The Need for Workers’ Economic Organisations

The International Communist Party’s position on the trade unions is based on the material fact that capitalism obliges proletarians to form associations for economic defence, and that as long as the proletariat exists as a class this will remain the case.

Such organisations form part of the pyramidal structure – class, unions, party – which was described at the 2nd Congress of the International in 1919; a structure which only becomes ‘class, unions, soviets, party’ on the eve of taking power. In both cases the unions, in Lenin’s words, constitute, ‘the transmission belt of the party’; the link between the party and the proletarian class.

This is a key tenet of our doctrine, and is why we have always seen our main task as connecting our motor of doctrine to the economic organisations, rather than to other ‘left-wing’ currents. In fact the Communist Party of Italy – which our current led at that time – would be the first section in the International to propose, and then energetically put into action, the Trade-Union United Front by proposing to the three then existing workers organisations (the C.G.L.(controlled by democratic socialists), the U.S.I (syndicalist union) and the Railwaymen’s union) that they merge; and by steering the struggles towards the fusion of all sectional disputes into a common platform of demands and the sole method of action of the general Strike.

Organisations which are formed around the immediate economic concerns of workers have proved themselves to be an indispensable part of the revolutionary struggle. In the Russian revolution, both unions and factory-shop committees played a significant part and were both organised, separately, and on a national scale, and in addition to the Soviets; in fact the rise of the Soviets has as its premise the existence, and the efficiency, of the unions.

Workers’ economic organisations during revolutionary periods are very different from the trade-unions we are used today, because they are CLASS UNIONS; that is, unions which tend to unite the various sectional and local struggles into one, generalised struggle.

Unions of this type must be open to all workers; because they are workers, because of their economic position in society, and to them alone. They are therefore politically neutral, and open to workers of all political persuasions, but such as to allow communists to form sections within them, thereby enabling workers to compare the effectiveness of the actions of the Left with other currents.

And although our slogan “TOWARDS THE RED UNION” might be misleading, since we tend to use the term interchangeably with CLASS UNION, we have no intention of wasting our time trying to form unions composed ONLY of communists and their sympathisers; this is because such a tactic has the effect of separating communists and the masses and which would be justifiably condemned by Lenin in his pamphlet Leftwing Communism – an Infantile Disorder.

But communists not only become separated from the trade-union rank-and-file membership through misguided attempts to form ‘pure’ unions composed of communists and their sympathisers, as theorised by the Dutch tribunists and German Kapdists. They are equally separated from workers by being prevented from forming separate fractions and standing for posts within the unions.

The potential for power to slip away from the official union leaders to classist fractions is something the former will ever seek to protect themselves against. In Italy, the revolutionary wave of the twenties, and the parallel development of union confederations anchored on class positions, was stamped out by fascism, which substituted the unions with official state controlled unions. In Britain, the aim of linking the unions to the State was also underway, but was accomplished relatively peacefully due to the lack of a large communist movement. But what distinguishes both these unions is a connexion between their ruling bodies and the State, and in both cases a key factor in preserving such a situation is the forbidding of communists from holding union posts; since without a communist perspective in the unions there remains only the bourgeois, nationalist one, which can see no further than the ‘realities’ of the market economy.

Thus in the early history of the General and Municipal Boilermakers, now one of the big two general unions, the executive of the GMWU, as it then was, would become extremely worried at the CPGB’s initiative (which got underway in 1924) to form a class union by means of the National Minority Movement. The communist tactic, whose declared intention was to take over the old unions, included setting up a general workers’ section within the GMWU. The union bosses of the GMWU would respond quickly, and in 1927 they would declare in Conference that the policies of the Communist Party and the Minority Movement were “inconsistent with loyal attachment to the Union” and “an avowal of loyalty to the union” was to be required from London officers who had recently attended a Minority Movement conference. Members who disobeyed this injunction would soon find themselves, and indeed entire branches, expelled from the union. Soon all district council members would be required to sign a document denying membership of the Communist Party and The Minority movement.

Along with these moves and the denunciation of Communism, the GMWU leaders would take steps to consolidate their power. At one of their biennial conferences in 1926 they would denounce the Minority movement for entering their candidates in elections for union posts, whilst at the same time an amendment was carried giving officers permanent tenure once they had been elected.

