The Classic Marxist Perspective of the Party and the Trade‑Unions Pt.2

(The first part of this article was published in ‘Spartaco’, inside page of No. 10 of Programma Comunista, 10-17-VI-1966)

A characteristic of Marxist texts is continually referencing the intimate connection between party and class, between party and class organizations of the proletariat. This connection destroys the claim for unilaterality in the activity of the masses and thus also of the party, as if economic, social and political struggles were separated from each other by a dividing wall and didn’t, instead, influence each other in a dialectical way, that is, by giving rise to a series of contradictions that characterize the real movement of the classes among themselves and of the parties that represent their interests.

In the Communist Manifesto of 1848 this relationship is masterfully described as follows:

«But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots. Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle (…)

«This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten‑hours’ bill in England was carried».

In The Poverty of Philosophy, written between December 1846 and June 1847, Marx, in sarcastically polemicizing with the philistine positions of the petty-bourgeois intellectual who dominated the working-class milieu of the time under the “socialist” ticket, analyzes the question in more detail. On page 138, after recalling that in England the workers’ combinations were authorized by Parliament, this having been forced upon them by the “economic system”, and that in 1825 Parliament itself had to “abolish all laws forbidding combinations of workers”, Marx ironically mentions the attitude of the “socialists” of the time:

«And we, as “socialists”, tell you that, apart from the money question, you will continue nonetheless to be workers, and the masters will still continue to be the masters, just as before. So no combination! No politics! For is not entering into combination engaging in politics?»

To this beautiful, “logical” way of reasoning is opposed the stark reality of the facts: “In spite of both of them, in spite of manuals and utopias, combination has not yet ceased for an instant to go forward and grow with the development and growth of modern industry (…) Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages (…) In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character (…) Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle”.

And on page 140 the text anticipates the Manifesto’s categorical statement, “every class struggle is a political struggle”, with an equivalent, equally categorical expression, “Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social”.

In 1873, Marx is forced to deal with the issue again, and this time not so much against a political school enunciating its theories, but against a political movement that is organizing within the International and behind its back: these are the anarchists, followers of the Russian Bakunin, whom Marx attacks and ridicules by reporting their beliefs in an article entitled Political Indifferentism. Marx thus exemplifies the strident contradiction between certain positions and the real workers’ movement:

«“The working class – the anarchists maintain – must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the State is to recognize the State: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one’s wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class! (…) Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters (…) Workers must not even form single unions for every trade, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society (…) In a word, the workers should cross their arms and stop wasting time in political and economic movements (…) In the practical life of every day, workers must be the most obedient servants of the State; but in their hearts they must protest energetically against its very existence, and give proof of their profound theoretical contempt for it by acquiring and reading literary treatises on its abolition; they must further scrupulously refrain from putting up any resistance to the capitalist regime apart from declamations on the society of the future, when this hated regime will have ceased to exist!”»

And he comments, «It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is».

At the June 20 and June 27 1865 meeting of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (First International), Marx gives a report to show that the Owenist John Weston had argued much nonsense in asserting that wage increases are harmful to workers and that more harmful are the influences of the Trade Unions on the economy as a whole and by extension on the working class. Marx first demonstrates, in a plain and simple manner, the content of the economic categories of capital, Value, Price and Profit (the report was later published under this title), their mutual relations and in what relation the working class stands; and in closing he comments thus:

«The whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation”. And again, “In checking this tendency of capital, by struggling for a rise of wages corresponding to the rising intensity of labour, the working man only resists the depreciation of his labour and the deterioration of his race».

«The slave receives a permanent and fixed amount of maintenance; the wage‑labourer does not. He must try to get a rise of wages in the one instance, if only to compensate for a fall of wages in the other. If he resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave».

Marx goes on to explain the basic reasons why the working class must counter the capitalist class’s action on the economic terrain, even though it is the terrain he defines as most favorable to capitalism:

«The fixation of its actual degree [i.e. of the maximum rate of profit] is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction. The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants (…) This very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economical action capital is the stronger side».

And precisely for this reason, “By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they [the workers] would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement”.

«At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market.

«They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’»

Marx concludes his report by submitting for approval a resolution that ends thus, “The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages. Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system”.

This concept of the trade union as the “lever” of the party would be carried over word-for-word into the Resolution of the First Internationals’s London Conference on Working Class Political Action in September 1871, specifically in the 9th Resolution on The Political Action of the Working Class. The final part defines the issue as follows:

«Considering

«- that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes;

«- that this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes;

«- that the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economical struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists.

«The Conference recalls to the members of the International:

«- that in the militant state of the working class, its economical movement and its political action are indissolubly united». In the Resolutions of the International, approved in September of the following year, 1872, in The Hague, these basic notions would be transferred to the letter.

