The Communist Party 58

In many Western countries, that is, those nations bound by an alliance with the United States, the Palestinian cause holds sympathy among the population and there are participatory demonstrations in its support, in some cases with large crowds. This has been seen recently in the United Kingdom, France and the United States itself.

The plight of the Palestinian people is identified as an exemplary case of oppression and injustice, reasoning that fighting against them is seen as a way to combat all injustice and political oppression, according to the motto “Palestine is the world”.

This conviction is fueled by feelings of indignation, compassion and solidarity, feelings which arise from the horrors of a war that, like the generality of conflicts in present-day capitalism, reaps terrible massacres among the civilian population, and which has a distinctly asymmetrical character as to the power relations between the parties involved in the conflict.

This is, however, a dangerous simplification.

The asymmetrical nature of a war does not define its essence. In Gaza, the army of the bourgeois Israeli state is not up against proletarian masses and the dispossessed in revolt but armed militias of bourgeois parties, headed by Hamas, which is itself supported by regional and world imperialist powers.

The proletarians of Palestine are mere cannon fodder according to the cynical calculations of these clashing bourgeois formations, including, of course, the Palestinian bourgeoisie-in-waiting.

The October 7 massacre perpetrated against Israeli civilians, in a kibbutz well known to have a pacifist orientation, and which also affected numerous immigrant proletarians, was one such calculation. Those who conceived, organized and implemented it knew that it would lead to the certain massacre of thousands of Palestinians. The assault was implemented in order to strike against the regional plans of Israel and its allies in the interests of another bloc of imperialist states headed by Iran.

The interests of the Palestinian working class, doubly oppressed, i.e., on both a national and class level, are at complete odds with the politics of Hamas and its supporters, allies and financiers.

Seventy years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict—generated and aggravated by the maneuvers of regional and global bourgeois powers—confirm that a solution within the framework of imperialism is insurmountable.

World capitalism is marching towards what is both its salvation and the ruin of humanity itself: a third world war. The economic crisis of overproduction has left humanity at the precipice of the abyss. Even if the capitalist states reached the solution of “two peoples, two states” in Palestine, it would only be a continuation of a higher, more serious level of the conflict already underway. In other words, there would be an even higher number of victims, mainly proletarian, on both sides of the front.

Taking the side of the so-called “Palestinian resistance”, that is, for the establishment of a Palestinian state within the framework of capitalism, means setting out on the road that leads, not to the defeat of oppression or social and political injustice, but to the deployment of proletarians in the new world war that is rapidly developing before our eyes.

That the good intentions of the world’s masses, who are mobilizing in reaction to the massacres in Gaza, are being used for the purposes of expanding and continuing the war, is proved by the fact that these mobilizations are directed by organizations that, beyond calling for a “ceasefire”, line up behind the Palestinian national-bourgeois parties in this 70-year conflict.

These organizations offer no criticism of the Palestinian nationalist parties, nor of the imperialist regimes that support them, nor any appeal addressed to the workers of Israel, nor any solidarity arising from the massacre of Israeli proletarians carried out by the militias of the bourgeois parties of Gaza.

The ethical law that seems to arise from the politics of these pro-Palestinian is that it should be a matter of standing alongside those who suffer the greatest massacre, justifying the lesser massacre of civilians. The problem is that it is not the asymmetry of the number of casualties that explains the nature of the conflict; this asymmetry is a fact that is highly susceptible to change, in the development of a conflict that is bourgeois in nature, and which will entail the increasing involvement of other capitalist states.

By ignoring the bourgeois nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, haphazardly tucking it away behind the asymmetry of forces, the pro-Palestinian movements aim to enlist ever larger masses on an international level in a war that is not social, that is, between classes, but between states of the same class, the capitalists.

In this way, any distinction between oppressors and oppressed, including the harassment of women in Islamist regimes, disappears behind the clash of states: this means the end of the struggle against exploitation and class domination within those countries that are supposed to support the “Palestinian cause”. It claims to fight against exploitation, injustice and oppression; instead, any struggle in this sense is set aside in favor of a conflict between capitalist states, justified as a reaction against the national oppression of the Palestinian people.

