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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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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