This witch hunt against communists, and the installation of a dictatorship of union bureaucrats in the GLWU followed hot on the heels of one of the most dramatic realisations of mass economic action Great Britain had ever seen – The General Strike of 1926 – and it reflected by and large what was happening in the other big general union (which later became the Transport and General Workers union). Thus the mass of British low-paid workers concentrated in the General unions were targeted for ‘whipping into shape’.

The reactionary measures of the union mandarins, aimed at filling any loopholes in a union structure vulnerable to communist penetration, show that even if many workers find the idea of a class union difficult to grasp, the union bureaucrats certainly know what a class union is, and how to stamp it out!

The 1935 Trade Union Conference marked something of a watershed for militant workers precisely because of the formal acceptance by the TUC that the exclusion of communists from the unions, in general, was to be desired. At this conference, two circulars, known collectively as ‘The Black Circular’, were issued by the General Council advising unions to exclude Communists from any office; and made the exclusion of delegates who were communist, or who had any association with communists, obligatory on trades councils wishing to retain formal affiliation to the T.U.C.

The Circular would be carried by a relatively small margin, of 1,869,000 against 1,427,000, and against the expressed opposition of the engineering, clerks, railwaymen’s and miners’ unions. Since the TUC had no power to compel its constituent unions to enforce this policy, however, it was ignored or rejected by many. The miners, engineers, builders, railwaymen and many other unions continued to elect communist officials; even the Transport and General Workers Union, though voting for the policy, did not amend its own rules accordingly. In the General and Municipal workers, and Steelworkers’ unions the ban was applied; and many trades councils were pressurised into operating it by the TUC’s threat to set up rival trades councils if the ban was not applied.

Such a policy, though clearly directed against Stalinism in particular, was aimed against communism in general.

How far such exclusions are in operation now varies from union to union, but, if anything, they have been extended and refined. They serve, in any case, to highlight one of the key characteristics of what we define as the CLASS UNION, that is: one within which communists can form their own fractions, are free to agitate amongst the union membership, and where the possibility exists for communists to be elected to office.

The attempt by the TUC to eject communists from the trade-union movement altogether would be reflected in a still greater integration of the union bureaucracy into the ruling echelons. Thus, in 1935, Walter Citrine and Arthur Pugh, secretary and chairman of the TUC, would be ushered into the inner sanctums of the ruling class with knighthoods bestowed upon them; and though a motion would be submitted at the 1935 TUC Congress objecting to the trade-union leaders accepting honours ‘at the hands of a government which is not established in the interests of the workers’, it would be rejected, even if by a slim majority. Years later in 1964, Citrine would reminisce about his ‘rebellious’ youth as follows:

“What had been the result of 1926? We had been regarded as revolutionaries. There was no doubt in my mind that considerable damage had been done to the Labour movement because of this. People did in fact suspect we were aiming at destroying the constitution, despite our disclaimers (…) We now had the position that the man who had been the chairman of the TUC at that time (Pugh) was a knight. The acting secretary had received similar recognition at the hands of the State [he says as a modest aside]. In effect, through us, our movement had been proclaimed, both by King and country, as one whose members were citizens deserving of one of the highest honours that the State could convey. How could this fail to affect the minds of the thousands who knew little about trade unionism, and to enhance its status and prestige.”

Such a sickening display of sycophancy and grovelling, plumbing new depths of subservience, must have disgusted even Citrine’s bourgeois paymasters!

Citrine had received his honour for his dedicated work in masterminding a capitalist fifth column amongst the workers’ ranks. Following the 1926 General Strike – an event that obviously sent shivers down his spine as late as 1964 – he would proclaim (as secretary of the TUC in 1927) that “the approach to a new industrial order is not be way of a social explosion”, and by 1928 his collaborationist ideas would become incarnated in what would later become known as ‘Mondism’. In that year, ‘discussions’ took place between the General Council of the TUC and a group of twenty big employees headed by Sir Alfred Mond, founder-chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries. The General Council and the employers’ groups held that the tendency to rationalisation and trustification in industry ‘should be welcomed and encouraged’. Trade unions as monopolists of labour supply could enter into partnership with the monopolists of capital, the aim being ‘a concerted effort to raise industry to its highest efficiency’.

