A R T I C L E : T H E I M P O S S I B L E F O R D I S T B A G G A G E O F L AT I N

AMERICAN ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

( A R E P LY T O ‘ T H E F O R D I S T B A G G A G E O F A N A R C H O -
SYNDICALISM’ BY BEN DEBNEY)

by Guilherme Falleiros, Katiuscia

Galhera, and Guilherme Nicolau
(authors listed in alphabetical order)

9TH DECEMBER 2019

‘The Fordist baggage of anarcho-syndicalism’, by Ben Debney, argues

that the high degree of adaptivity of global capitalism in the 20th
century gave rise to service industries, the feminization of the
workforce, the financialization of economies and immaterial
labour/knowledge work. Still, the author argues that anarcho-
syndicalism was unable to keep pace with these mutations in the labor
sphere. That failure is argued by Debney to be a reflection of anarcho-
syndicalism in theory and practice due to (1) an (assumed) Fordist
paradigm and (2) a focus on wage exploitation, instead of labor
exploitation.

As anarchists we deeply disagree with Ben Debney’s critique. The

author criticizes anarcho-syndicalism on the (false) assumption that it
is Fordist in essence. His hypothesis is not valid, nor his following
arguments. The author does do a good job in highlighting new forms
of labor – in this sense, the essay is quite updated in its literature
review. However, the critiques of anarcho-syndicalist experiences lack
references and empiricism. When there is some evidence of anarchist
organizing, it actually advocates against the author’s argument (as with
the discussion of Bengali workers and anarchist organizing, for
example).

This article takes as a starting point the fact that the Latin world of
work, and especially that of Latin America, has never been under a
Fordist paradigm; the Latin American context has never really
experienced issues associated with heavy industries. In order to test
and invalidate Debney’s premise, the article steps back to show
anarcho-syndicalism across the 19th and 20th centuries and then
demonstrates contemporary experiences in the Brazilian/Latin
American context.

In the time of the historical International Workers’ Association (IWA)

(1864-1876) there was an intense debate between advocates of
centralized organization and advocates of federation. Marx would
attack the small social organizations of various urban crafts and
services as petty-bourgeois, while Kropotkin, for example, would
remind us first of collectivist experiences in the context of French
Revolution with associations of tailors, shoemakers and the press.
Anarchist syndicalism in Latin America has followed-on from the early
anarchist movement’s analyses. For instance, in Argentina anarcho-
comunist working women were organizing and publishing their own
newspapers in the 1890s: La Voz de la Mujer [The Women’s Voice]
(1896-1897).
It is important to notice different models of social and economic
organization between the Anglo-Germanic and the Latin worlds. The
difference is not just cultural – there is a fundamental economic and
thus social organizational difference between these worlds. Still, there
are some similarities between their revolutionary syndicalisms.

At a time of expanding workers’ organization (which would lead to the

new IWA of 1922), a new model of revolutionary syndicalism emerged
in the form of the French CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail
[General Confederation of Labour]) influenced by James Guillaume,
heir to the International, which further inspired the formation of unions
in Latin countries and even in Germany and Russia. The exception is
the Anglophone world, which kept its own model of hegemonic
industry-based unionism (Damier 2009: 14-21). The level of
industrialization in Argentina and Brazil between the 1910s and 1930s
was low compared to the UK. Still, while acknowledging that Latin
American countries are unevenly industrialized (Argentina and Brazil
have larger industrial bases than Guatemala and El Salvador), overall
and historically Latin American industries are of low added value and
technology. Although Latin America was not a favorable environment
for Fordist-based unions, anarchists were actively involved in unions in
Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay (1905-1906), Bolivia (1908, 1912 and
1926), Peru (1912) and Chile (1913) (Zimmer 2019).

Therefore, Latin American syndicalism led by anarchists was mostly

organized in the services sector or light industries: a hard-to-imagine
situation for traditional Fordist organizing based on wage earnings,
rather than labor exploitation. In Argentina, anarchist unions used to
organize cabinetmakers, firefighters, hairdressers, peasants, port
workers, sailors, blacksmiths, salesmen, drivers, machinists,
mechanics, and bakers. Anarchists succeeded in organizing around
25,000 workers as early as 1895, and 40,000 workers in 1902.
Emblematic cases of repression, murder and pogroms, such as the
Tragic Week (1920) and Rebellious Patagonia (1920-1921), should also
be remembered.

In Brazil, the 1917 general strike in São Paulo began in the textile
industry and later incorporated civil officers, transportation officials,
printers and various other workers in urban sectors. In São Paulo city
alone, anarchists were capable of organizing 70,000 workers, with
similar uprisings throughout Brazil. Repression over anarchist popular
mobilizations through direct action was manifested in exterminations,
imprisonments (at Ilha das Cobras) concentration camps (such as
Ushuaia and Clevelândia), and laws to deport immigrants.

