Revolutionary Syndicalist Committees


The Revolutionary Syndicalist Committees were a trade-unionist organization created in 1919 by Pierre Monatte inside the General Confederation of Labour trade-union. It grouped the revolutionary syndicalists who were opposed to the Union sacrée national bloc during World War I and to the CGT's collaboration with the government.
Pierre Monatte became the CSR general secretary in 1921. They boasted 300,000 members. Meanwhile, the revolutionary syndicalists quickly became again in majority inside the CGT, and in 1921, following the equivalent of the 1920 Tours Congress for the French Section of the Workers' International, a split divided Léon Jouhaux's reformist trade-unionists with other revolutionary members, who founded the Confédération générale du travail unitaire.
After Monatte's exclusion from the French Communist Party in 1924, he created along with other ex-members the Ligue syndicaliste to organize again the revolutionary syndicalists. They published the Révolution Prolétarienne journal which succeeded to Monatte's Vie Ouvrière.
In 1936, the CGT and the CGTU re-unified themselves, an event in which the Syndicalist League's initiative of launching the Comité des 22 grouping together since 1924 known activists of the CGT, the CGTU and autonomous trade-unions. The following year, however, some revolutionary syndicalists opposed both to the parties' influence on the trade unions and to inner bureaucracy split to form the Cercles Syndicalistes Lutte de Classe.
Following the 1995 strikes, a trade-unionist current took again the name, claiming itself of its founders. They included members of the CGT, Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques and the CNT-Vignoles, and publish a journal called Syndicaliste!.