Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
Part Four
I. The Spartacist League and the trade unions
Spartacist's first political priority in attacking the International Committee's analysis of globalization is to uphold the perspective of trade unionism and, in particular, the authority of the AFL-CIO in the US. This is of a piece with its defense of a national program for the working class. The trade union form of organization arose historically on the soil of the national economy and the growing power of the national state. In the most diverse circumstances, whether the unions were the creation of a mass socialist party, as in Germany in the late 1800s, or whether they emerged as purely economic organizations with political ties to the liberal bourgeoisie, as in England, they based themselves on the success of the national economy and national industry.
The politics of the unions focused on pressuring the state to protect national industry by means of tariffs, etc. This historical development gave rise to strong and ultimately dominant tendencies of national opportunism and reformism. The basic evolution of the trade unions was not only in opposition to socialist revolution, but to the class struggle itself. As the economic life of the nation states of Europe and America increasingly expanded beyond the national sphere and onto the world stage, with the emergence of imperialism, the nationalist politics of the unions became the imperialist politics of the unions.
Thus the unions' tendency to embrace nationalism and integrate themselves into the state has very real material foundations. The development of globalized economy has undermined the viability of trade unions as nationally-based defensive organizations of the working class. This process is expressed in the decay of these organizations and their transformation into appendages of the employers and the state.
What is Spartacist's basic argument? Globalization is not real. There has been no fundamental economic change in capitalism since the beginning of the century. There is no objective cause for the wave of defeats suffered by the labor movement over the past two decades and the general decline in wage levels, benefits and working conditions. There has been no qualitative change in the role of the official unions. Rather this process is to be explained simply by the subjective cowardice and treachery of the union leaders.
Spartacist attacks the Socialist Equality Party for insisting that the decline of the unions cannot be simply, or even primarily, ascribed to the subjective qualities of the union leaders, but that the corrupt and reactionary character of the leaders must rather be understood, in the final analysis, as the subjective expression of more fundamental objective processes.
The effort to establish the link between political processes and more essential changes and developments in the mode of production has always been the hallmark of Marxism. This scientific approach flows from the philosophical premises and world conception of historical materialism. Certainly, this was the method of the towering figures of the Marxist movement, including Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, and they applied it to the study of the evolution of the trade unions and their assessment of the limitations of this form of working class organization. This historical and materialist approach has always distinguished Marxism from revisionism.
For Lenin, the objective connection between the development of imperialism and the degeneration of Social Democracy was the central point of his entire analysis of the betrayal of the Second International.
In his preface to the 1920 edition of Imperialism, he insisted that understanding the objective basis of the betrayals of the leadership of the Second International was the key question in the political reorientation of the international proletariat.
"Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problems of the communist movement and the impending social revolution."1
Nothing less is required today. The betrayals, degeneration and collapse of all the old organizations of the working class must be grasped in connection with the economic processes that underlie them.
Spartacist rejects this Marxist approach. They refuse at any point to make a historical evaluation of the trade unions. Instead they adopt an entirely subjectivist standpoint, which is summed up in their declaration, "The decline of the American labor movement is not fundamentally caused by the objective effects of 'globalization' but by the defeatist and treacherous policies of the AFL-CIO misleaders."2
To underscore their insistence that the official unions remain viable instruments of working class struggle, and that they simply need more militant leaders and policies, the Spartacists quote their 1984 statement entitled "Labor's Gotta Play Hardball to Win."
There follows a bit of fantasizing, which only demonstrates the prostration of Spartacist before the trade union bureaucracy and the essentially reformist orientation that, of necessity, accompanies their nationalist politics. They offer the example of a building strike that occurred the previous winter in New York City, where 15,000 strikebreakers were used to replace the workers. The office buildings operated more or less as usual. Workers Vanguard explains that this struggle could have had a happy ending if only the union leaders had decided to do the right thing.
Spartacist writes: "But let us imagine what would have happened if organized labor had sought to organize New York City's working people and appealed to the dispossessed population of New York's ghettos and barrios to actively support the heavily minority and immigrant building workers".
In a further flight of fancy, they continue: "Dozens and hundreds of strikers and other workers, union and non-union -- along with black and Hispanic youth -- could have surrounded every major office building in New York City and prevented anyone from entering."
This, supposedly, would have been sufficient to bring Wall Street to its knees. "David North to the contrary, the CEOs of American multinationals would not have responded by closing their New York headquarters and running their operations out of New Delhi or Mexico City. Rather the cops would have attacked and tried to break the picket lines, arresting militant workers and their supporters. The outcome would then have been determined by the ability of the New York City labor movement to organize effective actions backed by popular support, especially in the black and Hispanic communities."
