[GM10] Bases of Party Action in the Field of Proletarian Economic Struggles Pt. 9

17. – THE PARTY’S ATTITUDE IN THE FACE OF THE DISTORTION OF WORKERS’ STRUGGLES

The various attacks that have occurred in recent times are masterfully used by the union bureaucrats to terrorize the working class, demoralize it, and dilute its energies in popularist demonstrations. The thesis they advocate can be summarized as follows: “The country is in crisis and while all the sound forces are responsibly working to save the situation, groups of terrorists are fueling the fire, accentuating hatreds to bring the country to head-on confrontation, economic chaos, ruin, and this will lead the working classes to unemployment and misery”.

This is nothing new; once the bosses’ thesis is accepted that working-class living conditions can only be safeguarded if the business of enterprises is doing well, it seems logical to strive to prevent the collapse of the economy.

The thesis the piecards imply is thus that every enemy of peace between classes, every proponent of all-out struggle is a saboteur of the economy, a provocateur, a terrorist. Consequently, anyone who opposes the “responsible” line of the union bureaucrats is a provocateur, an enemy of the working class. The piecards always present the question as a contrast between proponents of violence and chaos against the peace-loving, honest-working masses, and even go so far as to demand individually from the members the abjuration and condemnation of violence.

For us communists, the question is nonsensical posed like this; we know that violence is inherent in capitalist relations of production and that all advocates of social peace only endorse the violence done by the privileged classes on the proletariat. While opportunists of all stripes spread the illusion that the proletariat can defend itself by means of peaceful demonstrations or by appealing to bourgeois legality, we argue, on the basis of historical experience, that only red violence will bring down the capitalist regime.

For us, however, violence is a necessary means, and just as “peace” or “freedom” do not make sense as abstract categories, neither does standing up for the “idea of violence” as opposed to “pacifist ideals”. Therefore we don’t counterpose the action of workers today on legalitarian and peaceful grounds with violent methods of action, but accompany them and try to open their eyes by always arguing that one day the bourgeoisie itself will force them into an open confrontation.

As materialists, we know that the workers today stay on the peaceful ground not because they’ve chosen to be pacifists rather than revolutionaries, but because they still have reserves, they still retain illusions, they hope that the machine of the capitalist economy will return to work as it had before, keeping for them those crumbs of welfare it had granted them in the past.

As concerns the means of action in workers’ struggles, it’s by no means true that we’re always and in all cases “for the use of violence”, indeed in some cases (e.g., July 1917 demonstration in Petersburg) the party imposed, against the wishes of many workers, that no weapons be used, deeming it useful that the opponents take the first step in this direction, clearly demonstrating in the eyes of the masses the need to react on the same ground. Of course, this doesn’t contradict with the party militarily organizing itself, nor with applauding any worker who – even individually – feels the need to boot up a piecard or boss.

The maneuver of the piecards consists in isolating from the proletarian mass those groups of workers who feel the need to take the struggle to the bitter end, passing them off as provocateurs, adventurists, enemies of the labor struggle.

Striking for democratic order or in support of the police trade union is certainly a serious matter, it’s more than just striking for reforms. To these “demands” the piecards have arrived after patient hammering over a period of years in which they relied on the illusion that life can continue as before, on the fear of economic collapse and consequent unemployment, of terrorist attacks, and on a skillful deployment of a police force which hasn’t fired on workers for some years. Certainly it’d have been very difficult for the piecards to show that the cops are friends of the workers after the Avola massacre.

To the mass of the workers, the matter is now presented more or less like this: first of all, it is “their” union, the one that in the “boom” years, they say, won them considerable economic improvements, that calls them to action and they respond to the call in a disciplined manner. Second, the piecards insist on the benefits to the working class of having a police force “no longer at the service of the bosses”, but at the side of the working class in defense of the democratic order, and thus also of the economic “achievements” of substantial layers of the proletariat. Thus, workers are urged to press to overcome the “reactionary resistance” that opposes this outcome. It’s clear that this position takes strength from a material situation: first, the existence of substantial labor aristocracies that have many advantages to defend, and then the very careful use of the police.

Thus the workers who watch almost indifferently the layoffs, the white murders (as the on- the-job fatalities are called), the poisonings of their comrades, are mobilized to weep over the corpse of some magistrate, a policeman, a journalist.

From the point of view of the practical direction of the party, however – beyond the disgust we all feel at seeing our class dragged into shit up to its neck – things don’t change at all. If workers walk off the job to demand that the police serve democratic institutions instead of “reactionary forces”, or that “police workers” have the right to union association, it’s still for them an action of struggle even if the goal is anti-proletarian.

What are communist workers to do in such cases? We must take note that – except for isolated and sporadic cases – such words of order have elicited no emotional reaction from the workers who have followed the directives of the piecards like sheep. Not even the proletarians who still remember the cops firing with live rounds and the beatings dared to rebel. This is not to say that the Italian proletariat has completely forgotten its fallen at the hands of the police. The majority of proletarians passively follow the orders of the piecards, unenthusiastically, grudgingly, because first of all they see no alternative; no trustworthy voice rises against them; then because the piecards have raised the possibility that the police may become something different than what they have been in the past and this is seen as a real advantage. Also plays the fear of being accused of complicity with terrorists; and the specter of unemployment. Finally, by discipline, by habit of moving together which, fortunately, has not yet been lost.