Engels in a letter to Bebel from London in March 1875, in which he harshly criticizes the “Program of the German Workers’ Party” guided by Marx’s “Glosses” against the nonsense contained therein, writes among other things: “There is absolutely no mention (in the draft program) of the organisation of the working class as a class through the medium of trade unions. And that is a point of the utmost importance, this being the proletariat’s true class organisation in which it fights its daily battles with capital, in which it trains itself and which nowadays can no longer simply be smashed, even with reaction at its worst (as presently in Paris). Considering the importance this organisation is likewise assuming in Germany, it would in our view be indispensable to accord it some mention in the programme and, possibly, to leave some room for it in the organisation of the party”.

Engels, between 1841 and 1845, had written an important work The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which he explains the necessity of the workers’ association to defend their wages, and – in p. 237 ff. of the Rinascita edition – among other things he writes: “It will be asked, ‘Why, then, do the workers strike in such cases, when the uselessness of such measures is so evident?’ Simply because they must protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity; because they feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not be made to bow to social circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as human beings; because silence on their part would be a recognition of these social conditions, an admission of the right of the bourgeoisie to exploit the workers in good times and let them starve in bad ones. […] They [the workers’ associations, or trade unions] imply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one‑sidedly, in however narrow a way, they are so dangerous to this social order. The working men cannot attack the bourgeoisie, and with it the whole existing order of society, at any sorer point than this”.

And on the importance of the struggles: “These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the working men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamientos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement (…) And as schools of war, the unions are unexcelled”.

This sequence of excerpts from our classic texts, condensing historical lessons from various different periods between 1825 to 1875, spans a historical phase particularly prolific as regards the fundamental vicissitudes of a class-divided humanity It includes gigantic turning points, from the definitive victory of the bourgeoisie in ’48 in France, from the establishment on the historical scene of the working class as a fighting class, struggling on its own behalf, to the establishment of the class party of the proletariat; from the rise of the revolutionary theory of this class of wage‑earners to the birth of the first world organization of this party, the First Communist International; this excursion, going back over century, linking up with the positions of the Left, you will recall from the first part of this work, gives an exact confirmation of the correctness of the positions of the revolutionary Communist Party on its live participation in the workers’ struggles, within the class organizations of the proletariat, in order to turn them into “levers” that are capable of unhinging the political power of capitalism. These texts make it abundantly clear that lying opportunist propaganda tries to make the mass of wage‑earners believe that workers’ unions should be “independent and autonomous” from the parties, so they can insinuate the reactionary belief that these economic associations can do without the leadership of the revolutionary communist party. The texts, in short, clarify the exact scope of the proletariat’s economic struggles, which, though just and inevitable, achieve nothing definitive and substantial for the class unless they move towards transforming themselves into struggles for the conquest of political power, that is, unless they serve as a practical exercise in establishing links with the political party of the working class, to the true communist party.

The texts cited record historical periods which are packed with the frequently heroic struggles of proletarians from the various European countries, and from the then young America, prepared to fight from a position of severe disadvantage – in the sense that it was in the course of such struggles that the class began to discover the forms of its class combat, testing them in the fire of many, often bloody, defeats, in the face of which the working class of today, if it has inherited from it the powerful lesson and the rich teachings, also has a grave historical responsibility not to betray the significance of so much heroism. And this grave responsibility weighs not only on the workers who are still unable to shake off the cowardice of their leaders and the betrayal of the old leaders who passed over to the enemy, but also on the revolutionary nucleus from the old generations of communists who survived through the immense tragedy of the counterrevolution, victorious over the Red October and the world revolution at the same time.

Every strike is a “battle”, and every battle is an episode in the “civil war” between the proletariat and society’s remaining propertied classes. In this battle, in this war, the classes mobilize their entire resources, their entire energy. The general staffs of the classes – the parties – check their battle plans, continually fine‑tune their weapons of offense and defense, study the enemy so they can strike at its heart. An army without leaders is not an army but a random collection of people; just as a body without a head is not a body but a deformed trunk. Thus the wage‑earning class without the party or physically separated from the party is only a mass of exploited people, and the party a nucleus of doctrinaires without a following, an end in itself, that is, an abortion of a party. Consequently, the class, with or without leadership, with or without its party, is forced to fight due to capitalism itself. When the adverse events of history prevent the establishment of the party, the class bleeds itself dry in these battles. But when the party rises from the very depths of the tragedy, as a sublimation of the sufferings, the betrayals, and the enslavement of proletarians, then this party, if it does not want the revolution to commit suicide, cannot but set itself the fundamental objective of conquering the leadership of the wage‑earning masses by penetrating the workers’ “associations”, “Trade Unions”, and “combinations” in order to turn them into “levers” against capital and against the opportunism lurking in the workers’ ranks; to turn them into “transmission belts”, in accordance with Lenin, of the revolutionary program.