Throughout the Arab-Middle Eastern region, the Palestinian question—the struggle against the US-Israeli devil—is fomented to mislead the proletarian masses from the struggle for their goals and against their respective bourgeois regimes. Turkey and Iran are perhaps the most striking examples of this strategy of the bourgeoisie to engage its proletarians in war propaganda and stifle their class aims.

In Western countries, the centers of mobilizations for a “ceasefire” and in support of the “Palestinian cause” are the universities. Students are the easiest social stratum to mobilize into the activist movement, even more so than the petty bourgeois, as they are concentrated and entrenched in academic institutions and putting off your studies for a while is not as difficult as it is for the petty bourgeoisie to interrupt its entrepreneurial enterprises. Even more so, the condition of the workers. They are all the more distant from the condition of workers, as they are not subject to corporate despotism; notably, they will lose no wages. So much so that it is certainly erroneous to speak of a student “strike”.

These characteristics, combined with the inter-class nature of their social stratum, and the passing nature of their individual class position, which propels most of them toward a higher social position than the proletariat, make students a mostly petty bourgeois movement from which the big bourgeoisie occasionally draws to renew the ranks of its political personnel.

Without a position or social function to provide a firm footing, as is—also—the case with the proletariat, the student movement is characterized by impotence and, consequently, it makes a ruckus, disorients and leads ultimately to the same false radicalism. Proletarians have greater constraints to break, but when they finally succeed, they become aware of their social and, therefore, political power.

The student movement, due to its petty bourgeois nature, is bound to vacillate between the class positions of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, favoring the class with the stronger force. It is more susceptible to bourgeois ideology than that of the proletariat due to the culture disseminated through bourgeois institutions. It’s consequently fertile ground for the renewal of opportunist parties, which find in it a fruitful environment to replenish their ranks, collectively parroting the motto “workers and students united in struggle”, which can only mean workers aligning with petty-bourgeois activism.

The mobilizations underway in American universities naturally remind one of the anti-war movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s. At the time, the bourgeois American State was directly involved in the conflict and sent tens of thousands of young people to die through compulsory conscription. At the height of the stability acquired during the post-world war reconstruction, and by virtue of their established dominance in the theater of imperialist powers, young Americans were no longer interested in going to die in a war so far from the confines of their homeland. A segment of the American bourgeoisie itself considered the choice to continue the military engagement to be a mistake. The masses in action were far superior, whether in the university or out.

Today the situation is quite different. For decades capitalist society has burned away the illusions of growing prosperity and is shrouded in a despairing atmosphere of hopelessness. The middling petty bourgeoisie thins and crumbles by the day. Its desperation, a result typical of the kind of powerlessness which affects the class, manifests in fanatical and reactionary movements. The student milieu is no exception; its movement tends to embrace false radicalism, from various identitarian wings to being fatally attracted to spurious revolutionary solutions that mystify and replace social revolution with bourgeois war.

The International Communist Party shows young people, students and workers the path of the workers’ and communist movement, of the social revolution against all wars between capitalist states.

The end of the dual national and class exploitation of the Palestinian proletariat and its dispossessed, along with the other national minorities (such as the Kurds, for example) can only come about through the international communist revolution. The political directions which place us on the historic path to our goal are the opposite of those whipped up by the pro-Palestinian camp: in every country, workers must struggle against their own bourgeoisies, in Gaza and the West Bank as well. Proletarians of all countries must say “No!” to inter-class solidarity in the name of war. We must appeal to the proletarians of Israel, too, to urge them to struggle against the Israeli State, side-by-side with the proletariat of Palestine.

In the face of the Gaza conflict, several anti-war appeals have emerged from the trade union movement in the USA—which has been back to expressing important struggles for about three years now. We will attempt to highlight their merits, limitations, errors and opportunist slips, and indicate what the correct communist trade union direction against the imperialist war should be.

The appeal that gained most prominence was the one drawn up on the initiative of the rather minuscule UE and a local of the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW).