The leader of the TGWU, Ernest Bevin, was equally convinced of the value of ’rationalisation’ and in his own ‘industrial bargaining’ preferred to deal with ‘one or two big companies which could afford to take long views’. Like Citrine, he would merely record the tendency of capitalism to concentrate itself in its imperialist phase, and passively usher through all the cuts and redundancies that are part and parcel of the ‘rationalisation process’.

Bevin would go on to distinguish himself as witch-hunter General of unofficial unions, and amongst the trophies in the Bevin display cabinet, we find the shrunken head of the unofficial Rank and File Movement in the London buses, which had dared to organise unofficial strikes on his patch during the thirties; what Bevin would dub ‘an internal breakaway’. Bevin, too, would find his services rewarded when he was offered the post of Minister of Labour during the 2nd World War. In a revealing quotation, Bevin would sum up his perception of his, and other trade-unionists role: “We look upon ourselves as the labour side of management”. In other words, management’s police force.

* * *

Thus far we have outlined certain tenets which our current subscribe to with regard to unions, and have indicated some brief episodes in the increasing integration of English unions into the state apparatus. But to what extent can we apply the historical experience of the Italian Left in Great Britain?

In Italy, the party’s strategy within the unions has been largely shaped by the prior existence there of an actual class union – the Confederazione Generale di Lavoro, the CGL – and its strategy has been derived from the actual experience of working in that union in the early part of the 20th century. How far this union defended class struggle we can see merely from reading Article One of its constitution: «The General Confederation of Labour constitutes itself in Italy in order to organise and discipline the struggle of the labouring class against the capitalist regime of production and work (…)».

After the 2nd World War, the party would work in the CGIL (the additional ‘I’ standing for ‘Italian’) where combative workers were still managing to propel the union into action, considering it to be the direct descendant of the old CGL. The Party’s agitation therefore focussed around the call for a return to the class union tradition of the CGL, at the same time not hiding from workers the fact that it considered the CGIL to be the direct descendent of the fascist corporatist unions. The party didn’t however work in the UIL and CISL, which had been formed with the specific intention of breaking up the CGIL (the UIL formed by the Christian Democrats, and CISL by the Republican and Right-wing socialists).

When we come to considering the best method of applying a class perspective to the workers economic struggles in Great Britain, clearly we cannot automatically translate the strategy in Italy to England because of different historical factors. But do these factors really affect the main lines of strategy, or do they leave them largely untouched?

Up until the party left the CGIL in 1975, we held out two broad possibilities for the future: either it would be possible to take over the old unions “magari a legnate”, (approximate translation:: even with cudgels), or else it might prove necessary to construct new organisations “ex-novo”. Let us look briefly first at why the second strategy was finally adopted in Italy, rather than the former, and then see where we can draw parallels.

In the early seventies, after the big struggles of ’68-’69, party comrades in the CGIL started to find that it was no longer possible to work within the CGIL. A process which had been underway for a long time – the union’s increasing integration into the state machinery – came to a particular head during the anti-delega campaign (which was against the new system of deducting union dues directly from pay-packets). Either party comrades accepted this method or not, and by not accepting it, they placed themselves outside the union. Also, the party’s Comitati di Difesa del Sindacato di Classe, which it had formed inside the union, now found itself in the position where there were no longer any classist elements inside the union, and the committees became reduced in size until they were composed only of party members.

The old union was becoming ever more integrated into the State and we would have ever more reason to predict that the class union could rise again only outside it. Therefore, the party now inclines towards preferring its members not to join the CGIL. This position however is not of principal, but reflects the sheer impossibility of working within the CGIL, which is now entirely impenetrable to any workers’ fractions organised on a class basis. Moreover, there is now no longer any internal life to speak of which would permit a work of penetration amongst the rank and file. In such conditions (apart from the fact that militants would be personally funding these unions) agitating amongst workers who aren’t members of the unions becomes just as valid as agitating amongst those who are. However, precisely because our position on this matter is decided ultimately by practical considerations, rather than of policy, we can admit that, especially in small firms, not being a member of the union might cause us to be perceived as adopting an anti-union position per se, which could compromise the work of militants in the workplace. In such cases, it might well be best for our members to join.

We can also see that working amongst the base and factory organisations where delegates are directly elected by workers is likely to be far more fruitful than engaging in arcane disputes about amendments to sub-sections, of clauses, of paragraphs, of sentences in union rulebooks; documents so obscure and legalistic that only the most determined and literate union member can understand them anyway.

