TLDR: the title.

This is more of a sub focused question. I’m aware of various thoughts in syndicalism, but there’s one that dominates this sub, which is anti privately/exclusively controlled productive private property and the same goes to surpluses. For all intents and purposes, privately owned = privately controlled, or exclusive right to control even if owned by a group/broader society.

As a self identified ancap, I’m always met with resistance, being ostracized by people we can identify as left anarchist. The problem is I always point out the inconsistency between declaring yourself a society with no rulers and free of oppression, only to turn around and say - you can’t do/have that because we said so, let alone justify the taking of privately saved and produced goods, or the means of production that were needed to produce those goods. For all it matters to me as an individual, this approach is no better than any capitalist country that could change a tax rate at any point to 100% and impose any restrictions on governance inside of my privately built and owned enterprise.

Personally, I believe in voluntary association and free exit, and unlike most capitalists, regardless if they are anarchists or statists, I’m not actively against socialists and communists ideas. And I do think that small socialists/communists communes don’t necessarily have to be coercive or oppressive, as it turned with state imposed socialism/communism regimes plagued with corruption.

For me it’s simply not my first preference, that’s it. And I’d rather at least try being happy in some tiny socialist community vs living in 95% of the regimes in the world today, because having lots of money or having a 250 ft long yacht was never been even close to my life goals and dreams, I just want to be free on the individual and economic side, and I have zero intentions dictating someone how to live their lives.

And to make sure I’m understood correctly, by free exit I don’t mean that someone is not going to have moral or other obligations to the community if they decide to exit. Otherwise I can see how a community of a syndicate can be abused by those that just want to extract value from it, or need a “place to crash” for sometime before they leave to the broader world again.

What I don’t understand is the hostility to individuals that put their sweat and blood into creating what we define as productive private property through voluntary association and voluntary exchange with others? I’m yet to hear a coherent argument, for the sake of simplicity, why do I have to provide all terms whether reasonable or not, that are demanded from me by a worker(s) that started a few weeks/months/years ago, within an organization that I paid for with years of my life, with my personal sacrifices, with objectively lower life quality during that journey because building a successful and honest business coming from $0 in your pocket is a fucking nightmare that most people can’t handle. Why?

And if we look at the syndicate or a community, it’s basically the same thing as a private enterprise, just scaled from a small 1 owner/ family owned and managed business making decisions to a larger organization where decisions are made by a different mechanism. But it’s effectively the same exact thing to an outsider who’s interested in becoming a part of that syndicate/community.

I can respect the preferences, and if individuals within the syndicate choose a certain system of governance and decision making - all power to them. By why there’s hostility toward those that don’t have the same preferences?

Example 1.

Say I own a small enterprise with 5 employees. My employees are aware of your alternative system, but they prefer to work with me and to remain in a system where private ownership is respected as an individual right. Both, me and my employees are genuinely satisfied, and we don’t want to change anything. Why would you be against me?

Example 2.

I/my family live on a farm land. We don’t invite any employees, final decisions are exclusively made by the head of the household. Nobody is forced to stay. Exit is assisted - one gets a piece of that farm land under their exclusive control, or can receive an equivalent cash payment, it’s up to them. What gives a right, or what justifies taking surpluses from my family?

I’d like to hear your thoughts. I feel like we need at least to build a bridge so we can understand each other better, so we could be neighbors that don’t necessarily like each other or each other ways, but at least don’t have conflicts over their disagreements.

In early September there was a visit from a member of the IWA Secretariat to Pakistan. A member of ZSP also attended. Meetings were held with members of Workers' Solidarity Federation from Karachi, Hyderabad and Peshawar, including several public meetings, visits to other activist centers and a few internal meetings and discussions. The public meetings were reported widely in the local press.

Workers' Solidarity Federation is growing in different cities in Pakistan and is the first IWA affiliate in the region. It became a Friend of the IWA several years ago and a full Section at the last IWA Congress in 2025. As part of the IWA's committment to promote the spread of our ideas and practices in new areas of the world, it was decided that the next Plenary and Extraordinary Congress would be held in Pakistan in 2027. Discussions about the planning and logistics of the event where held during internal meetings.

We also discussed the challenges for anarcho-syndicalist organizing in the region and possible areas for campaign.

We'd like to thank the members of WSF for their hospitality during this visit and look forward to continued cooperation and hearing more about their future success!

When union organizing struggles, the usual diagnosis is poor strategy. But it's not like any of us trying it are having high rates of success in our own workplaces. We can point to hostile governments, Reagan and PATCO, Clinton and NAFTA, to explain the decline in union density. I keep wondering, though, whether there are newer factors we aren't considering.

What if social media has shrunk the national attention span so far that people won't read anything longer than a paragraph? What if organizing now has to compete in a dopamine economy that didn't exist when our tradition's methods were developed, and it's losing to the doomscroll? And here's the one that unsettles me most: what if we've never actually proven a superior way to make collective decisions in a union? Because without that, you get a culture that's ignorant of union affairs, disengaged from them, and ultimately incapable of developing the skills necessary for self-governance.

You go deep into history and theory looking for answers, and you end up alone. Unable to spark others' fires, you become the ignored town crier at worst, the overworked elected superhero at best. Neither builds power.

It's tempting to conclude that it all comes down to currents beyond our control. But if these currents are real, then our organizing model has to answer them, or we should be honest that it can't.

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Pro-IWA Korea was recently admitted to the IWA as the IWA Initiative in Korea and have since been very active raising the awareness of anarcho-syndicalism in Korea. From a small base they have grown and are now almost 100 members.

At a meeting in Incheon on 5 July, they outlined their intended progress;

1. Initial stage (current): IWA Initiative in Korea

2. Intermediate stage (formerly PRO-IWA): Provisional Committee of the International Workers' Association in Korea

3. Final stage (goal): Section of the International Workers' Association in Korea