The Communist Party and the Confederation of Labor

The congress of the General Confederation of Labor is approaching, which is of the utmost importance for the work undertaken by the Communist Party among the ranks of the Italian proletariat. Unfortunately, the very short period of time between this congress and the recent one in Livorno, towards the preparation of which the activity of the communists has naturally had to gravitate to a large extent, prevents them from adequately preparing for the battle that will take place, in the same city and in the same theater, a few weeks after the split in the Socialist Party.

Nevertheless, an active group of organizers belonging to the Communist Party, already encouraged by the widespread support of organized workers and organizations, is working to unite, inspired by clear guiding principles and firm intentions, the trade union forces that are on the communist platform, ready for a fierce battle against the prevailing confederal reformism and also against the slippery behavior of yesterday’s maximalists, now united under the banner of the PSI around the counterrevolutionary politics of D’Aragona.

Naturally, the Communist Party newspaper, indeed the entire Communist press, will contribute greatly to the preparation and debate surrounding the trade union congress, and we have already devoted several articles to this important topic.

Today, we want to illustrate the position of principle and tactics of the communists on the various political trade union issues that will have to be addressed by the congress, and around which the most bitter and clear dissent between the right and the left will have to emerge.

The Statutory Question

There is a preliminary issue. The Confederation’s statute, as is well known, and as is characteristic in all countries for these large bodies dominated by minimalist practices, is designed to guarantee a priori majority in any vote to that small clique made up of the group of leaders, i.e., officials paid by the strongest and most numerous organizations. First of all, there is the well-known issue of double voting, for the Chambers of Labor and for trade federations; and more than anything else, without dwelling on the details of this problem for now, the established traditional practice of delegating their salaried officials to representatives of the various organizations, without any preliminary consultation with the members on the issues which their delegate will have to vote on their behalf.

All this leads to the consequence that the communists should have been given the time and opportunity to conduct an initial campaign aimed at drawing the attention of the masses to the tasks of the confederal congress, in order to get them to demand to be informed and to give their proxies full knowledge of the facts and to those who best reflected the opinions and directives prevailing by majority in each organization after adequate discussion. Instead, this can only be achieved in part, and while it is certain that the communist thesis will prevail victoriously where there is serious and exhaustive debate, it can easily be predicted that the vast majority of votes will be cast by the usual leaders of the large organizations, and especially of certain trade federations, who will not even have dreamed of eliciting any expression of opinion from those for whom they will vote.

The reform of the Statute can only take place, at most, as one of the last decisions of the Congress itself, and therefore voting can only be carried out according to the current rules.

But let us leave all this aside and come to the merits of the issues that will come before the Congress.

The Work of the Confederation

First of all, the congress of the organized Italian proletariat, which is meeting seven years after the previous congress, will have to examine and judge the work carried out by the Confederation over such a long period of time and of such tremendous historical importance, subjecting to its criticism the political and trade union policy followed in complex circumstances. This is a discussion that the communists will tackle head-on and on which, as is obvious, they will propose a resolution of complete disagreement with the political and trade union policy, both theoretical and practical, always followed by the reformists who are at the head of the Confederation, and therefore of disapproval and disavowal of their past work. A comprehensive critique of this, through the most important episodes of the class struggle in Italy before, during, and after the war, must be carried out by the representatives of the communist tendency, documenting how the General Confederation of Labor should be classified among the large proletarian economic organizations, which grew excessively in number after the war and which, due to their powerful structure and because they are in the hands of men and groups that politically represent the reformist, collaborationist, and social democratic doctrines and tendencies, admirably serve the counterrevolutionary game of the bourgeoisie. This must be demonstrated by recalling the Confederation’s behavior before the war, when it followed the party’s intransigence with enormous reluctance, maintaining contacts, including electoral ones, with opposing men and parties, even with renegades from socialism, and crushed and devalued any movement that tended to transcend the slow path of achieving the usual small improvements, using and abusing contacts and contracts with all the organs of the bourgeois state to obtain concessions; during the war, it ostensibly supported the Socialist Party in its policy of neutrality, but in reality gravitated with all its might towards the right wing, which always opposed the war, making no secret of its social patriotism, which only special conditions made different from other countries, and worked in practice (the Confederation) to collaborate with the bourgeoisie in its internal war needs, participating in civil organization and industrial mobilization committees after the war, when it openly opposed adherence to the directives of the Russian Revolution and the Third International, accepting the famous alliance pact with the party, but only to function in reality as another party, through the complicity of the parliamentary representation of the proletariat, opposing its own political program to the maximalist program and propaganda; playing the game of maximalist allies very skillfully, pretending to follow them in a disciplined manner, only to torpedo them in all their actions with relentless obstructionism, and then singing their deficiencies and failures in every key, thus achieving the brilliant result—for the counterrevolution—that many early maximalists are now turning precipitously to the right, convinced that the directives they initially embraced have failed, when in fact it was not those directives but the decade-long reformist and social democratic practice that was unfortunately tried out by the Italian proletariat in the post-war period, and that failed, i.e., proved to be counter-revolutionary.

