In light of the General Motors strike, and a host of other union-building struggles at Amazon, Starbucks, et al over the last period, it seemed worthwhile to put forward something I wrote 22 years ago, with some amended notes. I know this blog is frequently dedicated to rejuvenating critical theory at a hopefully high level, but in the end it only matters if we contribute, in whatever manner, to both the abolition of capital and the achievement of communism.
On Trade Union Work (A Schematic Outline of Political Points) [Originally posted, I believe, on Libcom.org, May 2001)
1. Trade unions are a basic form of workers’ organization. Unions negotiate the level of exploitation and the general conditions of that exploitation, such as wages, working conditions, safety, pensions and so on, for a section of the working class against the individual capitalists or corporations. In so far as the workers will necessarily fight to improve their lot under capital’s rule, unions will perform a necessary, albeit limited, function. It would be a completely mistaken notion to condemn workers for organizing in unions. Many ultra-Lefts, old and new, take the attitude that the unions are completely reactionary and that the workers should abstain from organizing in unions. This idea neglects the actual struggle of the workers. It would be ridiculous to tell the workers that they should not participate in unions because all they are doing is negotiating the rate and conditions of exploitation. We should just as well tell them to fold their arms and accept whatever level of exploitation is handed to them until “the glorious day of the revolution”. Rather, we must try to understand the possibilities and limitations of the unions and the union struggle.
2. The heterogeneous nature of the unions, their representation of sections of the class, and their role as mediators over the value of labor power keeps them from confronting the capitalist class as a whole, against said class’ right to rule. What is the basis for what we have said?
3. The union apparatus may mobilize workers for fights against particular capitalists or corporations for goals attainable within the boundaries of capitalist society or in the interests of the union machinery. However, there is no reason to believe that the union apparatus will always or even generally act in the workers’ interests even in individual cases. Often, the union apparatus will approve the firing of “troublemakers” and even try to drive them out. The idea that the union necessarily improves workers’ ability to defend themselves is radically false. Nor do we have any reason to believe that a change in the leadership of a local will necessarily change that situation, though it can. In reference to the union bureaucracy, we can liken them to cops: a cop may protect someone from being robbed, but if a community burns down the local crack houses, the cops will arrest the community people. Working class people can be protected, but they are not allowed to protect themselves, to self-determine their lives.
4. The unions are fatally compromised in relation to capital, whether a fraction of capital or capital as a whole. The acceptance of the possibility, nay, inevitability, of the collaboration of labor and capital forms the sine qua non of trade unionism. In practice, the trade union bureaucracy has to make constant deals and bargains with capital and they come to see capital’s side of the struggle as valid and necessary. Class collaboration is not a policy of union bureaucrats but the natural extension of trade unions as limited institutions. We do not oppose the workers fighting for limited improvements in their situation; rather, we oppose limiting the workers’ struggle to the boundaries of collaboration established by the trade union framework. The established trade unions tend to be not only counter-revolutionary, but also reactionary in daily struggles. Trade unions act as lawyers in relation to negotiating the daily exploitation of labor, without being able to call into question the fact of exploitation itself. They accept capital’s exploitation of labor as capital’s prerogative.
5. The unions are generally made up of the more privileged sections of the working class, who have the degree of concentration and power to organize. The unions tend to be based on skilled labor, larger scale industries and firms, or partial ability to regulate the industry to the benefit of a stratum of capitalists in a given industry. It is rare for the unions to constitute more than 30-40% of the working class, except for periods of upsurge in the class struggle. This is true in the U.S, France, Germany, and Japan, to be sure. The trade unions help establish and maintain one of the central intra-class hierarchies of the working class and work in such a way as to sacrifice non-union workers’ (or workers in other unions) interests in the name of defending the sectoral privileges of their members. This leads them to in fact betray their own members’ interests.