As anarchist organizing in Latin America was not limited to industrial

workers, the political agenda was not limited to wages either. For
instance, the issue of ‘carestia de vida’ [‘life scarcity’] was understood
by syndicalists as the lack of access to staple resources and the
predominance of low salaries, also related to the competition for jobs
among men, women and children (Goulart 2013). Improving people’s
lives was also related to freedom of association and shorter working
hours, which were considered strategically as steps towards
revolution. Here, there are similarities to the Haymarket May Day, as
revolutionaries also supported the popular will for shorter working
hours (Zimmer 2019). Some Brazilian anarcho-revolutionary
syndicalists, such as José Oiticica, organized for a general strike in Rio
de Janeiro in 1918 (Nébias 2009, Bartz 2014), and connected the
advancement of rights to the revolution (Salgado 2012). These political
agendas would also be advocated by Edgar Rodrigues (1987) in his
later review of a revolutionary syndicalism.
The Brazilian debate was part of a larger historical momentum. The
new IWA Congresses, which took place between 1920 and 1922,
given the failed experience of the Russian Revolution, began to define
anarcho-syndicalism in relation to other anarchist traditions. It’s worth
mentioning that the Latin American agenda for working class
emancipation beyond economic issues was aligned with some trends
in Latin Europe, especially the CNT (Confederación Nacional de
Trabajadores [National Confederation of Workers]) in Spain. This
process would continue with the founding of the FAI (Federación
Anarquista Ibérica [Iberian Anarchist Federation]), in 1927, and up until
the Spanish Revolution (1936-1937) (Damier 2009: 64-87)

At this time, a series of strategic anarchist practices under the

umbrella of anarcho-syndicalism were playing out in Spain:
neighborhood assemblies, community organizations, defense
committees and militias (Wetzel 2018). Mujeres Libres (a women’s
collective both in dialogue with and in opposition to the CNT)
organized more than 30,000 women. Spanish anarcho-syndicalism
was also linked to the Modern Schools, designed by Francisco Ferrer,
inspired by workers’ self-organization; the Tragic Week of 1909,
opposed to colonial action in Morocco; the tenant strikes of 1883,
1905 and 1919; and the 1930 strike involving the CNT with
construction workers, neighborhood and tenant communities, and the
fight against the cost of living. Again, it’s worth mentioning that well-
known CNT and FAI militants were barbers, waiters, teachers, drivers,
and even expropriators.

Following a workers’ history aroused by the Haymarket tragedy,

syndicalism in the industrialised ‘ABC’ area of Greater São Paulo took
as its own origin myth the murder of the young anarchist Constantino
Castellani in Santo André’s strike of 1919. União Operária [The
Workers’ Union], associated with the Confederação Operária Brasileira
(COB [Brazilian Workers’ Confederation]), was created in the context of
May Day, in 1918, as an anarchist and revolutionary syndicate. The
Workers’ Union had been planned since 1914 by autonomists with
proclivities towards direct action (Costa 2019). The League, as that
syndicate was also known, followed the Chicago ‘programme’ and
covered all professional categories. According to Armando Mazzo, an
early anarchist turned communist when reorganizing the Workers
Union in 1928, the anarchists gave incendiary speeches that always
ended by reaffirming the need to hang all capitalists. As Natalino
Vertematti, another of Castellani’s comrades, testified: ‘We followed
the anarchist syndicalism. Or socialism. But I stood in between these
times. Anarchism is a philosophy … We intended to educate the
masses’ (Costa 2019: 13-36, our translation).

Castellani, a weaver and the League’s General Secretary by the age of

18, was killed by the police during a march intended to convince
workers of a joinery to join a strike. After many troubled days, the
organizers of the League were arrested, deported or sent to Ilha das
Cobras prison, and locked-up for about 10 years. The Workers’ Union
was eventually refounded by communists a decade later. After nearly
half a century, upon the arrival of the major motor companies in the
neighbouring town of São Bernardo do Campo, a new union emerged:
the ABC Metallurgists, securing for itself the working force of the large
vehicle assembly lines (Fordist, one may say), in breach with the Santo
André Workers’ Union. After both unions allied in the nineties, they
kept Castellani’s memory, but now dissociated from its anarchist
elements. This ‘new unionism’ was driven to conciliation with the
bourgeoisie and the State, democratically taking over the Presidency
of Brazil in 2002, with the election of their greatest leader, Lula da
Silva. As in Brazil, across the American continent anarcho-syndicalism
was progressively overthrown by an corporatist/State union model.

This example illustrates how far away from anarcho-syndicalism the

Fordist ‘new unionism’ of the late 1970s and 1980s went, considering
a local reality of syndicalist history and industrialization – especially in
the ABC region – which had been at the frontline of the Brazilian
economy and labour politics, affecting the whole country. Now that
this populist cycle in Brazil has come to an end, the country faces its
highest deindustrialization rates, labor deregulation, the dismantling of
social security and so on. Against all this, anarcho-syndicalism has
been remembered (Vasco & Crispim 2014, Costa 2019) and reborn
with revolutionary syndicalism inside organizations like the Federação
das Organizações Sindicalistas Revolucionárias do Brasil (FOB
[Brazilian Federation of Syndicalist Revolutionary Organizations]).
FOB’s members work largely in the education sector. This refutes the
argument that anarcho-syndicalism failed to keep pace due to
immaterial work. Still, FOB’s political agenda includes broader
struggles, such as racism, patriarchy, colonialism and anti-fascist
issues in general. Therefore, either directly or indirectly, FOB includes
non-Fordist workers into its agenda: Black housekeepers (mostly
women), informal workers, street vendors, small-scale farmers,
indigenous workers and so on. Also, FOB has been concerned with
the broader impacts in countries at the periphery of the global
capitalism; class conciliation during the Workers’ Party government
that led to impacts in our bio-diversities, indigenous livelihoods, and
an increase in economic dependency on the international bourgeoisie
across commodity chains. Still, historical political practices beyond
labor (not wage) exploitation are also part of FOB’s political
repertoires, such as self-management, mutualism, and mutual aid
(FOB 2019).

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