All this must and will be said with a clear Marxist critical sense, so that it reaches the rugged proletarian soul, and making extensive use of what has been said and written on a thousand occasions by many of those who today stand alongside the confederal leaders and who will defend them as representatives of their party – that party which is finally a prisoner of trade union and parliamentary reformism, but without the Italian proletariat falling into the trap, which must be rescued from the snare and danger by the work and struggle of the communists.

Communist Union Tactics

Moving from assessing the past to action plans for the future, the confederal congress will address, among other minor issues, two major political problems that are closely linked: international relations and relations with the Socialist Party.

Here, it will be the task of our party comrades to give a complete and effective presentation of the trade union methods advocated by the communists. The Communist Party of Italy has a clear and consistent view of these issues because, on the one hand, it takes a Marxist stance on the trade union question and, on the other, it accepts the solutions outlined by the Second Congress of the Third International, not only out of discipline but also out of deep conviction. In fact, while the elements that today constitute our Communist Party took different positions on other issues examined by that congress, except for recognizing unconditional discipline to the decisions of the Congress, on the trade union question there was complete agreement: there was and is no tendency in the Italian communist movement to oppose the trade union criteria of the Moscow theses – as there was in many other countries, especially Germany – so we find ourselves in the best conditions to make a magnificent, conscious affirmation of the directives of the Communist International at a large trade union congress, which will have a great impact on the ranks of the international proletarian movement and on the resolution of the problems connected with the constitution of the Third Trade Union International.

We reserve the right to return to these interesting issues in detail and to publish extensively the results of the studies undertaken in this regard, in agreement with the party, by the comrades who are responsible for communist preparation at the confederal congress. For the moment, we will present them in brief summary.

According to the Marxist method, the relationship between trade unions and the party is established in such a way that the political, revolutionary, class-based party, which includes the most conscious and ideally and materially prepared elements, must lead the workers’ unions, which bring together much larger masses prepared for less advanced forms of struggle, in all revolutionary work: in order to fulfill its task, the party must have a strictly homogeneous program and be absolutely uncompromising in its methods, drawing proletarians into its ranks as they become ready for revolutionary struggle. The union alone could not replace the party and lead the proletarian revolutionary struggle, but on the other hand, in order to carry out its preparation, the party needs the unions to exist and to encompass the largest proletarian masses in which the party can and must carry out its work.

