Resuming the Union Question

With this column, we intend to once more bring forth the fundamental studies and articles produced by the Party concerning its (and its militants’) constant labor union activity within the objective limits of the current forces. This pertains to both the battles that the proletarian movement has undertaken and to the organizations the class has equipped to conduct them. The Party always expresses a line aimed at sharpening these forces, generalizing and unifying all objectives and struggles in the perspective of the rebirth of class organization. The Party also denounces the defeatism and demobilization pushed by nationalist and collaborationist unionism, which has gone as far as sabotage in order to uphold the repressive action of the State, in this timid period of recovery and reorganization for the class struggle. 

In the course of its labor activity, the Party, in light of the general approach established in its program and fundamental theses, has always sought to identify the specific tactical lines to be followed in relation to proletarian struggles and organizations. It  disavows all those that are only nominally proletarian and are proponents of collaborationism. Instead, we affirm our perspective, and formulate indications and slogans addressed to workers, particularly to the most combative section of them. Communist militants have always endeavored to give life to bodies of struggle and to promote the prospect of their unification towards the rebirth of the class union.

The article republished in this issue was originally produced in the 1960s, a period when the cycle of the relative development of workers’ struggles was re-emerging in Italy. The Party, which had reaffirmed itself as a militant organization just ten years earlier, was engaged in the work of re-establishing the cornerstones of the doctrine, albeit with “even if slender layers of proletarians.” Nonetheless, it felt an urgent need to translate “into action as continuous and systematic as possible a task recognized as permanent.” 

The party’s activity in the union field was “not a turning point, but the strengthening of a work that has never stopped,” and this continues to this day with the vicissitudes that we will soon describe. This article follows the discussion that appeared in our 1982 magazine “Comunismo,” No. 10, The Unions in the Era of Imperialism, highlighting its salient points and continuing it to the present day.