SAC Syndikalisterna
The Central Organisation of Swedish Workers is a Swedish syndicalist trade union federation. The SAC organises people from all occupations and industries in one single federation, including the unemployed, students, and the retired. The SAC also publishes the weekly newspaper Arbetaren, owns the publishing house and ran the unemployment fund Sveriges Arbetares Arbetslöshetskassa.
History
Establishment
s were first established in Sweden during the late 19th century. During the 1890s, trade union activities were largely coordinated by the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which favoured reformism and electoralism over revolutionary syndicalism. In 1898, the SAP established the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, the first national trade union centre in Sweden. Anarcho-syndicalism emerged in Sweden out of the far-left opposition to social democratic influence over the labour movement. Members of the Young Socialists began to advocate for the adoption of the syndicalist methods of the French General Confederation of Labour. SUF member became the leading advocate of anarcho-syndicalism in Sweden, synthesising the ideas of Daniel De Leon together with anarchist proposals for a post-capitalist society. In November 1906, leading members of the SUF were suspended from the SAP, cementing the organisation's definitive shift towards syndicalism. In August 1908, the SUF broke away from the SAP. They established their own party, which rejected reformism, electoralism and centralisation, endorsed the prefigurative conception of trade unionism and advocated for a revolutionary general strike.By this time, the nascent Swedish Employers' Confederation had established a collective bargaining agreement with the LO, which included a "right to work". But in 1908, industrial disputes between employers and workers were escalating into open class conflict, as lockouts threatened 220,000 Swedish workers with unemployment. Negotiations between the LO and SAF, mediated by the government, briefly halted the dispute. When negotiations halted and the lockouts resumed, on 4 August 1909, the LO called a 1909 Swedish general strike. Over 300,000 workers went on strike, shutting down the country's industrial economy. After one month, the LO called for a partial return to work, which resulted in the deescalation of the strike by the autumn, lasting until 13 November 1909. The strike was ultimately defeated; none of the workers' demands were met and thousands were dismissed from their jobs. The defeat caused widespread disillusionment among rank-and-file trade union members with their social-democratic union leaders. Half the LO's membership left the organisation over the following year.
By 1910, syndicalist opponents of the social-democrats had established the Central Organisation of Swedish Workers. In June 1910, the SAC held its founding congress in Stockholm, bringing together 37 delegates from various trade unions and socialist organisations, including the SUF; the delegates were largely men, with only one woman present. The SAC was established along syndicalist lines, based on the model of the French CGT and the North American Industrial Workers of the World, which organised it into a federation of local organisations. By the end of 1910, the SAC had 21 local federations, which brought together workers of various trades, largely construction workers, foresters, metalworkers, miners and stonemasons. The largest local federation was in the northern mining town of Kiruna. The SAC rapidly grew in size and influence over the course of the 1910s, coming to count 32,000 members by 1920. It remained relatively small compared to the LO, but was able to lead a series of strike actions by itself.
International relations
In September 1913, delegates from the SAC attended the First International Syndicalist Congress in London, where they and other revolutionary syndicalist unions attempted to establish a Syndicalist International. However, this process was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Throughout the war and after, the SAC maintained close relations with the syndicalist federations in Norway and Denmark.The SAC was sceptical of the rise of Bolshevism that occurred in the wake of the Russian Revolution, considering it to be a centralist and authoritarian ideology. It refused to affiliate to the Red International of Labor Unions, as the SAC considered it to be an organ of party politics and thus incompatible with the anti-political stance of syndicalism. In December 1920, the SAC participated in an international syndicalist conference in Berlin. When a Russian delegate encouraged the syndicalist delegates to affiliate themselves with the RILU, the SAC delegation responded by criticising the government of Vladimir Lenin and its political repression of the Russian anarchist movement.
The SAC attended the RILU's July 1921 congress in Moscow, where it supported a motion to keep the RILU independent from the Communist International, but the motion was defeated. Syndicalist unions that were in the opposition at this congress decided to establish their own international association. At a subsequent syndicalist conference, held in Düsseldorf in October 1921, delegates from the SAC supported the establishment of a syndicalist international. Back in Sweden, the SAC formally voted against affiliating with the Communist International in an internal referendum. In December 1922, the SAC, along with syndicalist unions from Argentina, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Spain, established the International Workers' Association. Members of the SAC rapidly approved its affiliation with the IWA.
