Syndicalist theory starts, as has been said, from the idea of a class war which must be waged relentlessly till a complete social transformation has been accomplished. The essential weapon in this struggle is the power of the organized workers. As the cause of the conflict is economic it must necessarily be fought out in the economic sphere. Syndicalist congresses have persistently repudiated political action and pinned their faith to a general strike as the grand instrument of social revolution. This reliance upon industrial or "direct" methods of action flows necessarily from the fundamental notions of syndicalism as to the nature of the State, and also from strictly practical considerations. Outside the mine or factory, working men hold divergent religious or political opinions which make effective mass action difficult, if not impossible. Inside, the nature of their employment gives them a sense of solidarity which overrides minor differences and bands them together in the syndicat for common defence ; to persuade them to pass from the defensive to the offensive is the syndicalist's task, and in the accomplishment of this political labels and contro versies would be a hindrance. The strike, therefore, is the characteristic syndicalist weapon. However limited in its scope and object, it is an educative experience; successful, it inspires the workers with a sense of power; unsuccessful, it impresses upon them the servility of their lot and the necessity for better organi zation and wider aims. Thus every strike is a preparation for the revolutionary "day," when the workers, or a fighting minority of them (for syndicalism repudiates as bourgeois the dogma of the sacredness of majority rule), shall seize the instruments of pro duction by an "expropriatory" strike. In the meantime, they are working out from day to day, in the ordinary course of their employment, the ethics and the jurisprudence of the new social order.
The strike, of course, is not the only weapon in the syndicalist armoury. Various other means of waging the class war, known collectively as sabotage, are both preached and practised. These range from bad or slow work to the greve perlee (destruction of goods or machinery) and the chasm aux renards (assaults on "black-legs" or jaunes). It is fair to say that many syndicalist leaders criticize these methods as destructive of the worker's moral and technical competence.
Syndicalism is essentially French in origin and reflects French working-class experience and conditions of life; nevertheless the history of Great Britain shows interesting foreshadowings of it. The idea of industrial self-government by the producers attracted for a time the mobile mind of Robert Owen ; and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 was an attempt to realize it in practice. James Morrison, a young, self-taught opera tive builder, seems to have originated the syndicalist conception of class antagonism on the part of the working-classes. The Opera tive Builders' Union had developed the same notion in the previous year. The plan of a general strike—originated by one Benbow f or a time, under the strange title of the "Sacred Month," made part of Chartist propaganda. There is no evidence, however, that these projects had any echo on the European continent. The
syndicalist idea, as understood in France, may be said to have originated in the discussions of the International Working Men's Association. A French delegate to the Congress of Basle in 1869, for instance, prophesied that "the grouping of different trades in the city will form the commune of the future" when "government will be replaced by federated councils of syndicats and by a com mittee of their respective delegates regulating the relations of labour—this taking the place of politics." These tendencies mani fested themselves with increasing strength during the '9os in the two great labour organizations of the period—the General Con federation of Labour (or "C.G.T." under its French initials) and the Federation of Bourses du Travail. The secretary of this latter organization, Pelloutier, did more perhaps than any other indi vidual to work out the characteristic doctrines of syndicalism and spread them among his fellow-workers. When these two bodies joined forces in 1902 trade-unionism in general and syndicalism in particular received an immense accession of strength, and the doctrine subsequently remained—in spite of the efforts of politi cal socialists to capture the syndicats for their own purposes—the characteristic expression of French revolutionary idealism.
Syndicalist doctrine has had considerable influence outside France. In the United States a movement of somewhat similar character arose with the organization of the Industrial Workers of the World (q.v.).
The influence of these ideas on the trade-union movement in Great Britain and Ireland has been very pronounced, though they have taken a different direction, modified by the traditional con servative instinct of the British working-class. In Great Britain the real cause of the permeation of certain unions by syndicalist ideas was the absorption of trade-union leaders in administration or in politics, which caused them to lose touch with the rank and file. Especially is this the case with regard to the miners, the railwaymen's unions and the engineers.
Daniel De Leon was a leader of the Socialist Labour Party in the United States from 188o onwards, and his writings influenced British socialist thought, particularly in the Clyde and in the mining valleys of South Wales. Though not a syndicalist in the strict sense, he advocated organization by industry and the general strike. It is significant that 1903 saw in England the secession of the Socialist Labour Party from the Social Democratic Federa tion. After that date, in addition to the growing educational in fluence of the Independent Labour Party (though this was never syndicalist), was seen the promotion of the Workers' Socialist Federation, the British Socialist Party (in the post-war period) and the Communist League, all of which advocated practically the same structure of organization and policy. They all agreed in a lack of faith in political action, though not always refusing to utilize it, but their real politik was industrial action. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they secured greater prominence ; they became the stormy petrels of the labour world in Great Britain, and their effect on the political action of the Labour Party was seen in the Council of Action in August 192o.