Frederick Engels, co-founder of the Marxist movement, wrote these lines about the 8-hour fight in the fourth German preface of the Communist Manifesto, which he finished on that first May Day:

“As I write these lines, the proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces; it is mobilized for the first time as One army, under One Flag, and fighting One immediate aim: an eight-hour working day, established by legal enactment... The spectacle we are now witnessing will make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united. If only Marx were with me to see it with his own eyes!”

Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin had this to say at one of the first May Days celebrated in Soviet Union:

“The demand for an eight-hour day, however, is the demand of the whole proletariat, presented, not to individual employers, but to the government as the representative of the whole of the present-day social and political system, to the capitalist class as a whole, the owners of all the means of production.”

Gabriela's reply was basically a rework of SEP leader David  North's arguments in his 1998 "Marxism and the Trade Unions":

"no, it was not wrong. However, Lenin's polemic 'What is to be Done?' against the Economists' conceptions of trade-unionism is very clear. To quote: 'The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to create (and inevitably does ...create) only trade-unionism, and working-class trade-unionist politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics' (Lenin, What is to be Done? p. 94). The transformation of the unions into open agents of capitalism is a corollary of the objective socio-economic function of the trade union, i.e., to secure for the commodity of labour power the best price under prevailing market conditions. The unions subordinate the working to the dictates of the market by directing their efforts to negotiating and securing agreements with employers, thereby fixing the price of labour power and determining the conditions in which surplus-value will be produced, and as such, the trade unions are obliged to guarantee that union members comply with the terms of agreement. Gramsci notes: 'The union represents legality, and must aim to make its members respect that legality.' As such the unions, in their very nature, are organically hostile and opposed to a development and extension of the class struggle. This is even more the case today when despite declining membership, as a result of their betrayals, they control and have assets,in some cases worth billlions of dollars. The revolutionary party fights for the political independence of the working class by raising their socialist consciousness, which is in direct opposition to the perspective of the unions. As Dave North points out in 'Marxism and the Trade Unions": Even if a renaissance of spontaneous militancy of a syndiclaist [sic] character were to occur--and such a development would be unthinkable without explosive rank-and-file rebellions against the old bureaucratic organizations-the development of such a promising movement along revolutionary lines would depend upon the independent work of the Marxist party, fighting to bring socialist consciousness into the working class." (pp. 30-31)

Reply to SEP on its position that trade unions are capitalist, not working class organizations, historically obsolete with no role to play in the coming socialist revolution, that workers should not join unions and indeed should leave the union movement:

@Gabriela, We have no disagreement on Lenin’s polemic against the Economists’ limited conceptions of trade unionism expressed in “What Is to Be Done?” But for Lenin, this was anything but an argument to write off unions as working class organizations; to the contrary, it meant that Marxists must wage a struggle against that spontaneous pull of bourgeois ideology.  Elsewhere in “What Is to Be Done?” Lenin wrote:

“The workers organizations for the economic struggle should be trade-union organizations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as far as possible assist and actively work in these organizations. But whilst, this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that only Social-Democrats should be eligible for membership in the ‘trade’ unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence up on the masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions. The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree of understanding, if they were not very broad organizations. The broader these organizations, the broader will be our influence over them—an influence due, not only to the ‘spontaneous’ development of the economic struggle, but to the direct and conscious effort of the socialist trade-union members to influence the comrades.”

This passage makes clear that Gabriela was selectively quoting Lenin’s comments about the limits of bourgeois trade unionism and grossly distorting and misrepresenting Lenin’s views on communist work in those bourgeois trade unions.

Lenin continued:

“The task of Social-Democracy is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.”

The debate here is not between Marxists and Economists. The debate here is nothing new, either. It’s been taking place for over a century. The issue is between Marxists and sectarians on “The question of the relationships between the party, which represents the proletariat as it should be, and the trade unions, which represent the proletariat as it is, is the most fundamental question of revolutionary Marxism.” —Leon Trotsky, “Communism and Syndicalism,” October 14, 1929

None of the great leaders of our movement—Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky [even Rosa Luxemburg] shirked from condemning conservative, privileged, nationalist, reformist trade union bureaucrats; none can be accused of fetishizing trade unions as the only proletarian method of struggle. But it is equally true that all of them agreed communists were duty bound to intervene in the mass movement and mass institutions of the working class. Further, all of them agreed that building powerful trade unions was a key part of the preparation of the working class for the political overthrow of capitalism. The program for the transformation of the unions from vehicles used by capital to subordinate and exploit workers into working class weapons in the fight to overthrow capitalism has been consistently developed in the communist movement beginning with Marx and Engels and then Lenin and Trotsky, the latter having the benefit of studying five decades of imperialism and globalization.

