What is Syndicalism? | Ideology explained скачать в хорошем качестве

What is Syndicalism? | Ideology explained

This video is an explanation of Syndicalism. Syndicalism used to be a very popular ideology among socialists and working people. It works by unionizing the workforce and taking the means of production using a general Strike. Twitter:   / viki1999yt   Transcript: Hello everybody. This will be the first video in a short series of short videos in which I talk about a particular form of socialism for a short time. As you can read in the title this one is on Syndicalism. You may have heard it in Monty Python or in the popular Hearts of Iron Mod “Kaiserreich”. But that’s pretty much it nowadays. But back in the day, and by that, I mean before world war one Syndicalism was one of the main revolutionary ideologies of the people. At the time there wasn’t a real model for how the working people would go about that revolution which Marx had called inevitable. The only real practical example was the Paris commune and that one happened more on accident than on purpose. Link to my video on the Paris commune in the top right corner. So how do you go about giving the workers the control over the means or production? At the time the choice was between Marxists, who at this time where largely reformist and Syndicalists who where more revolutionary. At the time Leninism was not yet invented so that was al there was. What’s a Syndicate you may ask. It’s sort of like a regional government. Imagine roughly the size of a county government in the USA. That syndicate would be ruled via direct democracy. Who would get to vote is a little foggy sometimes and many original syndicalists dismissed the suffragette movement as bourgeoisie movement. So, how did syndicalists want to go about taking the means of production from the owners? They wanted to form unions which would slowly demand more and more power using strikes and ultimately assume the ownership of the means of production for themselves. This would require all the unions to do it at the same time so that the police couldn’t crush the movement. The fact that unions usually don’t have single leaders also makes this a very attractive method of revolution for anarchists who as you know oppose unjust hierarchy. Historically Syndicalism never got into a position to take power and after the rise of fascism which destroyed it and Leninism which largely replaced it there weren’t many Syndicalists left. Nowadays Syndicalism is in a tough place. The USA is still barely unionized and even in countries like Germany and France where union membership is high Unions are far from the revolutionary hotbeds they used to be. Today it would be hard to rally unions to strike to get the ownership over the means of production since most workers aren’t familiar with socialism anymore. Most socialist parties have abandoned Syndicalism in favour of Leninism or Maoism as well. Another problem with Syndicalism is that it would de facto lead to a dictatorship of the syndicates in which the unions would form syndicates that would be controlled by the union members. Of course the goal of syndicalism is to create a direct democracy for everyone but the method of revolution would put the unions in a position to just take power for themselves and ignore those workers who aren’t unionized and simply not give them the right to vote. After all the unions might want to punish those workers who refused solidarity when the time for revolution came. Why should the syndicates give power to those who doubted them? Why should a worker who didn’t take part in the general strike be allowed to get the benefits? Of course, there are solutions to that but we have to acknowledge the problems to be able to solve them.