Activists sentenced to prison in Spain for campaign against workplace, equating public economic pressure with criminal coercion ~ Cristina Sykes ~ Workers’ groups yesterday (28 Sep) showed their solidarity with the six union activists from Gijon, Spain, who face prison for their campaign against La Suiza pastry shop. Unions warn of a massive blow to
Tag: Syndicalism
Radical Reprint: Image of an alternate past
A speculative work by two prominent French anarcho-syndicalists, Emile Pouget and Emile Pataud, Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth (How We Shall Bring about the Revolution)
Syndicalism – a working-class conception of socialism
Taking a look into the archives of Freedom in November 1912 as a wave of militant, non-hierarchical trade unionism reached its high water mark.
Tom Mann and the industrial union movement
A legendary trade unionist and communist of his era, Mann (1856-1941) was by turns an inspirational and frustrating figure for the syndicalist and anarchist movements in Britain. This is the first of an upcoming monthly series looking back on working class struggle in the early 1910s in the run-up to World War One, through articles
Kropotkin: Syndicalism and Anarchism
The following long read first appeared in Freedom’s July and August issues in 1912, as the Great Unrest was in full swing. He discusses the differences between northern and southern European attitudes, and the problems caused by a failure to push into revolutionary territory. I We are asked on many sides: “What is Syndicalism? What
Germany: Seasonal workers force farm bosses to pay up
Creditors who had taken over the Spargel Ritter asparagus farm in Bornheim, Bonn, thought they could get away without paying what they owed to low-waged workers, but a solid campaign organised with the FAU syndicalist union soon disabused them of that notion. The trouble with Spargel Ritter started two months before picking season was due
Language teachers win redundancy fight after two-month campaign
After the Delfin English School in London sacked all of its staff just before Christmas, subsequently declaring itself bankrupt, Tefl teachers with the syndicalist IWW union organised a picketing and social media campaign which has now won its fight for proper redundancy terms. The TEFL Workers’ Union, which represents staff at the school, said the
Diving into our early syndicalist histories
It is a standard cliché of Marxist attacks on anarchism to contrast “individualistic” anarchism with “collectivist” syndicalism. “Individualists” are backward looking, reactionary and beyond the pale while “syndicalists” are almost Marxist, and so worthy of faint praise. Another, also wrong, cliché with wider acceptance is that syndicalism arose in France during the 1890s in response
Review: Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW
This book deals with the international scope of the IWW, how it spread to other countries, often through the idea of the One Big Union being carried overseas by seafarers. Edited by Cole, P. Struthers D., Zimmer, K ISBN: 978-0-745399-59-1 PP: 320 Pluto Press 2018 Review by Anarchist Communist Group The Industrial Workers of the World was
Aspects of syndicalism in Spain, Sweden and USA
Considering the relative weakness of anarcho-syndicalism in Britain historially, Philip Holgate compares three countries where the revolutionary union idea took off and made a major social impact in Spain, Sweden and the US. Holgate, born at Chesterfield, 1934, studied mathematics at Exeter and spent five years teaching in a progressive school. He was a member of