Returning to the Trade Union Question

The following text was written at a decisive moment for the Italian labor movement:

Two months earlier, tens of thousands of workers, the “famous” 40,000—mostly managers and white-collar workers—had marched through the streets of Turin, effectively ending a season marked by impressive struggles.

The proletariat of the “Great Country” thus recorded one of the greatest defeats of the 20th century. Conversely, the bosses and their state could soar on the wings of enthusiasm as they carry on, annihilating the gains achieved by the workers in the previous two decades.

It was necessary to draw up a balance sheet. As usual, the Party promptly went to work. We went in search of the source of the red thread that binds the glorious past, moving from the miserable present to the radiant future.

But a balance sheet of what?

First, it was necessary to investigate the situation within the main counterrevolutionary agent within the working class: Tricolor unionism.

The stinging defeat would surely have brought back all the coryphaei of opportunism. At the forefront of this were those who deny the importance of defending the immediate economic conditions of the workers by trade unions. This is why in the first part of the text the Party repeated the principles of the work of communists within the trade unions: theses that distinguish and differentiate us from all other, more-or-less “extremist” rabble.

1) “Our political objectives do not entail the overcoming of the economic struggle, but, indeed, its maximum extension and its bursting into revolutionary struggle”

2) “Revolutionary communist consciousness already exists, impersonally and objective, in the historical theory, methods, and traditions of Marxism [and] can not be acquired spontaneously by the proletariat through its defensive struggle.”

3) “[E]conomic struggle in itself does not affect the causes that generate exploitation and cannot break out of the framework of the bourgeois social order.”

It was already necessary to derive tactics from these rock-hard principles. In order to properly elaborate upon this, a historical peak into the changes that the relationship between the trade unions have undergone—both in the democratic and fascist forms—was necessary.

This is the topic of the second installment of the article. The argument will be explored more deeply in a text to appear in Comunismo No. 10, The Party Facing the Trade Unions in the Era of Imperialism.

Thus, we sketch the thesis that unionism follows a parabolic trajectory, dividing it into three major periods:

1) Prohibition; 2) Tolerance; 3) Subjection

In this second installment of the column, we offer our readers a work to carefully ponder so as to properly approach the union question. This is a text that concludes with a warning that will always ring like a hammering bell against opportunist immediatism:

“Those who say they want to bring down this infamous regime must therefore be consistent and accept the instruments necessary for this purpose.”