Economic Crisis and the need to fight it with effective trade-union organisations

Throughout the world, Capitalism’s economic crisis is having a detrimental effect on the working and living conditions of the labouring class. “Let the bosses pay for the crisis” is a nice slogan, but capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism if the ominous effects of this mode of production weren’t borne mainly by the proletariat. Actually the only way the working class won’t end up “paying for” the crisis is by overthrowing capitalism, with which economic crises will cease insofar as their causes will have been addressed. But as long as capitalism survives, the working class can only resist the attacks it constantly suffers – with the mode of capitalist production itself the underlying reason for those attacks – by mounting a defensive struggle. We mean the economic struggle, or if you like the trade union struggle, which, once having attained a certain degree of development and intensity, the quantitative to qualitative leap having been made, becomes a political struggle. Both exist as two, dialectically connected, levels of the class struggle, with the latter superior to the former. The necessary condition for the transition from the working class’s economic to its political struggle is the class party. And the necessary condition for this qualitative leap, although not sufficient in itself, is the class trade union, in whatever form that might take.

The swelling of the ranks of the unemployed – which Marx referred to as the reserve army of labour – puts pressure on the employed workers, forcing them to accept lower salaries. This is determined on the one hand by the constant factory closures and on the other by the defeatist action of today’s trade unions, which stifle any serious attempt to prepare for a genuine workers’ mobilisation.

It isn’t just by lowering salaries that the exploitation of the workers is increased. Increasing the intensity of work and working hours, for example, with overtime, are other ways. All these methods are described in minute detail in Capital and are daily confirmed in the experience of workers in all countries, yesterday, today and in what remains of the capitalist future.

Clearly for revolutionary communism – Marx’s and ours – the denunciation of “increasing exploitation” doesn’t have a moral value – like for example the petty bourgeoisie who dreams of fair and equitable trade – but a scientific one; it isn’t even just about rallying the class (on a sentimental, pre-scientific, level: we are on the side of the working class), it is rather to indicate the increase in the quota of surplus value that capital needs to try and extract from the workers in order to avoid being inexorably crushed by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – an economic law described by Marxism which condemns capitalism to decline and death.

To the army of unemployed workers, in this first two years of crisis, we add agency workers and those on short contracts as well: the bosses don’t need to sack them; they can just choose not to renew their contracts.

For many workers the crisis has resulted in a drastic reduction in wages.

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The Communist Left – the only current in the world workers’ movement which remained faithful to revolutionary Marxism following the sorting-out process of the counter-revolutionary period, and which is represented today by our party alone – has never been so banal as to maintain that there is a mechanical correlation between crisis and class struggle. We have repeatedly shown how the great crises to begin with have generally had a depressing effect on worker’s struggles, due to unemployment and its power to blackmail those still in work. But despite this, the general deterioration of proletarian living conditions is one of the factors which prompt it to return to the path of open class struggle.

The relationship between the worsening of conditions and the return to the solid use of the strike weapon is affected by two key elements: the trade union and the class party. These two distinct organs of the working class are products and factors in this dynamic which is being fought out on a historical and international scale.

If the trade union battle is what we might call defensive, to do with resistance, while the political battle is offensive, the working class finds itself – not just today but for the last thirty years – in a difficult defensive phase. The numerous reports of struggles, triggered by the crisis, which are taking place throughout the world talk mainly of battles confined to particular companies. The workers are resorting to measures which although sometimes extreme nevertheless reveal their weakness, desperation and above all, the impossibility of lining up for a general conflict between the classes, or even of imagining how such a thing could happen.

If, until recently, apathy reigned throughout most of the working class, and there was a general lack of interest in trade union questions, today the workers, hit by the crisis, lack experience, and are therefore easy victims of a great confusion of ideas and the clever traps prepared for them by the career trade unionists in the regime trade unions; as well as being susceptible to the mistakes and naivety of those workers who have placed themselves at the head of the struggles against trade unionist opportunism. In the present state of things al this is serving to prevent, deviate or delay making the fundamental practical step without which the workers’ struggles, even if generous, are destined to fail, that is: unification within a general movement committed to struggle. And this can happen only if the working class equips itself with the necessary instrument to make such a step, namely, a genuine Class Trade Union, which it will have to rebuild outside and against the present regime unions.

The limitations of a struggle fought within a particular company are evident: the workers’ demands cannot go beyond the limits set by what is required to keep the company competitive, for fear of it being closing down or relocating elsewhere, and running the risk of some, or all, of the workforce being laid off. During phases of economic growth, like the one which ran from the end of the 2nd World War through to 1973, companies were under less pressure from competition and could be forced to make concessions. But competition becomes increasingly fierce during crises, and companies resort to exploiting the labour force as much as they can to stay in business.

The need for unification of the workers’ struggles is daily rejected and obstructed by the unions’ entrenched loyalty to the capitalist regime. Trade unions subjected to the State and the requirements of capital are the main instrument the bourgeoisie uses to weaken and undermine working class combativity. It is they that take care to bombard the workers with all the ideas and ideological paraphernalia certain to weaken their defensive struggles, and deprive them of a following.