Then comes the climax: "A one-day transit strike, for example, might have convinced the powers that be in the world's financial capital to impose a deal on the real estate barons favorable to the building workers."3
Here we see the cringing before the bureaucracy and the petty-minded reformism that arise from the subjective and nationalist politics of the Spartacist League. It is a pathetic scenario: First, the union bureaucrats change their minds -- and abandon their organic aversion to the class struggle -- and mobilize the masses. They even call a transit strike. (Not an indefinite strike; just a one-day strike. Even the fantasies of the Spartacist League conform to the small change of their politics.)
This, however, is sufficient to unnerve the bankers. They change their minds and, in turn, change the minds of the building owners. The circle of subjective decision-making is completed. Everyone has changed his mind and all the problems are solved. The building workers win, and labor and capital are reconciled.
Hence, according to the Spartacist League, there is no reason why the bitter experiences of workers with the AFL-CIO should become the starting point for drawing fundamental conclusions about the class nature and political role of the official unions, or the viability of national-based forms of organization and nationalist programs in general.
The only permissible conclusion is that the AFL-CIO must somehow be made to adopt more militant tactics -- bigger picket lines and more aggressive forms of pressure on the employers and the government. It is forbidden to challenge the authority of the established trade union organizations. In all their struggles, American workers must seek the sanction of the AFL-CIO.
In its 1994 perspectives document, the Spartacist League takes note of the growing disaffection of workers, especially the younger, more militant and more socialistically inclined sections, from the AFL-CIO unions. It notes further that the same younger workers who evince a concern for "broad political and social issues" have little interest in the external horse trading and internal machinations of their unions. Far from viewing as a positive development these signs of growing political interest and a striving to break the grip of the bureaucratic apparatus, Spartacists' reaction is to drag such workers backwards and keep them in the thrall of the AFL-CIO.
They write: "Given the succession of defeated strikes from PATCO to Caterpillar, many workers, especially the younger generation, do not view their union as a potential combat organization against the boss but at best as an agency to service their particular grievances. Consequently, we are now encountering young workers interested in broad political and social questions, who are not involved or concerned with intra-union affairs. We are also encountering immigrant workers whose experience in the more class-conscious labor movements of their homelands makes them open to revolutionary politics. It is necessary to convince such workers, who may be sympathetic to a socialist perspective, that the union movement can and must be transformed into an instrument of militant struggle against the bourgeois order."
One could hardly find a more categorical attempt to promote trade unionism as a political antidote to the growth of socialist political consciousness within the working class. This paragraph reveals the diametrically opposed social and political tendencies embodied in the Spartacist League, on the one hand, and, on the other, the International Committee and the Socialist Equality Party in the United States.
The SEP seeks to give conscious expression to the instinctive striving of the working class, in the first instance its more conscious and militant layers, to find a way out of the impasse resulting from the influence of the trade union apparatus. It seeks to reveal the connection between the failure of the AFL-CIO and the inherent limitations of trade unionism, and explain the need for the working class to take the road of political struggle, on the basis of a revolutionary, socialist and internationalist strategy. It encourages the development of a rebellion against the labor bureaucracy, and sees in the growing conflict between the working class and the AFL-CIO the basis for new, more militant and revolutionary forms of working class organization.
The Spartacist League reacts to the signs of a collision between the working class and the trade union apparatus with alarm and hostility.
It seeks to defend the apparatus and hold back the working class. It is well aware that the very workers who are hostile to the union apparatus and are looking for a more revolutionary alternative will be attracted to the political program of the Socialist Equality Party. That is why the Spartacists so deeply hate the SEP. Their antipathy for the Marxist party reflects the fear and hatred of the trade union bureaucracy itself.
II. Marxism and the trade union question
The Marxist movement has a long and rich record of theoretical and political discussion on the trade unions, and their inherent limitations. The Spartacist League makes no study of this record. Instead, it attributes to Marxism a rosy assessment of trade unions and their supposed revolutionary potential, which is entirely unwarranted from the standpoint of Marxist doctrine and, moreover, flies in the face of the long and bitter practical experience of the working class with the unions.
The Spartacist League summed up its conception of the relation of the Marxist movement to the trade unions in an article published in Workers Vanguard in July 1993 entitled "Workers League vs. the Unions." They declared that "for communists," the "fundamental aim in the labor movement" is "to transform the unions into a tool of the revolutionary will of the proletariat."
