French Syndicalism

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 5, 1 June 1913, Page 3

French Syndicalism

THE CONFEDERATION GENERAL DU TRAVAIL

(BY E. J. B. ALLEN)

2. The Congresses which followed, in Tours 1896, Toulouse 1897, Rennes 1898, Paris 1900, debated certain important economic problems, but did not give much to the movement until the unity of organisation was accomplished on the basis laid down in the Congress at Lyons in 1901. This Congress gave the form of organisation which included the Confederal Committee, from which is selected a committee of control, whose chief work is to watch the finances and various working of the Confederation, Apart from the abovementioned “ Commission de Controle” is a “ Commission du Journal,” whose work is to receive and classify and verify the various articles, and to see to the regular and permanent publication of the official weekly organ of the Confederation, “ La Voix du Peuple. ’ ’

More important than these two committees is the Commission des Greves et de la Greve Generate.” This is composed of six members from the section of the Bourses du Travail, and six from the Federation d’ Industrie, and article 16 defines their duties as follows:

“ The committee of strikes and the General Strike has for its object the studying of the strike movement in all lands.

“ It is to receive the subscriptions of solidarity and ensure their distribution to those interested.

“ It is to enforce and make all the useful propaganda to penetrate into the spirit of the organised workers the necessity for the General Strike. To this end it. must create, or help to create, wherever possible, sub-committees of the General Strike.” All the organisations in the Confederation are autonomous from the local union upwards. A study of the rules will show that the Confederation General du Travail is organised on the basis of federation. The unions are not like the old craft guilds. The union is to-day an organisation of defence and of struggle against capitalist exploitation. We will now see what are the tendencies and the means followed by the Confederation.

Article I. —The General Confederation du Travail, guided by its present rules, has for object: Ist, the grouping of the wage workers for the defence of their interests, moral and material, economic and professional; 2nd, it groups, outside of all political schools, all the workers conscious of the struggle to be waged for the abolition of the Wage Class and the Master Class.

The end pursued is clear and admits of no equivocation. If, in the daily struggle, the Confederation essays to tear partial amelioration from the employers, only that the spirit of the workers may be raised, that they will augment their force of resistance and means of struggle, the end sought is, and remains, the abolition of the Wage Class and the Master Class. Thus the Confederation appears as a real organisation of the Class Struggle. It may well be affirmed that it is the one and only organisation that places itself really on this field.

lii effect,no equivocation is possible. In the circle of social studies, in the political parties, in the Masonic lodges, etc., you may have, in fact do have, wage workers and masters, exploiters and exploited, and in none of these groups are the conditions which allow us to term them organisations of class; it is only the union which can be termed a class organisation. The former are based on a community of ideas, but the union is based on a community of interests. And the workers there exploited have an identical origin, grouped in their unions and federations they find themselves a class, and they oppose themselves as such to the whole of bourgeois society, and inscribe at the head of their charter that they struggle for revolutionary ends, for the abolition of the Wage Class and the Master Class.

The Confederation is based upon the antagonism of interests between the two classes that divide Society. The workers can obtain nothing which they cannot enforce, and which they are capable of taking. Neither the exploiters nor the bourgeois state concede the ameliorations nor liberties; it is by an exterior pressure always more intense, by an incessant agitation destined to enervate its adversaries and to win from them to-day a portion of their prerogatives, and to-morrow another, that the Confederation goes to the fight.

From its adversaries the Confederation asks nothing, and it is upon the will and the spirit of struggle of its members that it obtains all, and it counts upon the educative virtue of its own action.

Struggle always, without cessation or respite, holding the spirit of revolt of the workers always awake, and never being satisfied so long as the workers remain exploited, this is without contradiction the most effective tactic.

That in order to side-track the Working Class movement the bourgeois state formulates in certain articles of law, or where the demands are won gives them sanction, this in reality counts for little. (To be concluded next month.)