Anarcho-syndicalism is the current within anarchism that organizes through labor unions (syndicats in French) run directly by the workers themselves — without paid officials, professional negotiators, party leadership, or state mediation. The union is both the instrument of struggle under capitalism and the embryo of the future society: the same organization that fights the boss today will run the workplace tomorrow.
The central concept is the general strike: the simultaneous withdrawal of labor across an entire economy. Anarcho-syndicalism holds that workers do not need to seize the state or win elections. They need to organize at the point of production — in the workplace itself — and build the capacity to shut the economy down. When workers stop working, capitalism stops functioning, because capital without labor is inert. The general strike makes this dependency visible.
The tradition’s major organizations include the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) in Spain, the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) in France, and the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in North America. The CNT played a central role in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1939, organizing factories and services on anarchist principles — worker assemblies made decisions, production continued without managers, and distribution was organized through federation rather than through markets or state planning.
Anarcho-syndicalism differs from conventional trade unionism in several ways. Conventional unions accept the framework of capitalism: they negotiate for better wages and conditions within the employer-employee relationship but do not challenge the relationship itself. They often develop professional bureaucracies — paid officials, legal departments, strike funds managed by administrators — that accumulate their own interests and become conservative. Anarcho-syndicalist unions refuse this: officials rotate, mandates are revocable, decisions are made in general assemblies, and the goal is not a better deal within capitalism but the abolition of the wage system altogether.
The IWW’s preamble states the position directly: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” This is not a complaint about unfair treatment but a structural analysis: the interests of those who own and those who work are fundamentally opposed, and no negotiation within the system can resolve this opposition. The only resolution is the end of the class division itself — which requires direct action at the point of production, not political parties, not legislative reform, not appeals to the authority of the state.
Related terms
- The general strike — syndicalism’s revolutionary method
- Class — the division syndicalism organizes against
- Exploitation — the extraction syndicalism resists
- Direct action — the mode of action syndicalism practices
- Self-organization — workers managing their own struggle
- Federation — how syndicalist unions coordinate
- Capitalism — the system syndicalism opposes
- Anarcho-communism — the related current focused on collective ownership