A text from 1980 on two diverse deviations regarding the economic struggles of the proletariat

The historical purpose of opportunism, that is, the tendency to choose the easy path, considered the most “appropriate” for achieving results, has always been to interpose the most varied hypotheses, proposals, and ideologies between the working class and its political party, in order to distract the former from its ultimate task: social revolution; but the labor movement is not excluded from this mission either; for the party, it would be the ideal instrument, the “transmission belt”, for conveying to the working class not only subversive messages aimed at the bourgeois order, but also appropriate guidance on the best tactics in economic struggles. Whether the opportunists are acting in good faith or are outright traitors matters little; as the saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” In any case, finding good faith in today’s politicians, regardless of their political affiliation, is simply impossible.

The article we are republishing, from 1980, effectively analyzes the two principal deviations from the economic class struggle: “anarcho-syndicalism” and what we might call “economic agnosticism”.

The former derives from currents already present at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which placed the focus of revolutionary action on the union rather than the party, and sought to keep it free from bourgeois influences (Dutch Tribunists, the German KAPD, American and French syndicalists, etc.). Ever since then, the Left resolutely opposed those movements, similar to the Turin-based “L’Ordine Nuovo”, which believed that the revolutionary movement consisted of hollowing out the unions in favor of workers’ councils, which were supposed to form the structure of the revolution’s economic and state institutions, conceived as having begun in the midst of full-blown capitalism, with a wholly idealistic vision of the revolutionary process.

The latter deviation, the view that the struggle is futile, a mere Sisyphean task, and that everything should be staked on the Party’s political action, is even older, and was already refuted by Marx in 1864 during a debate that took place at the First International in London: Marx’s observations, recorded in the pamphlet “Value, Price, and Profit”, are unequivocal:

«Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation.

At the same time […] the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. […] Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!”»

«[…] Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system»

Today, our great Karl would not be so delicate in his criticism of the trade union federations. In any case, we must always cite our mentors, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the Left, to demonstrate that opportunism, which seemingly constantly renews itself in its anti-proletarian function, is in reality always the same: the arguments remain the same even if cloaked in ingenious innovations, and they will remain so as long as they are needed to prevent the class from waging genuine and effective struggles for its demands, and from aligning itself with the direction that only the revolutionary party can provide.

It doesn’t matter to us whether the unions are led by reactionaries, which is to be expected in periods when there is a lack of widespread worker militancy, as is the case now, nor are we concerned with founding purely communist, revolutionary unions. But neither do we believe that the struggle for specific demands is useless, in accordance with Marx’s teachings. For us, trade unions, to the extent that they are open to all workers, are and always will be the focus of our attention and, if possible, our participation; as early as 1951, we wrote:

«Trade unions, regardless of who leads them, being professional economic associations, always bring together members of the same class. It is quite possible that organized workers will elect representatives with not only moderate but even bourgeois tendencies, and that the union leadership will fall under capitalist influence. Nevertheless, the fact remains that trade unions are composed exclusively of workers, and therefore it will never be possible to say of them what is said of parliament, namely, that they are susceptible only to bourgeois leadership».

A lot has happened since then, but nothing has changed in the nature of capitalism, and nothing must change in the party’s attitude toward the class’s economic organizations.

The Communists and the Struggles for Workers’ Rights

from “Il Partito Comunista,” No. 66, 1980

Revolutionary communists have always attached great importance to the struggles that workers are forced to engage in, due to economic and social conditions, to defend their position as wage earners against pressure from employers and capitalists. They seek to be the vanguard of the workers in these struggles, to win their trust, and to demonstrate to them that communist methods are more effective in defending workers than those proposed by other political parties or groups.

However, given the inherent instability of the economic and social terrain on which these struggles take place and the precarious nature of “conquests” within a society that thrives on the exploitation of wage labor, these struggles do not even make a dent in social relations; they do not challenge the political power of the propertied classes or the capitalist system.

The proletarians, however, even if they wanted to, could not renounce to the struggles to defend their immediate interests, because simply giving up their defense against the greed of capitalism would reduce them to a state of brutishness worse than the one into which they are being forced. Nor would a “poor” working class, that is, one incapable of participating in the consumption of the commodities churned out at an ever-increasing rate by the productive apparatus, serve capitalism’s interests. Capitalism has an interest in ensuring that workers have an “income” that can be “consumed” on the capitalist market to the greatest extent possible, in order to keep it alive and functioning so as to perpetuate the infernal mechanism of the exploitation of wage earners.

This explains the existence of “capitalist” unions, that is, unions that the regime has an interest in establishing, either in opposition to class-based unions or, in the absence of a class-based organization, as totalitarian unions that serve the regime, abiding to the needs of the market economy, and uphold the social and political stability of the capitalist regime.

