According to Wikipedia on Anarcho-Syndicalism: Adherents view it as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a new society, democratically self-managed by workers.....Moreover, anarcho-syndicalists believe that workers’ organizations – the organizations that struggle against the wage system, and which, in anarcho-syndicalist theory, will eventually form the basis of a new society – should be self-managing. They should not have bosses or "business agents"; rather, the workers should be able to make all the decisions that affect them themselves."
"In contrast to other bodies of thought (Marxism-Leninism being a prime example), anarcho-syndicalists deny that there can be any kind of workers' state, or a state which acts in the interests of workers, as opposed to those of the rich and powerful."
My question is this. In the production of goods and services and in the absence of business agents how could economic decisions be calculated effectively in a business if everything is democratically self managed? Most workers would not be attuned to economic events unfolding and would come to rely on those who did take it upon themselves to know what signals the market were sending and how it would affect production. So you would be back to having business agents making decisions for a given business anyway.
Am I misrepresenting Anarcho-Syndicalism? Is this a valid criticism?
Yes, there is no way getting around 'bosses' (division of labor, trading labor for goods, etc) if they want to accomplish anything.
Not to mention the fact that co-ops can exist in a free market...
Can someone explain what would be the flaws with a worker managed factory?
Cool, let them buy enterprises and run those, driving out of business ‘normal’ competitor. Otherwise let them shut up.
Drew Brando: Can someone explain what would be the flaws with a worker managed factory?
Lack of management. lulz
Here's one interesting thing to point out about syndicalism -
It seems to only apply to industrialised western nations. That's because it's primarily concerned with workers in society. How is any of this relevant to mostly agricultural regions of the world with very few urban areas? How does it concern all those peoples who have to live in subsistence societies, such as the shepherds in Afghanistan?
Indeed, the SPD in Germany never really sought the votes of peasantry and was just interested in dealing with manufacturing workers, because they carried the same attitudes of Marx in condemning the "idiocy of rural life".
Most such working people's movements try their experiments in Third World countries, such as India, but they find few working peoples there. Back in the 1940s, there weren't many industrial towns in India other than the one ran by Tata Steel in Jamshedpur. The people there (a tiny minority of the populace) had higher wages and better standards of living than most of the populace, and pro-worker movements found little to engage them to get their attention.
Now, if they went back to western nations, they'll find it harder to bring change to places with older established systems.
Yes but they think it's unfair for management to make more money then the worker, they call it "exploitation".
They also think it's unfair for someone to own property in the means of production, while others are paid to do the job.
Can someone explain to me why they think like that?
I can't say I know for sure, but a lot of it seems to stem from a misunderstanding of wealth. Like the so-called "liberals" in the US, they seem to view wealth as a fixed quantity which must be shared equally. One looks around, sees all the inequality in the world, stops and thinks, "well gee, isn't it sort of arbitrary that, here we are, human beings on earth, and rather than sharing what's here, we have this artificial institution called 'property', whereby a few greedy people grasp up far more than they need, while over there all those people have far less." They think, sure we could be like the progressives who seek to redistribute some of the wealth to increase "fairness", but why not go even further: if there were no property to begin with, there wouldn't be the issue of some owning more than others. Then we can be equals, brothers, have solidarity. Sounds nice.
The frustrating part is trying to square all that with economics. It's not easy to do. For my money, the number one misunderstanding is that their vaunted means of production, which must be communally used, but never owned, had to have been created by somebody. It's not as though theres been a simple shuffling of a fixed quantity of "means" throughout the millennia. But that's obvious to anybody in this forum.
In short, their slogan is "property is theft", because property, in their mind, is nothing more than a human mental construct that a few powerful people at some point in the past established in order to exploit everybody else, and everybody under that yoke just sort of buy it without examining whether such a thing actually exists. All their talk of exploitation begins with that assertion. Bosses exploit workers, not because they should pay workers more, but because their very function is to exploit. Any money they make comes directly from workers rightful salary. Blah blah. I'm done.