Syndicalists wanted trade unions, not governments, to run the whole economy
Most unions bargain for better pay. Syndicalists aimed far higher: organise workers industry by industry, win fights through strikes and direct action, and eventually let those same unions take over production and replace the state. Between the world wars it was a major force in the socialist movement.
The name comes from French, where a syndicat is a trade union, usually a local one, and syndicalisme simply means unionism; Spanish sindicato and Italian sindacato are close cousins. The phrase revolutionary syndicalism appeared in French socialist journals in 1903 and was taken up by the General Confederation of Labour, the CGT, to describe its approach. Unionists abroad who copied the French model carried the word into other languages.
The earliest such unions took shape during the 1870s, in Spain and across North America, before rising to prominence in France. Leading organisations included Spain's CNT, the Italian Syndicalist Union, Germany's FAUD and Argentina's FORA. The International Workers' Association, founded in 1922, linked them across borders and at its height spoke for millions of workers; some members broke away in 2018 to form the International Confederation of Labour.
Where to draw the boundary is disputed. Historians such as Ralph Darlington, Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe use the label broadly for any revolutionary, direct-action union, including America's Industrial Workers of the World, Ireland's followers of James Larkin and Canada's One Big Union, arguing that shared methods matter more than doctrine; the IWW itself claimed to be something superior to syndicalism. Larry Peterson and Erik Olssen object that this blurs real distinctions. Peterson's narrower test stresses federalism over central control, the general strike as the ultimate weapon, a federated economic order replacing the state, and unions as the building blocks of post-capitalist society.
The roots run deeper than the name. E. P. Thompson and Rudolf Rocker saw syndicalist tendencies in British labour as early as the 1830s, and the movement drew directly on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism, popular in the anti-authoritarian wing of the First International founded in 1864. In 1880s Chicago, anarchist-led groups campaigning for an eight-hour day showed what Kenyon Zimmer calls proto-syndicalism, and the deadly Haymarket Affair of May 1886 led radicals on both sides of the Atlantic to rethink the general strike.
Source: Syndicalism
