Syndicalism - Theory

Theory

Syndicalism is one of the three most common currents of socialist economics, together with Market socialism and socialist planned economies. It holds, on an ethical basis, that all participants in an organised trade internally share equal ownership of its production. By contrast, socialism emphasises distributing output among trades as required by each trade, not necessarily considering how trades organise internally. Communism rejects government-sanctioned private ownership of the means of production in favor of ownership by the class of individuals who actually use such property (i.e., the workers or proletariat, who under most variants of communism would have control of the state as well, muddling the distinction between state and proletarian ownership). In syndicalism, unions exist independent of the state rather than needing the state's micromanagement and central planning. As with businesses in capitalism, labor unions in syndicalism would likely share a complicated relationship of co-operation and opposition with the state (with the obvious exception of anarcho-syndicalism, under which there would be no state).

Syndicalists state that society is to be organised bottom-up based on direct democracy, confederation, workplace democracy and decentralized socialism, and that to get to such a society they may either initiate a general strike through direct action and workplace occupation or - in the case of reformist syndicalists - develop the syndicalist economics alongside the state, in competition to it. Syndicalists state that delegation - the use of proxy representation - will facilitate direct democracy and that each commune/region would be independent in the confederation.

Syndicalists typically support homosexual rights and women's rights. Prominent anarcho-syndicalist Emma Goldman was among one of the first to speak out for homosexual rights explicitly.