Faced with the historical fact of the degeneration of the proletarian movement, of parties and trade unions falling into the hands of petty bourgeois and social-pacifist elements, the reaction that led to the reconstitution of the revolutionary movement in the Third International took the form of breaking up the old parties to make way for communist parties based on revolutionary program and action, BUT NOT BREAKING UP THE TRADE UNIONS. Once the historical problem of the constitution of the communist party had been resolved, the struggle against reformism in the trade unions was conducted from within, on the basis of the political party disciplining all the actions of communist organizers and those they organized, by means of communist groups formed in each union, with the aim of overthrowing the leaders and winning the unions’ membership and total leadership for the party, through systematic discipline, and not through special alliance pacts based on equal rights between unions and the party, which is an entirely social-democratic concept.

The proposals of the communists at the confederal congress therefore do not and cannot in any event, even if the Confederation were to remain in the hands of leaders even worse than the current ones, aim to split it into two bodies in order to immediately have a trade union body dependent on the party. It is only for base polemical purposes that the reformists and unitarians attribute to us the intention of wanting to split the Confederation, which would be contrary to all our theoretical and tactical criteria and to the Moscow theses. We will remain, but we will remain precisely because this is the best method for us to kill reformism, to defeat the counter-revolutionaries who today lead the organizations of the Italian proletariat, with the complicity of so many maximalists of yesterday, and that method is to distance ourselves from the masses, leaving the reformists better arbiters to enslave them to their politics.

The International Trade Union

The international trade union organization that existed alongside the Second International political movement betrayed it no less and was dispersed by events. Indeed, it can be said that its downfall in the whirlpool of bourgeois collaboration was even more shameful. However, while the Second Political International has been definitively defeated and can be considered no longer to exist in the face of the resurgence of the Third Communist International, the social-democratic elements, which are the long arm of the bourgeoisie, still hope to remain in the saddle in the trade union field and are organizing, in the Amsterdam Office and Secretariat, a Trade Union International subservient to reformism, indeed to the reactionary bourgeois politics of the “League of Nations.”

The Communist International has long since taken the initiative to wrest the leadership of the proletarian economic movement from that counterrevolutionary body through the establishment of an International Council of Red Trade Unions, closely linked to the central organs of the political International. In accordance with the agreement establishing this Council in Moscow, and in accordance with the decisions taken on this matter by the Congress of the International, this international body is joined by national trade union confederations that are communist in orientation and support the theses of the proletarian dictatorship and the Soviet revolution – as well as by the communist minorities of national trade union bodies led by social democrats. While these minorities must not leave their respective national organizations for the general tactical reasons we have outlined, the national confederations won over by the communists must, in joining Moscow, undoubtedly break away from Amsterdam.

The Italian reformist confederates, and the various Serratis who support them, are trying to muddy the waters by arguing that it is possible to join both Moscow and Amsterdam at the same time, but this is nothing more than a vulgar trick, which we will dispel, if necessary, by reproducing all the documentation already published in our press even before the Livorno Congress. The organized Italian workers must be presented with a clear dilemma: either Amsterdam or Moscow. It must be shown how absurd is the insidious supposition that at the next international congress of red trade unions, or at the third congress of the International, these decisions can be revisited in order to reconsider the Italian political and trade union defectors.

If, as is likely, the majority votes for Amsterdam, the communist minority of the Confederation will have to set up its own organization in order to continue its work within the Confederation and to intervene with the full weight of its clearly communist program at the international meeting of red unions.

With the Communist Party

As regards relations with the proletarian political party, it is clear that the communists must propose withdrawal from the Socialist Party and, as a logical consequence of the proposal to join Moscow, membership of the Communist Party of Italy, Section of the Communist International. There is no middle ground between these two options, nor could there be. The communists who are in the Confederation will count on the proposal to join their party, and will not take any other proposal or expedient into consideration.

The problem of relations with the party runs parallel to that of relations with the International. Either with the Communist Party of Italy and the Third Trade Union and Political International, or with the yellow International of Amsterdam. Even if the Congress responds with the latter, we will continue the struggle, certain that the proletarian masses are with Moscow, are with us, are for the thorough struggle against the counter-revolutionary maneuvers of reformism, and with them and with Moscow, victory will smile on our flag.