A-Infos (en) UK, ACG, Stormy-Petrel #7 - Unions or Councils? --- Council Communism, Syndicalism, and Anarchist Communist Workplace Strategy (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Why have council communist and similar ideas been historically popular 
and influential amongst class struggle anarchists in the UK? And why has 
the orientation of UK based anarchist communists not been generally 
towards revolutionary syndicalism? --- First of all, the influence 
should not be over-exaggerated. Whilst council communist ideas have 
perhaps been considerably more common amongst class struggle anarchists 
in the UK than in, for example, Spain, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, 
they cannot be said to have 'dominated' the movement since their 
emergence in the early 1920s. --- Also, in the period between then and 
the early 1940s, their influence was predominantly, though not 
exclusively, in Scotland. However, in the period from the 1980s onwards, 
council communist ideas were certainly influential upon the Anarchist 
Communist Federation/Anarchist Federation and subsequently the Anarchist 
Communist Group.

Pre-WW1

Two organisations in the earlier period were notable for their adoption 
of a broadly council based conception of revolutionary workers 
organisation. They are the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation 
(APCF) and the United Socialist Movement (USM). The origins of both are 
in the earlier unification of the Glasgow Anarchist Group, which had 
emerged from the Socialist League in the mid-eighteen nineties, and the 
Glasgow Communist Group, which had been formed at the beginning of 1913. 
During 1916 they came together as the Glasgow Anarchist Group. In 1920, 
under the influence of the Russian Revolution they reverted to the 
Glasgow Communist Group and in 1921 this became the Central (or Glasgow) 
group of the newly founded Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation.

None of these name changes reflected any major shift in the core 
anti-statist, libertarian politics shared by these groups.

Glasgow and industrial Scotland generally had been involved in what has 
become known as the 'Syndicalist Revolt', a period which preceded the 
First World War in which worker militancy was high and what in the UK is 
known as Syndicalism (revolutionary syndicalism in the Latin countries), 
though a relatively small current, was at its high point. Syndicalist 
influence in General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) affiliated trade 
unions was growing and syndicalist groups such as the Industrial 
Syndicalist Education League and Industrial Democracy League (the latter 
arguably the dominant organisation arguing for syndicalism after 1913), 
the Industrialist League, the Revolutionary Industrialists and 
Industrial Workers of the World. Most syndicalists in the UK oriented 
towards transforming the existing trade unions into industrial unions, 
with many of these wanting to use amalgamation (unification) of the 
existing craft and trade unions to this end. A small minority looked to 
creating alternative, revolutionary unions but other than the 
short-lived Building Workers Industrial Union, formed shortly before the 
outbreak of World War One in 1914, this did not happen on a significant 
scale.

Except in Glasgow. There, the DeLeonist Socialist Labour Party 
established the Industrial Workers of Great Britain, which was an 
expression of Socialist Industrial Unionism. This small union was 
involved in a famous strike at the Singer factory in Glasgow in 1912 
which ended up in a crushing defeat. Socialist Industrial Unionist 
ideas, which saw a role for militant unionism allied to a socialist 
party, were strongest in Scotland in the first 30 years of the Twentieth 
Century.

In this period there also existed a smaller, explicitly anarchist, group 
the Industrial Union of Direct Actionists (IUDA), formed in 1907, whose 
General Secretary was Guy Aldred. Aldred was to become very important, 
if controversial, in the class struggle anarchist movement in the 
1910s-1930s. Arguably, the IUDA was the UK's first anarcho-syndicalist 
group and had emerged from the Voice of Labour newspaper, an anarchist 
journal oriented towards union organising. The IUDA's leading lights 
included John Turner, who would subsequently become a trade union 
official, and the Spanish exile Lorenzo Portet and they had a presence 
in East London, Liverpool and Leeds. The group remained small and 
relatively marginal during the rise of Syndicalism in the UK.

The collapse of the trade unions and much of the major syndicalist 
unions in Europe such as the CGT in France upon commencement of war in 
1914 severely impacted the British syndicalist movement, effectively 
derailing and causing it to lose its previous momentum. The Russian 
Revolution of 1917 also impacted Syndicalist organising as a new model 
for workers' emancipation emerged - the Communist Party. Thousands of 
militant workers were drawn towards Bolshevism and almost overnight 
revolutionary syndicalism, as well as Socialist Industrial Unionism 
became seen as an anachronism. Certainly, some partisans of the latter 
continued, notably John McLean in Scotland and the Socialist Labour 
Party and its schisms in the wider UK, but Syndicalism as a significant 
independent force within the labour movement was gone. In the later 20s, 
former Communist Party industrial organiser, Tom Brown, became a 
torch-bearer for anarcho-syndicalism and there existed small clusters of 
anarcho-syndicalists in the South Wales coalfields but they were very 
much exceptions.