That fundamental Marxist analysis, that ABC of Marxism, began to change in SEP leader David North’s orbit (Workers League, SEP predecessor) in the early 1990s, culminating in a September 1993 resolution called “The Globalization of Capitalist Production and the International Tasks of the Working Class.” In it, North argued that qualitative expansion of globalization had caused a qualitative degeneration of the trade unions, to the point where they were more like a companion union or scab outfit than a working class organization. But North still talks of “a broad-based insurrection by the workers” against the bureaucrats and still leaves room in his program for unions, and is still forced to concede that “Lenin by means rejected the unions outright, but he insisted that they could only play a positive role to the extent they were subordinated to the revolutionary socialist political party of the working class.” North’s resolution continued:

“In order to prepare the working class for the struggle against the bureaucracy, the party must strive to create new forms of struggle among these workers, including factory committees and even trade unions, organized independently and in opposition to the AFL-CIO.”

But in his 1998 “Marxism and the Trade Unions,” which has served as the theoretical underpinning for the SEP’s current antiunion line, North took a great leap backward regarding unions from the 1993 document.  In 1998, North is saying unions are organically reactionary, antiworking class, intrinsically hostile toward the class struggle, and historically obsolete. What qualitative changes in the world economy occurred between 1993 and 1998 to justify this revisionism of Marxism?  This is an important question, because in previous debates SEP supporters responded to excerpts from Trotsky and Lenin that excoriated sectarians for their opposition to conducting communist work in reactionary-led unions by saying 70 to 90 years of globalization has rendered Trotsky’s “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” and Lenin’s “Left Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder” out of date. Now I disagree with that, but what happened between 1993 and 1998 to justify North’s great leap backward?

North then cobbles together quotes in a one-sided manner from Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Antonio Gramsci in a futile attempt to provide Marxist cover and theoretical justification to North’s anti-union, anti-Marxist revisionism. One-sided in the sense that North selects passages that criticize the conservative, class collaborationist trade union bureaucrats. I have provided lengthy passages from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in earlier exchanges and this post that show all of them considered it a communist’s duty to fight for the leadership of the unions and transform them into weapons of revolutionary struggle.  For now, let’s hear what Luxemburg had to say about the relationship between unions and the communist [“Social-Democratic”] party in Luxemburg’s time, since North spent considerable time in his lecture on the outstanding German Marxist. From Luxemburg’s “The Mass Strike: Chapter 8: Need for United Action of Trade Unions and Social Democracy”:

“To desire the unity of these through the union of the party executive and the general commission is to desire to build a bridge at the very spot where the distance is greater and the crossing more difficult. Not above, amongst the heads of the leading directing organisations and in their federative alliance, but below, amongst the organised proletarian masses, lies the guarantee of the real unity of the labour movement. In the consciousness of the million trade-unionists, the party and the trade unions are actually one, they represent in different forms the social democratic struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. And the necessity automatically arises therefrom of removing any causes of friction which have arisen between the social democracy and a part of the trade unions, of adapting their mutual relation to the consciousness of the proletarian masses, that is, of re-joining the trade-unions to social democracy. The synthesis of the real development which led from the original incorporation of the trade-unions to their separation from social democracy will thereby be expressed, and the way will be peppered for the coming period of great proletarian mass struggles during the period of vigorous growth, of both trade-unions and social democracy and their reunion, in the interests of both, will become a necessity.

“It is not, of course, a question of the merging of the trade-union organisation in the party, but of the restoration of the unity of social democracy and the trade-unions which corresponds to the actual relation between the labour movement as a whole and its partial trade-union expression. Such a revolution will inevitably call forth a vigorous opposition from a part of the trade-union leadership. But it is high time for the working masses of social democracy to learn how to express their capacity for decision and action, and therewith to demonstrate their ripeness for that time of great struggles and great tasks in which they, the masses, will be the actual chorus and the directing bodies will merely act the “speaking parts,” that is, will only be the interpreters of the will of the masses.

“The trade-union movement is not that which is reflected in the quite understandable but irrational illusion of a minority of the trade-union leaders, but that which lives in the consciousness of the mass of proletarians who have been won for the class struggle. In this consciousness the trade-union movement is part of social democracy.”