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) is a small union, but one with an important history. Today, it has only 35,000 members, a size on the scale of the major base unions in Italy, and therefore very small for the United States. It was established in 1936 and was one of the first affiliates of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), the confederation of industrial unions that had been formed a year earlier, in 1935, as distinct from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was the old confederation of craft unions, founded in 1886.

In the 1940s, UE reached 600,000 members. In 1949, due to the CIO’s refusal to take action to stop raids by other unions, which they opportunistically undertook in response to UE’s refusal to file the affidavits of non-communist leadership required by the Taft-Hartly Act to participate in the NLRA process, it left the CIO, which had by then become a regime union on par with the AFL. In 1955, the two would merge, forming today’s AFL-CIO.

Competition with the powerful CIO marked the beginning of UE’s decline. Another decisive cause was the crisis in the home appliance manufacturing sector, to which most of the members of this union belonged, which, since the 1990s, has seen a vast process of relocation of production to outside the USA to newly-industrialized countries where labor costs are lower (a process commonly referred to as “outsourcing”). Nevertheless, it has maintained a certain vitality and recognized prestige in the North American trade union movement to date, concentrated mainly in the eastern part of the country. Conflict-ridden and with a union life based on member participation, UE, however, has an opportunistic leadership. For example, in 2019 it supported the social democrat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primaries, ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The appeal was published on October 20, just days before the Israeli army entered the Gaza Strip, in the midst of carpet bombing in preparation for the ground operation. It was signed by more than 200 local unions and 5 national labor organizations:

• the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), with 100,000 members, joined on Oct. 24;
• then the National Nurses United (NNU), with 225,000 members;
• then the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), with 200,000 members;
• on Dec. 1, the United Auto Workers (UAW), with 390,000 members, joined; and,
• finally, on Dec. 28, the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America (AFA-CWA), with 50,000 members.

These 5 unions, totaling nearly 1 million members, belong to the AFL-CIO, which has 55 union federations with about 12 million members. So roughly 1/10th of the AFL-CIO’s member unions, corresponding to 1/10th of the membership, have joined the roll call, which is a substantial minority of the labor movement, even given the still-low temperature of the class struggle.

However, the appeal remains in the realm of bourgeois pacifism, thus deluding the workers that peace can be achieved by appealing to governments to cease military operations, and not through a social struggle of the working class that imposes this goal by force, in the knowledge that confronting each other are not different ideas or even “good versus evil”, but enormous conflicting material interests: on the one hand, those of Capital and on the other, those of the proletariat. Thus, the goal of stopping imperialist wars can only be accomplished in an definitive and total way if the class struggle transcends into a revolution that overthrows the political power of the ruling class in all states.

The appeal therefore boils down to asking the bourgeois regime for a policy of peace: “We call on President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza… In making this appeal, US labor unions join the efforts of 13 members of Congress and others calling for an immediate cease-fire”.

This conduct conceals an enormous mystification. Militarist policy is not a free choice on behalf of governments but is an obligation for them, a vital necessity. To it all bourgeois states, whether democratic or authoritarian, right-wing or left-wing (however little these distinctions may count), must comply. Capitalism generates and needs war as its only escape from the abyss of world economic crisis and, consequently, from the revolution of the increasingly immiserated and starving proletarian masses.

On the one hand, the advancing economic crisis of overproduction brings capitalist competition, between enterprises and states, to paroxysm, making the shift from commercial to military confrontation increasingly frequent. Each bourgeois state is threatened by the others. On the other hand, all bourgeois states are threatened and attacked, together and without distinction, by the economic crisis that, by creating the material conditions favorable to social revolution, deteriorates the living conditions of the proletariat. Capitalist war, therefore, represents the at once economic and social solution to the crisis of capitalism.

This appeal by UE is fabricated in order that the UAW leadership can use the union’s base as support for President Biden in the upcoming presidential election, both by instructing its members to vote for him and by providing more or less substantial financial resources. That is, it is an appeal to a bourgeois political party, passed off as a “friend” of working people, by the UAW leadership.