6. Many people claim that the trade unions are a school of struggle for the working class. The unions may indeed find themselves opposed (usually despite their wishes) to the capitalists, as working class institutions, while being limited by the need to accept partial victories and represent even the most backwards sections of the working class. However, the unions are not opposed to capital as such. Every union in the history of the United States (and everywhere else, as far as I have seen), from the NMU, to the Knights of Labor, to the FOTLU, to the AFL, to the CIO, has eventually struggled to limit workers to demands that could be met under capital’s aegis. Only the IWW has been a different kind of organization, but only in so far as the IWW was not a union. The IWW refused to make contracts, did not establish systems of stewards, and saw itself largely as an organizing center, rather than as a union. In fact, one could view the IWW as a partial recreation of the International Workingmen’s Association, in terms of its structure and composition.
7. The inability to oppose capital and the capital-labor relation partially rests on the recognition of the unions by either particular capitalists or corporations or even industries as legitimate partners in the control of labor and the production of a consistent, manageable pool of labor power. This is obvious in the case of the craft unions, but also in hiring halls and industrial unions in different periods and different ways. It also partially rests on the increasing integration of the state and the trade unions. The official recognition of the trade unions also means deeper collusion between capital and the unions. Their legalism increases and things like the dues check-off system gives the bureaucrats a vested interest in staying within the law. The integration with the state further increases the distance between the membership and the officialdom. Finally, the unions would cease to exist without the capital-labor relation, so the union machinery and officials have a vested interest in the continuation of the capital-labor relation.
8. Some people claim that the unions can be schools for the democratic self-organization of the class and its struggles. A careful differentiation needs to be made here between what is sometimes possible, generally only at the local level, and what has historically been true, especially, but not only, at the regional, national and international levels. Leninists and Social Democrats have often confused temporary tolerance by the leading union bureaucrats (such as with Lewis in the CIO) with actual democratic control of the union by the workers. At those levels, the unions have always been bureaucratic and most successful workers’ struggles find themselves in direct conflict with the unions, except when certain union officials support massive upsurges in working class activity in order to rein them in and re-institutionalize that struggle. This history is obvious in reference to the AFL, the Knights of Labor in their last years, as well as the independent craft unions. However, from the very beginning, even the CIO represented a section of the trade union bureaucrats from the AFL recognizing the need to rein in the mass insurgency of 1934. At every step, as the workers became less militant or more connected to the leadership of Lewis, Hillman, Reuther, the CPUSA, etc., that same leadership came to dominate and de-rail the workers’ struggles. The idea that the unions can provide a place for workers to begin to judge the policies of different tendencies within the class, to test their power against the capitalist class, and to democratically control themselves and their would-be leaders is absurd. Unless one means that the workers can learn about the limitations of class collaboration by watching themselves be repeatedly sold down the river. Rather, workers need to take control of each struggle from the unions. Democratic control can only be asserted over struggles from outside the union machinery.
9. The response to this argument is as follows: “It is incorrect to argue that because the trade unions are limited organizations that they must always submit to the rules and laws of capitalism. This confuses the limits of a reformist, class collaboration leadership with the limits of trade unions. This attitude also serves as a left cover for such a policy.” On the contrary, the idea that unions can be anything other than class collaborationist serves as an apology for trade union reformism. Certainly, local leaderships can take a different approach, and sometimes have, but they generally face the hostility of the regional, national and international leaderships. The power of a revolutionary local leadership has to come from the base and from workers’ struggles, not from Realpolitik within the union by this or that “party” seeking to form a “revolutionary opposition” within the apparatus.
What is the attitude of revolutionaries towards trade union activity?
