Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the transition of revolutionary syndicalists from the centrality of the working class to that of the nation. Thesesubjects remained in the anti-system and anti-bourgeois framework from which they came but, coinciding with the First World War, they pronounced themselves in favor of intervention in the name of value and the national ideal.
Their ambition was to elaborate and practice a project of “social democracy”, combining socialism and nationalism, with the result of confusing the real terms of class relations. Revolutionary syndicalism was one of the ideological sources from which fascism drew, from which it represented the left soul, the one made up of anarcho-syndicalists followers of Georges Sorel, young intellectuals, leftwing interventionists. The union was defeated by the clash with the party and instead of adopting policies to defend the workers, it made use of the government’s
defl ationary economic policy, on whose behalf they made painful wage cuts. After the crisis of 1929, some revolutionary aspirations took their breath away despite class defense being prohibited. I also wanted to highlight the dialectic that opposed them to the regime as well as the ideological, political and cultural contents that marked their experience and favored, after the Second World War, the project
of confl uence in the social-communist trade union.
