In the beginning, there were peasant communities; they were destroyed by the bourgeoisie. Dispossessed of their land, uprooted and turned into proletarians, men, women, and children alike were forced to sell their labor power in order to survive. This fundamental contradiction of Capital, whereby a bourgeois class seized the means of production and accumulated wealth at the expense of those it had dispossessed and crammed into industrial centers by the thousands, provoked outrage and awakened a strong working-class consciousness. Beyond the spontaneous revolts that were bloodily suppressed, trade unionism emerged within factories, fueled by the solidarity of the struggles for dignity, as a form of self-organization and a bulwark against injustice. But it was also conceived as a tool to overthrow the capitalist mess and its cohort of misery and destruction. It was seen as a school for the people, as the self-established embryo of a new world that would allow them to rediscover the lost world of artisans and peasants, the only one that made sense to them. It was this early trade unionism that shook the foundations of capitalism on several occasions. In France, Russia, Germany, but above all in Spain, where in 1936, workers and peasants organized within the CNT, in an unprecedented movement, abolished the capitalist economy locally, including the state, in order to manage production, land, and the commons directly and collectively.
The revolution was defeated by an international coalition. Moreover, the soft underbelly of capitalism has the ability to absorb the blows dealt to it and turn them to its advantage. In this respect, it sometimes proves remarkably flexible in transforming outbreaks of social anger into new opportunities for growth. The system recovers essentially wage-related demands in order to better relaunch itself in its forced race to increase value. Aided in this by the political parties on the left of the parliamentary political spectrum—the left of Capital—and the rise of the welfare state, the unions eventually became integrated as bureaucratic institutions into the workings of the Megamachine. Formatted by factory mechanization, Fordism, and Taylorism, this working class, fragmented into subclasses, divided into blue- and white-collar workers, disregarding its past, was led and absorbed into the induced race for consumerism—credit, comfort, social advancement. Little by little, the unions, integrated into the management of Capital rather than breaking with it, lost all their revolutionary edge.
Admittedly, even today, there are still pockets of combative union resistance, but they are often confined to the margins. Anarcho-syndicalism, where it survives, is attempting to reinvent itself, without the state, without parties, faithful to direct democracy. But the task is difficult: in a world where value flows are abstract, financialized, and delocalized, the old forms of struggle are struggling to grasp the new, masked faces of exploitation now scattered throughout the world.
Social ecology does not bury trade unionism: it calls for its renewal, provided that it ceases to think of itself as a mere negotiating agent in factories or offices. It proposes that it join a broader strategy, that of a popular reappropriation selecting the means of production, starting with the most vital ones. And no longer just by and for workers, as proposed in the past, but with and for today’s local communities. No longer to accommodate state aid, but to go beyond it. No longer to defend jobs, but to rethink concrete activity against the abstraction of wage labor, to rethink the place of goods production, its meaning and its place within the human community and beyond, in the natural world.
This kind of unionism, re-embedded in social life, transcending the phenomenon of identity, can once again become a historical force. But it must break with bureaucratic routines, relearn how to dream and create in conjunction with other protest forces and concrete alternatives. Communalism invites trade unionism to build this federalist movement, one that aims for an emancipated world starting at the local level and extending beyond to embrace the world.