Anarchy and Culture
Fernand Pelloutier and the Dilemma of Revolutionary Syndicalism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9969950 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alan B Spitzer (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1963 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 379-388 |
| Publication date | 1963-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Review of Social History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020859000002376 |
| OpenAlex | W2136291454 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Advancing under socialist banners, the labor movement in Western Europe won such success by the end of the nineteenth century as to produce a deep moral and intellectual crisis in European socialism. Internecine quarrels over revisionism, participationism, and antipolitical syndicalism reflected the malaise of a “revolutionary” movement that each year bound itself more closely to the system it had vowed to destroy. For socialist theoreticians, the crisis was cognitive or “scientific” – it had to do with issues of adequate historical analysis and prediction – but for the theorists of French revolutionary syndicalism it was essentially a moral crisis. In their eyes the socialist parties had already failed because they were the instruments for manipulation and betrayal of the workers by leaders whose ambitions could be gratified through the capitalist establishment. They identified a practical and moral alternative to political socialism in the revolutionary general strike prepared and carried out by autonomous proletarian organizations. Such organizations were necessary to the idealists of the general strike if their programs were not to degenerate into a strictly verbal revolutionary Couéism and they therefore put great stock in the development of militant working-class associations. Among these, the Bourses du Travail, which flourished from 1895 to 1901 under the dedicated direction of the anarchist intellectual, Fernand Pelloutier, seemed the most promising
Communism · Dilemma · Economic history · Epistemology · Militant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Proletariat · Socialism · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Legal and Social Philosophy · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |