[GM7] Bases of Party Action in the Field of Proletarian Economic Struggles Pt. 3

5. — THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN THE IMPERIALIST EPOCH

What has changed in the trade union dynamics of the imperialist era?

Our reconfirmation of the classical Marxist perspective in the field of movements of proletarian economic bodies is based not on a mechanical identification of the present situation with that in which the great workers’ unions arose, nor with that following World War I.

On the contrary, we find ourselves today neither in the first nor in the second of these situations: the class unions of the epoch of “peaceful development of capitalism” have been succeeded by “tricolored” unions, i.e., loyal to the defense of the nation and in many countries veritable State unions; the one and the other form express only different degrees of a single historical evolution necessary for the survival of the capitalist regime in its imperial epoch.

This evolution, which we summarily refer to as the process of subjugation of the workers’ union to the State, has the greatest influence on the future resurgence of the revolutionary class movement, which, however, will reappear in the classical terms we have indicated and which are even more sharply delineated by this historical process: a network of class economic bodies, battle of the class party to subtract them from any other political direction and to submit them to its own, a battle which corresponds (here’s the novelty!) also to the maintenance and strengthening of the efficiency of the economic workers’ organisms on the level of the pure defense of workers’ immediate interests.

The imperialist epoch of capitalism is distinguished by the extreme concentration of production and financial capital, but also by intensified State interference in all aspects of economic and social life. The State not only manifests itself more and more as the “committee for managing the common affairs” of the ruling class, as its apparatus of domination and the concentration of its armed force against the proletariat, but also becomes the guarantor of the capitalist economy, increasingly obedient to the necessities of its operation, and taking upon itself the task of managing the capitalist productive mechanism.

This accentuation of State functions is also necessarily reflected on proletarian bodies by determining the fact that they are left free to develop only if they do not bind themselves to a revolutionary perspective and are put under control in their own trade union demands and economic action. The bourgeois class has not forgotten the lesson of 1917-1926, when the workers’ unions, despite being headed by opportunists and avowed reformists, had been on the verge of unleashing the revolutionary struggle between the classes and being won over to the address of the class party.

The theses of the International already noted this situation and indicated that,

“The economic struggle of the proletariat becomes a political struggle during an epoch of the decline of capitalism much quicker than during an epoch of its peaceful development”.

In the imperialist epoch, capitalism can no longer allow the free unfolding of economic struggle, nor of workers’ organization, because it has historically experienced that the manifestation of generalized economic struggles in the presence of a critical cycle of the capitalist economy can dangerously turn into a political struggle, into the assault on political power: that is, that the struggle of proletarians on the economic terrain is, because of the conditions under which it takes place, likely to be much more easily influenced by the direction of the revolutionary party.

Having escaped the revolutionary danger in 1919-26, the capitalist State will no longer allow any free unfolding of social conflicts, because it knows full well that this “free unfolding” can produce disastrous effects for the preservation of the regime.

It doesn’t abolish workers’ economic organizations, but strives by all means to control them and to subject their action to definite limits, to bind it to itself and its fortunes with a thousand ties and to make it its appendage to the point, at critical moments in the class struggle, of openly turning it into a cog in the State machine. This achievement of being able to control the economic labor movement at the inevitable moments of productive breakdown and economic crisis is essential to the survival of the capitalist regime, for it is the only element that can prevent the transition from economic crisis to social and political crisis.It doesn’t abolish workers’ economic organizations, but strives by all means to control them and to subject their action to definite limits, to bind it to itself and its fortunes with a thousand ties and to make it its appendage to the point, at critical moments in the class struggle, of openly turning it into a cog in the State machine. This achievement of being able to control the economic labor movement at the inevitable moments of productive breakdown and economic crisis is essential to the survival of the capitalist regime, for it is the only element that can prevent the transition from economic crisis to social and political crisis.

6. — THE CRITICAL STATE OF CAPITALISM AND THE APPEARANCE OF THE STATE UNION

Capitalism in the imperialist epoch attempts, due to the exacerbation of its internal contradictions, to control on a social scale the anarchic development of the economic and production process, from which the growing social tensions arise. This is why the State feels the need for direct control over workers’ unions, which is evidence of capitalism’s extreme weakness and vulnerability in the imperialist phase. Control that can take various forms, of which the most adequate and perfect is that of the insertion of the workers’ union into State structures, by means of which the State seeks to make wage levels compatible with profit, the cost of labor with economic output, and the ineradicable contrasts between the needs of wage earners and those of companies tolerable to the capitalist system; in short, to regulate the relations between workers and bosses within the framework of regime preservation. Thus the trade union goes from free to compulsory, from class organ to organ of the bourgeois State, from the defense of proletarians it passes to the defense of the national economy.

