International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam Totally Explained

Everything about The International Anarchist Congress Of Amsterdam totally explained

The International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam took place from 24 August to 31 August, 1907. It gathered delegates from 14 different countries, among which important figures of the anarchist movement, including Errico Malatesta, Luigi Fabbri, Benoît Broutchoux, Pierre Monatte, Amédée Dunois, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Christian Cornélissen, etc.

Organisation of the Congress

The Belgian and Dutch anarchists were at the initiative of the congress . While the Dutch took care of the material organisation of the event, the Belgians started the publication of the Bulletin of the Libertarian Internationale, which had as main editor Henri Fuss Monatte opposed this "French model" of neutrality of trade-unions to Russian anarchist trade-unions or to Belgian or German christian or social-democrat trade-unions. Malatesta thought that trade-unions were reformist, and could even be, at times, conservative. Along with Cornélissen, he cited as example US trade-unions, where trade-unions composed of qualified workers sometimes worked in opposition to non-qualified workers in order to defend their relatively privileged position. According to Malatesta, anarchists had to also defend this Lumpenproletariat instead of only working for the improvement of labor conditions. Malatesta underlined divisions of interests inside the workers' movement itself, going so far as to criticize the notion of social class: "There is no class, at the strict sense of the word, as there are no class interests. Inside the workers' 'class' itself, there is, just as in the bourgeoisie, competition and struggle." Henceforth, he thought that workers' solidarity needed a common ideal, which couldn't be found in the frame of the professional trade-union. If Monatte had criticized the risk of a possible bureaucratization of the trade-unions, while asserting the necessity of maintaining permanent employees in trade-unions, Malatesta categorically denied the legitimacy for an anarchist to become such a permanent employee of a trade-union. Finally, Malatesta criticized over-idealization of the general strike, stating that the latter could not, by itself, provoke a revolution, which would necessarily have to pass, according to him, by an armed insurrection.

Legacy

This opposition between two visions of the organisation of the workers' movement in trade-unions was later on merged in anarcho-syndicalism, which combined the revolutionary conception of trade-unionism with anarchist principles.

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