OscailtThe Forgotten Tradition of French Sovietisma review of David Berry's A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917-19452015-04-01T19:45:57+08:00Anarkismoanarkismoeditors@lists.riseup.nethttp://www.anarkismo.net/atomfullposts?story_id=28039http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/feedlogo.gifCGT inspired mass anarchosyndicalism [1]http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28039#comment158912015-04-01T19:45:57+08:00L. AkaiI just saw this one on Ainfos a few seconds ago and was wondering if it was an A...I just saw this one on Ainfos a few seconds ago and was wondering if it was an April Fool's joke. Because I certainly don't know of any CGT inspired mass ANARCHOsyndicalist movement in the history of Poland. This is really revisionism on a grand scale.CGT inspired mass anarchosyndicalism [2]http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28039#comment158982015-04-09T00:37:06+08:00Michael SchmidtHi Laure
The history of the Polish ZZZ is usually represented as a nationalist-...Hi Laure<br />
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The history of the Polish ZZZ is usually represented as a nationalist-leaning aberrant form of syndicalism, but Rafael Chwedoruk's studies on the subject challenge this view - even though he himself tends towards the conventional view. Allow me to expand, using an extract from my & Lucien van der Walt's forthcoming book on internationalist anarchist organisational history, Global Fire:<br />
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In 1930, the Pilsudski regime united several unions: nationalist, independent, socialist (including a small faction of the Polish Socialist Party and a workers’ faction that had broken with the Second International), and the GFP to form the Union of Trade Unions (ZZZ), the programme of which, according to Chwedoruk, “was a compromise between radical syndicalism and reformism, even solidarity,” the latter presumably meaning solidarity with the regime. Nevertheless, Chwedoruk noted that <br />
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"… the syndicalists became more and more socially radical in the era’s economic crisis. They supported and organised many strikes. The syndicalist wing dominated the ZZZ … It was a large centre (170,000 members) and had influence within certain industries (esp. in Schliesen in central Poland) – in construction, metal industry, military undertakings etc. The ZZZ declared for the class war … [yet] had a small parliamentary group …"<br />
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... The ZZZ was clearly a mixed organisation including conservatives clustered around Stanislaw Cat-Mackiewicz, editor of the journal Slowo (Word), but also embraced a significant anarcho-syndicalist current centred on the likes of tobacco worker Ignacy “Morus” Głuchowski (1892-1944), Polish Anarchist Federation militant teacher Władysław Głuchowski (1911-1941), former prisoner of the Russian Okhrana secret police Stefan “Szwed” Szwedowski (1891-1973), and agronomic draughtsman Tomasz “Janson” Alfons Pilarski (1902-1977). <br />
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The ZZZ published the journals Front Robotniczy (Workers’ Front) and Glos Pracownika Umyslowego (Intellectual Workers’ Voice) on the pages of which anarchists like Wieslaw Protschke (1913-1945) were active: an article by Protschke on Bakunin as a freedom fighter irritated Cat-Mackiewicz so much that he asked the police to intervene against “Bolsheviks in the ZZZ”. <br />
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Chwedoruk argues that Polish syndicalism was a strange hybrid, a “unique political doctrine” straddling “the border of national-Bolshevism and anarcho-syndicalism,” and “a weird mixture of nationalism, syndicalism and anarchism”. It is not clear whether this is because he appears to take the ZZZ as an undifferentiated whole, or whether it is because of the common error of counting as syndicalist those like the Zet youths under the sway of non-syndicalist ideas such as those of Sorel.<br />
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... From 1931 to 1939, the ZZZ established itself as a powerful force on the labour front, and expressed an interest in joining the IWA: the anarcho-syndicalist current within it was represented at the 1938 congress of the IWA in Paris in 1938 by Pilarski... The ZZZ was forced underground in 1939 by the Nazi-Soviet Pact invasion... Many of its anarchist members would come to play leading roles in the anti-Nazi resistance: Pilarski, a member of the anarcho-syndicalist FAUD in Silesia from 1919-1933, had even helped form the anti-Nazi “Black Ranks” (Schwarze Scharen) militia in 1929 before being forced to flee Germany under threat of execution for high treason. <br />
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Ok, I'll end there. In essence, the ZZZ starts out as a yellow union federation with an anarcho-syndicalist minority influenced by the line of the French CGT-Unitaire (much of Polish radicalism n this era is Francophile and many exiled Polish revolutionaries lived in Paris). This is no dout where some differences of interpretation come up: does one consider the CGT-Unitaire of 1922-1936 to be anarcho-syndicalist or reformist syndicalist or some other admixture? <br />
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Nevertheless during state-combated strikes in the mid-1930s, the conservative elements (in particular the munitions workers) withdrew from the ZZZ, driving it further leftwards and leaving it in the hands of the anarcho-syndicalists who by then had become the majority faction, which explains its pro-IWA turn in the late 1930s, until its suppression by the Nazis, though it reformed underground structures during the war.<br />
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In the final analysis, because the ZZZ was an organisation of class and not of tendency, it is entirely likely that even during its "anarcho-syndicalist phase" as a mass organisation from about 1934-1939, it still contained nationalist and social-democratic tendencies who somewhat ameliorated its growing radicalism. I'm also fairly sure that the real "revisionism" on the nature of the ZZZ relates directly to Soviet-era distortions of syndicalist history, and the usual Stalinist hostility to a historiography that has anyone but their favourites fighting the Nazis. I hope that helps?<br />
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Best regards<br />
Michael