In this situation, our task is to denounce directives so abhorrent in both method and objectives, to remind the workers who are called to mourn over the violence exercised against super-paid magistrates and journalists about the violence that is exercised daily on them, the 2,000 annual deaths on the job, the tens of thousands of invalids, the periodic massacres and beatings carried out by the police, the unemployment and misery they have to endure to enrich the capitalists.

We must not so much oppose the thesis of class violence to the thesis of pacifism, as to search for the most sensitive keys, to arouse that healthy class hatred which the workers keep buried deep in their hearts, and show them the practical path they must take, counterposing the goals of the piecards with our class claims and their method with our methods. If a communist worker spreads such a leaflet or speaks in an assembly advocating the same things this doesn’t mean that he has adhered to the directives of the piecards, but that he’s taking advantage of the occasion to do agitation and propaganda work among his fellow workers, which wouldn’t be possible if he remained in the factory.

The problem of giving orders for action opposed to those of the piecards can be considered only if we have considerable influence, or if a spontaneous revolt against their directives arises among the workers. Quite simply, orders are given when they move forces, when we are sure that they will be carried out, otherwise we would, among other things, look like the ridiculous figure of a general without soldiers.

Apparently we’re still far from such a situation. However, assuming for the sake of argument that in a factory half of the workers were willing to follow us (or that we anticipate they will be once the action starts), it’s not necessarily a good thing (and should be carefully considered) for there to be a separation in the action between the workers directed by us and those following the piecards. The same at the general scale applies to one factory over the others or to one category over the others. In this regard, the practical directives of the party after World War I are a significant example.

These considerations certainly do not lead us to belittle the action of small groups of workers who tend to break the police discipline of the union bureaucrats, who have the courage even if only a few to wage real strikes against their directives. We would be all talk if we snubbed an action of even a few dozen workers under the pretext that “it’s not general”, “it has no prospects”, and so «it is doomed to failure”. Our task is precisely to make sure that that action extends, has prospects, does not result in complete failure. In this we have always had to sustain a fierce struggle with the various extra-parliamentary grouplets that influence these workers’ groups and try to drive them into isolation by separating them from the mass of their fellow workers.

After World War I, the mass of the proletariat moved in defense of its conditions although it was led by reformists. Today, the mass of the proletariat is moving on a ground that is contrary to its own conditions of life and work. Therefore, the rise of small opposition groups is not a centrifugal tendency, but represents a healthy reaction of a very small minority of the proletariat that feels, albeit confusedly, the need to move on class ground. In fact, we have rightly attached much more importance to strikes called by the railroaders’ Unitary Rank-and-File Committees (CUB) or the hospital committees – true class-based actions – even if they were by a minority of workers – than to the pre-announced and duly castrated “general strikes” called by the trade unions centers, which, while mobilizing 15 million workers, aren’t true class struggles in our sense, but purely demonstrative or popular actions in both method and goals.

But if there’s a healthy reaction behind the rise of these groups, we know that in a weak situation like our current one, if they’re not influenced by the Party they’re short-lived because they immediately fall prey to the centrifugal tendencies brought by the various grouplets who make “the alternative” a moral issue, they’re always ready to spout that the union “no longer exists”, that all workers who follow its directives are traitors, and they do not pose the question of how to wrest influence from the piecards, but that of being “alternative”, of separating themselves from the masses who sheepishly follow the traditional leaders.

Our function is precisely to make sure that these sound drives do not dissipate and aren’t stifled. That’s why we tried to intervene when the Rome CUBs gave the watchword of sabotaging strikes called by the centrals, when the “rank-and-file hospital workers” behaved in the same way and refused to participate in assemblies called by the CGIL. We denounced the danger that this would lead them to isolate themselves from other workers, which was what the piecards wanted. Their mistake was not that a few of them threw themselves into fighting action, but that they demanded to sabotage the actions called by the piecards and so abandon the vast majority of workers in their hands.

It’s clear that if even a small group of workers really shows itself willing to mobilize, we cannot deny their action under the pretext of waiting for the masses, we must instead push them and direct them in the right way, make sure that they do not throw themselves into desperate actions: we have also had small direct experiences in this regard among school workers both during the “20- hour blockade” and in internal quarrels in workplaces where our comrades waited neither for the initiative of the official unions nor for the adherence of the majority of workers to conduct small actions. In these cases it’s true that the small group would separate from the mass, but from a sleeping mass, not from a mobilized mass. Such actions, if they succeed or if they don’t result in a collapse of forces, would bring significant examples, practical demonstrations for the mass of workers. After all, the counting of forces should be done in a dynamic rather than a static sense, and we cannot rule out the possibility that, in given situations, even the action of a small group may trigger a chain reaction, transforming itself into a general movement.

