Revolutionary Syndicalist Opposition to the First World War: A Comparative Reassessment

In an important recent contribution to our understanding of the organised trade union movement's response to the First World War, Wayne Thorpe has argued that European revolutionary syndicalist organisations (to use the very broad term for a number of different but related revolutionary union movements that were also known variously as 'industrial unionist' and 'anarcho-syndicalist'), viewed internationally, were unique in not supporting the imperialist ventures of their respective governments. Evidence is provided to suggest that support for the war by the important French syndicalist organisation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), has obscured the fact that five other national syndicalist organisations - in belligerent Germany and Italy, and in neutral Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands - remained faithful to their professed workers' internationalism. On this basis, it is argued, syndicalists beyond France, more than any other ideological persuasion within the organised trade union movement in immediate pre-war and wartime Europe, can be seen to have constituted an authentic movement of opposition to the war, refusing to subordinate class interests to those of the state, to endorse policies of 'defenc- ism', or to abandon the rhetoric of class conflict(1).

The substantive thrust of Thorpe's argument is undeniable. Indeed, it was not only the great majority of the official leadership of the trade union movement that rallied to the national cause. Practically all the leaders of the Second International (the collective voice of the world's socialist parties representing 3 million workers in 27 different parties), renounced their prior internationalist pledges and rushed to support their respective governments' war drive. This was despite repeated pledges that, in the event of war, social democratic parties would "do all in their power to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the population and to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule"(2). When in August 1914 the German Social Democratic Party (the main organisation of the Second International) voted in the Reichstag for war credits demanded by the government, its attitude was shared by virtually all other major parties of the International. By contrast, revolutionary syndicalists generally took a strong position of opposition to the war on the basis that