Spartacist's claim is radically false. Revolutionary Marxists have never considered their "fundamental aim" to be turning the unions into instruments of the revolutionary struggle of the working class. On the contrary, the greatest Marxist leaders and theoreticians have insisted that the unions, by their very nature, can at best serve as defensive organizations of the working class, seeking to obtain the best possible wages and working conditions within the framework of the capitalist system. Whatever tactics revolutionary Marxists advocated for intervening in the unions, they emphasized, as a matter of principle and revolutionary strategy, the narrow and limited scope of trade union struggle. They sought to educate workers on the need to construct independent political parties, based on the perspective of socialist internationalism, to fight for political power and the abolition of the wages system.
The Spartacists' attempt to cut Marx down to their own size produces laughable results. At one point they counterpose to "parochial, nationally limited trade unionism" the need for "an internationalist class-struggle perspective." (Emphasis in the original). According to Spartacist, the vehicle for carrying out such a perspective is not a socialist political party of the working class, but rather the trade unions, somehow transformed from organizations that have historically embraced nationalism and class collaboration into their internationalist and revolutionary opposite.
Next comes the following astounding sentence: "Indeed, one of the reasons for the establishment of the First International founded by Karl Marx was to organize trade-union solidarity between workers in Britain and continental Europe."
In other words, Marx founded the First International, not as the international revolutionary party of the working class, to which the unions would be entirely subordinate, but rather as a means for building the unions and coordinating their activities on a European-wide scale. Thus Spartacist recasts Marx in its own image, reducing him to a trade union administrator.
We have already seen the theoretical blunders of Spartacist on the question of the wages struggle. It is also necessary to note the essentially ahistorical method which they employ in citing the "iron law of wages" controversy from the 1860s, in order to attack the IC's analysis some 140 years later. It is an example of the failure to consider political questions from the standpoint of their historical context and evolution that is so characteristic of the formal and anti-Marxist method of Spartacist, and petty-bourgeois "leftism" in general.
After all, Marx and Engels were writing about the economic struggle in the period of the first flush of trade unionism, when capitalist industry was growing rapidly in England, and was just beginning to develop on the Continent. The modern nation state structure of Europe and North America was still in the process of formation, and the mass socialist parties of the Second International were still the music of the future. The working class was just beginning, in a mass way, to make its experience with the trade unions, and while their essential limitations could be grasped from a scientific understanding of the class relations of capitalist society, the future evolution of the unions could not be predicted with complete precision.
An entire historical epoch has passed since then. Capitalism has evolved from free competition to monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Two world wars, the Russian revolution, the rise of Stalinism, the triumph of fascism in Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union and decades of trade union reformism and corporatism have transpired. One would have to be a hopeless doctrinaire, a la Spartacist, without an inkling of the historical materialist method, to proceed as if these great historical events and experiences had no bearing on Marxism's assessment of trade unionism today. Indeed, even within their own lifetimes, Marx and Engels became increasingly scathing in their estimation of trade unionism and categorical as to its organic opposition to revolutionary socialism.
As a serious review of the writings of the most important Marxist theoreticians makes clear, Spartacist's notion that the basic task of socialists is to transform the unions into instruments of revolutionary struggle is a wild departure from Marxist doctrine. Indeed, Marx and Engels stressed that the unions, by virtue of their essential economic function, did not oppose the wages system, but rather helped enforce it.
What is this economic function? By means of the trade union form of organization, workers in a particular branch of industry combine their forces in order to obtain the most favorable possible terms for the sale of their labor power to the capitalists. On the one hand, this is an attempt by the workers to defend their position vis a vis the employers. But at the same time, resting as it does on the foundation of the wages system, it is a means of enforcing the capitalist law of wages, i.e., affecting the labor market so as to keep wages, at any given time, at approximately the full market value of labor power.
Thus Marx wrote in Volume One of Capital: "The trade unions aim at nothing less than to prevent the reduction of wages below the level that is traditionally maintained in the various branches of industry. That is to say, they wish to prevent the price of labor-power from falling below its value..."4
Engels, in an article entitled "The Wages System"(1881), wrote: "The law of wages is not upset by the struggles of the trades unions. On the contrary, it is enforced by them."5
The same idea was elaborated in greater detail by Rosa Luxemburg in her 1899 polemic against Bernsteinian revisionism, Reform or Revolution:
"But the fact is that the principal function of trade unions...consists in providing the workers with a means of realizing the capitalist law of wages, that is to say, the sale of their labor power at current market prices. Trade unions enable the proletariat to utilize, at each instant, the conjuncture of the market. But these conjunctures....remain outside the sphere of influence of the trade unions. Trade unions cannot suppress the law of wages. Under the most favorable circumstances, the best they can do is to impose on capitalist exploitation the 'normal' limits of the moment. They have not, however, the power to suppress exploitation itself, not even gradually...