That doesn’t sound like Luxemburg would agree with North that unions are intrinsically procapitalist. In fact, following in the footsteps of Engels, Luxemburg actually helped develop fundamental concepts of Marxist strategy for transforming the unions: challenging craft and trade divisions, recruiting masses of working people to direct political action, and fighting the stranglehold of the trade union bureaucrats.

Gabriela: "The transformation of the unions into open agents of capitalism is a corollary of the objective socio-economic function of the trade union, i.e., to secure for the commodity of labour power the best price under prevailing market conditions. The unions subordinate the working to the dictates of the market by directing their efforts to negotiating and securing agreements with employers, thereby fixing the price of labour power and determining the conditions in which surplus-value will be produced, and as such, the trade unions are obliged to guarantee that union members comply with the terms of agreement."

Sounds like something we've heard before in the workers movement: LaSalle's "iron law of wages."

Gabriela thinks she's presenting North's groundbreaking theoretical contribution to Marxism, this creative application of Marxism they would say that meets the contemporary challenge of building the communist movement by exposing the allegedly inherent capitalist, counterrevolutionary nature of trade unions. Unions can do no good; they make no difference because they accept capitalism and sign legal contracts that binds them to adhere to capitalist approved conditions. Unions are in the way of socialism.  They've got to go, say North and his followers who think they are creatively applying Marxism.

Gabriela's cite is essentially a restatement of LaSalle's "iron law of wages," which held that wages could not be raised permanently above a fixed level no matter what workers did. A strike for wages was a waste of time, because workers cannot do anything to improve their conditions due to the inflexible level and the control capitalists exercise over workers. The Malthusians said that Workers would either have more kids thus lowering them back to subsistence; other "iron law" supporters claimed that any wage increases would be offset by price raises.  Unions were useless, even harmful to workers, said the 19th century Northites.

Marx disagreed, correctly stating that wages consisted of 2 parts: the physical mininum the social mininum, which change due to  socio-historical conditions. Or, as Trotsky put it in the Transitional Program for  Socialist Revolution: ".... "Realizability' or 'unrealizability' is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by struggle."

@Gabriela, North’s citation of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s quote about unions and legality is also one-sided. Gramsci’s fought with the leaders of the General Confederation of Labor (CGL), the trade union dominated by the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). But Gramsci never wrote off unions as organizations of the rank and file. North leaves out how Gramsci viewed unions as one of the organizational vehicles used by a revolutionary party in its “protracted trench warfare” against capitalism’s cultural hegemony.

Further, Marxists have never viewed “legality” as a permanent, absolute taboo. Rather, until the working class is strong enough to overturn capitalism, the revolutionary workers movement seeks to operate in the freest, most bourgeois democratic environment, able to utilize every democratic right workers have won to advance the revolutionary socialist movement. We would rather be above ground than underground.

And until the working class is strong enough to abolish capitalism (which is most of the time), communists have always been for workers improving their condition the best they can, wresting the most concessions they can from the capitalists. Fighting and winning worthwhile reforms are not the same as a reformist political perspective. We fight for immediate, partial demands to improve the lot of workers, but we tell them that until we replace this capitalist government with a workers government, whatever gains we win will be under attack and eroded, and we will be plagued by wars, crises, unemployment, economic crashes, Katrinas, BP, and Fukishimas.  When Marxists recognize  the given relationship of forces codified in a contract, we are not permanently endorsing the wages system, just as when we run candidates in capitalist elections, we are not endorsing bourgeois democracy.

Gabriela: "The revolutionary party fights for the political independence of the working class by raising their socialist consciousness, which is in direct opposition to the perspective of the unions." That's not true, according to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemberg, and other outstanding Marxists. North completely underestimates the significant role played by socialists in titanic US labor struggles, from the IWW in the early 20th century to the Congress for Industrial Organization (CIO) ascension in the 1930s, spearheaded by communist-led strikes in the three fights that pioneered that CIO fight for industrial unionism--San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis.

Trotsky told us long before David North that the trade union bureaucracy was firmly entrecnched and had been changed into the "economic police of capital." This makes communists' dialectical grasp of the contradictions of trade unionism all the m ore important. The bureaucracy has changed the unions to the capitalist state; the job of communists is to break those chains. That's why Trotsky placed so much importance on demanding complete political independence from the capitalist state. "It is precisely in the present epoch...that revolutionary work in the trade unions, performed intelligently and systematically, may yield decisive results in a comparatively short time."