In Italy there are the Base Committees, the Comitati Unitari di Base, which arose in the late sixties outside of the unions, but which were rapidly transformed into branches of the old union – a miraculous transformation which arose simply through the bosses awarding the old unions ‘official status’ and refusing to recognise workers representatives in negotiations unless they were members of the official union. Thus the Cdf – the factory committees – became outposts of the official unions in all factories and workplaces. Nevertheless, in small and medium workplaces where they can achieve a certain degree of autonomy, there are possibilities for agitation within them.

Despite this stance, of not joining the CGIL, we don’t however advocate sabotaging their actions, or asking workers to leave until other organisations have appeared to take their place, and the same goes with regard to the TUC and official unions in Great Britain: we can criticise the policy and actions of the official unions, and hold out the prospect of the class union, but sabotage and boycotting would give out the most confusing messages.

In Italy, France and Belgium, and on a very modest scale in England, new organisations of economic struggle have begun to appear outside the official unions. Thus, perhaps the most important reason of all for our not working in the old, corrupted workers organisations is that the workers themselves are leaving and setting up new unions! By remaining in the old ones we would appear to be defending reaction against class struggle. Although we will always be loathe to cause splits amongst workers organisations, we now have to face up to a situation where the old unions in Italy are considered by workers merely as prisons, and the thing is to go over the fence as quickly as possible.

In Italy, in particular, these new workers’ organisations have assumed the more or less permanent form of the COBAS’s (Comitati di Base) amongst teachers and railway workers, and these organisations are increasingly beginning to link up with each other, even to the extent that alternative Chambers of Labour are being formed with a view to creating territorial networks. Here the slogan OUTSIDE AND AGAINST THE OLD UNIONS becomes not just negative rejection of the old union but positive affirmation of the new.

These new organisations DO NOT express a PERFECT class line, otherwise they would be unions composed just of communists (in theory anyway); in fact, we always held that the old CGL was a class union, even when led by opportunists, because the POTENTIAL still existed within it for classist elements to agitate, form fractions and to take over the leadership. The same goes for the new unions; they are bound to go this way and that as different currents gain the ascendancy, and that is all for the good; workers will be able to see the various tactics and platforms of different political tendencies tried out in the school of practice, and make up their own minds on the strength of what they see. It is stupid and pointless to assume, as some do, that these faltering steps mean that the COBAS’s are already incorporated into capitalisms’ grand designs! The way to the class union will be difficult and hard won, and no matter how hard we ‘reflect’ from our armchairs on the perfect way to achieve unity, the process will certainly not be neat and tidy!

In England, however, there have not yet been large-scale attempts at setting up new unions except for the highly significant tube-workers organisation, which was forced into organising its own actions in response to the official union’s complacency. Combative workers in general are therefore still organised inside the old unions, or else outside them but only in a individual capacity or as informal groupings.

What is likely to alter the picture is that virtually every kind of industrial action, apart from the most harmless and insipid, is now banned. The official unions will therefore have to break the law, or be seen as standing shoulder to shoulder with the bosses every time any kind of struggle takes place. The latter route the unions are almost bound to take, and at that point, the workers ’ex-novo’ unions might finally get a kick-start. Another possibility is that some unions will take the plunge and put themselves the wrong side of the law, or at least win approval from their membership by finding clever ways around the law (loopholes which will then be blocked off!).

The essential difference between the Italian and British union structures is that whilst the Italian worker joins a union Confederation, of a ‘right’ or ‘left’ political complexion, and is then put in a section which corresponds to his category of work, the British worker joins a craft, industry, or general union, or else the union he has to join in order to work in a particular place (the closed shops). These unions are almost all affiliated to the TUC, but not all, and the TUC can not make decisions which bind its members in any case. Therefore there is a labyrinthine complexity to British unions which would mean that we cannot pretend we know whether all unions are impenetrable to a classist influence or not.