"This much may be said about the purely economic side of the 'struggle of the rate of wages against the rate of profit,' as Bernstein labels the activity of the trade union. It does not take place in the blue of the sky. It takes place within the well defined framework of the law of wages. The law of wages is not shattered but applied by trade union activity."6
By ignoring and implicitly denying the law of wages under capitalism, and attributing to the trade unions unlimited possibilities for improving wages, the Spartacists, notwithstanding their indulgence in revolutionary-sounding rhetoric, deny the objective necessity for socialist revolution and the building of a political party of the working class based on Marxism. For if workers, by means of trade union struggle, can drive their wages ever higher, why should they embark on the struggle for power and the abolition of capitalism? At best, socialism becomes a moral desideratum, and scientific socialism is replaced by a new version of utopianism.
The Spartacist League is not entirely oblivious to the reformist logic of its position. Thus, in the manner of all eclectic pretenders to Marxism, it includes a passage in its attack on the Socialist Equality Party and the ICFI aimed at providing itself with a theoretical cover. "There are, of course," the Spartacists write, "limits to what can be gained through trade-union struggle, however militant. As their labor costs rise beyond a certain point, capitalists will respond by retrenching (i.e., shutting down less profitable operations), introducing new labor-saving technology as well as shifting some operations to low-wage countries."7
In fact, this allusion to the law of wages is theoretically flawed. It suggests that the introduction of new technology to reduce the proportion of labor power to fixed capital is simply a contingent aspect of capitalist production, merely a defensive response to rising wages. While it is true that capitalists employ new technology for the specific and conscious purpose of undermining the wages struggle of workers, that is only one aspect of the matter. As Marx and Engels explained, as early as the Communist Manifesto, the constant revolutionizing of the production process is an inherent feature of capitalism, dictated not only by the pressure of the working class, but by the competition between rival capitalists which is an essential feature of the capitalist market.
But even more illuminating of the basic method of Spartacist -- that is, subjectivism -- is what immediately follows the above quoted sentence:
"The labor bureaucracy points to the ability of the capitalists to counter union gains by such means in order to argue that the workers must accept existing, or even worse, conditions without a fight, while laying the blame on workers in other countries for 'stealing American jobs.'"
Thus, having alluded to a fundamental and objective feature of trade unionism, which renders it incapable of permanently raising the wages of the working class, Spartacist rushes to place the blame, not on trade unionism as such, but rather on the nefarious motives of trade union officials. The SEP would be the last to dispute the rotten character and base motives of the union leaders, but the fact remains that workers' struggles, in so far as they remain restricted to the form of trade unionism, can find no means of overcoming the basic tendency of capitalist production to drive down workers' wages and working conditions. This is what Spartacist seeks to obscure.
The theoretical insight into trade unionism provided by the Marxist analysis of capitalist production relations, and the scientific conclusions drawn from decades of historical experience, demonstrate that the trade union form of organization organically evolves in a manner hostile to the class struggle. The fact that trade unions arose historically out of the class struggle does not mean that they provide an adequate means for prosecuting that struggle. On the contrary, their essential role as instruments through which workers collectively bargain to sell their labor power, and the forms of organization attendant to that role, inexorably drive them to adopt a standpoint of class collaboration and conciliation.
III. The antagonism between the unions and revolutionary Marxism
Thus, the historically antagonistic relationship between the revolutionary Marxist party and the trade unions -- a phenomenon that has emerged wherever industrial capitalism has developed -- is rooted in the objective characteristics of the trade union form. The Marxist party represents the working class in its historical capacity as the revolutionary antithesis to the production relations of capitalism. The trade unions ultimately base themselves on these very production relations.
What are some of the essential characteristics of the trade union form? In the first place, the trade unions organize workers according to particular crafts or branches of industry, that is, according to the requirements of the capitalist market for labor power. Thus, by their very nature, they do not represent the working class as a unified social and revolutionary force. Instead, they divide workers into various sectional interests, defined by the operation of the capitalist market, not the historical imperative to overcome that market. The unions, in essence, embody the working class in its aspect as an oppressed and exploited part of society, not as a revolutionary class.
For precisely this reason, the unions respond to technological progress in a reactionary manner. Either they seek to block it, in order to maintain existing employment and wage levels, or they abandon any defense of jobs and wages and collaborate in imposing new forms of production at the expense of their members. The unions cannot embrace technological progress, which serves the long-term historical interests of the working class, and at the same time defend the immediate conditions of workers, which are threatened by such progress, because this task can be accomplished only on the basis of a revolutionary socialist orientation. Such an orientation strives to mobilize the working class in defense of its immediate needs, while demonstrating to the workers at every point the need to abolish private ownership of the means of production and establish common ownership of technology and all the basic levers of economic life, so as to reorganize production in accord with human need, rather than profit.