Placed in these terms, the call for workers’ solidarity and unity above all national and religious divisions loses its vigor, being deprived of a practical indication of struggle: an abstract statement that does not set out to combat the bourgeois forces advocating militarism and war, but rather, seeks to dialogue, appeal and even genuflect before them.

There was then a whole series of less widely-circulated calls against the war in Gaza, for a “cease-fire”, which saw these characteristics reversed. That is, they have had the virtue of providing practical directions for struggle on how to fight against the militarism of US imperialism, but by holding the Israeli and US governments alone responsible for the conflict and avoiding any attack on the opposing bourgeois line-up constituted by Hamas and the equally bourgeois powers that support it and their equally cynical warmongering and murderous policies, they end up deploying workers on one side of the conflict, thereby giving ideal nourishment to the imperialist war, instead of its sabotage.

For example, we read from the February 28th appeal of Local 48 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), an affiliate of the AFL-CIO with about 820,000 members: “WHEREAS…the workers’ struggle has no boundaries…WHEREAS, working-class opposition to this US-Israel war goes hand in hand with the union motto ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ and the appeal ‘Arabs, Jews, blacks and whites, workers of the world unite’…IBEW Local 48 supports the Palestinian trade unions’ call for workers around the world to stop the shipment of arms for the US-Israel war; we salute the dock transport workers in Barcelona, Belgium, Italy and elsewhere who have declared that they refuse to handle arms shipments for this war; and we support and encourage the actions of these workers in the US to stop arms shipments…by opposing what is in effect yet another US war, this time against the people of Gaza…” [emphasis is ours].

The call for international proletarian unity and the direction of struggle to oppose the imperialist war on practical grounds are thwarted by the mystification of the character of the ongoing war in Gaza, described as imperialist and bourgeois on one side only.

The only extenuating circumstance is that this stance goes against its own bourgeois regime, that of Washington, which has in Israel, not its only, but a crucial, ally in the Middle East.

The practical indication of sabotage through strikes, blocking the transportation of war materials, etc., is insufficient if these actions are understood in themselves as decisive. They must be seen as intermediate steps to finally arrive at a general mobilization of the working class against the militarism of their own capitalist states. Moreover, each imperialist power has often found itself simultaneously arming states at war with each other. For example, Qatar, now hosts concomitantly the largest US base in the Middle East and the political leadership of Hamas.

If “the workers’ struggle has no borders” and if “an injury to one is an injury to all”—inasmuch as the interests of the working class are unique on the international level and its struggles must be unique and coherent if they are to be victorious—it is not acceptable to limit the plan of action against the imperialist war to the national level alone, disregarding its repercussions for workers in other countries. If the practical direction of struggle in the US is right, but the definition of the nature of today’s war in Gaza is mystified, on the international level, the result is to push workers toward supporting the bourgeois front that backs Hamas.

For a country such as Italy, whose bourgeoisie, owing to material determinations, always plays on several tables and, since Mussolini’s time, has been cultivating a relationship with the Arab-Palestinian ruling classes as part of its imperialist policy in the Mediterranean area, an approach such as the one in this latest appeal means leading the working class to support one of the ruling class’s foreign policy options, instead of fighting for its own class interests.

A practical direction to place the movement squarely on the terrain of the international unity of the proletariat, and not on the terrain of bourgeois warfare (which can only destroy that unity), should:

• denounce the war as bourgeois and imperialist on both sides;
• express solidarity with the proletarians of both countries, thus also with the workers of Israel by appealing to proletarian brotherhood;
• identify and denounce both bourgeois regimes that lead workers to fratricidal slaughter;
• give the proletarians of all countries and all imperialist alignments the same practical direction of struggle against militarism and war.

In the absence of these elements, which alone make the union’s direction truly internationalist, the result is to align the proletariat with the belligerent policy of the international bourgeoisie.