Further, Trotsky said, "the fundamental mistake of such attempts [to turn away from unions because of the role of the bureaucracy] lies in that they reduce to organizational experiments, the great political problem of how to free the masses from the influence of the trade  union bureaucracy....the most important task of the revolutionary party became the liberation of the workers from the reactionary influence of the trade union bureaucracy."

If unions were inherently antiworking class, why would Lenin view them as schools of communist management in workers states, as he did in 1920 in his report to the Communist Party on the New Economic Policy? Northites argue that unions today aren’t the same as in 1920, that globalization has transformed the class character of unions into capitalist trusts. Again, the conflation of the rank and file with the procapitalist labor caste. Despite decades of business unionism and class collaborationism that have severely weakened unions, they are organizations of workers, with immense resources at their disposal which could be used to organize immigrant workers and fight for all working people if the rank and file are won to a class struggle left wing perspective.

 

Northites argue that "globalization" has transformed the national-reformist trade unions organizations not only incapable of putting up a serious fight against transnational corporations, but into capitalist organizations that workers should reject and abandon in favor of independent rank and file committees. Northites support what Nick Beams, leader of the Australian section of North’s ICFI, said a while back that “ to the extent that the extraction of surplus value from the working class still took place within the confines of a given state, it was possible to apply pressure to capital via the national state for reforms and concessions to the working class. This was the program of the national state for reforms and concessions to the working class.”

 

This is rubbish and a repudiation of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Multinational corporations and the financialization of capital do not supersede the class struggle within each country. Nation-state capitalists are still doing all they can to maximize the exploitation of workers in “their” countries by extracting as much surplus value as they can. The major working class defeats in the 1980s involved PATCO air traffic controllers, Greyhound bus drivers, Hormel meat packers, Phelps-Dodge copper miners, and Easter Airlines machinists. International capital or multinationals did not play a role here.  Eastern, Greyhound and Hormel got most of their surplus value from wage labor inside the US.

 

Beams is forgetting what Trotsky taught us in the Transitional Program:

 

"Realizability' or 'unrealizability' is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by struggle."

 

There will be revolutions in existing unions that transform them from defensive organizations into revolutionary instruments of the proletariat. There will be new unions and new forms of struggle including rank and file committees, factory and shop committees, and workers councils.

 

The SEP’s principal error is its refusal to distinguish between the union as the rank and file and the union bureaucratic officialdom—a petty bourgeois caste with distinct material interests from the workers—at the helm serving as labor lieutenants of capital.  Revolutionaries fight to kick out the sellout labor bureaucrats while defending the unions from the capitalists and their state.  But this requires a dialectical understanding of the contradictions of the trade unions—something North and Co. lack.

 

The working class ranks are the union, not the officials. It is public sector unionists fighting back in Wisconsin who are showing the potential political power of the working class. Detroit’s striking schoolteachers a few years back were unionists who showed the potential power of the proletariat. The workers at Republic National Windows who occupied the plant a few years ago were unionists who showed the potential power of the working class. Trade unionists in New York’s Transit Workers Local 100 terrified Wall Street and showed the potential power of working people with their 2005 strike against the MTA and the entire US political establishment. Back in 1997, it was 185,000 striking UPS unionists who had the company reeling with an impressive strike that won significant solidarity from workers around the country.

 

In each case, the procapitalist labor officialdom tried to sabotage the strikes on behalf of their corporate masters; in each case, the ranks of the unions pressed forward, independent and in defiance of the bureaucracy and capitalist government. Each of the above-named Marxist leaders warned against the limits and conservatism of trade unionism; each also strongly supported communist work in trade unions—even reactionary ones—to transform the unions into instruments of revolutionary struggle, as Trotsky put it in the Transitional Program, “trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution.”

 

Private and public sector unionists from all over the country are organizing support for Wisconsin’s fighting trade unionists. A political revolution against the procapitalist labor bureaucracy by the rank and file unionists is beginning. The job of communists is to wage a political struggle in the unions and liberate the workers from the reactionary procapitalist bureaucrats. The job of communists is to defend public unions under attack by capitalists and their government by drawing private sector unionists into the fight in order to strengthen both public and private sector unions. The job of communists is to fight to defend unions and make them as strong as possible by organizing as many workers into unions as possible, in order to wield union power to extend working class solidarity to every political, social and economic battle.