1. The most basic answer is to say that revolutionaries will find themselves in the unions and in the trade union struggle. This is not simply a struggle for daily demands against the ruling class, but a struggle for the autonomy of workers in struggle, in relation to capital and to the unions. It is not a principled struggle to spread the influence of the unions over an ever-increasing section of the working class. It is a struggle to foster self-reliance and the creation of independent workers’ organs to control each and every struggle and to challenge the capital-labor relation. To abstain from unions would clear the path for the trade union bureaucrats, but neither should we seek positions in the union, except under conditions of mass rank and file action. We can only become “better” bureaucrats by seeking positions in the unions [EDIT 11/2023: under any other conditions], a tendency with a long history.
2. The essential form that revolutionary trade union work takes is the formation of a revolutionary opposition, which does not seek leadership, but which promotes the idea that workers win struggles only through self-organization and self-determination. The revolutionary opposition expresses the conscious idea of working class self-determination within and against the trade unions. This opposition may not always be public (for a variety of reasons: security, repression, expulsions, etc.), but it must cohere around a complete rejection of all external limitations on struggles and for the creation of independent organs of control and information in each struggle. At the same time, we can participate in the struggle for union democracy, union independence from state control, etc. in order to clear a greater space for struggle for those workers in the unions. The revolutionary opposition fights against the union officialdom and ideological adherence to unionism as one of the greatest impediments within the working class to the workers’ interests and as the agents of capital in the working class.
3. The labor bureaucracy is the agent of the capitalist class within the working class. The labor bureaucracy supports capital’s domination of labor. This labor bureaucracy has always been, at its core, defined by a policy of class collaboration because the unions are class collaborationist. Unlike Leninists, we see unions as inherently class collaborationist, regardless of leadership. This has not changed. The struggle against the labor bureaucracy is essential to the struggle against the capitalist class. The labor bureaucracy will always choose its ties to capital over any ties it has to the workers.
4. What has been increasingly true since the 1920’s, however, is the degree to which the trade unions have become tied to the state. The trade union officials have always been ‘the labor lieutenants of capital’, but the unions themselves are increasingly also the guardians of state authority and bourgeois legalism, sanctified by state regulation of the trade unions (see the Taft-Hartley Act, the National Labor Relations Board, the McCarran Act, and so on). This finds its purest expression in the fascist regimes and military dictatorships, but is true of the ‘democratic’ states also.
5. This does not mean that the labor bureaucracy is the same as the bourgeois parties. There is no choice between the Democrats and Republican (or the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Parties, or the Conservatives and Labor or the Liberal Democratic Parts and the Socialist Party, etc.), but there is a difference, at times, between the left, center and right in the trade unions. This is possible to say because the union bureaucracy leads mass working class organizations directly representing labor against a particular employer or industry. The control exerted over the workers determines the labor bureaucrats’ usefulness to the capitalist class, but also requires that the unions partially attend to the need of the workers. The key, here, is that the bureaucracy must maintain control, and this may require actions a la John L. Lewis supporting the formation of the CIO and supporting mass organizing drives. [EDIT Nov. 2023: This sections requires at least rethinking and is especially open to question. In the present where there are the normal parties of bourgeois domination, and "electoral parties" become effectively fascist parties, while the "normal" bourgeois parties behave as they did in the 1920's and 30's, failing to properly oppose even on bourgeois grounds the fascist parties, it also feels simplistic to not understand the difference for the struggles of the oppressed to oppose open regression and to simply equate bourgeois democratic conditions with fascist conditions. In the end, based on my theses, is voting for a liberal genuinely in some sense worse or more meaningless than siding with a nominally progressive union bureaucrat?]
6. Another distinction must be made between the upper and lower layers of the bureaucracy. Conflicts arise because lower layers of the bureaucracy are more likely to break with (or at least temporarily violate) a class collaborationist policy. This is the case for a variety of reasons: closeness to the living conditions of the rank and file; greater pressure from the rank and file due to a more direct dependence on the members in a local; less benefits from association with the union; conflicts over being in an employee-employer-like relationship with the upper layers of the bureaucracy, etc.