Such proclamations can help align the proletarian masses with the federal government’s foreign policy. The US Congress, in a bipartisan vote, elected to fund the $95 billion rearmament of Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. At the same time, Biden, who also pushed for and signed the military aid package, feigns a non-interventionist, negotiation-ready stance of the peacemaker in both the Middle East and Ukraine. “Isolationist” positioning was a tactical expedient to which the US resorted in the aftermath of both world wars. In this way, the US government succeeded in imposing the propaganda motif of the great power whose political clout compels it to fight for the sake of humanity, democracy, and planetary prosperity.

We must remember how unions have been used in the past by capitalist states to orient the masses and shape them ideologically with a view to intervention in capitalist wars. The collaboration of trade unions with governments has often served the function of managing social crisis in the run-up to war.

The policy of subordination of the American trade unions to the State, pursued by then-President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, was significant in this regard. It was then a matter for the bourgeoisie to cope with problems such as rising inflation and labor shortages through the granting of moderate wage increases. Wilson was re-elected to the White House in 1916 thanks to a campaign inspired by neutralism. Then, when the war was over, Wilson himself was the promoter of the League of Nations, a transnational body which was supposed to prevent new wars. Meanwhile, the United States had intervened in the final throes of World War I to sit at the victors’ table. The path of wartime interventionism also passed through the cooperation of the trade unions, while pacifist proclamations quickly turned into the calls to arms still heard ‘round the world.

On October 5, 2022, the Railroad Workers United (RWU), an organization of railroad workers in the United States, adopted a resolution calling for public ownership of railroads. In the US, these are divided into various private companies.

Later on, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) also issued a similar appeal. In light of these recent facts, we feel it is important to clarify the Party’s standpoint on nationalization.

The communist view on nationalization under a capitalist regime has always been clear and consistent. Marx and Engels wrote much to attack Lassalle’s myth of state socialism, and we, the inheritors of Marxist doctrine, are still fighting against it today. It is clear that there are recurring themes in the various ideological deviations that prevent the proletariat from recognizing its historical goals.

Such a position is well-illustrated in Engels’ text Anti-Dühring (1878), as we quoted also in Il Programma Comunistai n. 13 of 1962: “the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists”.

Let us examine how this transformation occurred in the railways of the United States. As the RWU statement notes, the US Government effectively nationalized the private rail infrastructure in the US for 26 months due to the inability to effectively move the nation’s freight during WWI.

Our Bukharin was in New York at the time, where he was editing the Novyy Mir. His writings allow us to gain a more detailed understanding of the circumstances. On February 16, 1917, he wrote:

“The stronger the position of US capital, the stronger its appetites.

“To satisfy these appetites, strong means of fighting are indispensable: army, air fleet and navy, military fortifications.

“And so the period of so-called preparations has begun. With an infernal din, to the roll of drums and the singing of patriotic songs, they have begun to set in motion, at full throttle, a pump that sucks money to the people for militarism.

“…Economic life becomes a barrack-like entity. Plans to transfer the railways, telephone, and telegraph to the State are drawn up. In addition, a series of institutions is established to draw up plans to transfer or subordinate important sectors of finance and production to the state. A central organization has already been set up to take care of raw materials (this business will be handled by the banker), labor (will it be assigned to Gompers?), and the care and repair of cannon fodder, etc. etc.

“…Of course, in the meantime, they do not forget the ‘fellow workers’. An attack against the right to strike is launched on the whole front. The federal government lashes out against the railroad workers. In a whole series of federal parliaments, bills are introduced, one after another, against the right of workers to defend their interests by strike.”

Indeed, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, sending 116,700 proletarians to their deaths in the name of democracy. This was an ideological smoke screen used to hide the interests of US imperialism. RWU does not feel the need to recall this. While it provides a nostalgic account of Wilson’s nationalization of the railways, it is important to remember that this was a war waged for imperialist measures, both at home and abroad.

In no. 80 of our Italian theoretical review, Comunismo, we published Part XVIII of our text “The Labor Movement in the United States of America”; it provides a description which is more than suitable for our purposes here.

“During the summer of 1917, alongside the initiative against socialist and extreme left-wing organizations, a practice of cooperation between unions and the government in important sectors of war production took shape. It was based on a series of agreements that regulated working conditions and the very presence of unions within industries operating under government contracts.”