 

The capitalists still spend billions a year to prevent workers from organizing into unions. If unions were merely instruments, tools of corporations, US capitalists would save their money and listen to David North. The SEP is running a public relations campaign on the bosses’ behalf with its antiunion dogma.  Communists should defend unions—the rank and file of the unions—not the union officialdom—against union-busting legislation and other attacks from the capitalists and their government. Communists should fight to organize as many workers as possible into unions. Communists should fight for a rank and file rebellion and participate in this rebellion with the goal of building a class struggle left wing, revolutionary leadership of the union. We cannot build a revolutionary workers party without a class struggle left wing in the unions. Communists do not urge workers to vote “no” in union elections. This is a repudiation of Marxism.

 

In recent years, workers in a number of meatpacking and textile plants from Iowa to North Carolina have won hard-fought fights for union representation. Many of these union struggles have been led and waged by immigrants from other countries; workers who are strengthening our class with their class consciousness, solidarity, militance, and combativity. They are internationalizing our class, showing us a glimpse of the face of the US working class that will make a socialist revolution in the coming years.

 

The SEP dismisses this development. When I asked an SEP supporter if he supported these fights for union representation by meatpackers and textile workers, his reply was those workers should have talked to an SEP person first, that they would learn the hard way they’d made a mistake in becoming dues payers for the bureaucracy of these unions.

 

This is a rather cavalier stance for a revolutionary workers party toward immigrant workers who are strengthening the US working class by infusing it with combativity and class consciousness.  These workers from Mexico, Vietnam and other nations who have won  unionization struggles are part of the same working class radicalization that we are witnessing with the formation of the Indianapolis GM Stamping Rank-and-File Committee. One should not be counterposed to the other. Communists should support both.

 

In the excellent article by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky recently reprinted by the WSWS and entitled, “For Committees of Action—Not the People’s Front,” Trotsky, in urging French workers in the 1930s to break from the class collaborationist People’s Front and form committees of action as organizations of working class struggle, said:

 

“…Similar situations arise and will continue to arise at every step—in most cases on a local but often also on a national scale. The task is to avoid missing a single situation of this kind. The first condition for this is a clear understanding of the import of the committee of action AS THE ONLY MEANS OF BREAKING THE ANTIREVOLUTIONARY OPPOSITION OF THE PARTY AND TRADE UNION APPARATUSES [emphasis by Trotsky].

 

“Does this mean to say that the committees of action are substitutes for party and trade union organizations? It would be stupid to pose the question in this manner. The masses enter into the struggle with all their ideas, traditions, groupings and organizations. The parties continue to exist and to struggle…”

 

All globalization means with regard to unions is that the international working class needs to forge class struggle left wing leaderships worldwide that imbue the unions with proletarian internationalism, solidarity, trade union democracy and independence from the capitalist state. When writing the program for the First International, the International Workingmen’s Association, Marx stress the need for workers to have their own foreign policy independent of the capitalists’ foreign policy; a workers foreign policy that would be based on solidarity and internationalism. Another supposed David North ideological breakthrough is exposed as nothing new.

 

Globalization and financialization is nothing new. Lenin covered these in his 1916 seminal pamphlet, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Yes, this was during a much earlier stage of imperialism, but no amount of multinational corporations and financialization--and nothing North has argued have altered the basic framework of imperialism nor changed unions from workers to capitalist organizations:

 

“…the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.”

 

“Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

 

Concentration and centralization of capital and production to the point where monopoly capitalism replaced free competition of capital; the ascension and domination of finance capital; the export of capital; the division of the world among capitalist nation-states; the division of the world among the “great powers.”

 

Lenin’s analysis of monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, described globalization then and it applies now.

 

 Ultraleft sectarians in the communist movement opposed to working in unions are nothing new. In 1920, a Dutch ultraleftist named Anton Pannekoek proclaimed: “The trade-union officials collaborate with the state bureaucracy not only in using their power to hold down the working class on behalf of capital, but also in the fact that their ‘policy’ increasingly amounts to deceiving the masses by demagogic means and securing their consent to the bargains that the unions have made with the capitalists” (World Revolution and Communist Tactics).

 

Lenin answered Pannekoek and the other ultralefts in his pamphlet, “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile  Disorder”. He even wrote a chapter asking, “Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions?” His unequivocal answer was yes.

 

“…We cannot but regard as equally ridiculous and childish nonsense the pompous, very learned, and frightfully revolutionary disquisitions of the German Lefts to the effect that Communists cannot and should not work in reactionary trade unions, that it is permissible to turn down such work, that it is necessary to withdraw from the trade unions and create a brand-new and immaculate "Workers’ Union" invented by very pleasant (and, probably, for the most part very youthful) Communists, etc., etc….

