page_title: Syndicalism
section_title: World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Syndicalism / Heyday / World War I
caption_attribution_description: August 8, 1914 edition of Einigkeit
context_page_description: Syndicalism is a radical current in the labor movement that was most active in the early 20th century. Its main idea is the establishment of local worker-based organizations and the advancement of the demands and rights of workers through strikes. According to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, it was predominant in the revolutionary left in the decade which preceded the outbreak of World War I because Marxism was mostly reformist at that time.
  Major syndicalist organizations included the General Confederation of Labor in France, the National Confederation of Labor in Spain, the Italian Syndicalist Union, the Free Workers' Union of Germany, and the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation. Although they did not regard themselves as syndicalists, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Canadian One Big Union are considered by most historians to belong to this current.
  A number of syndicalist organizations were and still are to this day linked in the International Workers' Association, but some of its member organizations left for the International Confederation of Labor, formed in 2018.
context_section_description: Syndicalists had long opposed nationalism and militarism. Haywood held that "it is better to be a traitor to your country than to your class". French syndicalists viewed the Army as the primary defender of the capitalist order. In 1901, the CGT published a manual for soldiers encouraging desertion. Similarly, in 1911 British syndicalists distributed an "Open Letter to British Soldiers" imploring them not to shoot on striking workers, but to join the working class's struggle against capital. Patriotism, syndicalists argued, was a means of integrating workers into capitalist society by distracting them from their true class interest. In 1908, the CGT's congress invoked the slogan of the First International, proclaiming that the "workers have no fatherland".
  When World War I broke out in July 1914, socialist parties and trade unions –  both in neutral and belligerent countries –  supported their respective nations' war efforts or national defense, despite previous pledges to do the opposite. Socialists agreed to put aside class conflict and vote for war credits. German socialists argued that war was necessary to defend against Russia's barbaric Tsarism, while their French counterparts pointed to the need to defend against Prussian militarism and the German "instinct of domination and of discipline". This collaboration between the socialist movement and the state was known as the union sacrée in France, the Burgfrieden in Germany, and godsvrede in the Netherlands. Moreover, a number of anarchists led by Peter Kropotkin, including the influential syndicalist Christiaan Cornelissen, issued the Manifesto of the Sixteen, supporting the Allied cause in the war. Most syndicalists, however, remained true to their internationalist and anti-militarist principles by opposing the war and their respective nation's participation in it.
  The majority of the French CGT and a sizable minority in the Italian USI did not. The CGT had long had a moderate, reformist wing, which gained the upper hand. As a result, according to historians like Darlington or van der Linden and Thorpe, the CGT was no longer a revolutionary syndicalist organization after the start of World War I. It followed the French president's call for national unity by agreeing to a no-strike pledge and to resolve labor disputes through arbitration and by actively participating in the French war effort. Most of its members of military age were conscripted without resistance and its ranks shrank from 350,000 in 1913 to 49,000 dues-paying members in 1915. CGT leaders defended this course by arguing that France's war against Germany was a war between democracy and republicanism on the one side and barbaric militarism on the other. Italy did not initially participate in World War I, which was deeply unpopular in the country, when it broke out. The Socialist Party and the reformist General Confederation of Labor opposed Italian intervention in the Great War. Once Italy became a participant, the socialists refused to support the war effort, but also refrained from working against it. From the start of the war, even before Italy did so, a minority within USI, led by the most famous Italian syndicalist, Alceste De Ambris, called on the Italian state to take the Allies' side. The pro-war syndicalists saw Italian participation in the war as the completion of nationhood. They also felt compelled to oppose the socialists' neutrality and therefore support the war. Finally, they gave similar arguments as the French, warning of the dangers posed by the "suffocating imperialism of Germany", and felt obliged to follow the CGT's lead.
  USI's pro-war wing had the support of less than a third of the organization's members and it was forced out in September 1914. Its anarchist wing, led by Armando Borghi, was firmly opposed to the war, deeming it incompatible with workers' internationalism and predicting that it would only serve elites and governments. Its opposition was met with government repression and Borghi and others were interned by the end of the war. The anti-war faction in the CGT, on the o
caption: August 1914 edition of Die Einigkeit, a German syndicalist newspaper, protesting the outbreak of war
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