Against Union Nationalism

War is returning to the gates of the European capitalist metropoles with dramatic attention, bringing with it the ancient disease of patriotism which, even in the distant past, diverts a part of the labor and union movement away from the struggle for their proper class interests. Such a disease was the cause of a long series of historical defeats for the working class from which it is still struggling to recover, even after such a great length of time. This nationalist swerve, in its time, affected a very significant portion of the parties and labor unions which, 110 years ago, was conquered by this nefarious virus and took sides in the First World War, putting themselves under the deceitful banner of their bourgeois fatherlands. This was the first great defeat of the labor movement in the imperialist historical phase of capitalism, which persists to this day. Therefore, in order to attempt to prevent this horrible screenplay of war preparation from reaching its dramatic epilogue, we must investigate the profound causes of that treachery wrought by the leaders of parties and labor unions. These leaders offered the proletariat, tied at its hands and feet, to its class enemy. They ensnared it in a stifling social peace, all in order to make it support its own bourgeoisie in the war effort.

Even if this process took on different shapes and sizes, across all advanced capitalist countries, labor unions and parties played a very important role in strengthening the homefront during the course of the conflict. Furthermore, the (at least apparently) different ways in which the labor movement reacted to the call for unity of the fatherland did not stop the outcome from still being the same, which was simply catastrophic for the proletariat. The case of Germany was a model example in this sense, as the Social Democratic Party exercised an almost absolute control over the labor unions, and so the decision made by its parliamentary group to vote on war credits had the effect of bringing with it, almost without opposition, the classification of workers as a part of the national front. Even in France the majority of the SFIO (even though its name meant “French Section of the Workers’ International”) voted for war credits, and, even though the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was not controlled in the same way by the Socialist Party, the wave of patriotism managed to impose itself. Sometimes it did this with more ferocious methods, as was seen with the case of the assassination of Jean Jaurés. In the Italian case, the subordination of the labor movement to the war became mystified by the deceptive position taken by the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) leadership of “neither support nor sabotage.” Hidden behind this slogan was the necessity of dealing with a working-class base less willing to slavishly follow the standard-bearers of the bourgeois fatherland. If this were the case, it was because the set of institutions and social devices which, in Germany, had favored a greater political submission of the working class to the bourgeois regime, had not yet developed in Italy. Weighing into this was the relative backwardness of Italian industrial development compared to Germany, where a different degree of integration of the more “affluent” strata of the proletariat (those which Lenin called the “labor aristocracy”) into the bourgeois regime had been achieved. For this reason, the component of the labor movement which was most enthusiastically seduced by the patriotic spirit was that of revolutionary syndicalism. This tendency was organizationally connected with the Italian Syndicalist Union, and broke with the latter precisely on the issue of war. With regard to the interventionist orientation of Sorelian trade unionism in Italy, the thesis that it played a role of some significance in precipitating the events that led to the war, cannot ultimately be considered unfounded. However, this does not mean agreeing with the narrative that sees rejecting membership in unions dominated by the Socialist Party as the cause of what weakened the formation which was opposed to intervention in the war. The case of Germany is a very eloquent example of how the bourgeoisie managed to win over the union and labor movement for war, even in a country where there was a larger socialist-inspired party and in which the control exercised by this party over the unions was even stronger.

If, even in the case of Italy, no internal force within the proletarian movement was able to simultaneously stop the process of mass adhesion to the war effort and to impose its own class interests (including that of not being slaughtered for the benefit of the capitalists!), this should be explained by searching for analogies with the conditions that had been created in other European countries. It is therefore necessary to evaluate how many of these mechanisms, which have had a detrimental influence within the proletariat, are still present in today’s society and the world of labor. These mechanisms are of course simultaneously political, economic, and ideological.

The formula of the so-called “national interest,” agitated by every bourgeois faction and every opportunist political formation within the labor movement, beyond its fallacious and deceptive character, condenses within itself a core of horrifying “truth.” This is the case to the extent that it describes, through the lens of bourgeois ideology, the fact that, at a certain point in their development, the imperialist powers of old Europe found themselves facing each other in a contest. This contest had transferred from competition between companies to the higher level of competition between states. Monopoly capitalism is the formula that summarizes this tendency, which has pushed bourgeois politics to interject between itself and the proletariat the diaphragm of the “welfare state.” This is done in order to prevent the sharpening of social conflict and any revolutionary overthrow that would support a process of transition to socialism, whose material prerequisites have already reached a notable degree of maturity. In fact, in state-monopoly capitalism, the social character of labor, which sees the cooperation of growing human masses, is taken to its extreme consequences. Then, on the side of distribution, individual appropriation remains. But in a monopolistic context, thanks to such individual appropriation, it becomes increasingly difficult to hide the character of capital as a “relationship between men mediated by things.” The so-called “welfare state” fulfills, in this case, a multitude of functions in an economic, social, and ideological sense, the result of which is the maximum mystification of reality. On the one hand, the surplus value extorted from workers is partially returned to them in various forms of assistance. On the other hand, public spending becomes the element that mystifies the class character of the state. The state is then deceptively proposed as this neutral entity with respect to the different components of the social body. The “welfare state” therefore acts as a vehicle for bourgeois ideology, which imposes itself through the corruption of the proletariat. The more prosperous a country’s economy is, the greater the resources that the bourgeoisie leading the state will be able to devote to corrupting its proletariat, both materially and ideologically.