 

“We are waging a struggle against the ’labour aristocracy’ in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them over to our side; we are waging the struggle against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class over to our side. It would be absurd to forget this most elementary and most self-evident truth. Yet it is this very absurdity that the German "Left" Communists perpetrate when, BECAUSE of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character of the trade union TOP LEADERSHIP, they jump to the conclusion that ... we must withdraw from the trade unions, refuse to work in them, and create new and ARTIFICIAL forms of labour organisation! This is so unpardonable a blunder that it is tantamount to the greatest service Communists could render the bourgeoisie. Like all the opportunist, social-chauvinist, and Kautskyite trade union leaders, our Mensheviks are nothing but ‘agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement’ (as we have always said the Mensheviks are), or ‘labour lieutenants of the capitalist class’, to use the splendid and profoundly true expression of the followers of Daniel De Leon in America. To refuse to work in the reactionary trade unions means leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie, the labour aristocrats, or ‘workers who have become completely bourgeois.’ [emphasis by Lenin]

 

“This ridiculous ‘theory’ that Communists should not work in reactionary trade unions reveals with the utmost clarity the frivolous attitude of the ‘Left"’ Communists towards the question of influencing the ‘masses’, and their misuse of clamour about the ‘masses"’ If you want to help the ‘masses’ and win the sympathy and support of the ‘masses’, you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the ‘leaders’ (who, being opportunists and social-chauvinists, are in most cases directly or indirectly connected with the bourgeoisie and the police), but must absolutely WORK WHEREVER THE MASSES ARE TO BE FOUND. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations -- even the most reactionary—in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found. The trade unions and the workers’ co-operatives (the latter sometimes, at least) are the very organisations in which the masses are to be found…. [emphasis by Lenin]

 

“These facts make crystal clear something that is confirmed by thousands of other symptoms, namely, that class-consciousness and the desire for organisation are growing among the proletarian masses, among the rank and file, among the backward elements. Millions of workers in Great Britain, France and Germany are FOR THE FIRST TIME passing from a complete lack of organisation to the elementary, lowest, simplest, and (to those still thoroughly imbued with bourgeois-democratic prejudices) most easily comprehensible form of organisation, namely, the trade unions; yet the revolutionary but imprudent Left Communists stand by, crying out ‘the masses’, ‘the masses!’ but REFUSING TO WORK WITHIN THE TRADE UNIONS on the pretext that they are ‘reactionary’, and invent a brand-new, immaculate little ‘Workers’ Union’, which is guiltless of bourgeois-democratic prejudices and innocent of craft or narrow-minded craft-union sins, a union which, they claim, will be (!) a broad organisation. ‘Recognition of the Soviet system and the dictatorship’ will be the ONLY (!) condition of membership. (See the passage quoted above.) [emphasis by Lenin]

“It would be hard to imagine any greater ineptitude or greater harm to the revolution than that caused by the ‘Left’ revolutionaries! Why, if we in Russia today, after two and a half years of unprecedented victories over the bourgeoisie of Russia and the Entente, were to make ‘recognition of the dictatorship’ a condition of trade union membership, we would be doing a very foolish thing, damaging our influence among the masses, and helping the Mensheviks. The task devolving on Communists is to CONVINCE the backward elements, to work AMONG them, and not to FENCE THEMSELVES OFF from them with artificial and childishly ‘Left’ slogans. [emphasis by Lenin]

“There can be no doubt that the Gomperses, the Hendersons, the Jonhaux and the Legiens are very grateful to those ‘Left"’ revolutionaries who, like the German opposition ‘on principle’ (heaven preserve us from such ‘principles’!), or like some of the revolutionaries in the American Industrial Workers of the World advocate quitting the reactionary trade unions and refusing to work in them. These men, the ‘leaders’ of opportunism, will no doubt resort to every device of bourgeois diplomacy and to the aid of bourgeois governments, the clergy, the police and the courts, to keep Communists out of the trade unions, oust them by every means, make their work in the trade unions as unpleasant as possible, and insult, bait and persecute them. We must be able to stand up to all this, agree to make any sacrifice, and even -- if need be—to resort to various stratagems, artifices and illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges, as long as we get into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry on communist work within them at all costs. ….