The experience of the Soviets (Councils) and Factory Committees in the 
Russian Revolution and the Workers and Soldiers Councils in the German 
Revolution (1918-1923) attracted many of the former syndicalists and 
industrial unionists who saw in the experience of the Councils and 
Committees an expression of workers' organisation and power that 
paralleled revolutionary syndicalism but was apparently more effective. 
But what was perhaps more attractive to many was the idea of a 
disciplined, centralised party committed to seizing power.

Anarchists in the UK welcomed the Russian Revolution primarily because 
of the Soviet experience - it appeared to centre working class autonomy, 
decentralisation and possibly federalism. News of the Bolsheviks' 
persecution of left opponents filtered through very slowly.

And significant parts of the emergent movement for a Communist Party in 
the UK were anti-parliamentarian, not necessarily because of the 
influence of anarchism but because they saw the futility of electoral 
politics and the negative experience of Labour representation. The South 
Wales Socialist Society and the Workers Socialist Federation, both whom 
were to contribute to the establishment of the Communist Party (of Great 
Britain), were anti-electoralist, the latter being likely influenced by 
the Syndicalist movement in South Wales and even to some extent 
anarcho-syndicalism.

Guy Aldred, previously of the IUDA and explicitly an anarchist became a 
founder member of the self-labelled "Anarcho-Marxian" Anti-Parliamentary 
Communist Federation and in the early days of this organisation Aldred 
claimed that to be a coherent anarchist meant being a coherent Marxist 
and in this, he broke with Kropotkinist 'orthodoxy' which was very 
anti-Marxist. And the APCF rapidly came to identify with what was to 
become the anti-electoralist communism of the German and Dutch communist 
left - what would become in the later 1920s, Council Communism.

News spread from Germany concerning the revolution there. Workers 
Councils were established and mass worker organisations emerged in the 
period 1919-1923 which were defended a 'council' based communism as 
opposed to a 'party' communism. These ideas became increasingly popular 
on the left wing of international communism including in the UK. They 
were attacked by Lenin in his polemic 'Left-wing Communism: An Infantile 
Disorder' and the Leninist majorities in the Communist movement globally 
worked hard to marginalise those ideas - often dismissing them as anarchist.

If the 'party' communists saw their vanguard party approach as 
transcending 'apolitical' syndicalism, then for the 'council' 
communists, the workers' councils transcended syndicalist forms also. 
They considered the Trade Unions to have been integrated into the 
mechanism of capitalist exploitation and disagreed with revolutionary 
and anarcho-syndicalists who believed the union form could be 
revolutionary and genuinely represent the interests of the working class.

In countries that had large, functioning, anarcho-syndicalist unions 
notably Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Germany, the post-1917 wave 
of struggle and of Bolshevism, impacted them with many being swept into 
the nascent Communist Parties. But anarchists in these nations tended to 
remain oriented towards syndicalism and the existing syndicalist 
movement rather than towards 'councilism'. Certainly, there was some 
crossover - notably in Italy and Germany - but syndicalism remained the 
workplace strategy for the majority of anarchists.

In the UK, the relatively small syndicalist movement and the much tinier 
anarcho-syndicalist groupings were eclipsed in this wave. The anarchist 
movement, particularly where it had a working class base from before the 
War, did not have a syndicalist union to orientate towards. Most 
anarchist workers were in traditional Labour Party affiliated trade 
unions, if at all.

This led to the anarchists of the APCF orienting towards what would 
become Council Communism and rejecting working within the trade union 
movement or taking up an orientation towards what remained of the 
Socialist Industrial Unionist groups. In taking this direction they were 
influenced most directly by the Workers Socialist Federation (WSF) of 
Sylvia Pankhurst. The WSF, which came out of the Women's Suffrage 
movement, took 'left' positions after 1921 and eventually became the 
Communist Workers Party after its expulsion from the Communist Party of 
Great Britain. Its paper, the Workers Dreadnought, was an independent 
and critical voice with a wide circulation amongst anarchist and 
syndicalist readers. During the 1920s the APCF maintained this line 
whilst constituting the most organised anarchist or anarchist communist 
group nationally, even though it was mainly based in central Scotland, 
with supporters in London and elsewhere.

