Was syndicalism really a viable competitor to communism?

BigBlueBox

Banned
A common cliche in alternate history seems to be syndicalism replacing state communism as the main ideology of the far left. The most notable examples of this are Kaiserreich and Twilight of the Red Tsar. Did syndicalism have more support than the other far-left alternatives, such as left-anarchism or market socialism? Was it more practical and effective than its competitors? Or is it just a cool ideology that timeline writers like including?
 
In the early years of the 20th century anarcho-syndicalism was a fairly popular ideology on the left, particularly in Italy and Spain. Even in the US the Industrial Workers of the World, while not strictly syndicalist, were heavily influenced by the movement. Syndicalism collapsed because of the rise of fascism, which led to the largest syndicalist movements being outlawed and destroyed. In a world where the Bolsheviks fail, like Kaiserreich, Syndicalism is well set up to be a major far-left ideology.

For Twilight of the Red Tsar my idea was that with Communism completely discredited as an ideology former Communists would search for a new ideology and rediscover syndicalism.
 
. . . Even in the US the Industrial Workers of the World, while not strictly syndicalist, were heavily influenced by the movement. . .
But the Wobblies were a clear minority and had probably reached their high water mark, as much as I might wish things had been different.
 
It is tempting to find a new name for the bogeyman on the left as one tries to draft an alternative without familiar pieces yet still being familiar, in other words we want the USSR and Communism by another name. Before the revolution the left was rather fragmented since it was more debate than action, and where it became potent it had become socialism. If the revolution failed in 1917 I think "Communism" survives and perhaps better in that it no longer has the success and blood to make it truly threatening. Syndicalism seems to be a step towards Communism so perhaps it becomes the label just as Russian terminology was adopted once the Bolsheviks succeeded. In any political spectrum there would be a far-left debate, Syndicalism seems to have a future in so far as it agitates for union power, so in industrial nations you could create it as the far-left movement, ideology or party, but I think it takes on things from what followed and competed, evolving in weird ways without the USSR as the guide light. So I think the label can endure but does it stay the thing inside the box? I assume not.
 
Main issue I see with syndicalism is that it takes the backing of a strong union (or at least a tradition of such). Why is this an issue? It's because either the capitalists are likely to stomp down on them or co-opt (see US and Bismarckian Germany), or the parties are more likely to try and represent the workers with "socialism".
 
People on both left and right believe so much in the fiction of the strong man, hero, guru, wise man, etc, that I have a hard time seeing any de-centralized model getting enough traction to really get rolling and prove itself.

Sometimes I think the most we can realistically hope for is a society with multiple power centers, such as a largely independent church which speaks for moral values, and obviously as many failures as successes in this regard. Such as universities which zealously guard their independence, and for example where public-private partnerships in medical research are a sometimes occurrence and not seemingly a requirement every single time. Such as professional associations which have teeth and really do effective advocate for those they seem, and so on and so forth.

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I would like to see how a society would develop if the laws were 55-45% in favor of unions, but I think it would be hard to get to there.
 
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