[GM7] Bases of Party Action in the Field of Proletarian Economic Struggles Pt. 4

7. – THE DYNAMIC OF TRICOLORED TRADE UNIONISM

What’s important as concerns its repercussions on the unfolding of class struggle is understanding that the trade union which has entered the orbit of control of the bourgeois State does not cease for that reason to defend the economic interests of categories and strata of proletarians: its function consists in subordinating such defense to the preservation of the capitalist regime and economy, not in denying it altogether.

From the practical point of view, the trade union becomes the “manager” of the “crumbs” that the capitalist system can drop in periods of productive boom on more or less vast strata of the working class; it becomes the conduit for bourgeois corruption of the working class, the proper instrument for creating and fortifying labor aristocracies.

In practice, the tricolor policy in periods of momentum of capitalist production consists of distributing to the working class what Capital can grant, in such a way as to extinguish in the proletarians every class instinct and to divide them as much as possible, to create privileges and guarantees for sectors of the proletariat, etc.

That is, a process takes place whereby trade union politics takes in hand proletarian economic demands in order to carry them out on a non-class, rather class-dismembering level. The policy of the Swiss trade unions, having signed an outright formal peace with Capital, was based not, of course, on the denial of all economic claims, but on the creation of a deep rift between the labor aristocracy of Swiss workers and the mass of immigrant workers; that is, a part of the Swiss proletariat was able to win economic privileges on the condition of a declared peace with the bosses, that is, of the renunciation of the strike and the methods of direct action and on the skin of another part of the proletariat.

The Italian trade unions behaved in the same way: after the period when post-war reconstruction posed the problem of sacrifices, period! they set up a policy of class division on the basis of privileges granted to some categories of workers and denied to others. We all remember that the same piecards who now speak of wage “equalization” were until 1970 avid supporters of percentage increases that favored the highest categories and qualifications, of company and sectoral disputes, of wages linked to productivity that favored workers in large companies at the expense of others, of the institution of piecework, of production bonuses and in general of anything that could divide one worker from another. They spearheaded strikes and agitations for economic improvements with the sole concern that these remain within the sphere of legality and “democratic coexistence”, breaking all those methods of struggle that could arouse in proletarians a class instinct and fostering the formation and codification of a practice according to which the strike is a simple symbolic demonstration, the prelude and basis of peaceful bargaining between the “parties”.

This is essential to understanding the current situation in which the counterrevolutionary leadership maintains the ability to bind the great mass of proletarians to their policy. It depends on the fact that proletarians, or at least vast strata of them, have found in the trade union an effective defense of their corporate interests, that is, of individuals, of departments, of groups, of companies, of categories, naturally paying for all this by renouncing the ability to mobilize on a class level. Today proletarians find themselves surprised at the reality that the capitalist crisis lays bare: that their leaders have never defended their interests as a class, but have defended the capitalist economy, that their organizations have become administrative offices and are unfit for any frontal and decisive struggle.

The fact is that they were so before, too, but their reality was hidden by the possible benefits that rained down on part of the proletariat through the productive momentum. Now that the economic crisis denies or minimizes these benefits the trade union body suddenly presents itself for what it is: a transmission belt of capitalist interests to the core of the working class.

For the mass of proletarians this is shocking and traumatic, it inevitably generates at first dismay and demoralization in the class, all the more so since trade union policy continues to maintain even today, and will maintain as long as the situation allows it, characteristics that may appear as defense of the conditions of certain strata and groups of the class. This is why the tendency to isolate oneself typical of certain proletarian groups who already feel the need to oppose, on class grounds, tricolored politics is to be considered truly disastrous to the effects of class recovery.

The liberation of the proletarian masses from the influence of this policy will be neither easy nor quick, much less automatic. It will require a further exacerbation of the economic crisis for the proletarians to be materially compelled to react, but it will also demand constant and patient work of demonstration and example on the part of the most advanced and combative workers who must never agree to allow themselves to be isolated from the mass of their comrades, but must make use of every opportunity and every possibility, even the slightest, to carry among them class-based language, the call for the resurrection of class unions.