Introduction (1982)

This monographic issue of our magazine, entirely devoted to the union question, comes out while a vast attack on the living and working conditions of the working masses is underway. The law on cutting severance pay, the cancellation of the agreement on the salary scale by the bosses, the umpteenth tax and tariff measures being defined as we write, highlight what for us revolutionary Marxists is only a historical confirmation: capital is desperately trying to get out of the deepening crisis that is afflicting it, which is a crisis not of this or that “mode of politically managing the economy”, but of the capitalist mode of production itself, by reducing as much as it is socially possible the living conditions of the entire working class.

While all over the world, from East to West, North to South, bourgeois society is demonstrating that it is unable to control its own terrible contradictions and is slowly but surely falling towards the only solution it can give to its historically recurring cyclical crises inherent in its own economic nature: a generalized war between imperialist blocs, on a world scale, where each State tries to get out of the quagmire in which its economy is stranded by enacting measures that follow the two classic directives that characterize the attack of big capital on the exploited classes: the reduction of the purchasing power of wages and the restructuring of corporate production processes through the expulsion of the “superfluous” workforce from the factories.

Both of these effects interact with each other to the detriment of the working class; the growth of a vast army of unemployed proletarians acts as a brake on the growth of wages, and the joint action of the bosses and the governments that defend their interests plays on this contrast to progressively drive the working masses back to the miserable levels of life from which they had been deluded by the official trade unions and the false “socialist” and “communist” parties into believing that they had finally escaped.

In this context, the function of the official representatives of the workers, the national tricolor unions, appears with increasing clarity as that of valuable and indispensable organizations to the ruling class for the preservation of the social and political stability of capitalist society. Every governmental or employers’ measure, dictated by the progressive worsening of the general economic situation, finds in them the best vehicle to be imposed on the workers without provoking class reactions dangerous for the general order of capitalism.

Their reformist, collaborationist and renunciatory policy is the backbone of the social peace that has characterized this second post-war period, in which the working class has been, as it still is, absent from the world stage of the real class struggle. The degree of degeneration of these trade unions, the real character of their anti-proletarian purpose, and the consequent attitude that revolutionary communists must hold toward them today, can only be derived, as is the tradition of our Party, with the study of the entire span of their existence, using the theoretical weapon of the Marxist method. Only through the past history of the workers’ movement is it possible to understand and reaffirm what the infamy of the times we are living through does not yet allow us to see: the only possibility of preventing the collapse of the bourgeois class from dragging the working classes with it lies in the ability of the proletariat to succeed in reuniting its action with the leadership of the revolutionary communist party, which represents its historical aims, and thus determine the objective conditions indispensable for the conquest of political power by the working class, the destruction of the bourgeois State, the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship and the subsequent transformation of the capitalist economy, which produces goods for the sole purpose of making profits, into a socialist economy, towards the production of goods that meet all the needs of all mankind.

But for this to happen, it is indispensable that the working masses return to the uncompromising defense of their immediate conditions of life through the class struggle against all the forces that defend the interests of the capitalist economy, with the consequent rebirth of a class-based organizational fabric that frames and directs the most combative part of the proletariat in this struggle. The rebirth of class unions as intermediate bodies between the party and the class in struggle is indispensable, as is reiterated in all the sets of theses of the Communist Left.

The two reports we’re publishing here tend to re-present this classic Marxist perspective, which, as such, is ours alone, in polemic not only with the official opportunism of the false “workers’ parties”, but also with those who distort this fundamental cornerstone of Marxism, claiming that the return of the proletariat to the revolutionary struggle must follow paths different from those known so far.