7. What does this mean? It means that a revolutionary opposition in the unions must exploit the divisions in the union apparatus between different officials. It is possible to win individual officials from the apparatus to the workers’ side during individual fights. It is also possible, in a mass upsurge, pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation, for a portion of the apparatus to break with the bureaucracy and join the revolutionary opposition.
8. There are no recipes regarding strategy and tactics to be drawn from the above points. There can be no concession to temporary allies in the apparatus (who we will probably have to fight tomorrow) on this. We cannot be silent for one moment on the weaknesses and failings of our ‘allies’ because silence provides a left cover for the left-reformists and centrists. There is ample proof of the deadliness of this policy in the British General Strike of 1926, the French General Strike of 1935, Spain in 1936-9, the CIO, and other crucial moments closer to home.
9. A revolutionary opposition must always address the interests of the workers in the union in relation to the interests of the working class as a whole, internationally. Many workers in the unions support the trade unions and get material benefits from the union. Even in the face of mass struggle, many workers will have illusions in the role of the unions. This includes a section of the revolutionary rank and file whose size and weight varies in any period. Cooperation with particular officials is possible when we have the same goal, but must be conducted in such a way that we fight for workers’ independent organs of struggle to which everyone is subordinated.
10. It is in the nature of what we have to propose as revolutionaries that we make the left-reformists and centrists (and trade unionists of all sorts) uncomfortable and even hostile. We will have few allies among the union-oriented Left and trade unionists.
11. Revolutionaries also reject the notion that the unions are politically neutral. They are not and never will be. This is obvious in all the major imperialist powers, especially Britain, France and the United States. The unions can never really have independence from the state and from capital, even when they have independence from all capitalist parties.
12. Finally, I want to address one last argument which in my opinion sums up the Leninist attitude towards the unions. It might be reasonably worded as follows: “We also reject the notion that the unions are necessarily consigned by fate or by their non-revolutionary function to be lead by reformist or reactionary tendencies in the working class. This is a complete falsehood. It is possible for unions to be lead by a revolutionary party of the working class, in a way that is consistent with revolutionary politics. The difference between revolutionary leadership and non-revolutionary leadership is this: that communist trade union leaders always fight for the full victory of the workers in every struggle, seek to push each struggle to its fullest development, and never stop a struggle from achieving the maximum victory. Communists also do not accept agreements that constrain the right of the workers to fight (such as no strike clauses, cooling off periods, notice of strike, etc.) The reformists hold back the struggle at every point where it comes up against their personal interests, their relations with the bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties, where it threatens bourgeois property or where it threatens to go beyond their control. In other words, the reformists are always pulled back by the policies of class collaboration, which rest on the right of the capitalist class to exploit the working class, while the working class’ only right is to bargain for a better arrangement within the existing order.” The problem of the first sentence is that leadership appears as the problem and the solution, rather than the class nature of the unions as mass working class reformist bodies which can be nothing but class collaborationist. The question of who leads the unions does not change their character, but the nature of trade unions certainly changes the character of the revolutionaries who lead them. The approach quoted above does not start from the self-activity of the working class as the central component of struggle. It fails to take into account that any structure which the struggles of the working class give rise inevitably become integrated into capital in some form or another if they survive beyond the movement which gave rise to them. Nor does it take into account the current conjuncture and the fate of unions in a post-Keynesian world of (choose your term of choice: neo-liberalism, globalization, new enclosures, etc.) Those unions and relations codified the partial victory of the working class in the United States in the 1930’s, working class militancy during WWII and the new period of global expansion of capital after WWII. They in turn became the means of managing and controlling working class struggle.
Written May 2001
Addendum November 2023:
Need to add more clarity that in the name of the defense of a particular industry, unions can be quite reactionary. e.g. Prison guard unions, unions in the military industry, and in general against global warming.
More than ever, Marx's comment on the relationship of communists to the struggles of the proletariat as a class in The Communist Manifesto are more a propos than ever, and yet more challenging than ever.
“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”
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