PDF-Version: On the Thread of Time – International Trade Unions

In the first proletarian movements, the distinction between organisations defending the economic interests of the employees and the first groups of political circles and parties was not very clear. However, already in the opening address of the First International of Workers, it is clear that this is a worldwide association of political parties. In fact, the address, after recalling the road taken since then by the working classes in defending their interests against bourgeois exploitation, the ten-hour bill snatched from the English parliament, and the results of the first production cooperatives, uses such propaganda material in the critical field, and underlines the refutation to the theorists of the bourgeois economy according to whom production would have frighteningly collapsed if the extortion of work from employees had been reduced by shortening the day and raising the minimum age of the worker, as they lied in the thesis that there can be production without “of a class of masters employing a class of hands” in large proportions according to the precepts of modern science. But soon afterwards, the address states that the trade union movement and cooperative work will never be in the position to face “the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries”. “Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies”. Therefore, the great duty of the working classes is to conquer political power.

The question of political power and the state resulted in long battles first between Marxist socialists and libertarians, with the split of the first International, then between revolutionary Marxists and Social Democrats. Lenin gave the irrevocable historical demonstration that the tendency to “evade” or “ignore” the question of the attitude of the revolution towards the State” was “the most characteristic thing about the process of the gradual growth of opportunism that led to the collapse of the Second International in 1914”.

The cardinal points of the Marxist position that Lenin re-established in “State and Revolution” on the basis of the doctrine of the Third Communist International of Moscow were: destruction by violence of the bourgeois state apparatus – revolutionary dictatorship of the armed proletariat for the progressive dismantling of the capitalist social system and the repression of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie – worker state system without career bureaucracy, but with the workers “periodically called to the functions of control and supervision” removable at all times and with the same financial treatment – finally, the dissolution of the new state apparatus as production takes place on a communist basis.

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The meeting of workers’ unions in a single international body happens late, because even nationally they group together much later than propaganda groups that turn into real parties. First of all, professional federations are formed and then they meet in national confederations.

This network of economic organisation is always quite distinct from that of party politics, but it is an exception, often causing confusion in international relations, the English Labour Party system, which accepts the accessions of both workers’ groups and political parties and economic Trade Unions. The Labour Party is not and does not even declare itself to be socialist and Marxist, it adheres nevertheless to International politics, in which successive world congresses were attended more or less directly by delegations from the trade union confederations of the various countries.

If the process of opportunism denounced and confronted by Lenin had its political aspect within the second International with the abandonment of any serious preparation of the proletariat for revolution, the insertion in the parliamentary system, and lastly the final betrayal with the support of war with the national bourgeoisie in open contempt of the decisions of the world socialist congresses of Stuttgart and Basel, opportunism was no less serious in the trade union field. The heads of the large trade unions and trade union confederations bureaucratised themselves into a practice of contacts and agreements with the employers’ organisations that led them to increasingly reject the direct battle of the wage-earning masses against the employers. Gradually in front of the workers’ organisations there came trade unions of industrialists who educated the bourgeoisie to overcome, for class reasons, the autonomy of the company and competition in a double monopolistic struggle, directed against the consumer on the one hand and against the workers’ trade union side on the other, the union monks constructed the method of economic collaboration for which the workers instead of fighting in every company and in the wider field against the employer, obtain limited advantages on condition that they support the productive enterprise by avoiding strikes and shifting to the level of co-interest in the “productivity” and “performance” of industrial work.

If socialist parliamentarians shamefully betray the working class by voting for military credits and entering the war ministries of 1914, the union leaders prove to be worthy equals proclaiming the duty of the industrial workers to intensify their work to produce the means of war necessary for the salvation of the country, and lure them into compromise by boasting exemptions from military service.

The gust of crisis and confusion that passed over the proletarian movement interrupted during the whole war the life of the offices of international workers, the political one in Brussels, the trade union one in Amsterdam. To top it all off, the same confederations that are dissidents from the reformists, and led by libertarians or trade unionists from the Sorel school, all had failed to resist the seductions of social-patriotism; A classic example is that of the French Jouhaux who threw himself fully into chauvinist politics and the sacred union.

