What attitude do anarchists take to existing unions?
As noted in the last section, anarchists desire to create organisations in the workplace radically different from the existing trade unions. The question now arises, what attitude do anarchists generally take to these existing unions? Before answering that question, we must stress that anarchists, no matter how hostile to trade unions as bureaucratic, reformist institutions, are in favour of working class struggle. This means that when trade union members or other workers are on strike anarchists will support them (unless the strike is totally reactionary — for example, no anarchist would support a strike which is racist in nature). This is because almost all anarchists consider it basic to their politics that you don’t scab and you don’t crawl (a handful of individualist anarchists are the exception). So, when reading anarchist criticisms of trade unions do not for an instant think we do not support industrial struggles — we do, we are just very critical of the unions that are somet