Luxemburg, in Reform or Revolution, sums up the attitude of the unions to technological development as follows:
"Insofar as trade unions can intervene in the technical department of production, they can only oppose technical innovation. But here they do not act in the interest of the entire working class and its emancipation, which accord rather with technical progress and, therefore, with the interest of the isolated capitalist. They act here in a reactionary direction."8
The unions must, moreover, seek to establish legal and binding agreements with the employers for the terms of the sale of labor power. In so far as they enforce these contracts, they enforce the principle of bourgeois legality, and seek to ensure stable and peaceful relations between employer and worker. Any insurgent movement of workers threatens these relations, and social revolution means the eradication of the very economic and social foundations upon which the unions are based.
What are the further implications of the acceptance of the status of workers as sellers of labor power? Inevitably it compels the unions to adapt themselves to the changing needs of capital for new forms of labor, based on higher levels of exploitation. When new methods and forms of capitalist production demand a new type of worker, without the safeguards of relatively secure employment, the eight hour day, firm job classifications, seniority, pensions, health benefits, etc.; when, instead, they demand flexible, part-time and temporary labor, where workers' hours are dictated by the immediate needs of the employer, and wages and benefits remain at poverty levels, the unions must either supply these requirements of the market, or go out of business.
Historical experience has demonstrated, in practice, the organic antagonism of the trade unions to the class struggle and to social revolution. In this respect, the examples of Britain and Germany are most revealing, since the two countries provide the classical models of trade unionism. In Britain, the unions grew and flourished in the aftermath of the collapse of a revolutionary political movement of the working class, Chartism. They emerged as purely economic organizations and rapidly came under the political wing of the Liberal Party, the party of the manufacturing bourgeoisie. In Germany, the mass unions were founded by the Social Democracy. They officially adhered to the program of Marxism and emerged as instruments on the economic front of the mass socialist party. Yet, in both countries, the unions evolved as conservative defenders of the capitalist status quo.
IV. Engels and the English unions
Engels, in his writings on the English working class from the 1840s, evinced considerable enthusiasm over the growth of strike struggles and trade unions. But even at this early stage, he criticized the narrowness of the unions and considered Chartism to be a superior and more advanced form of struggle. In his later writings, he associated the rise of the unions with a political decline in the labor movement, following the breakup of the Chartist movement after 1848. He became increasingly contemptuous of the unions, describing their transformation from instruments of working class insurgency into well-established institutions of the official status quo.
In an 1879 letter to Bernstein, Engels did not mince words as to the state of the English labor movement:
"For a number of years past the English working-class movement has been hopelessly describing a narrow circle of strikes for higher wages and shorter hours, not, however, as an expedient or means of propaganda and organization but as the ultimate aim. The Trades Unions even bar all political action on principle and in their charters, and thereby also ban participation in any general activity of the working class as a class...
"One can speak here of a labour movement only in so far as strikes take place here which, whether they are won or not, do not get the movement one step further. To inflate such strikes -- which often enough have been brought about purposely during the last few years of bad business by the capitalists to have a pretext for closing down their factories and mills, strikes in which the working-class movement does not make the slightest headway -- into struggles of world importance, as is done, for instance, in the Freiheit, published here, can, in my opinion, only do harm. No attempt should be made to conceal the fact that at present no real labour movement in the Continental sense exists here, and I therefore believe you will not lose much if for the time being you do not receive any reports on the doings of the Trades Unions here."9
In 1881 he wrote: "Trades Unions have now become acknowledged institutions, and their action as one of the regulators of wages is recognized quite as much as the action of the Factories and Workshops Acts as regulators of hours of work."10
In the same article he anticipated the emergence of new, political forms of struggle that would overcome the stifling influence of the unions on the working class:
"More than this, there are plenty of symptoms that the working class of this country is awakening to the consciousness that it has for some time been moving in the wrong groove; that the present movements for higher wages and shorter hours exclusively, keep it in a vicious circle out of which there is no issue; that it is not the lowness of wages which forms the fundamental evil, but the wages system itself. This knowledge, once generally spread amongst the working class, the position of the Trades Unions must change considerably. They will no longer enjoy the privilege of being the only organizations of the working class. At the side of, or above, the Unions of special trades there must spring up a general Union, a political organization of the working class as a whole."11
In a famous article entitled "England in 1845 and 1885," Engels described the shift in the attitude of the manufacturing bourgeoisie toward the unions following the rapid growth of British industry in the decades that followed the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846):
"Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades Unions, lately considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronized as perfectly legitimate institutions and as useful means of spreading sound economic doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time."12
Of the "great Trades Unions," he wrote: "They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model working men of Messrs. Leone Levi and Giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.