Division and repression
By the 1920s, Sweden was seeing the most industrial disputes of any country in Europe. In 1922, the SAC began publishing its journal Arbetaren, through its publishing house. Membership of the SAC peaked at 37,000 in 1924. In 1928, the SAC experienced a split, as more radical syndicalist members, led by P. J. Welinder, left the organisation and established the Syndikalistiska Arbetarefederationen. Welinder believed that the SAC was too moderate and pushed for more confrontational tactics during strikes. Despite the split, the SAC maintained a membership of 35,000 throughout the 1930s, while the SAF had only a few thousand members. By the late 1930s, following the death of Welinder, the SAF merged back into the SAC.In the wake of the Spanish Revolution of 1936, the SAC criticised the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo for joining the government of Spain, although it also accepted the CNT's tactical autonomy on the matter and defended the policy of anti-fascist unity. After the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, many exiled syndicalists moved to Sweden and joined the SAC. In 1938, the secretariat of the IWA relocated to Stockholm.
During World War II, the grand coalition that governed Sweden introduced a number of emergency measures which restricted workplace organising. The SAC became one of the few opposition forces in Sweden; its protests against the government's appeasement of Nazi Germany made it a target of political repression, which weakened the organisation and caused its membership numbers to dwindle. Members of the SAC, including Arbetaren editor Birger Svahn, were imprisoned or sent to internment camps, the latter of which had been established to separate left-wing radicals from detained military personnel.
Post-war revisions
Following the conclusion of World War II, anarcho-syndicalist unions throughout Europe experienced a decline, while reformist trade unionism began to see a resurgence. In Sweden, where the anarcho-syndicalist movement hadn't been suppressed by dictatorship or wartime repression, the SAC remained active, making it one of the few IWA affiliates that continued to function. The Swedish state was also developing into a social democracy, with a comprehensive system of welfare and collective bargaining, in which trade unions themselves were tasked with administering social benefits.Although the SAC had earned moral recognition for its opposition to Nazism during the war, its relevance as a workers' organisation was diminishing. From 1945 to 1957, its membership numbers declined from 22,000 to 16,000. Moderate syndicalists within the SAC, led by the German emigrant Helmut Rüdiger, believed that if the SAC was to survive as an organisation, then it needed to provide a workable alternative to the LO; they argued that, due to the changes brought by the record years of economic expansion and modernisation, the principles of anarcho-syndicalism needed to be revised. Rüdiger thought that, as the states which anarcho-syndicalists had previous opposed had since been transformed into welfare states, overthrowing the state would also mean abolishing its social programmes. In a challenge to the anarchist "orthodoxy" of anti-statism, he thus proposed that anarcho-syndicalists should act within existing state systems in order to democratise the economy, rather than waiting around for a social revolution. He also expressed support for participation in local government. This "new orientation" increasingly informed the practices of the SAC, as the moderate faction gained more influence during the 1950s.
In order to pursue such reforms to the state structure and bolster its own popularity, the SAC elected to participate in the administration of unemployment benefits in Sweden. In 1952, the SAC membership voted to approve the creation of a syndicalist-administered unemployment insurance fund. Rejecting direct action, they declared their goal to be the establishment of industrial democracy by bringing state and private companies under workers' control., the editor of Arbetaren, declared the SAC to have renounced the "magic wand of revolution". Instead he announced that the SAC "regards the progressive democratisation of the economy as its primary task... The basic idea consists in gradually transferring economic power from the shareholders to the producers." During this period, while its political platform grew increasingly moderate, the SAC also saw a marked growth in its membership.
The SAC's establishment of unemployment insurance funds resulted in the further deterioration of relations between it and the IWA, which increasingly criticised the SAC as "reformist" and "collaborationist". The IWA secretariat pulled out of Sweden in 1953. The Spanish CNT was particularly critical of the SAC, which it felt was contracting the IWA's founding values, especially after the SAC involved itself in the CNT's internal factional dispute. The CNT called for members of the IWA to reaffirm traditional anarchist principles, to reject any collaboration with the state and to repeal of the IWA's statute of tactical autonomy, a motion which passed at the IWA's 1956 congress. Tensions between the CNT and SAC came to a head at the IWA's 1958 congress, when the SAC withdrew from the international organisation. For its part, the SAC called for the "modernisation" of anarcho-syndicalism by revising its principles to fit post-war material conditions.