How would syndicalism work?

How was syndicalism supposed to work? I understand a union was supposed to take control of an industry or maybe a specific plant. But, was there any central planning? Would the the state have gone to the coal miners union ans said "We need XX amount of coal this year." Would the union have decided how much coal was actually mined? I have been reading about DeLeonism and the IWW. Thanks!
 
In general the coal mine would be run by the union which votes on how to run the mine democratically, I suspect there would be some level of the central government nudging them to fulfill quotas though simply because its such an essential energy resource. Jello Biafra described how the American economy was run at in Reds once and now I can't find it. That did a very good job of summarising how I see syndicalism would work in practice, critical industries have much more government input but for the most part the union and various other worker run organizations manage things (or the collective in the case of stuff like film and agriculture).
 
How was syndicalism supposed to work?

...

I have been reading about DeLeonism and the IWW. Thanks!

It's a very vague question because of the massive wealth of different kinds of 'Syndicate' you could have.


In general a 'syndicate' is a self-organised buiness/political/action group.


So one could argue that cooperative are syndicates, so are political groups, or crime rings. It 'works' because their are inderviduals within the group that know how to run the group...and that's about it.

Different kinds of syndicate will require different types of running model.

For instance a cooperative, makes all worker/users shareholders in the business. A trade Union may be set up to provide a political voice to a top down employer (in this sense the employer is not part of the syndiate which is the trade union). In a lottery, it might be to spread the potential large winnings by reducing the cost per ticket.

Asking how would it world is like asking; how does private enterprise work? You need to start looking at specifics.

I don't know anything about DeLeonism and the IWW...


...Yet on the other hand one can comment on Corperationalism, with the concept of worker shareholding. It works because the corporation is designed to look after its workers, this is because the workers themselves, look after the other workers and the corporations business interest.

In this sense the corporation workers get a (n equal) vote to determine their 'bosses' or CEOs, who manage the rest of the workers and the corporations interests. They get paid comparatively more for this, but they are held in their job roles via meritocratic principle based on the fact that if the company isn't doing well and their is a lack of confidence in the CEOs the can be removed via the workers in the company, rather than only via an executive board.

By expanding the shareholder vote, the workers are therefore in control over the overall direction of the business, and hence business decisions/mergers/expansions are undertaken with the consent of the workers, where they deem it best, to reinvest profits.

The addition of a dividend bonus from company profits also provides heavy incentive for the workers themselves to care about the macroscopic running of the business and the businesses overall performance, therefore reinforcing a strong worker ethic and general wish to improve the company, since doing that will improve the individual worker.

Because the worker is therefore interticaly linked with their job, a workers life being their job, as their job is their life. The workers are more likely to request facilities and services that go beyond the basics of the companies initial business model. Such as to provide cheap staff canteens, flexi-working, self-improvement or proffesional qualifications study.

In this sense the workers design their workplace to suit their own needs and desires, and so generates a great sense of satisfaction for working for the corporate body.



When corporations reach national prominence, the politics of the corporation can now directly effect those citizens who are not typically part of the corporation.

For instance, if we were to talk about an energy corporation that has grown to supply 90% of a nations energy, but only employs 0.1% of the nation. Now 0.1% of the nation has 'defacto control' over the nations energy supply.

In a purely capitalist society, that fraction would be much much smaller, and the democratic principle more strongly eroded.

The point is that now the politics of the syndicate, are now the politics of the nation. Since this erodes democratic principle, it is generally seen as 'a bad thing'. Yet in the modern world very large corporations already hold such powers over democratic principles and can 'dictat' to the state, what is going to happen.


There is no good solution for what happens when corporations (of a capitalist or socialist nature) reach similar levels of defacto authority as the state. At the turn of the last century, they had somewhat the same concerns as we do today in limiting the power of industry (now the financial industry, as opposed to manufacturing) to 'dictat' our general lives.

In the 1900s the idea came step with step with communism, here the state itself would absorb such corporate entities and so make all the people of the nation a shareholder.

Unfortunately this never really worked from a political point of view, as instead taxation and 'state politics' came to 'dictat' the business policy, rather than the workers. The state using the argument that it represented 'the will of the proletariat', who for the most part didn't have any interest in the workings of 'Soviet Steel' for instance picking a name out of then air.

Facism took a slightly different route, it saw such entities a 'more equal' to the state, i.e. states within states. Hence corporation workers would therefore be incorporated into the political system and given position of power so that via incorporating the corporations, the CEOs and Bosses woudl recognise the perils to national interests, and so try to move their business models towards state interest lines, and so that the state itself could gain favourable 'buy orders' from corporation via trading political influence and position.

Within the libertarian world, such forms of socialism were not particularly strong due to the aristocratic roots of primarily the British Empire, and the notion of the American dream focused far more on the individual, than the state or the business.

This has changed somewhat over the decades, and there are, more in Europe than the US, forms of corporation that have grown under the corporatist model, many of these have opted for 'transnational identities' while protecting a select group of high value, high utility workers.

The notion here is that if in a single nation they may grow so powerful so as to begin to have the public government take interest, as a transnational they can distance themselves from such politics and act as the organic entity they try to be.

This is why certain corporations are more than endemic across the entire world and contribute massively to the global economic system, even though there are very few state controls on them.
 
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