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The renegades and the social traitors who during the war had proudly fought each other under their respective national flags returned to gather after it in the Yellow International, and the international trade union office in Amsterdam established the best relations with the International Labour Office founded in Geneva alongside the League of Nations.

The Leninist communists thoroughly attacked all these institutions, expressions of world imperialism and of the counter-revolutionary capitalist effort that desperately stood up against the rise of the victorious world proletariat in the red dictatorship of October.

The tactical line of trade unionism of the communists, who founded the Comintern in Moscow in 1919, should however be remembered in the essential points in order to be clearly understood. No doubt in the field of proletarian political organisation about the need to break definitively not only with the opportunists of social nationalism but also with the hesitant centrists in the face of the word of the struggle against parliamentary democracy, for the revolutionary dictatorship in all countries. So, as the Brussels International was repudiated and the grouping then formed and ironically indicated with the name of the Two and a Half International, Communists from every nation were invited to break up with local socialist parties.

In the union field, while it was no less clear the declaration of war to the yellow servants of the capital of Amsterdam and Geneva, direct material emanation of the bourgeois monopoly states and with no connection to the layers of the working class, was resolved in a consistent manner but not formally identical the problem of local and national organisations.

The issue gave rise to many debates among young communist parties. In many of these they supported the tactic of abandoning trade unions led by the yellows in order to move to the formation of new secessionist economic unions bringing together workers disgusted by the opportunism of social democratic officials. It was believed by these groups, German, Dutch and other countries, that the revolutionary struggle needed not only an autonomous communist party but also an autonomous trade union network connected to the party.

Lenin’s criticism proved that such a view implicitly and sometimes explicitly contained a devaluation of the party’s task and hence of the revolutionary political necessity, and that it was related to old workerist concerns that participated in the errors of the right. To it were linked the trends, also represented in Italy, to devalue the same trade union and industry based nationally compared to the factory organisations formed among the workers, or Consigli di Azienda, that were considered not as fighting bodies in a general network, but as local cells of a new productive order that would replace the bourgeois one in the management, leaving the autonomy of the company to subsist under the direction of its workers. This conception led to a non-Marxist vision of the revolution, according to which the new economic type would replace the capitalist type cell by cell with a more important process than those concerning central power and general socialist planning. The Comintern doctrine eliminated all these deviations and specified the importance, in the historical situation of the time, of the economic union in which the workers flocked to all countries in compact masses imposing vast national trade union struggles and laying the foundations for political battles. For Marx and Lenin in the deployment of the workers’ forces the party was indispensable, if it lacks or loses revolutionary strength the trade union movement can only be reduced to the sphere of collaboration with the bourgeois system, but where situations mature and the proletarian vanguard is strong and decisive, the union also passes from organ of conquests to organ of revolutionary battle, and the strategist of the conquest of political power is based on the decisive influence of the party, possibly even a minority, in the trade union bodies through which the masses can be called to the general strikes and to the great struggles.

The second congress of the Comintern of 1920, in its union theses, which are among the most expressive, wanted therefore for the communist parties to work in the traditional union confederations to try to conquer them, but in the event that they could not snatch the direction from the opportunists, not to draw from this situation reason to give the workers the handover to abandon them and found other unions in the national field.

This tactic was faithfully applied, for example, in Italy, where the Communists participated in all the trade union struggles and performed intense work in the factories and leagues of the Chambers of Labour, many of which were run by them, in the trade federations, some of which they controlled, although the General Confederation of Labour was in the hands of the anti-communist reformers Rigola, d’Aragona, Buozzi and the like.

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In the field of international organisation, while still maintaining this tactic in the individual countries, the communists founded the International Red Trade Union – Profintern – based in Moscow, which brought together the national centres led by communists, and in the front line the Russian trade unions. It was the time of the Moscow word against Amsterdam in the worker movement.

