The Errors in Principle of Syndicalism¶
Core Argument¶
In this 1929 polemic, Leon Trotsky dissects the theoretical foundations of syndicalism through a critique of his former comrade Pierre Monatte, arguing that revolutionary syndicalism had become a reactionary obstacle to proletarian revolution. The core argument is that syndicalism’s twin principles—trade union autonomy and trade union unity—are hollow abstractions that, when elevated above concrete class struggle, serve to reconcile workers to capitalist domination rather than prepare them for revolutionary conquest of power.
Trotsky traces Monatte’s political trajectory from his principled 1915 split with the chauvinist CGT leadership through his brief membership in the French Communist Party to his expulsion and subsequent retreat to pre-war syndicalist positions. The central charge is that Monatte has learned nothing from the intervening fifteen years—the war, the October Revolution, the rise of Stalinism, and the betrayals of the British General Strike. Monatte’s insistence on trade union unity led him to oppose breaking with the Anglo-Russian Committee even after the General Council of British trade unions had betrayed the 1926 general strike, placing him in de facto alliance with Stalin, Bukharin, Cachin, and Monmousseau, who had also supported the bloc with strikebreakers.
The theoretical heart of the chapter is Trotsky’s refutation of the syndicalist conception of the state. He identifies this as a direct inheritance from Bakunin’s struggle against Marx, locating syndicalism’s anti-statism within the petty-bourgeois tradition of Proudhonism. The syndicalist warning against the “dangers” of proletarian state power, Trotsky argues, objectively serves the bourgeoisie by discouraging workers from seizing power. In bourgeois countries, the real danger is the bourgeois state itself, not some hypothetical future danger of a workers’ state. Trotsky inverts the syndicalist framework: the trade union bureaucracy, far from being an antidote to state power, is in Britain the backbone of imperialism, the mechanism through which the bourgeoisie rules indirectly over the working class. The Labour Party and the trade unions are not opposing principles but a technical division of labour within a single apparatus of class domination.
The polemic is directed simultaneously at Monatte’s La Révolution prolétarienne circle and at the Stalinist epigones who, Trotsky notes, have caricatured his 1923 arguments to attack Monatte from the opposite flank. Trotsky’s method is to show that both syndicalist abstentionism and Stalinist bureaucratic centrism share a common failure: neither prepares the proletariat for the conquest of power. The chapter concludes with a sharp formulation: the task of a genuine communist party is not to counterpose trade union to state but to lead the working masses in overthrowing both the bourgeois state and its trade union bureaucracy simultaneously.