the union movement was much weaker. At this point 800 labor activists and 5,600 workers from various striking industries had been arrested. Anarchist leaders of the bank workers union were tortured while in detention. The strike wave was finally defeated and although some concessions had been won, most demands were unmet.

While such a flash of labor militancy and harsh repression in 1969 alone is more than most countries see in a decade, a high degree of militancy was maintained and the movement as a whole showed little sign of slowing down up to 1973. In that year, a military coup with support from the CIA led to the establishment of a right-wing dictatorship under Juan Bordaberry, similar to and followed a few years later by the dictatorship established by Augusto Pinochet in Chile. According to Araiza Kokinis, labor strife was the main reason that Uruguayan elites threw their support behind the coup.

In the aftermath of the coup the level of repression became totally overpowering. The left labor movement was crushed and dozens of members of the FAU, the first of the leftist organizations to be specifically targeted, were disappeared, tortured, and executed. Soon not a single member of the FAU was living freely in Uruguay as they had all been forced into exile, killed, or imprisoned. The AFL-CIO provided 100s of 1000s of dollars of seed money to help establish a new and more moderate Uruguayan labor federation to rival the now-hobbled CNT. The first five years of the dictatorship saw real salaries drop by 50% across the country.

Was it all for nought? If past revolutionaries have taught us anything it’s that, even when the final goal is not reached, popular struggle for both basic dignity and radical change is always invaluable. Without these efforts capitalism would have no resistance and would be immeasurably worse. It’s only through movements like these that the human impulse for freedom blooms and some space for human development and happiness by the majority of people is created beyond the otherwise all-encompassing machinations of capitalism and the state.

The FAU had built a flourishing mass anarchist unionism that played a leading role in the country’s labor movement, something anarchists the world over had not been able to do for decades and have not been able to since. There are different ways we can interpret the FAU’s exceptionalism. Is the FAU a mere aftershock from the massive earthquakes of early 20th century anarchist unionism? Or is it a bridge to the future?

Conclusion

The legacy left to us by our predecessors is a glorious one. At their peaks they had *almost* everything and, by comparison, we begin now with *almost* nothing. But the recent rise of the anarchist and labor movements portends the conditions for an anarchist labor movement to be reborn. No doubt our movement is just an embryo right now, as it was in 1869. 

Contrary to left mythology, history doesn’t pick sides, doesn’t put its finger on the scales, doesn’t select a chosen few. No one’s coming to make this movement for us. It’s up to us, as it was up to the First Internationalists, the Cuban tobacco pickers, the Italian auto workers, the Chilean miners, the Peruvian textile workers, the Spanish telephone workers, and the Uruguayan bank workers. Though our numbers are currently few, in surveying the landscape of labor and anarchism today I see no signs that point to a dearth of passion or brilliance that would obstruct us from achieving our loftiest ambitions.

All revolutionary movements start somewhere, and there’s nowhere in history I’d rather choose to start than where we are right now. Favorable conditions are the fuel, our traditions and ideals are the matches, and all we need to do to ignite a movement is create a spark. What we have now that anarchist unionists past never will again is blood in our veins, fire in our hearts, and an opportunity to burn brighter than ever before.