18. – HOW TO RESPOND TO THE FALSE OPPOSITION OF TRADE UNION ACRONYMS

While for the more genuinely working-class categories (metalworkers, construction workers, agricultural laborers, chemical workers, etc) the unity of workers in the workplace and in action is a foregone conclusion for now, for other categories (railroad workers, state workers, school workers) this unity is still far off and to many workers it even seems inconceivable that they should march together. This is due to the traditional presence of autonomous unions, openly bosses’ organizations that nevertheless influence a considerable part of the workers and that in the case of the railroad workers have also managed to gather a considerable number of combative workers disgusted with the CGIL’s behavior.

Confederal piecards and autonomous piecards apparently wage war against each other and bring division among the workers. This is their real purpose, and in this they prove to be complementary to each other: the attitude of the confederal piecards allows the autonomous ones to present themselves as upright defenders of that category; the position of the autonomous ones allows the confederal piecards to brand any worker who speaks of demanding higher wages as “autonomous”. Of course, neither give a damn about workers’ interests, as we have always denounced, and they demonstrate this not only and not so much with their platforms of demands as with their methods of action that wreak havoc and demoralization among workers.

The division has become a traditional fact, so much so that it would be considered exceptional if the members of the autonomous and the confederal unions went on strike together. It occurs, for example, that the confederal piecards proclaim a strike, while the autonomous ones call for sabotage. Subsequently, it’s the autonomous piecards who call for a strike, and then the confederals proclaim actions by announcing them at least a week in advance, openly stating that their first concern is not to damage the service. The autonomous piecards take their cue from the CGIL’s methods to decree that “by now the traditional strike is no longer needed” and that other, more effective forms of struggle must be sough out, and so they appear more bellicose by proclaiming actions that seem more incisive and that more than anything else require the individual adherence of workers: e.g., strike by only the machinists, in turn “to disorganize traffic”, or of the pilots on airplanes, or of only the commanders on ships, or in schools the famous “blocking of the end-of-term assessments”, again in turn “to have the minimum economic damage”. The hysterical cries of confederal piecards and smartass journalists presenting these actions as the apocalypse help inculcate in some workers the idea that indeed these methods are more effective. To the extent that they are practically carried out (as among railroad workers) and aren’t just saber-rattling (as in the school), these methods of struggle are instead deleterious: first, they take away the habit of joint action from workers and accustom them to division; then they are more difficult to carry out precisely because they are individual actions and often affect only a tiny fraction of the workforce, generally the part that performs specialized tasks. Finally, because of all the noise around such actions, any worker who feels the need to fight in earnest is classified as an autonomous and the confederal piecards point him out as such to the mass of his comrades.

In this situation of extreme disorientation and division we have tried first of all to make workers understand the need to oppose both sides, achieving unity which is the first condition for an action to succeed. We’ve always denied that the actions promoted by both the confederals and the autonomous piecards were real struggle actions, as much in terms of platforms of demands as in terms of methods. We have always defended the strike weapon against the confederals who devalued it by using it harmlessly and against the autonomous who proclaimed that it must now be abandoned.

However, we could not argue in this case that “one must participate in all strikes” because it would have appeared to workers as an absurd position and would not lead to any results. Instead, we had first to show that the main obstacle to successful struggles was the division among workers and to indicate a practical way to overcome this division. Therefore, where we had the possibility to act, we always maintained that the decision to participate or not to participate in a strike had to be made by all the workers, whether members or non-members of the various unions, in assembly, regardless of the directives of the piecards. Always in assembly, all together, the demands that met the workers’ real interests were to be enunciated and the modalities of action determined. Thus the strike would not be a mere sheepish response to the piecard’s call but a real struggle action, felt by the workers reaffirming in front of the piecards their demands: ultimately, an act of indiscipline against them. Of course, we never dreamed of making the workers believe that it was enough for real class demands to be voiced in a single workplace to reverse the situation, but we argued that this was necessary precisely to put pressure on the union leadership and to set an example for other workers.

In doing so we were exposing ourselves to a risk: that the assembly would decide not to participate in the strike. It was a risk that we had to accept, and in this case it was the lesser of two evils since most of the workers in such a situation would not have participated in the strike anyway. If we called the workers to decide we also had to accept that it would be decided against our will. However, the small experiences we’ve had show that this is more a theoretical risk than a practical one. The very calling of assemblies always required us to make a considerable effort and could never be done without a minimum mobilization of the workers; so this in itself constituted an action. And our comrades always tried to make sure that the decision was always a positive one by showing the workers how taking part in the action led to better results: possibility of making connections with other workers, of agitating our real demands, making our voices heard, impossibility for piecards to accuse us of being scabs, etc, etc.

In this regard, again in the reduced proportions in which our action is carried out today, we have in some cases had good results, and all the times we have succeeded in getting to assemblies the decision has never been one of sabotage: on several occasions we have given the piecards the highest mischief, we have made the actions they proclaimed actually succeed by turning them, as far as we could, into real struggles.