For Revolutionary Work in the Trade Unions

Internationally, trade unions are now a shadow of what they used to be. Everywhere they are led by traitors who have overseen countless concessions and defeats. Yet despite the crying need for a fighting leadership that can truly defend the working class, the influence of revolutionary parties on the working class is weak and/or weakening.

This failure is not explained by a simple lack of forces, but by the refusal or inability to build a consistent opposition to the union bureaucracy. However, the Theses on Tactics of the Third Comintern Congress were clear:

At bottom, if the so-called revolutionary organizations have failed, it is because they are pursuing wrong strategies in their industrial work. In this respect, the ICL has been no exception. But for our part, we have in recent years drawn lessons from our failures.

The following theses are based on our experience of intervening in the strike waves that have recently shaken several countries, notably at Boeing in the U.S. But just as important is our experience in smaller conflicts and everyday struggles in a context of growing international reaction.

We Need a Revolutionary Strategy

The starting point for revolutionary work in industry is that the working class needs a Marxist program to guide its struggles. A revolutionary program is essential regardless of whether it is a reactionary period, a period of economic strikes, or one of great political struggle. However, the majority of Marxist organizations explicitly reject the struggle for a revolutionary leadership of the unions.

When it comes to war, everyone understands that an army must be led by a general staff that seeks to defeat the enemy. A high command that seeks to temper the conflict rather than win it will not only make victory difficult, if not impossible, but will deploy tactics that maximize losses and minimize gains.

The same is true of the class struggle. Working-class leaderships that seek coexistence with capitalism will conciliate at every stage of the struggle. They maximize defeats and do nothing to advance workers’ strategic interests. On the other hand, a revolutionary leadership, far from sacrificing immediate gains, employs tactics that can maximize partial victories while advancing the historic interests of the working class.

The Danger of Opportunism

The most common problem in industrial work is conciliation of the union bureaucracy. In its most right-wing form, this policy takes the form of open support for non-revolutionary union leaderships. This support is usually justified with the false argument that a “left wing” leadership encourages workers to fight.

As an intermediate layer, close to the capitalists in its aspirations but dependent on the workers for its influence, the union bureaucracy plays no independent role in the class struggle. The political stance it takes reflects pressure from the bourgeoisie or from its working-class base. But fundamentally, the bureaucracy seeks to conciliate capitalism. When it veers to the left, it does so not to foster working-class militancy but to keep it contained as far as possible within channels acceptable to the bourgeoisie.

This does not mean it’s never principled to form a united front with a wing of the union bureaucracy. But any temporary bloc must be formed based on a real class line (e.g., in a strike or against national unity), and must never impute a progressive role to the bureaucracy. The aim of such a bloc is not to cease hostilities but to demonstrate in action why a revolutionary program is necessary.

Left-Wing Criticism

In many cases, conciliation of the union bureaucracy takes an indirect form. Sharp criticism is leveled at the workers’ leadership, but this criticism remains at the tactical level and is not aimed at replacing these traitors with a revolutionary leadership of the unions.

Such an approach limits the role of revolutionaries to putting pressure on the current leadership. Pressure from the left can force the bureaucracy to adopt a more militant stance and tactics, or even push workers to temporarily go beyond their leadership. But unless a fundamentally different strategy is offered, around which the elements of a new leadership can rally, the movement is condemned to remaining in the hands of the bureaucracy. When the time comes, the bureaucrats will be able to sabotage the struggle, no matter how much pressure was put on them previously.

Criticizing the tactics of the union leadership without seeking to build a new leadership based on a revolutionary strategy is to attack the symptoms of the disease without touching its cause.

Anti-Union Ultraleftism

A sectarian policy toward trade unions is just as harmful as an opportunist one. While this is most often cloaked in radical verbiage, the practical consequence is the same: the absence of an alternative to the bureaucracy.

Some organizations associate the pro-capitalist policies of the union leaderships with the unions themselves. In so doing, they deny what every class-conscious worker intuitively understands: even the most reactionary of unions is a bulwark against the bosses and a stepping stone for collective action. The result of the reactionary ultraleft position is to abandon the workers when their organization is under attack by the state or the bosses, leading such “Marxists” to lose all credibility in the eyes of the workers.

Radical Abstentionism

A less reactionary but equally sterile expression of sectarian politics is to denounce the union bureaucracy with revolutionary verbiage without offering anything in the way of answers to the concrete problems workers are facing. At best, this approach is totally sterile.

Grand proclamations about the need for revolution might provide an image of yourself as a great revolutionary. But they do nothing to advance class consciousness. The only way to truly increase the influence of revolutionary ideas is to show how they are essential to advancing workers struggle.

Adventurism

It is easy for an organization that has no real influence in an industry to put forward radical demands with no consideration of the political context or the obstacles to their implementation. The result is sterile and generally irrelevant. It is far more dangerous when those who do exert real influence push workers onto the offensive when conditions are unfavorable.

The practical consequence of criticizing the bureaucracy based solely on its lack of radicalism is to constantly push for more radical action. In the absence of a broader revolutionary understanding of the political situation, the result is a caricature, with small groups of isolated workers going on the offensive or staying on strike when they have no chance of victory. This policy demoralizes the vanguard and can lead to catastrophic consequences far worse than a simple policy of conciliation.

A revolutionary leadership must guide the class struggle both when it is on the offensive and when it is on the defensive, not call for an offensive in all circumstances!

Economism

The pressure of work in industry tends to narrow political horizons to the most immediate problems. The task of revolutionaries is not only to offer workers a broader perspective on their oppression but also to show them that a general understanding of class relations, the political context and international conditions is vital for struggle to be successful, no matter how modest it may be.

An economist conception of trade-union work, on the contrary, accommodates the political consciousness of backward layers of the working class. For example, in reaction to racial tensions, the economist response is to advocate unity against the bosses in the abstract. What isn’t said is that workers have a vested interest in actively fighting racial oppression. In this way economism seeks to “maintain unity” not on the basis of higher class consciousness but according to the lowest common denominator. Thus, the antagonisms that divide workers are maintained.

Minimum and Maximum Program

Revolutionary work in industry is necessarily concrete. It must tackle the most pressing problems facing workers in their daily lives. This does not make this work reformist; overcoming the obstacles that keep the working class docile and divided requires a Marxist understanding of capitalist society.

It is by putting the Marxist program into practice against the pro-capitalist bureaucracy—the main obstacle to class consciousness—that trade-union work becomes revolutionary work. The synthesis between minimum and maximum program is achieved precisely when a broad revolutionary conception is employed to guide the proletariat’s immediate struggles. The errors listed in this document all have the common thread of breaking this vital link.

To see how the ICL puts these principles into practice, see: https://iclfi.org/topics/en/labor and https://iclfi.org/topics/en/trade-unions.