"But as to the great mass of the working people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower."13
As for the relations between the First International and the trade unions, they were, contrary to Spartacists' depiction, essentially antagonistic. In a letter of 1871 to Carlo Cafiero, an Italian socialist who helped organize a section of the International in Naples, Engels wrote, "The trade-union movement, among all the big, strong and rich trade unions, has become more an obstacle to the general movement than an instrument of its progress..."14
In a letter of 1887 to John Mahon, a Scottish socialist, he said, "What you say about the leaders of the Trades Unions is quite true. We have had to fight them from the beginning of the International. From them have sprung the Macdonalds, Burts, Cremers and Howells, and their success in the parliamentary line encourages the minor leaders to imitate their conduct."15
During the life of the First International, Marx paid considerable attention to the development of trade union and strike struggles, and he held open the possibility that the unions could contribute to the revolutionary liberation of the working class. However, he had no illusions that they could serve as a substitute for the independent political organization of the working class. Thus, for example, at the Basle conference of the International, Marx spoke in opposition to a resolution submitted by a French delegate proposing the establishment of an international federation of trade unions. Such an association, the delegate declared, would be "the true commune of the future."
According to a report of Marx's speech, "He [Marx] denies that it is the commune of the future because [this] project rest on the division of labor, principal cause of the slavery of the workers. It may ameliorate the lot of the workers a little, but it cannot be offered as an ideal."16
Another report quotes Marx as follows: "The trade unions by standing alone are powerless -- they will remain a minority. They do not have the mass of proletarians behind them, while the International influences these people directly; the International doesn't need the organization of trade unions in order to win the workers -- the ideas of the International inspire them at once. It is the only union which inspires full confidence among the workers."17
In the final years of his life, Engels hoped that the emergence of unions among the more oppressed sections of workers, particularly the impoverished laborers of London's East End, and struggles such as the great dock workers' strike of 1889, signaled a new, militant brand of trade unionism that would contribute to the development of a mass socialist movement of British workers. Marx's daughter, Eleanor, played a leading role in the early struggles of one of these unions, the gas workers, as well as the political agitation that led to the formation of the Labour Party. But by the time of his death in 1895, Engels was writing with bitterness of the inclination of the leaders of the "new unionism" to follow the same conservative path as their predecessors.
V. The lessons of German social democracy
Within the German social democracy, the British unions were commonly referred to as bourgeois unions. It was felt that the German unions, founded by the socialist movement and officially part of the revolutionary camp, would play a different role. But as German industry developed rapidly, particularly in the latter half of the 1890s, and the membership and treasuries of the unions grew apace, they quickly began to evince the same reactionary tendencies that characterized their British counterparts.
Eduard Bernstein, who lived for some two decades in exile in England, based his revisionist theories to a large extent on the "success" of the British unions. He claimed that the English unions demonstrated the capacity of trade union reformism, combined with parliamentary activity, to progressively overcome the exploitative tendencies of capitalism, leading eventually to a peaceful transition to socialism.
While the leadership of the Social Democracy, including initially the trade union leaders, officially opposed Bernstein's attack on Marxist orthodoxy, his opportunist program articulated the social interests and political inclination of the German unions. The latter soon became the most important base for the opportunist tendency within the Social Democracy. In the first decade of the 20 th century, the party leadership increasingly adapted itself to the right-wing politics of the unions, and this process was very much at the heart of the political degeneration that led to the collapse of the German Social Democracy in 1914.
Rosa Luxemburg was in the forefront of the political and theoretical struggle of the Marxist wing of the party against the national opportunist tendency, directing much of her fire against its exponents in the trade union apparatus. Her brilliant polemic against Bernstein, Reform or Revolution, was in large measure a refutation of the attempt to endow trade unionism with a revolutionary dynamic. While acknowledging their necessity, she called the efforts of the unions a "labor of Sisyphus," explaining that their successes were, in the end, determined by the economic and trade conjuncture, and that gains won in one period would be lost in another. Moreover, she declared, the more the economy developed on an international scale, the less viable the national orientation of the unions.
As the membership of the unions grew, alongside the growth of German national industry, the union leadership began to agitate for autonomy, arguing that their role as organizers of the day-to-day struggle required that they be independent of the decisions of the party. Luxemburg led the fight against this conception.
In the first decade of the 20 th century, this conflict became more intense, particularly in the aftermath of the Russian revolution of 1905. Luxemburg embraced the revolution and insisted that it signified the emergence of proletarian revolution not only in Russia, but on a European-wide scale. The unions, on the contrary, reacted with horror to the events in Russia, recognizing in them a direct threat to their perspective of peaceful and gradual growth within the framework of German capitalism.
