Syndicalisme is a French word meaning "trade unionism". In France, it was known as syndicalisme revolutionnaire.
Syndicalism forms one of the three most common theories of a pre-managed economic and labor structure. It believes, on an ethical basis, that all participants of each organized trade internally share equal ownership of its output and therefore deserve equal earnings and benefits within that particular trade, regardless of position or duty. This contrasts socialism's emphasis on the distribution of output from all different trades to one another as required for each one, not necessarily considering how those trades organize themselves internally. Both these systems of pre-organized government can theoretically include variations on privatism, unlike the third such pre-arranged materialistegalitarian stand of Communism, which includes abolition of government-sanctioned private ownership and private earnings in favor of making all property legally public and therefore solely the responsibility of the state.
Anarchosyndicalism came through the close connection and the participation in marches between syndicalists and anarchists. George Sorel misappropriated the term to combine his theory of action, irrational violence, with syndicalism. Anarchosyndicalism came to be a prominent force in France two decades before the First World War.
Hubert Lagardelle wrote that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon formed the fundamental theories of anarchosyndicalism; his repudiation of both capitalism and socialism, his flouting of political government, his scheme of free, autonomous economic groups, and war not pacifism is the core of man.
During the Spanish Civil War, syndicalist methods and theories were used by the Spanish anarchist-syndicalist union Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), and also professed by the opposing side, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacionalsindicalista or the "National Syndicalists."