Let’s put on our seven-league boots and move forwards a few decades. We can say that in both post-war periods the social mechanism of the welfare state, whose embryo had already formed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, has never ceased to expand and grow in importance in the large capitalist countries. This growth, especially in the three decades of economic prosperity following the Second World War, has modeled union and political life on the paradigm of corporatism.

The reformist parties of the labor movement had undergone a genetic mutation through the two imperialist wars. They arrived at a program of regulating the bourgeois political economy and its crises. Meanwhile, the unions reborn from the ashes of the European conflict have accentuated their characters as, de facto, an element of the state apparatus.

To tell the truth, the process that led the union to become an instrument of the nation and its state, and to become a powerful vehicle of bourgeois ideology within the proletariat, was supported by certain characteristics which had accompanied it from its birth. Let’s look more specifically at the Italian case, and in particular at the history of the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGdL). We can observe how from the moment of its foundation in 1906, the cornerstones of this confederal organization were the trade federations that had taken over the then-widespread reality of labor chambers, even back then.

The latter had the advantage of being grounded in territory. This allowed it to bring together workers from different factories and workplaces, protecting them from the hierarchy and networks of interests that lurked within those companies. At the same time, they brought together workers from different trades, bringing forth an awareness that they belonged to a single social class, even if it was not without internal articulations. Of course, even today the CGIL (with the I standing for Italian), which is different from the CGdL, contemplates the existence of labor chambers in its statute, but it is no mystery to anyone that the union has always put them in second place compared to trade federations, and that currently they are nothing more than a dull simulacra of what they were over a century ago.

Regime unionism, which developed under the bourgeois republic as the legitimate heir of fascist unionism, is the result of the intimately corporatist character of the structure of regime confederations. These regime confederations played an essential role preventing the unification of the working class outside of individual trades, and, especially after the end of the era of prosperity, even outside of individual companies. They did this especially in those trades destined to be divested. Nonetheless, it was precisely in response to the Hot Autumn that, with the adoption of withholding union contributions from paychecks (the famous “delegation”), companies were offered a tool for direct control over workers. All this did was expose them to employer blackmail and police control. This delegation has proven, over time, to be one of the most effective tools for ensuring the subservience of the unions to the logic of capital. It has been the trap that even rank-and-file unionism has not wanted to or even been able to completely escape. Such unionism fails to put up an effective fight since it has (willingly) adapted to the certainty of a monthly income assured by this deduction from paychecks, that no voluntary payment of dues could have guaranteed.

Another important aspect of the corporatist structure of republican Italy was the growing importance assumed by labor laws. The more workers saw the possibility of collectively defending their interests through struggle fade, the more they developed a tendency to appeal to the work courts. They began to entrust their own cause, for a fee, to the care of a lawyer.

The legal assistance offered by unions to workers in navigating labor laws is, to put it generously, a blunt weapon. It has fostered the illusion that the courts of the capitalist state could be the right venue for defending their interests. Behind this trap lies hidden the very dangerous mystification of the state as something intended to be a neutral body, above classes. Thus, workers, often even in perfect solitude, are coaxed back to the decrees of the bourgeois judge. Labor laws act thusly as a safe method to mature in the worker the conviction of their own individual powerlessness. The antidote to this state of affliction can only be found in collective action, which instead demonstrates what extraordinary latent force is endowed within the proletariat as a whole. However, the aim of regime unions, after the end of the times of economic prosperity, was to harness, discourage, and isolate all collective activity of the workers.

The segmentation of the proletariat through trade contracts played a fundamental role in the subordination of the class to capital and its state, while rhetoric about the “general interests of the nation” filled the mouths of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) politicians and the tricolor unionists. In fact, in the language of petit-bourgeois chauvinism, this national interest was nothing more than a fetish behind which the interest of national and international capital was hidden. Say that a section of the workers were to demand better working conditions and improved economic treatment, perhaps by reclaiming some of the relative surplus value taken by technological advancements and the rise of the organic composition of capital. They would have immediately faced an anathema against these “corporatist” attitudes, and inevitably against the “general interest of the nation.”

How many times did the Stalinist and ultra-opportunist PCI of the 1970s claim that certain sections of workers demanding wage increases were unleashing “corporatist interests,” labeling it as the “entryway to fascism?” This represented a kind of “Freudian displacement,” diverting attention from the inherently corporatist nature of the trade federations and the entire union, which was gearing up for the turning point in EUR, Rome. The petit-bourgeois chauvinism advocated for by the reformist left has had a prominent function in pushing the workers’ struggles towards non-class objectives, through the moderation of wage requests and the acceptance of the flexibility of work.

