Anarcho-Syndicalism and Direct Action

Anarcho-syndicalism fused anarchist opposition to the state with a strategic emphasis on revolutionary trade unionism, holding that federated labor unions (syndicats) could serve simultaneously as the primary instrument of revolutionary struggle and as the organizational skeleton of a future stateless, worker-managed society. In France, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), founded in 1895, formally adopted the Charte d'Amiens at its 1906 congress, a foundational document declaring the union's independence from all political parties and affirming the revolutionary general strike as labor's ultimate weapon against capitalism, in preference to parliamentary reform. The theorist Georges Sorel, in Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence, 1908), gave the general strike its most influential philosophical treatment, arguing that its power lay less in its literal practicability than in its function as a mobilizing social "myth" capable of unifying working-class consciousness and will toward revolutionary confrontation.