Paul Anderson, review of How We Shall Bring About the Revolution by Emile
Pataud and Emile Pouget (Pluto, £7.95) and Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker (Pluto, £7.95), Tribune, 7 September 1990
If you’re dissatisfied with the moderate reforms and pragmatism of social democracy, where do you turn politically? For perhaps 50 years after the Bolshevik revolution, in Britain as in most of the developed world, the obvious answer was to some form of Leninism. The political space to the left of social democracy was largely occupied by people who took their inspiration from 1917, even if, as time went by, more and more of them came to argue that the revolution had gone astray at some point.
In recent years, however, all that has changed. The Leninists are still with us, of course, but they no longer dominate the left. Revulsion at the brutal police states created by every "successful" Leninism and disgust at the manipulative tactics of the various domestic Leninist sects have taken their toll. People who want something more radical than social demo¬cracy no longer look to those squabbling over the legacy of 1917.
One result of this has been a dramatic growth of interest in the radical socialist traditions, mostly libertarian, that were shoved aside, swallowed or smashed by Leninism in the twenties and thirties — guild socialism, council communism, anarchism, syndicalism. Hence these two volumes, both reprints in Pluto's "Libertarian Classics" series.
Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget were two of the leading militants of the French trade union federation, the Confederation General du Travail, during its revolutionary syndicalist period in the early years of the century. How We Shall Bring About the Revolution, first published in French in 1909, is their account of a fictional revolution in which the working class takes power by means of a general strike, expropri¬ates the expropriators and sets up a self-managed stateless syndicalist society.
There are some obvious objections to Pataud and Pouget's scenario, not least that they are far too optimistic about the ease with which a revolution would overthrow capitalism. And, of course, the French syndicalists never did bring about the revolution. Their movement was already on the ebb at the start of the first world war, which split the CGT into rival factions, with the majority supporting the war.
The story was different in Spain, where the Confederation National del Trabajo, stiffened by a far stronger anarchist presence, remained true to its anti-party, anti-parliamentary origins right up to the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 and subsequently came close to realising the dreams of Pataud and Pouget. Rudolf Rocker wrote Anarcho-Syndicalism in 1937 to explain to an Anglophone readership the ideas of the CNT. It is a useful partisan summary of the history and aspirations of the syndicalist movement, and the circumstances of its writing just about make excusable its extraordinary optimism.
Both these books are fascinating historical documents; but do they have anything to contribute to a post-Leninist left? On the whole, I fear not. The syndicalists' emphases on self-management and the need for political means to be compatible with politi¬cal ends remain apposite. But the idea that trade unions could or should create a new stateless commonwealth seems rather quaint today. Revolutionary syndicalism was a phenomenon of societies far less complex than our own — societies that had yet to experience consumerism, the Keynesian-corporatist welfare state, transnational companies or information technology. And, like it or not, there's no turning the clock back.