The APCF was essentially a propaganda group, with consistent outreach to 
working class communities, particularly in the Lanarkshire Coalfields. 
From 1923 to 1929 the APCF published the monthly journal, Commune, and 
an occasional bulletin, the Special Anti-Parliamentary Communist 
Gazette. The organisation seems to have been in touch with the Dutch 
council communists, particularly after 1927. In 1931 Guy Aldred, who had 
been a leading light for a decade, left and brought some members with 
him. Eventually, he would form the United Socialist Movement (USM), with 
groups in Greater Glasgow, Leeds and London, three of the main centres 
of anarchism in the UK. The USM did not hold significantly different 
positions to the APCF but came to be dominated by the personality of Aldred.

In 1939, the APCF made its clearest expression of its position on 
workplace organisation. Called Principles and Tactics, the statement stated:

"The Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation is an Anarcho-Marxian 
organisation holding none of the prejudices which orthodox 'Anarchists' 
and 'Marxists' harbour towards each other. In its mission -- to aid the 
workers to overthrow Capitalism and its watchdog the State -- it draws 
its inspiration from Anarchists and Marxists alike. It admires and would 
emulate the ardour, courage and initiative suggested by names like 
Bakunin, Malatesta, Durruti -- the brilliance and perseverance 
associated with Marx".

They go on to point out the limitations of Industrial Unionism, notably 
its potential for "reformism". Socialist Industrial Unionism as a 
"laudable" aim but unlikely to be realised before the very eve of the 
revolution and they state that they "have also much in common with our 
comrades of the Industrial Workers of the World", but that ultimately 
"Workers' all-in Soviets or Councils of Action are the only democratic 
organs capable of facing up to the problems ahead. There the right of 
recall can operate and will prepare the way for the workers themselves 
to bring about their emancipation. Once Capitalism is overthrown, these 
soviets, Councils, Syndicates, or Industrial Unions -- the label does 
not matter much -- allow the workers to control production on the job -- 
the only real democracy".

So, the APCF did not see permanent economic organisations of the working 
class as necessary precursors of the new society and this led them to 
not promote 'alternative' unions but rather the idea of spontaneous 
workers councils as the means and the end of the struggle. 
Simultaneously, they didn't entirely rule out syndicates or industrial 
unions developing but did not actively seek to establish them.

Between them, the membership of APCF and USM likely never amounted to 
more than a couple of hundred but their activity was boosted 
significantly with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and Revolution 
in 1936. The UK anarchist movement was revived by the events of 
1936-1939 and both the APCF and the USM threw themselves into solidarity 
work for the Spanish CNT-FAI.

The USM published Regeneracion and the APCF joined forces with the 
Freedom Group in London in 1936 to produce The Fighting Call. The USM 
and APCF co-operated, producing the Barcelona Bulletin in 1937. The 
APCF's Jenny Patrick and the USM's Ethel MacDonald went to Barcelona and 
the latter stayed until after the last gasp of revolutionary Spain, the 
Barcelona May Days of 1937. She was the voice of the CNT's International 
English language radio service. Both the APCF and USM were highly 
supportive of the libertarian movement in Spain and did not engage in 
criticism of anarcho-syndicalism as a tactic but both became critical of 
the behaviour of the anarchist leadership, particularly those who joined 
the Republican government. In 1938 the APCF published 'The Friends of 
Durruti Accuse' by the Spanish anarchist group The Friends of Durruti, 
an article highly critical of the CNT-FAI leadership.

The APCF suffered a split in 1937 which created the Glasgow Anarchist 
Communist Federation (GACF), which eventually became part of the 
Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB). The Glasgow ACF defended much the 
same positions as the APCF in relation to workplace struggle, but the 
AFB overall was influenced by anarcho-syndicalism. All three groups, the 
APCF, USM and GACF supported strikes during World War Two, when the 
Labour and Communist Parties were set against them. All three 
recommended workers action independent of the trade unions although the 
ACF referred to this as 'syndicalism'; a form of spontaneous syndicalism.

In 1937 the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union (ASU) was established in London, 
which sought to establish a specifically anarcho-syndicalist workers' 
union and which applied to join the International Working Men's 
Association (IWMA), but was rejected. It grew rapidly, but also declined 
rapidly and was no longer active by the start of the Second World War. 
This was the first specifically anarcho-syndicalist organisation in the 
UK since before World War One.