When Luxemburg declared that the mass political strikes that had rocked the Tsarist autocracy represented the form of working class revolutionary struggle, and insisted that the Social Democracy had to prepare consciously for the outbreak of mass strikes in Germany, the unions responded with frenzied denunciations. At one trade union congress they passed a resolution banning any discussion of the mass strike tactic.
In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, written in 1906, Luxemburg deepened her critique of the unions, warning of their opportunist trajectory, their tendency to exclude the most oppressed sections of the working class, and the growth of bureaucratism within them. Insisting on the hegemony of the revolutionary party over the trade unions, she directly linked the demand of the unions for autonomy with the opportunist tendency spearheaded by Bernstein.
"The trade unions represent only the group interests and only one stage of development of the labor movement," she wrote. "Social democracy represents the working class and the cause of its liberation as a whole. The relation of the trade unions to social democracy is therefore a part of the whole, and when, amongst the trade-union leaders, the theory of 'equal authority' of trade unions and social democracy finds so much favor, it rests upon a fundamental misconception of the essence of trade unionism itself and of its role in the general struggle for freedom of the working class...
"The theory of the 'equal authority' of trade unions and social democracy is likewise not a mere theoretical misunderstanding, not a mere case of confusion, but an expression of the well-known tendency of that opportunist wing of social democracy which reduces the political struggle of the working class to the parliamentary contest, and desires to change social democracy from a revolutionary proletarian party into a petty-bourgeois reform one. If social democracy should accept the theory of the 'equal authority' of the trade unions, it would thereby accept, indirectly and tacitly, that transformation which has long been striven for by the representatives of the opportunist tendency."18
In ringing passages that provide a concise and passionate summation of the political responsibility of Marxists to combat trade union fetishism, Luxemburg penned a brilliant refutation not only of Bernstein, but of his present-day political offspring as well. As the following paragraphs show, the opportunists of Luxemburg's day employed the same demagogic arguments against the Marxists of that era as do the Spartacists against the International Committee today. What is the greatest crime of the IC, according to the Spartacist League? By rejecting the claim that the existing trade unions can be revived and turned into militant, indeed revolutionary, organizations of the working class, the IC is supposedly spreading defeatism among the workers.
Here is how Luxemburg addressed such charges: "And finally, from the concealment of the objective limits drawn by the bourgeois social order to the trade union struggle, there arises a hostility to every theoretical criticism which refers to these limits in connection with the ultimate aims of the labor movement. Fulsome flattery and boundless optimism are considered to be the duty of every 'friend of the trade-union movement.' But as the social democratic standpoint consists precisely in fighting against uncritical trade-union optimism, as in fighting against uncritical parliamentary optimism, a front is at last made against the social democratic theory; men grope for a 'new trade-union theory,' that is, a theory which would open an illimitable vista of economic progress to the trade-union struggle within the capitalist system, in opposition to the social democratic doctrine."19
Luxemburg proceeded to show how the ostensible optimism of the opportunists masked a profound skepticism toward the revolutionary capacities of the working class and a hostility to the fundamental political task of Marxists, i.e., that of equipping workers with the theoretical means to critically evaluate their own experiences and thereby gain scientific insight into the social relations of capitalism, and the necessity for its revolutionary overthrow.
In a passage that stands as a devastating indictment of Spartacist's contempt for any serious theoretical and historical assessment of trade unionism (or any other basic issue, whether it be the nature of world economy, Stalinism, or the national question), and their attempt, instead, to block workers from drawing any fundamental lessons from their own experiences, Luxemburg wrote:
"In contradistinction to social democracy, which bases its influence on the unity of the masses amidst the contradictions of the existing order and in the complicated character of its development, and on the critical attitude of the masses to all factors and stages of their own class struggle, the influence and power of the trade unions are founded upon the upside down theory of the incapacity of the masses for criticism and decision. 'The faith of the people must be maintained' -- that is the fundamental principle, acting upon which many trade-union officials stamp as attempts on the life of this movement all criticisms of the objective inadequacy of trade unionism." (Emphasis added).20
That Lenin was in fundamental agreement with Luxemburg on the question of the unions is evident from his struggle at the turn of the century against Russian economism, which he characterized as a variety of Bernsteinian revisionism. What Is To Be Done was an extended polemic against the attempt to degrade Marxism to the level of trade unionism, which, as is well known, Lenin called "the bourgeois consciousness of the working class."
It is worth noting that the Russian unions played no appreciable role in the October Revolution. Indeed, the large rail workers union, which was dominated by the Mensheviks, worked actively against the socialist overthrow.
Trotsky, in The War and the International, written in 1915, made a major contribution to the Marxist analysis of the unions, stressing their historical subordination to the national economy and the national state. He wrote: "The great centralized trade unions of Germany developed in direct dependence upon the development of national industry, adapting themselves to its successes in the home and the foreign markets, and controlling the prices of raw materials and manufactured products...