One of their main techniques is to keep each battle isolated and make sure they don’t link up. With this end in view the union avoids identifying itself with the general common objectives of the class and refuses to mobilise its members to fight for them. Even when agitating for goals that seem to be uniting the class, in reality they are working to keep it divided. A case in point is the frequently heard slogan, “stop the sackings”, a demand that tends, as in so many cases, to focus workers’ attention on their own particular company or department, given that it is there where the decision to lay anyone off is made, and if so, who and how many. Also, a firm that is about to close, can it actually avoid sacking its staff? Only by not paying them anything.

To mount a defence during this crisis against the consequences of mass lay offs, the correct class demand for rallying workers is: wages for unemployed workers, and a reduction of working hours with no reduction in wages for employed workers. To achieve these objectives, which alone correspond to the requirements of workers’ defence and which overcome the difficulty that the individual employer in crisis is unable to pay, will involve a sector-wide general struggle, indeed of all sectors and professional categories. The adversary is no longer the particular capitalist productive cell, the firm, where the struggle to defend jobs entails keeping it afloat at any cost, something which is objectively impossible, but now becomes the entire bourgeois class as incarnated in its State, from which is demanded the payment of an unemployment wage.

Naturally that isn’t to say the union shouldn’t also be organising the workers’ struggle at the level of the individual firm as well. But its role should be to organise the whole of a category at least on the national scale and to represent the inescapable necessity of overcoming the barriers of the union struggles fought at the micro level; in order to extend the battle onto the plane of an open and general struggle of all workers for their common demands.

Another way the betrayal in the trade unions manifests itself is the way it tries to prevent different struggles from linking up by downplaying the relationship between the individual crises in each firm and the larger global one, depicting the particular characteristics of the individual firm to the workers as the crucial factor. Thus we have criticism of the boss for not doing his job properly, for not having an effective industrial plan in place, for having incompetent directors for being corrupt, etc, etc. According to this reasoning the salvation of the working class depends on the company’s ‘fitness for purpose’, like it was for the slaves of old, chained to the oars of the galleys. The same reasoning, on the scale of the country, is applied to governments: it is the government’s policy which is aggravating the crisis! But now the crisis has got to the stage of closing factories, this inter-classist, national-company solidarityappears in its most monstrous aspect, and it really needs to be exploded.

Any crisis at company level has its own particularities of course. But what it has in common with all the others is the fact that a part of the workers will be condemned to unemployment, and the ones that are left will have to carry a heavier workload. For this reason the efforts of a true class union should be about providing the material possibility of developing a class identity based on a sense of having the same social interests, and joint mobilisation for genera objectives, which regard all workers as such, not insofar as they are employees of such and such a company. And this because the broader and more united a large strike is; the more effective it will be.

The pro-regime trade-unionists delude the workers that the solution to their problems lies in finding a brilliant entrepreneur to take over the firm, and that is what they should be fighting for! In reality speculative, financial, freebooting capitalism is the legitimate offspring of entrepreneurial and industrial capitalism. Speculation is inherent in the laws of capitalism and has been there since its birth. What makes it increasingly sought after is the growing difficulties involved in getting businesses to invest in production.

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These class demands – full salary to unemployed workers and reduction of working hours – are not new; indeed both of them are features of traditional class trade unionism.

Marxist communism’s position on the trade unions has never been one based on generic, superficial extremism, of the “we want everything and we want in now” variety so characteristic of the petty bourgeois and student groupings that infested the margins of the workers’ movement in the 1970s. Certainly our classist slogans don’t in themselves have the magical property of transforming workers from the state of weakness and difficulty in which they find themselves today into a class which is all of sudden strong, united and combative.

What distinguishes class syndicalism from bourgeois syndicalism is the general plan of struggle. Traditional class trade unionism perceives its ultimate goal as achieving the emancipation of labour; the present regime unionism perceives it as an all-out defence of parliamentary democracy. Everything else is the consequence. If the period between the end of the Second World War and now has resulted in the working class relapsing into its present state of prostration, to the point it has even lost the sense of being a class, this is because the second form of organisation has had success, that of the bourgeois regime, whose aim is to destroy bit by bit any residual class positions within the unions and the proletariat. This incessant work continues today, and will never cease as long as capitalism exists.

Communist intervention amongst the workers doesn’t deny the importance, and the role, of partial and limited struggles such as those occurring today. It means supporting them, but also, when the struggle has reached a degree of intensity that the workers can see what they are facing more clearly, profiting from these battles to point out the need for a larger and broader deployment of forces. It means reminding the class of the general aims of trade union struggle. And the latter must be proposed not as an abstract declaration of principles but as an immediate and necessary goal to be fought for, and for which material preparations need to be made.

With regard to struggles that arise within a particular company, in practice we communists will point out to the workers in particular disputes what we consider to be the least worst directives, but at the same time we will explain how their inherent weakness proves the need to organise themselves in preparation for harder and longer strikes, ultimately arriving at the point where a general strike for class demands once again becomes a possibility.

The correct approach to the trade union struggle is one which aims to prevent the energy expended in partial struggles being entirely exhausted at a purely local level, so it can be used, to a greater or lesser degree, to take a step towards the unification of the worker’s forces, towards an enhanced capacity of the working class to fight its battles.