After a few years, this clear and distinct method underwent a first regressive adjustment. This verified, for the reasons of the general situation of the capitalist world, which it is not necessary to recall in full, the returns and failures of the revolutionary movement in Europe, was a pretext for it, in relation to the needs of the Russian state, to change international trade union tactics and suppress Profintern, and went so far as to ask for Russian trade unions to be accepted as a national confederation in the Office of the Yellows in Amsterdam, and called on the communist workers to fight for this objective and to protest at the predictably refusal of the opportunists to accept such registration. It was a first step on the liquidationist path. The policy of the popular fronts and the defence of democracy, parallel to the evolutions of the Soviet State’s foreign policy, which has now entered the world circuit of imperialism and aligned itself on the barricades of imperialism, completed the process of liquidating the political and organisational autonomy of the proletariat, starting with the party and ending with the trade unions and mass organisations, and the transformation of these into instruments of bourgeois conservation and imperialism.

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The problem of unification between political and trade union bodies of proletarian struggle in its approach must take into account historical facts of the greatest importance that have occurred since the end of the First World War. These facts are, on the one hand, the new attitude of the capitalist states towards the trade union reality and, on the other hand, the same dissolution of the Second World War, the monstrous alliance between Russia and the capitalist states and the clashes between the winners.

From the prohibition of economic unions, a coherent consequence of pure liberal bourgeois doctrine, and their tolerance, capitalism passes to the third phase of their insertion into its social and state order. Politically the dependence had already been obtained in the opportunist and yellow unions, and proved itself in the First World War.

But the bourgeoisie had to do more to defend its established order. From the very beginning, social wealth and capital were in its hands, and it was concentrating them more and more with the continuous repulsion in nothingness of the leftovers of the traditional classes of free producers. In its hands up to the liberal revolutions was the political and armed power of the state, and more perfectly in the most perfect parliamentary democracies, as with Marx and Engels demonstrates Lenin. In the hands of the proletariat its enemy, whose numbers grew as the accumulating expropriation grew, was a third resource: the organisation, the association, the overcoming of individualism, the historical and philosophical division of the bourgeois regime. The world bourgeoisie wanted to snatch from its enemy also its only advantage, it has developed its own internal class consciousness and organisation, It has made unprecedented efforts to suppress the peaks of economic individualism in its bosom and give itself a planning. It has from the first moment in the state an organism of deception and police repression, strained over the last few decades to make them, equally at its service, a body responsible for economic control and regulation.

Since the prohibition of the economic union would be an incentive to the autonomous class struggle of the proletariat, in this method the actual delivery has become quite the opposite. The trade union must be legally established in the State and must become one of its organs. The historical way to this end has many different aspects and also many returns, but we are in the presence of a constant and distinctive character of modern capitalism.

In Italy and Germany the totalitarian regimes brought about the direct destruction of the traditional red unions and even the yellow ones, states that have defeated fascist regimes in war are moving in the same direction by other means.

Temporarily in their territories and in those conquered they have allowed trade unions to operate that say they are free and have not forbidden and still do not forbid unrest and strikes.

But wherever the solution of these movements flows into official negotiations with the exponents of the state political power who act as arbitrators between the parties economically in conflict, and it is obviously the boss who is thus the judge and executor.

This certainly preludes the legal elimination of the strike and of the autonomy of the trade union organisation, which has already taken place in all countries, and naturally creates a new approach to the problems of proletarian action.

International bodies reappear as the emanation of established state powers. Just as the second International was born again with the permission of the then victorious powers in the form of domesticated offices, so today we have offices of socialist parties in the orbit of the western states, and a so-called communist information office in place of the glorious third International that once was.

Trade unions are grouped together in congresses and councils that no one can prove to be linked to the working class, and that by palpable evidence demonstrate to be put together by one group or another of governments.

The salvation of the working class, its new historical rise after terrible struggles and misfortunes, is not with any of these bodies. It is on the way to bringing together the theoretical reordering of views on the most recent phenomena in the capitalist world and the new organisational approach in all countries on a world scale, which will reach a higher level than the military clash of the imperialists, putting the class war back in place of the war between states.

Source: “Battaglia Comunista”, No. 26, 1949.