"For all the undisputed superiority of the German organization, the tactics of the unions were very much the same in Berlin and London. Their chief achievement was the system of tariff treaties."21
As this brief historical review shows, the unions evolved in an opportunist direction, regardless of whether they were established independently of the Marxist party, or as the offspring of the party. Moreover, as the "new unionism" in England revealed, even where they embraced the more oppressed layers of the working class, they rapidly adopted a standpoint of hostility to the class struggle and the socialist revolution.
History has moreover shown that the trade unions are most successful precisely when the national market is most secure and the national bourgeoisie enjoys an exceptionally favorable position on the world market. These are periods when, in general, the class struggle is at a low ebb and the political consciousness and initiative of the working class are in decline. Such was the case of England at the height of its industrial monopoly in the 19 th century, Germany in the period of its explosive industrial growth at the turn of the century, and the US in the period of its economic hegemony after World War II.
Indeed, the more the class struggle has moved in the direction of a revolutionary confrontation with the bourgeoisie, the more the workers have come into conflict with the unions. Thus in Germany, in the period leading up to the outbreak of the world war, workers began to move independently of the unions, throwing up new forms of struggle such as workers' councils. And when proletarian revolution erupted in Germany at the end of the war, the unions played a crucial role in the Social Democracy's counterrevolutionary suppression of the mass movement. It is no accident that Friedrich Ebert, a top Social Democratic union leader and first president of the Weimar Republic, oversaw the assassination of Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January of 1919.
VI. The historic degeneration of trade unionism
It is necessary to bear in mind that the great Marxists of the late 19th and first decades of the 20th century were writing about unions which, notwithstanding their severe limitations, played a far greater role in the daily life of the working class than the moribund trade union organizations of today. The pre-World War I German unions, in particular, provided many social services and served as a center of the cultural life of the workers. Officially, at least, they championed the socialist aspirations of the working class, and masses of workers looked to them for leadership and participated in their activities. Those who led the mass German unions had been initially educated and trained by the party and claimed the mantle of Marxism.
Even in the first decades following the Second World War, the major unions in Europe claimed some form of allegiance to socialism, and the AFL-CIO in the US remained, to some extent, a focus of the militant resistance of workers to the encroachments of big business. It was one thing, under these conditions, for the revolutionary party to employ as a central tactic the placing of demands on the union leadership, as a means of exposing the trade union bureaucracy before the workers. It is an entirely different matter today, after two decades during which the unions have essentially completed their degeneration, betraying the most elementary interests of the working class and transforming themselves into outright corporatist extensions of the employers and the state.
In an article written in 1937 entitled "Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State?" Trotsky answered those who argued that the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its totalitarian methods rendered the Fourth International's characterization of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state obsolete. "The class character of the state is determined by its relation to the forms of property in the means of production," he wrote. Insofar, therefore, that the Soviet regime continued to base itself on the nationalized property forms established by the October Revolution, it remained a workers' state. At the same time Trotsky insisted that this assessment was not timeless. Unless the horrific degeneration of the Soviet state was halted, through a political revolution of the Soviet working class and the overthrow of the Stalin regime, and the Kremlin's nationalist program was replaced by the international revolutionary program of Bolshevism, the bureaucracy would inevitably complete its counterrevolutionary role and usher in the restoration of capitalism.
To illustrate his basic point, Trotsky made an analogy to the trade unions. "The character of a workers' organization such as a trade union is determined by its relation to the distribution of national income. The fact that [AFL President] Green and Company defend private property in the means of production characterizes them as bourgeois. Should these gentlemen in addition defend the income of the bourgeoisie from attacks on the part of the workers; should they conduct a struggle against strikes, against the raising of wages, against help to the unemployed, then we would have an organization of scabs, and not a trade union."22
If one considers the role of the AFL-CIO and its international counterparts in the more recent period, in light of Trotsky's stipulation that a trade union is a workers' organization insofar as it seeks to defend the workers' share of the national income, then it is clear these organizations have, for some time, failed to meet this criterion. For an extended period, the AFL-CIO has actively collaborated with the bourgeoisie in lowering the living standards of the working class, sabotaging strikes, framing up workers and throwing workers onto the unemployment lines. More recently, it has embraced the government's forced-work welfare "reform," by which the ruling class seeks to turn millions of unemployed into a new source of super-exploited cheap labor.
Workers are trapped inside "trade union" organizations, which have assumed the character of corporatist syndicates, controlled by petty-bourgeois bureaucracies, whose own interests are in no way connected to even a residual defense of the rank and file's share of the national income.
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