At that time, the government was facing a significant challenge.

“The unions, feeling particularly strong because of the enormous demand for labor and the urgency of the work, demanded that the wage conditions and union regulations and, above all, the closed shop, were respected in all contracts;

“The government was facing three main issues: the growing militancy of the workers, the unions’ insistence on the closed shop, and employers’ reluctance to accept wage increases”. After all, “profits in war industries were guaranteed by the state”.

In this context, it was the government’s responsibility “to offset any additional costs resulting from pay raises”. The concessions made to the railwaymen were the price the American bourgeoisie was willing to pay to keep its imperialist war plans undisturbed.

In December 1918, the unions held a vote among railroad workers on whether they preferred the railroads to remain state-owned or return to private ownership. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of continued nationalization, with 306,720 votes cast in favor and only 1,466 votes cast in favor of a return to private ownership. These figures are not surprising. Nationalization was done to maintain control over the railroad’s labor force, even in the face of wage concessions that individual capitalists were reluctant to make. And it was incredibly effective.

The American Federation of Labor, or AFL, the regime trade union confederation in the United States, and the American opportunist parties, were all enthusiastic when, in the eight years leading up to World War II, Roosevelt outlined his reforms, which consisted mainly of developing the National Recovery Act (NRA) and devaluing the currency. Our New York comrades, showing that they were very clear about the situation and the historical perspective, wrote then:

“The failure of the London Conference where US imperialism had intervened with the prospect of wresting from its contenders major concessions regarding industrial-financial expansion plans, employing all pressures ranging from diplomatic intrigue to open and direct threat, determined to a certain extent the new orientation expressed in the NRA, a parallel agency of the capitalist state for a more rational exploitation of the working masses.

“This plan was established on the basis of the existing worldwide power relations, the conflicting and antagonistic forces of the different imperialisms. These power relations manifested through unprecedented crises, industrial, financial, and trade failures. It is therefore inevitable that this plan rests on the prospect of a new conflagration for the conquest of new markets” (Prometeo, n. 94 of October 15, 1933).

In addressing the perspective well-outlined by our comrades, Roosevelt merely endorsed and further developed Wilson’s lesson on the need to “concert”. It was not a matter of any alleged political masterminding, but rather of the general tendency of world capitalism having arrived at its imperialist stage, which imposed the authentic social-political content of fascism on to the bourgeois regimes. This content was the disciplining of the “productive forces of the nation” through the framing of workers’ unions and employers’ associations in the bourgeois State. In Germany and Italy, the process began with the physical destruction of the existing trade unions. It then continued with the formation of State-controlled trade unions. Finally, once the bourgeoisie abandoned its brown and black shirts, it continued with the establishment of regime trade unions, which were reconstituted from above by opportunist political parties. These parties have since served as agents for the subordination of trade unions to the national interests of capital. In the United States, on the other hand, there was no need for open dictatorship; however, much of the process of destroying class-based labor organizations occurred, and certainly not without violence.

Roosevelt encouraged every industry to form a federation and submit a “code of fair competition” for the president’s approval. This code, in principle, “would bind each employer not to lay off anyone, to allow a minimum wage and a maximum of 40 hours per week, and to recognize the workers’ right to organize themselves to enter into labor contracts.

“The president had the option of amending each code before approving it. Once approved, each code acquired the force of law. …All or most of the employers had signed up, but they brazenly violated the code “in letter and spirit”. The government had neither the ability nor the will to take serious action against the violators. …Despite the pressure from the masses and the spontaneous spread of strikes, the AFL piecards had been the most vocal proponents of the presidential maneuver” (Prometeo n. 101 of March 25, 1934).

“It is clear that Roosevelt’s new economic policy was designed to provide a temporary solution until the outbreak of the world conflict” (Prometeo n. 105 of June 17, 1934).