Given these preliminary considerations, two tendencies have emerged within the “opposition” to capitalism that deviate from revolutionary Marxism and represent a serious obstacle that delays the arduous and painful process of rebuilding proletarian organization. The first, which we might define as “pure syndicalism”, maintains that today’s unions do not defend the workers’ cause because they are tainted by “politics”, and that, consequently, true class-based unions cannot be revived until organized party groups are banned from within them. This position draws on anarchism, which views political struggle within the working class as an “evil” that generates divisions which tear apart the unity of action of the proletariat. It is a vision that disregards the actual state of social and political organization of the classes, which in simple terms divides people into two clear and distinct groups, the exploited and the exploiters, while overlooking the fact that the terms “exploited” and “exploiter” are “relative” and not absolute. The only social class that possesses this characteristic is the proletariat, which by definition has no reserves or resources other than the ability to create more proletarians. Thus, within these two broad categories, among the exploited, alongside the proletariat, we can also include the lumpenproletariat, which views the working proletarian as “privileged”; the petty bourgeoisie, which sees the middle bourgeoisie as its exploiter; and the middle bourgeoisie, which, in turn, recognizes the big bourgeoisie as its master. It is no coincidence that this conception is expressed in terms of the “People” as opposed to capitalism, a conception that is also common to opportunism. In reality, the boundaries between social classes are not fixed and, above all, cannot be identified in any single person; thus, unlike in pre-capitalist societies where classes were rigid and strictly compartmentalized, in capitalist society classes are “open”, so that individuals can cross class boundaries and move from one class to another at will over the course of their lives. It follows that a factory worker who owns a home is not a proletarian; conversely, an intellectual who writes books for a capitalist publisher, owns nothing, and barely makes ends meet is a proletarian. The labor union organizes both non-proletarian workers and proletarian workers; the unemployed, mostly pure proletarians, are organized alongside “white-collar workers”, who are largely non-proletarian, as well as the upper strata of workers, the so-called “labor aristocracy,” and so on.

The working class, as we can see, is not homogeneous. Divided into strata, each with its own interests, it expresses itself through political orientations and organizes itself into parties. While the basis for union aggregating is common to all wage earners, precisely because they are wage earners, the interests that drive the various strata of workers to organize differ; therefore, each political group in which these different interests are expressed strives to gain control of the organization in order to use it as a lever to defend its own interests. This inevitable dialectic is clearly evident in the history of the labor movement, ranging from the earliest workers’ associations composed solely of wage earners to the Anglo-Saxon trade union, which accepted only skilled workers as members; from the “free” trade union up to the triumph of fascism, which brought all workers, whether or not they were affiliated with political parties, under its control; and finally to the fascist trade union, which was coercive and totalitarian. The division of social classes into political parties, therefore, is irrepressible, just as the political division of the working class is inevitable. Contrary to what the “pure syndicalist” approach posits, “politics” is the only means by which the pure proletariat can ensure that the immediate and general interests of the entire wage-earning class prevail within the class organization. Not just any “politics”, but the one and only “politics”, which springs from the revolutionary Marxist program, represented by the class-based political party, the sole instrument through which the proletariat presents itself as a historical class, with defined principles, a preordained strategy, and a solid and coherent organization. On the other hand, we challenge anyone to provide a single example that attests to the union’s neutrality toward political parties and the state. And even the union’s political neutrality would constitute, amid the clash between parties, a particular, distinct “politics”. The current regime-aligned unions are not the product of “politics” in general, but of a specific policy, one commonly expressed by all parties, based on the defense of the capitalist regime.

The second tendency, seemingly opposed to the one described above, maintains that the union is an outdated form that the proletariat must abandon, that economic demands are fleeting, and that everything must be resolved through “politics”. The proponents of this trend do not deny the “reality” of the proletariat’s economic needs, but they argue that these “vulgar” needs must be regarded as a “pretext”, an unpleasant and unsightly “accident”, to be exploited in a Machiavellian manner to “elevate” the wretched workers to the “level” of a higher political vision. A sort of updated politique d’abord with “revolutionary” overtones, which is supposed to make the bourgeoisie tremble before a proletariat so heroic and generous as to fight for an abstract ideal, to which socialism would be reduced. Socialism is instead a material social need through which all other needs, spiritual, cultural and intellectual are satisfied; it is not a sort of sectarian abstraction.

Political education is either revolutionary education or, alternatively, the mundane conditioning of the proletariat to accept the lies that the upper classes use to keep the working class subjugated. Revolutionary education is that which exposes capitalism’s economic and social blackmail aimed at inducing wage earners to make “sacrifices”, that is, to renounce economic and social struggles, the defense of wages that are being devalued, of jobs that are becoming increasingly precarious, and of lives increasingly teetering between being consumed in the factory or being violently cut short on the battlefields of an imperialist war that already looms large. It is nihilistic, that is, petty-bourgeois education, not emanating from our proletarian class, that urges workers to abandon the “vulgar” struggles for bread, wages, work, and housing. This, on the other hand, is the path toward the proletariat’s submission to the regime, which asks nothing more of the workers than to “leave” the concern for their needs in the hands of the unions and the regime’s parties.

The proletariat’s absence, total thus far, from the class struggle does not authorize anyone to advocate replacing “economics” with “politics”, or abandoning class organization in favor of other “political bodies”, perhaps “Soviet-style.” On the contrary, the proletariat’s current state of subjugation to the regime indicates that we must struggle to wrest from the regime the economic initiative of its unions, an initiative that is steadily waning as the capitalist crisis erodes the “reserves” that have thus far kept the working class tied to the present regime.

But in order to adopt this perspective, these two deviations are misleading. The first because it denies the political significance of economic struggles, and the second because it denies the immediate economic interests of the workers.

Communists neither deny nor dismiss the proletariat’s economic struggles as mere pretexts; rather, recognizing that these struggles are necessary, useful, and inescapable, they work within the proletariat to convince it that there are no “conquests” without class struggle, without class organization, and that these “conquests” are nullified by the capitalist regime if the proletariat does not violently overthrow it and establish its class dictatorship on the basis of this victory.

This is the political program that communists bring to the working class and to its struggles for better working conditions and social change.