strand in the thinking of organized labour everywhere. Inspired largely by the
writings of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), and especially hisReflections on Violence
(1908), syndicalism seeks control of society by directstrikeaction leading to
co-operative worker control of industry. Strikes, and especially the strategy of
the general strike, supposed to be able to collapse a capitalist industry in just a
few days, were seen as the only useful and legitimate tactic for organized labour
to take in pursuit ofsocialism. The main country affected by syndicalism was
France, and even today the French union movement has traces of syndicalism
in its make-up.
There were two important consequences oftrade unionsaccepting a
syndicalist position, one tactical and one theoretical. The tactical impact was
that the highly syndicalist French union movement refused to make political
alliances with socialist parties, or to form their own parliamentary party.
Electoral reform was seen as a dangerousrevisionism, and thus the path that
socialism took in Britain, where the unions formed the Labour Party
specifically to get representatives of workers elected, was ignored. As a result
no broadly-based working-class political alliance was possible, and none of the
funding and organizing experience of the unions was available to French
parliamentary socialists. This contributed to the inability, save briefly during
thepopular frontperiod, of a socialist government to take office in France
until 1981. The second consequence, more theoretical, was to force a breach
with orthodoxcommunistparties, because syndicalist insistence on worker
control and ownership of their own factories and workplaces clashed with the
ideas ofdemocratic centralismand thevanguard of the proletariatthat
Lenin used to build modern international communism. There was always far
more of ananarchistflavour about the syndicalists, not only in France but in
Italy and during its brief periods of importance in Britain, during the period
1911–14, and in inter-war America. A shorter-term and more practical
implication on French trade unionism is that because of this aspect of its past
it has tended to use its efforts much more in pursuit of often symbolic political
goals, rather than in more mundane bargaining for wage and work condition
improvements.
Systems Theory
Systems theory is a version offunctionalism, popular in the 1950s and 1960s,
and especially associated in political studies with the works of the American
academic David Easton (b. 1917). It concentrated on the idea of a political
system as being a mechanism by which popular demands and popular support
for the state were combined to produce those policy outputs that best ensured
the long-term stability of the political system (or thestateitself). Along with
Systems Theory