Syndicalism is a version of trade unionism which was mainly important in the years before the First World War, though it remains a potentially explosive strand in the thinking of organized labour everywhere. Inspired largely by the writings of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), and especially his Reflections on Violence (1908), syndicalism seeks control of society by direct strike action leading to co-operative worker control of industry. Strikes, and especially the strategy of the general strike, supposed to be able to collapse a capitalist industry in just a few days, were seen as the only useful and legitimate tactic for organized labour to take in pursuit of socialism. The main country affected by syndicalism was France, and even today the French union movement has traces of syndicalism in its make-up.
There were two important consequences of trade unions accepting a syndicalist position, one tactical and one theoretical. The tactical impact was that the highly syndicalist French union movement refused to make political alliances with socialist parties, or to form their own parliamentary party.
Electoral reform was seen as a dangerous revisionism, and thus the path that socialism took in Britain, where the unions formed the Labour Party specifically to get representatives of workers elected, was ignored. As a result no broadly-based working-class political alliance was possible, and none of the funding and organizing experience of the unions was available to French parliamentary socialists. This contributed to the inability, save briefly during the popular front period, of a socialist government to take office in France until 1981. The second consequence, more theoretical, was to force a breach with orthodox communist parties, because syndicalist insistence on worker control and ownership of their own factories and workplaces clashed with the ideas of democratic centralism and the vanguard of the proletariat that Lenin used to build modern international communism. There was always far more of an anarchist flavour about the syndicalists, not only in France but in Italy and during its brief periods of importance in Britain, during the period 1911–14, and in inter-war America. A shorter-term and more practical implication on French trade unionism is that because of this aspect of its past it has tended to use its efforts much more in pursuit of often symbolic political goals, rather than in more mundane bargaining for wage and work condition improvements.
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