What is a syndicate?
A syndicate is a business that sells feature material such as cartoons to newspapers at a cost far less than that which the newspaper would have to pay were they to do the work themselves. This allows a cartoonist to have his/her work appear all over the country and allows even tiny newspapers the opportunity to run big-name comic strips.
As we will use the term, a “syndicate” (often called a “producer co-operative,” or “co-operative” for short, sometimes “collective” or “producers’ commune” or “association of producers” or “guild factory” or “guild workplace”) is a democratically self-managed productive enterprise whose productive assets are either owned by its workers or by society as a whole. It is a useful generic term to describe the situation aimed at by anarchists where “associations of men and women who . . . work on the land, in the factories, in the mines, and so on, [are] themselves the managers of production.” [Peter Kropotkin, Evolution and Environment, p. 78] It is important to note that individuals who do not wish to join syndicates will be able to work for themselves. There is no “forced collectivisation” under any form of libertarian socialism, because coercing people is incompatible with the basic principles of anarchism. Those who wish to be self-employed will have free access to the productive assets
As we will use the term, a “syndicate” (also called a “producer co-operative”, or “co-operative”, for short, sometimes a “collective”, “producers’ commune”, “association of producers”, “guild factory” or “guild workplace”) is a democratically self-managed productive enterprise whose assets are controlled by its workers. It is a useful generic term to describe the situation aimed at by anarchists where “associations of men and women who . . . work on the land, in the factories, in the mines, and so on, [are] themselves the managers of production.” [Kropotkin, Evolution and Environment, p. 78] This means that where labour is collective, “the ownership of production should also be collective.” “Each workshop, each factory,” correctly suggested James Guillaume, “will organise itself into an association of workers who will be free to administer production and organise their work as they think best, provided that the rights of each worker are safeguarded and the principles of equality and ju