As elsewhere, British workers are expressing their discontent with the old unions largely by remaining indifferent to them, perceiving them as irrelevant, or at best, merely as subsidised pension or insurance societies. In England, as in Italy, rank-and-file organisations have arisen in the past, notably in the seventies, and these groups did express fairly coherent criticisms of the union bureaucracy, even if they often tended to be party cells of left-wing organisations with few external members. Occasionally unofficial and wild-cat strikes gelled around these rank-and-file organisations and they even attained a national level of organisation. They have now pretty much fizzled out though; or become, as in Italy, the official unions form of organisation in the factory; or mediators of the conflicting interests of the many and various unions that may be found under one and the same roof. But we can anticipate a reborn rank-and-file movement arising in England again, and possibly forming the basis for an organisation of workers which could form a pole of opposition to the Union barons.

The tightening grip of the unions in Britain has had the unfortunate effect of causing profound disillusionment with the union form as such, and whatever we say, that disillusionment is not likely to be dispelled until living evidence of the Class Union appears on these dispirited shores.

* * *

There are in fact three broad positions which are supported in the proletarian economic movement: no trade-unions at all; the parastatal union; and the class union. To the first group belong those who maintain that the union form is irrelevant, as well as those who advocate not a trade-union, but a union composed just of communists, or factory councils as substitutes for the economic union. To the second group belong the present union leaderships who mystify their own ‘autonomy’ from ‘parties, Governments, and bosses’ only to better chain the workers to the ‘national economy’, in other words, the State and the bourgeoisie. To the third group belong those who fight for the rise of a proletarian economic movement with a classist leadership.

The politics of the first two groups concur in their denial of the class union, both now, when the domination of the patriotic unions is uncontested, and when the Class Union becomes a pressing necessity. The first group refuses to face up to the integration of the unions into the State and seeks for new, incorruptible forms of organisation instead. In a word, it entrusts the overthrowing of the class enemy to forms rather than to forces. As Marxists, we will never tire of repeating, that our viewpoint is based on economic determinations rather than ideas, therefore, even though we cannot anticipate exactly what form the class union might take, it will still be brought into being as a necessity; because workers have been forced to defend themselves against capitalisms attacks; even if their old organisations have been taken over by bourgeois agents.

Whatever organisational structures the new union might have, it will be shaped by proletarian necessity, and it will (eventually) need to be an organisation of wage earners which extends beyond the limited local horizon of the factory, of sectionalism, and of the locality. We can only go along with the negaters of the unions so far: we can agree that the old unions are corrupt, but we cannot agree that this means that all workers economic organisations inevitably become corrupted or that economic organisations are no longer necessary.

Some negaters of the unions have in fact gone so far as to posit nothing at all in their place, except a vague trust that the working class will eventually solve the problem ‘on its own’. This is a fatalist view that is as good as saying that GOD will solve the whole problem, and is motivated by a profound suspicion of all organisations per se. The position of this current may be summed up in the slogan ‘all organisations are corruptible, therefore no organisation’. It thinks that it has seen this maxim confirmed by the present state of the unions and parties under capitalism, and therefore relapses into a nihilist hopelessness or frantic activism (although we can only hope that the present nihilism is as much a precursor to revolution as the Narodnik variety). Rather than drawing the lesson that all these corrupt organisations are useless to the workers because they are bourgeois organisations, they decide that organisations themselves are to blame.

By denying the need for proletarian organisation, they are merely providing added ideological ammunition for the bourgeoisie against the working class: whose strength lies precisely in… organisation.

In essence, communists must make their presence felt in the economic battles of the proletariat; whether inside or outside the unions; whether official or unofficial, and constantly fight the official unions’ attempts to restrict these struggles within the bounds of bourgeois convenience. Instead we must hold out the prospect of workers’ organisations which take a firm stand firm on the basis that workers’ and employers’ interests are fundamentally opposed.

Our party will assess the issue of whether we can work in the old unions or not on the basis of the practical possibilities for agitation and propaganda which exist within them; which is basically where-ever combative workers are to be found. Workers are certainly voting with their feet in many unions and leaving in droves. But even if we did decide to try and work inside particular unions and found it to be wasted effort, any amount of failed practical experiment is better than negating the necessity for the eventual genesis of the Class Union in the revolutionary struggle. It is a necessity rejected by all other parties – many of whom, incidentally, have also rejected the working class as necessary revolutionary subject as well, or who even try and tell us that… the working class has ceased to exist!

The union Mandarins also think the working class has ceased to exist – not only because such an attitude is a comforting illusion to them as they go about their dirty work, but because their branch meetings are now largely composed… of invisible workers!