Syndicalism Quotes & Sayings

Proposed Roads to Freedom
In this book Russell weighs the respective advantages and disadvantages of Socialism, Marxism and Syndicalism. — John Stuart Mill

If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists. — Frank I. Cobb

One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . 'Libertarians' . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over... — Murray N. Rothbard

To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the "sole prerogative" to determine the products. — Paul Goodman

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Yet if anyone cares to read over the now crumbling minutes giving an account of the meetings at which the Italian Fasci di Combattimento were founded, he will find not a doctrine but a series of pointers ... It may be objected that this program implies a return to the guilds (corporazioni). No matter! ... I therefore hope this assembly will accept the economic claims advanced by national syndicalism. — Benito Mussolini

In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable. — Bertrand Russell

Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance. — Rudolf Rocker

In the modern period, similar ideas are reiterated, for example, by an important political thinker who described what he called "a definite trend in the historic development of mankind," which strives for "the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life." The author was Rudolf Rocker, a leading twentieth-century anarchist thinker and activist.3 He was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in his view in anarcho-syndicalism - in European terms, a variety of "libertarian socialism." These — Noam Chomsky

So understood, anarchism is the inheritor of the classical liberal ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment. It is part of a broader range of libertarian socialist thought and action that ranges from the left anti-Bolshevik Marxism of Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick, and others, to the anarcho-syndicalism that crucially includes the practical achievements of revolutionary Spain in 1936, reaching further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in the Rust Belt of the United States, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and in many other countries, most extensively in the Basque country in Spain, also encompassing the many cooperative movements around the world and a good part of feminist and civil and human rights initiatives. — Noam Chomsky

I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy and power of the fascist cohorts. — Benito Mussolini