The APCF changed its name to the Workers Revolutionary League (WRL) 
during the Second World War and then dissolved into a looser local 
network called the Workers Open Forum. The USM, reduced to a handful of 
die-hards, carried on until 1965 by which time it had moved towards 
pacifism and effectively away from active engagement with the workers 
movement.

After the end of the APCF/WRL, no libertarian communist organisation 
emerged until the end of the 1960s. The Anarchist Federation of Britain, 
which was associated with Freedom Press, was a patchwork of 
anarcho-syndicalists, pacifists, co-operativists and therefore a classic 
synthesist organisation.

A second Anarchist Federation of Britain would emerge after the Second 
World War with a more revolutionary and syndicalist orientation.

Anarchist Communists, syndicalism and councilism after World War 2

The IWA accepted the membership of the anarcho-syndicalist Syndicalist 
Workers Federation (SWF) which was established in 1950, formerly being 
the second Anarchist Federation of Britain. Although small, the SWF had 
a dynamic presence on the libertarian left and amongst a layer of rebel 
workers in the 1950s and 1960s, publishing Direct Action newspaper. 
However, by the mid-1970s the SWF had declined and consisted of one 
group in Manchester.

In 1971, as an alternative to the moribund SWF the short-lived Anarchist 
Syndicalist Alliance (ASA) emerged. The ASA was a small organisation 
that bridged anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, producing the newspaper 
Black and Red Outlook. It contained many of the militants who 
subsequently play a role in industrial unionism, anarcho-syndicalism and 
Platformism in the later 70s, 80s and beyond. The ASA argued that it 
would be "futile, even dangerous" to establish "alternative trade 
unionism" (report of their third Conference, 1971) and focused on 
building Industrial Networks and working within the existing Labour 
Party affiliated trade unions.

The first post-war anarchist communist tendency, the Organisation of 
Revolutionary Anarchists (ORA) came out of the Anarchist Federation of 
Britain around the same time as the ASA, publishing the newspaper 
Libertarian Struggle. The ORA called to democratise the unions and to 
democratise the various Trotskyist Rank and File groups. If the former 
was difficult, with a high level of class struggle in the UK, it may 
have seemed realistic. The latter was no less optimistic as the 
Trotskyists kept a strong grip on their rank and file groups.

Libertarian Struggle in 1973 talked about "The failure of the 
anarcho-syndicalists who make a far too ready identification of their 
union with the working class as a whole. The way forward in a 
revolutionary situation is the rapid building of workers 
councils...union committees are no substitute for direct workers power". 
This does sound like the influence of council communism, although the 
ORA did not specifically talk about that influence. Rather, parts of the 
ORA eventually gravitated towards Leninism.

In 1975 the Anarchist Workers Association (AWA), the UK's first 
consistent Platformist organisation was established, publishing the 
newspaper Anarchist Worker. Following two very active years, this split 
in 1977 and two groups emerged from that collapse - the Libertarian 
Communist Group (LCG) which moved closer to Leninism and the Anarchist 
Communist Association (ACA). The former dropped anarchism for 
'libertarian Marxism' and joined the Marxist group Big Flame in 1980 in 
whilst the ACA collapsed in the same year. None of these organisations 
oriented towards anarcho-syndicalism either in the sense of defending 
anarcho-syndicalism as a strategy or in the sense of working with 
anarcho-syndicalist groups, all of which were not significantly larger 
than themselves. In terms of their industrial strategy, they advocated 
rank and file organisation at the base of the mainstream trade unions.

In 1979 the Direct Action Movement (DAM) was established and replaced 
the Syndicalist Workers Federation as the UK IWA section in 1979. For a 
short period the DAM was the only organised expression of anarchism in 
the UK and had the perspective of building an anarcho-syndicalist union, 
which it expressed in a very dogmatic way - the DAM was the basis of a 
new labour movement and there was no need for an anarchist organisation. 
In reality, the DAM acted mostly as an anarcho-syndicalist propaganda 
group, publishing a newspaper, Direct Action.

An organised Platformist anarchism tendency in the UK did not re-emerge 
until 1985 and the founding of the Anarchist Communist Federation (ACF). 
One of the groups that joined the ACF in its early days were the 
Syndicalist Fight group, a split from the DAM-IWA that wanted to work 
within the existing trade unions to reform them, rather than build an 
anarcho-syndicalist union from scratch; the tactic of the DAM-IWA.