It is a matter of historical record that Roosevelt decided to nationalize the railways once again during the second world war. Executive Order #9412 of December 27, 1943, clarifies the true reasons: “the continuous operation of some transportation systems is threatened by strikes called to commence on December 30, 1943”. The railroad workers were about to go on strike for wage increases. The mobilization remained confined within the railway sector because there were no class trade union organizations promoting the extension of the struggle to the rest of the working class and indicating opposition to the ongoing imperialist war. After all, the US bourgeois regime had good reason to comply with the proclaimed principles of cooperation. They granted the railway workers raises to placate them in lieu of continuing their struggle, which was crucial for capitalist productivity. Railway workers benefited not from nationalization, but from the concessions of the State.

After the war, we were just as clear:

“The Marxist analysis of society and the bourgeois system of production is incomplete without acknowledging that State intervention and control in the economy is not a deviation from the fundamental laws of the capitalist economy. It is, in fact, the natural and inevitable outcome of all its historical development. This intervention can go as far as the elimination of the legal form of individual private ownership of the means of production. It will not eliminate the fundamental fact of the capitalist system of production: the exploitation of human labor through the appropriation of surplus value. The capitalist economy in the period following World War I was oriented toward generalized forms of State intervention and control. The Nazi-fascist totalitarian experiment fulfilled the function of permitting and fostering capitalist accumulation and counter-balancing the determining forces of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a phase characterized by the succession of violent economic crises and, therefore, by the recurring threat of equally violent social crises. The American New Deal experiment had a similar effect.

„…It is clear that in the monopolistic, centralizing, totalitarian phase of capitalism, the state’s policy of nationalizations is the ultimate weapon used to defend profit and exploit workers in the most brutal way.

„…Nationalization does not suppress the market or the exploitation of labor. It merely regulates the economy according to market forces. Nationalized industries are guaranteed a monopoly within their own borders, but this does not affect the market as a whole. Nationalization also does not prevent the realization and appropriation of surplus value. In fact, it often helps to rescue deficit economic units. Nationalization guarantees capitalist profit in all cases. On the level of inter-imperialist relations, nationalizations are the most bare and obvious expressions of the tension of all national economic forces…. Finally, in the game of class struggles, nationalizations represent the most refined method of immobilizing the active energies of the proletariat and regimenting its fellow poputčiks” (Prometeo, n. 4 of December 1946).

It is true that the Stalinized “Communist” parties prolonged the misconception that Europe was marching toward socialism by virtue of the use of nationalization after World War II. This claim is not only still around, but is still believed. It has even survived the fall of those opportunist parties. The reality unveils the thoroughly bourgeois nature of this political claim and is explained by it. Moreover, as we have seen, it was fully implemented by both the bourgeois-democratic as well as the Nazi and fascist regimes in preparation for World War II.

The Communist Party stands in stark contrast to this social-imperialist watchword in the trade union movement. It supports demands that unite workers more and more broadly, without compromising their independence from the bourgeois class and its State. It rejects the division of workers into two camps: those in companies susceptible to nationalization because of their “strategic value” for national capital and the rest of the working class. Railroaders must be called upon to fight for a single collective contract for the category, beyond the divisions between different companies, containing substantial gains in wages and in working conditions, and this is achieved by organizing united, generalized strikes. Any benefit must be won through struggle, regaining courage, the spirit of independence and confidence in our own strength. We must not seek support from the ruling class. We must be careful not play into the possibility that, in given historical circumstances, it suits the interests of the bourgeoisie to nationalize a given industry and make limited concessions to small portions of the proletariat in order to better oppress and exploit the working class as a whole.

This is opportunism, plain and simple. It’s the sacrifice of the ultimate goals of the proletarian struggle for contingent benefits and only portions of it. Only by fighting collectively can strong wage increases be won, even when the bourgeoisie is unwilling to grant them. The labor movement will only be able to fight on political ground, including opposition to imperialist war, if it unifies workers above divisions between companies, categories, localities, and finally nations. This can only be achieved by a combative trade union struggle movement that unifies workers in the fight against Capital. The labor movement must fight for strong wage increases, reduction of working hours for equal wages, and full wages for unemployed workers.