“The Executive Committee of the Third International must, in my opinion, positively condemn, and call upon the next congress of the Communist International to CONDEMN … THE POLICY OF REFUSING TO WORK IN REACTIONARY TRADE UNIONS IN GENERAL…” [emphasis by Lenin]

If Lenin were alive today he would be speaking directly to the Socialist Equality Party in essentially the same terms. The revolutionary leader who viewed unions as schools of communist management in a workers state would take issue with the SEP’s contention that unions are not workers organizations but capitalist organizations.

Similarly, in Trotsky’s writings about trade unions in the era of imperialism and how communists should orient toward them, articles that were written as late as 1940, the Russian revolutionary leader sounds like he’s speaking directly to the Socialist Equality Party—and in the harshest of terms.

Let’s hear from Trotsky’s “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”:

 

". . . From the foregoing it seems, at first sight, easy to draw the conclusion that the trade unions cease to be trade unions in the imperialist epoch. They leave almost no room at all for workers’ democracy which, in the good old days, when free trade ruled on the economic arena, constituted the content of the inner life of labor organizations. In the absence of workers’ democracy there cannot be any free struggle for the influence over the trade union membership. And because of this, the chief arena of work for revolutionists within the trade unions disappears.

 

"Such a position, however, would be false to the core. We cannot select the arena and the conditions for our activity to suit our own likes and dislikes....

 

"It is necessary to adapt ourselves to the concrete conditions existing in the trade unions of every given country in order to mobilize the masses not only against the bourgeoisie but also against the totalitarian regime within the trade unions themselves and against the leaders enforcing this regime. The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. [emphasis by Trotsky] This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy. . . .

 

“….In other words, the trade unions in the present epoch cannot simply be the organs of democracy as they were in the epoch of free capitalism and they cannot any longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to serving the daily needs of the working class. They cannot any long be anarchistic, i.e., ignore the decisive influence of the state on the life of the people and classes.

 They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no

room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can

either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the

subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution,

or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the

revolutionary movement of the proletariat.” [emphasis added]

 

“…in spite of the progressive degeneration of trade unions and their growing together with the imperialist state, the work within the trade unions not only does not lose any of its importance but remains as before and becomes in a certain sense even more important work than ever for every revolutionary party. The matter at issue is essentially the struggle for influence over the working class. Every organization, every party, every faction which permits itself an ultimatistic position in relation to the trade union, i.e., in essence turns its back upon the working class, merely because of displeasure with its organization, every such organization is destined to perish. And it must be said it deserves to perish.” [emphasis added]

 

Does this not still apply? Who is Trotsky talking to? The Socialist Equality Party!

 

In his August 1940 “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” Trotsky prophetically answered the SEP’s contention that the UAW has turned into a capitalist enterprise:

 

“Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy, who pick up the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class. If that is not achieved, the labor bureaucracy is driven away and replaced by the fascists….

 

“The intensification of class contradictions within each country, the intensification of antagonisms between one country and another, produce a situation in which imperialist capitalism can tolerate (i.e., up to a certain time) a reformist bureaucracy only if the latter serves directly as a petty but active stockholder of its imperialist enterprises, of its plans and programs within the country as well as on the world arena.”

 

How did Trotsky respond to this tendency of the union bureaucrats to morph from being agents of the capitalists into “petty but active stockholder[s] of imperialist enterprises? Did he write off the unions as working class organizations as the SEP has? Did he call for workers to quit the capitalist enterprises and form rank and file committees independent of the capitalist union? Did he abdicate his duty as a communist to fight the bureaucrats and break the chains to the capitalist state? No, Trotsky said this:

 

“….Does this mean that in the epoch of imperialism independent trade unions are generally impossible? It would be fundamentally incorrect to pose the question this way. Impossible are the independent or semi-independent reformist trade unions. Wholly possible are revolutionary trade unions which not only are not stockholders of imperialist policy but which set as their task the direct overthrow of the rule of capitalism. In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution. In this sense, the program of transitional demands adopted by the last congress of the Fourth International is not only the program for the activity of the party but in its fundamental features it is the program for activity of the trade unions.”

 

Trotsky’s  1938 “The  Transitional Program for Socialist  Revolution” sounds like it too is directed to sectarians like the SEP. Although the SEP occasionally refers to the Transitional Program in a perfunctory manner, in practice the SEP never applies it and has essentially abandoned it.

 

From “Trade unions in the transitional epoch”:

 

“The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy….Sectarian attempts to build or preserve small ‘revolutionary’ unions, as a second edition of the party, signify in actuality the renouncing of the struggle for leadership of the working class. It is necessary to establish this firm rule: self-isolation of the capitulationist variety from mass trade unions, which is tantamount to betaryal of the revolution, is incompatible with membership in the Fourth International.