In the five years between the collapse of the LCG and ACA and the 
foundation of the ACF, groups such as Counter-Information and Wildcat 
had developed, who were influenced by council communism. These, and 
other groups such as Careless Talk, the London Workers Group and Black 
Star also looked to a workers council model of workplace organisation 
rather than syndicalism. The ACF was, in part, influenced by this milieu 
but also by the politics of Solidarity for Self Management, the 
libertarian socialist group that existed from the early 1960s until the 
early 1990s. Solidarity, which had come out of Trotskyism, but was 
strongly anti-Leninist, advocated for worker self-organisation and 
workers councils and had a network of industrial militants who reported 
on what was happening in struggles around the UK through a series of 
bulletins.

At this time, in the UK, other than the DAM-IWA no syndicalist ideas and 
organising models existed in the broader labour movement, beyond a 
handful of dispersed union activists. Indeed, syndicalism had become an 
object of derision on the left, long dismissed as 'economistic' and 
lacking political sophistication.

The ACF and subsequently the Anarchist Federation did not reject 
syndicalism out of hand, but rather saw that:

"Unions by their very nature cannot become vehicles for the 
revolutionary transformation of society. They have to be accepted by 
capitalism in order to function and so cannot play a part in its 
overthrow. Trades unions divide the working class (between employed and 
unemployed, trade and craft, skilled and unskilled, etc.) and argued 
that even syndicalist unions are constrained by the fundamental nature 
of unionism" (Aims and Principles of the ACF, AF and ACG).

The ACF developed an industrial strategy based upon the creation of 
workplace groups at two levels: The Workers Resistance Groups, which 
would organise those workers who wanted to fight the employers but who 
were not necessarily committed to a revolutionary transformation of 
society. And Revolutionary Worker Groups which would bring revolutionary 
militants together in workplaces and across industries to build a 
'leadership of ideas' and to actively promote worker self-organised 
struggle. The ACF was involved in the establishment of the Communication 
Workers Group in the Post Office along with anarcho-syndicalists, 
council communists and former Solidarity militants.

But the reality is, in the UK, syndicalism, until the re-establishment 
of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 2000s, was not a 
movement any larger than the anarchist movement. Anarchist Communist 
workplace activity, therefore did not orientate towards syndicalism but 
rather towards other models of worker self-organisation and the one 
adopted by groups such as the ACF/AF and ACG was that of independent 
workers resistance groups, organising autonomously from the trade 
unions. The AF did have members in the Industrial Workers of the World, 
but did not co-ordinate activity within that union and certainly did not 
have any practice of social insertion. The ACG has members in specific 
organising initiatives - industrial union branches - in the IWW but 
remains at the early stages of consistent and focused social insertion. 
Most unionised members of the ACG are in the Trade Union Congress 
unions, some dual card with the IWW. In struggles, the ACG advocates the 
creation of independent cross-union workers and strike committees. The 
ACG continues to develop its workplace activity as part of its 
developing program.

Addendum: Other groups on the 'libertarian left' in the last 20 years in 
the UK include the Libertarian Communist Initiative (LCI), an 
Especificist (the first group to use Especificism as a point of 
reference in the UK) split from the AF in the late 2000s, oriented 
towards the IWW. The freakish Liberty and Solidarity adopted what some 
of their militants called 'Blue Syndicalism' - a socially conservative 
form of syndicalism which they promoted in the IWW. They increasingly 
came under the influence of the venomously anti-anarchist Comite 
Syndicaliste Revolutionaire in France before disappearing. More 
recently, Plan C: Anti-authoritarian Communists emerged, seeing 
themselves in the libertarian wing of the autonomist movement. They have 
a 'movementist' approach which downplays specific organisation and 
orientates towards social movements, tending not to focus on workplace 
activity. At the opposite end of the autonomist spectrum are the 'Notes 
from Below' who focus primarily on workplace activity and support rank 
and file initiatives in the TUC unions and in the Industrial Workers of 
Great Britain (IWGB). And finally, the Angry Workers, who are more 
critical of the trade unions and the syndicalist movement than Notes 
from Below but work towards establishing a 'class union' which resembles 
the COBAS Base unionist phenomenon in Italy. The Anarcom Network (ACN) 
holds a position on the trade unions that is influenced by both 
councilism and syndicalism, containing as it does, former members of 
Wildcat and DAM.

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/stormy-petrel/
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