From the EUR turning point of February 1978 to the open contentions of the 1990s, more than a decade has passed. During this time, some sections of the working class distanced themselves from the tricolor unions. They initiated struggles that were beyond the control of the regime’s bigwigs. At one phase, these struggles seemed to hint at the opening of a new season.

Contentious unions have experienced some downsizing. However, this has not completely annulled their role as a “social glue.” They still manage to keep a considerable part of the proletariat hitched to the bandwagon of the bourgeois nation.

On the other hand, the birth and development of rank-and-file unions arose from the workers’ perceived inability to utilize the Triple Alliance. They felt this limitation prevented them from effectively defending their working conditions, real wages, and employment itself. The possibility of doing without tricolor unions gave many workers hope for the rebirth of an authentic class-based union. The most combative workers’ disputes in recent decades have generally had to rely on rank-and-file unionism.

But today, more than four decades after the birth of rank-and-file unionism, due to the poor overall development of the class struggle, we must make a balance sheet of the positives and negatives. To the extent that rank-and-file unions have not been able to adopt an organizational model consistent with the aims of the workers’ struggle, they also have accepted the anti-proletarian practice of delegation, while subordination to the dominant ideology has imposed demands on the ground of “rights” rather than on that of needs. This often puts demands for wage increases and reductions in working hours in the background. In these long years in which struggles have been limited or absent, even the rank-and-file unions have appeared to be following a path that has brought them closer, in many ways, to the regime unions. A discourse that is especially valid for the Base Trade Union (USB), which has agreed to submit to the 2015 law on union representation.

Generally speaking, rank-and-file unions have seen the growth of a manifold bureaucratic apparatuses in connection to their number of members. They have multiplied the number of union detachments in many companies and in the public sector, and they also offer services such as Fiscal Assistance Centers (CAF), patronage, etc. All these aspects do not have much to do with the class struggle; rather, they enable these apparatuses to survive and perpetuate themselves, without having to rely too much on the recovery of the workers’ movement.

At times, in order to meet workers’ requests to save their jobs in companies undergoing restructuring or divestment, the two most important rank-and-file unions in terms of membership, the USB and the CUB, have invoked the life-saving solution of nationalization.

Many rank-and-file union militants seem completely unaware of the pitfalls that lie in this appeal to the bourgeois class state to save workers from unemployment. Even the very possibility—often only illusory and ideological—that unemployment can be avoided thanks to the intervention of the state, is another important factor towards nationalism.

In fact, if the imperialist contest is described, in a simplified way, as an economic competition between nations, then the completely erroneous belief takes root that the guardian of workers’ interests is the state to which they belong.
Even a position taken by a rank-and-file union on the side of a formation engaged in war, even one apparently far away in space, is a fact that can lead to the accumulation of flammable material. Material which, by the way, serves to light the pestilent fire of nationalism. For example, the attitude of the SI Cobas and the USB in the face of the war in Gaza is partisan behavior in the bourgeois sense. It confuses the righteous indignation about the genocide of the Palestinians and the harsh conditions of national oppression with adhesion to a camp that includes Russia and Iran. The word “Zionist” simply becomes a slur, and the existence of a Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli proletariat is denied. In this, the political directions of these “union-parties” of pseudo-Marxist orientation, open the way to bourgeois interventionism in every war.

The SI Cobas has always tried, in vain, to overcome the unbridgeable gap that separates its once strongly ideologized leadership from its rank-and-file, which is composed mainly of immigrant logistics workers. The attempt to transform these workers, who are capable of very generous struggles, into “perfect” Marxist militants has proven to be unrealistic and counterproductive for the union itself. The mid-term results have been the cessation of the growth of the SI Cobas and the induction of the union leaders to side unconditionally with Hamas in order to please their rank-and-file, which has within it a considerable portion of Muslim workers.

The USB has made a choice that mirrors the campist tradition of the so-called “Network of Communists” (RdC) group that leads the union, which has gone over the years from strictly pro-Sovietism to one-way anti-imperialism that demonizes the United States and its allies—as if there is no working class in those countries. This frontist attitude in Middle Eastern conflicts has led these unions to join those who rejoice in the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7th. Meanwhile, the majority of the proletariat is horrified by these massacres, just as they are by the carnage in Gaza. One gets the impression that, in a general situation where the international proletariat is docile, these sorcerer’s apprentices view the sending of Palestinian masses to slaughter under the banner of nationalism and obscurantism as a good substitute for class struggle. We will not have to wait too long before the disastrous results of such blatantly interventionist and anti-proletarian attitudes become apparent.

In such a situation, the need to struggle against the germ of nationalism, which manifests as a campist attitude of respect, that is taking root in some elements of rank-and-file unionism becomes clear. It is necessary to reiterate the need for the working class to reject any appeal to sovereignism, any flag-waving that serves the deceitful fetish of the nation, and any alignment within the wars of the bourgeoisie. We recognize the bourgeoisie as an international class that uses the national state to better oppress the proletariat. The working class is also an eminently international class and must achieve unity to put itself in a position to fight only for itself. That is, to fight for its own contingent and historical interests that prefigure a world without classes, without capital, without exploitation, and without borders.