The Workers Are the Revolution That Will Never Come

Anarcho-syndicalism could’ve saved us. But we’re too selfish, too scared, and too far gone.

Here’s the thing about hope: it’s beautiful right before it breaks your teeth.

I’ve been reading Chomsky again, masochism, maybe. Or maybe I just needed to remember there was a moment in history when someone still believed in people. Believed that workers could own the machines, that power could be horizontal, that we could govern ourselves without selling our souls to capitalist or kings.

Anarcho-syndicalism was the dream.
Worker-run everything.
Decentralized power.
Labor as the core of dignity, not exploitation.

No bosses. No billionaires. No politicians playing God with lives they’ve never lived.

It’s not chaos, it’s structure without the parasites. It’s bottom-up governance, built from the shop floor and the neighborhood, not top-down decrees from sociopaths in suits.

And it could’ve worked.
It did, briefly.
Spain. 1936. Factories run by collectives. Farms redistributed. Schools rebuilt. A glimpse of something raw and righteous before it was crushed by fascism and forgotten by textbooks.

Chomsky called it “the rational form of anarchism.”
Not utopia. Just possible.

But here’s the twist. The splinter. The part that haunts:

It won’t happen. Not now. Not here. Maybe not ever.

Because the problem isn’t just capitalism.
It’s us.

We’re the product of a system designed to isolate, consume, and obey.
Most people don’t want freedom. They want comfort.
They don’t want collective power. They want a better boss.

Even the oppressed carry the virus.
Ask anyone with two cents of privilege if they’d give it up for the common good.
Watch them hesitate.
Watch them rationalize.

We were sold the dream of individuality so hard we forgot we were a species.

You can’t build syndicates on that. You can’t organize the disillusioned.
You can’t light a revolution when everyone’s too tired to spark.

And deep down, most of us know it.

That’s why every attempt at worker ownership gets buried under bureaucracy or bought out by venture capital. Why solidarity gets drowned out by hashtags and dopamine feeds. Why every time the ground shakes, we run to strongmen instead of standing up ourselves.

Anarcho-syndicalism could’ve saved us.
But it demands more than ideology.
It demands trust.
Discipline.
Humility.
Sacrifice.

And those are foreign languages in this empire of selfies and scarcity.

So yeah, I’ll keep reading Chomsky.
I’ll underline the good parts.
I’ll imagine the world we almost had.

But I won’t lie to you.
We won’t get there.

Not because the system is too strong, but because we’re too scared to kill it.