 

“At the same time, the Fourth International resolutely rejects and condemns trade union fetishism, equally characteristic of trade unionists and syndicalists.”

 

Further:

 

“a) Trade unions do not offer, and in line with their task, composition, and manner of recruiting membership, cannot offer, a finished revolutionary program; in consequence, they cannot replace the party….”

 

“b) Trade unions, even the most powerful, embrace no more than 20 to 25 percent of the working class…The more oppressed majority of the working class is drawn only episodically into the struggle, during a period of exceptional upsurges in the labor movement. During such moments it is necessary to create organizations ad hoc, embracing the whole fighting mass: strike committees, factory committees and finally, soviets.”

 

c) “In periods of acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the trade unions aim to become masters of the mass movement in order to render it harmless…Therefore, the sections of the FI should always strive not only to renew the top leadership of the unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists; but also to create in all possible instances independent militant organizations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society, and if necessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions. If it be criminal to turn one’s back on mass organizations for the sake of fostering sectarian fictions, it is no less so to passively tolerate subordination of the revolutionary mass movement to the control of openly reactionary or disguised conservative (“progressive”) bureaucratic cliques…”

 

A common thread throughout the history of the communist movement is the duty of revolutionaries to intervene in mass struggles and conduct political work in bourgeois led trade unions in order to transform them into instruments of revolutionary struggle.  In 1866, Marx said of the unions:

 

“Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organising centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement leading in that direction. Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the non-society men into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as the agricultural workers rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of downtrodden millions.”

 

In 1891, Engles wrote to Schulter:

 

“But when I think of next year’s international congress in Brussels, I should think it would have been well to keep on good terms with Gompers, who has more workers behind him, at any rate, than the S.L.P., and to ensure as big a delegation from America as possible there, including his people. They would see many things there that will disconcert them in their narrowminded trade-union standpoint — and besides, where do you want to find a recruiting ground if not in the trade unions?”

 

We’ve already heard extensively from Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg on the political responsibility of communists to transform unions into revolutionary vehicles of the proletariat.

 

Was the Comintern wrong in 1920 when it advised John Reed and the US communists to work within the AFL and against the misguided attempt to forge revolutionary unions instantly through the IWW? Was it wrong to recognize the class struggle militancy shown by millions of AFL workers during the 1919 strikes in Seattle and elsewhere? Was it wrong, as former US Socialist Workers Party leader Farrell Dobbs put it, for the Comintern to deem it necessary to "join the AFL to help the membership replace the Gompers bureaucracy with workers' leaders who were class-struggle minded?”

 

Was Comintern leader Gregory Zinoviev wrong when he wrote that "We do not need to destroy trade unions in which millions of workers are organized. But we must revolutionize them and lead them onto our path?”

 

No, they were not wrong. David North and the SEP are wrong in claiming globalization has changed the class character of trade unions from working class to capitalist.

 

The SEP’s  orientation toward trade unions and its position that unions are inherently antiworking class organizations is a reactionary, ultra-left, sectarian repudiation of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky; one that is in alignment with the capitalists, who spend billions every year to prevent workers from organizing into unions. With good reason, because workers are still better off with unions than without, because there’s still a correlation between unions and better living standards, and the capitalists know this. It is elementary that communists help workers organize into unions, defend the unions against capitalist attacks, and fight to transform unions into revolutionary weapons.

 

This is how the revolutionary Marxist vanguard brings socialist consciousness into the working class? By urging workers to reject unions, abandon unions, vote no to joining a union? Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxumburg are turning over in their graves. You don’t introduce socialist consciousness into the working class by echoing the bosses’ antiunion stance.

 

On the surface, the SEP’s position is incomprehensible. Communists are not antiunion. There’s a class line being crossed here. Spartacist spinoff groups like the Internationalist Group and the League for the 4^th International, accurately characterized the SEP as “scab socialists.” The SEP advises workers to vote “No” on organizing a union. It gives left cover to the capitalists’ antiunion line.

 

Listen to David North and you’d swear you’re listening to the CEO of a capitalist corporation—not the central leader of a revolutionary communist party. But low and behold, it turns out that David North, under the name David Green, is actually the chief executive officer of a capitalist corporation, Grand River Printing & Imaging—a $25 million printing company that is, surprise, nonunion.

 

Looks like Marx’s historical materialism has been confirmed again. Being does determine consciousness.