Anarcho-syndicalist International Workers' Association

Naming and distinction

The English abbreviation IWA is shared with the First International of 1864 (International Workingmen's Association). The founding name was International Working Men's Association (IWMA); the present name, International Workers' Association (IWA), dates only from 1974. The Spanish official name is Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores (AIT), and the organisation is written together as IWA–AIT.

Founding

From 25 December 1922 to 2 January 1923, delegates from ten countries held an illegal congress in Berlin and founded the organisation. The congress was interrupted and resumed after two raids by German police (first in a suburb, later in Niederschönweide and Alexanderplatz), and the delegates represented roughly two million workers. Signatories of the founding declaration included the Italian syndicalist union USI (500,000), Argentina's FORA (200,000), Portugal's CGT (150,000), Germany's FAUD (120,000) and France's Comité de Défense Syndicaliste (100,000), alongside Sweden's SAC, Mexico's CGT, the Netherlands' NAS, Chile's IWW, Norway's NSF and Denmark; the total exceeded one million. Spain's CNT was then the largest anarcho-syndicalist union, but its delegation was arrested on the way to the congress and could not attend; it joined the following year with 600,000 members.

Lineage and intellectual basis

The IWA placed its founding in the lineage of anarchist and revolutionary-syndicalist international organisations and presented itself as the legitimate successor of the First International. After the split of the First International there had been earlier anarchist internationals, including the Saint-Imier International (1872-1881) and the Black International (1881-87). The Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin laid the intellectual foundations for a revolutionary-syndicalist International. Although he was not a member of any revolutionary-syndicalist or anarchist organisation, he developed the idea of the union as the cell of a future free society and as the means of preparing social revolution, which deeply influenced the IWA's aims and principles. From the 1890s Kropotkin led a campaign to rebuild the anti-authoritarian wing of the First International, and in 1902 he proposed founding a Labour International, leading to the conception of a revolutionary-syndicalist International as the successor and continuation of the anti-authoritarian First International. The statutes adopted at the founding congress reflected various forms of revolutionary syndicalism, the outcome of the debate Kropotkin had raised over organisational form: non-partisan unions not subordinated to a party, under anarchist influence.

The founding of the IWA marked a break with Bolshevism, and the founding congress became the point at which many syndicalist unions that had attended the 1920 Comintern congress broke with the Comintern. After the revolutionary years of 1917-1923 and their repression, the anarcho-syndicalist milieu founded the IWA in 1922, a response to the rise of Marxism-Leninism and to the problem of international anarchist organisation.

Organisational principles and practice

Member organisations admitted workers and students regardless of political affiliation. The CNT made workers' self-management, federalism and mutual aid its three principles, preferred direct action and workers' assemblies, and rotated unpaid committee posts. Spain's CNT was the IWA's largest affiliate and was historically affiliated to the IWA (AIT); in 2018 it helped found the new international organisation ICL-CIT (Confederación Internacional del Trabajo) together with other unions. The CNT is also known by the abbreviation CNT-AIT. The Spanish Civil War and revolution is the IWA's central related event: the CNT was the armed force that stopped the July 1936 rising, and telephone exchanges, factories and trams passed under union management. An attempt to take over the CNT-run telephone exchange led to the May 1937 street fighting in Barcelona.

Repression and decline

The IWA's main affiliated unions were destroyed under intense repression in the 1920s and 1930s: Argentina's FORA was crushed by the 1930 Uriburu coup, Portugal's CGT went underground after the failed general strikes of 1927 and 1934, and unions in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Japan, Cuba, Bulgaria, Paraguay and Bolivia were also destroyed. By the late 1930s legal anarcho-syndicalist unions survived only in Chile, Bolivia, Sweden and Uruguay. Anarcho-syndicalism reached its peak during the Spanish Revolution of 1936, when the CNT led the defeat of the insurgents in Catalonia and collectivised three-quarters of the Republican economy, but it declined with defeat in 1939 after disputes over the CNT's participation in the Republican government and the suppression of the social revolution. Spanish anarcho-syndicalism was repressed through imprisonment, killing and exile.

Postwar and present

While other internationals collapsed during the Second World War, the syndicalist International continued to operate and survives today. At its tenth congress in 1958, Sweden's SAC left, partly because a statute change to permit standing in local elections failed. In the twenty-first century the IWA went through an internal crisis and in 2016 expelled Spain's CNT, Italy's USI and Germany's FAU; the expelled organisations founded a new international, the International Confederation of Labour (ICL-CIT, Confederación Internacional del Trabajo), in 2018.

Distinctions

The IWA is distinct from the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern, RILU), founded by the Comintern in Moscow in 1921. The Profintern was the Comintern's trade-union section, set up to coordinate the Comintern's trade-union work. Syndicalist delegates who took part in its founding, such as 'Big Bill' Haywood of the American IWW, demanded that it be fully independent of the Comintern, but were outvoted and a resolution was adopted calling for the closest possible ties between the Profintern and the Comintern. The Comintern tried to bring syndicalists in through the Profintern, but syndicalist organisations in various countries refused to be entangled in a trade-union international directed by a political movement (communism) and did not join.

Anarcho-syndicalism is also distinct from other currents of syndicalism: the 'neutral' revolutionary syndicalism that keeps its distance from political theory, Daniel De Leon's industrial unionism influenced by Marxism, and Georges Sorel's authoritarian syndicalism with its defence of vanguardism and the creation of myth. Anarcho-syndicalism is further distinguished from other anarchist currents by its friendliness to industrialisation and organisation, whereas others idealise small, dispersed units. Its intellectual origins lie in the anti-authoritarian wing of the First International (IWMA) and the practice of the French CGT, and it crystallised as a distinct current after the 1907 international anarchist congress in Amsterdam.