Fight for Union Freedom in Germany

Posted on December 21, 2009, filed Under WSA. Leave a Comment

by Tom Wetzel

A struggle by the workers at the New Babylon Cinema in Berlin — a relatively small firm — has now blown up into a fight with much larger legal consequences for German workers. A December 11, 2009 court edict in Berlin now poses some serious questions: Will German workers have the legal right to a union of their own choosing? Will they have the legal right to form grassroots alternative unions?

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Anarcho-Syndicalism and The Workers Organization

Posted on January 15, 2009, filed Under Worker Struggle. Leave a Comment

(What Is Anarcho-Syndicalism?)

By George Woodcock. Ed. By Scott R.

Ed. Note: Anarcho-Syndicalism = Anarchism + Syndicalism [from greek an + archos (without+leader) + syn + dikale, (together+justice); the international Anarchist labor movement; an evolution of libertarian socialism].

Adapted from George Woodcock, Railroads & Society, 1943 (Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library, No. 18, April 1999).

Syndicalism is a method of social organization which goes away from all the traditional conceptions of authority and government, of Capitalism and the State. While Communism in abolishing individual capitalism, creates a worse monster in its place in the form of the economic state, Syndicalism leaves all the patterns of administration which have in the past resulted only in the oppression and exploitation of man by man, and sets out to build an organizational form based on the natural needs of man rather than on the interests of ruling classes, based not on the dictates of authority, but on the voluntary cooperation of free and equal individuals in satisfying the economic needs of the men who form society.

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The Principles of Revolutionary Unionism

Posted on January 18, 2003, filed Under Ideas & Action Archive. Leave a Comment

The Principles of Revolutionary Unionism

Adopted at the Berlin Congress of Revolutionary Unionist organizations, 1922.

l. Revolutionary unionism, basing itself on the class struggle, aims to unite all workers in combative economic organizations, that fight to free themselves from the double yoke of capital and the state. Read more