Indeed, the imperialist epoch is characterized by this necessity: either the labor movement submits to the interests of the nation, or becomes objectively and materially revolutionary. Class unionism is possible only insofar as it turns against the very bases of regime survival or, better, inevitably strikes at them. The explanation for this is already found in the Theses of the Communist International: the impossibility of capitalism to reorganize the economy after the war except by crushing the labor movement. Opposite deduction: extreme value of any class economic movement – which capitalism can no longer tolerate. The epoch of proletarian revolution is open.

International capitalism could not have emerged from its crisis and could not have reorganized its economy without crushing the economic and social struggles of the proletariat because it could not afford to maintain the economic conditions of the proletariat at the pre-war level. Consequently, proletarian economic struggles tended to take on an objectively revolutionary aspect, that is, they were susceptible to being directed by the party. The proletariat’s defensive struggle couldn’t maintain the conflict between proletarians and capitalists on the economic terrain, because it impacted the very foundations of the regime and consequently tended to become a struggle against the State.

Class unions would either have to restrict the defense of living conditions within the framework of bourgeois needs, or they would have to become red unions directed toward a revolutionary attack. In the imperialist epoch, therefore, the very basis of trade union action is changed, which, in critical periods, can quickly transcend to insurrectionary struggle, or to the total sacrifice of working-class conditions.

But this also means that a union directed by any party other than the revolutionary class party cannot in these critical periods conduct economic struggle in a consequential manner, which, by contrast, was possible in the epoch of peaceful development of capital. In that epoch the economic struggles of the proletariat could also be pitted against the revolutionary struggle, as they can in the current non-critical epochs. In the imperialist epoch the connection is closer.

From this follows the immense value and importance assumed by the elementary movements of the proletariat aimed at defending bread and work. But the fact that they easily move to the political terrain doesn’t lead the party to deny their essential value; on the contrary, it emphasizes their necessity. It’s precisely this situation that deploys the class party on the ground of proletarian defense, while it deploys against this essential need of the workers all the parties of the bourgeoisie and all its State forces. All the forces of social preservation align themselves to prevent the free and open manifestation of the economic struggle, to maintain the legal entanglement that characterizes it today. Only the Party forces support the free momentum of workers’ struggles.

Capitalism will no longer allow the peaceful resurgence of free trade unions or their activity, as in its previous era. The time when it could allow the free organization of workers and its parties to attempt competition with revolution on the trade union field is over. It will still attempt it, of course, but it will at the same time attempt to destroy the labor movement.

It’s essential to evaluate on this basis the attitude of the various political forces that claim to appeal to the proletariat and the revolution.

If reformism sold out the independent class unions to the capitalist State because the only other road was revolution, the same evolution has been undergone by the KAPDist and anarcho-syndicalist movements becoming, albeit in the name of revolution and the conquest of power, sworn enemies of proletarian economic organization. The thesis of the “destruction of trade unions”, which was an infantile mistake in 1921, has now become a defeatist and counter-revolutionary position. The party alone takes the position of expecting its own strengthening from the revival of the trade union struggle and class unions. This is its distinctive direction.

This array of forces makes the reconstitution of the proletariat’s associative-economic network more difficult and subjects it to a thousand possible pitfalls, but it also makes the party’s work of clear-cut direction and the action of even the small proletarian forces that put themselves on the trade union terrain valuable and irreplaceable.

It was on the basis of its enormous expansion to the world scale that capitalism could allow free development to the economic workers’ movement, even favoring it and seeking only to limit its connection with the revolutionary party. The theory at the time was that of the “neutrality of trade unions”, just like the “neutrality of the state in economic conflicts”.

This situation ended with World War I when workers’ unions were led directly into the service of the homeland in the war. But, after that, the proletarian economic struggle resumed and found its natural vehicle in the existing trade union bodies. A historical battle was waged, the revolution lost, which had for its stakes either the placing of trade union bodies in the State sphere or their transformation into organs of the revolution by exalting the economic struggle to its logical conclusion. The capitalist mode of production could rearrange itself only after winning this battle and subjecting workers’ bodies to the strict control, direct or indirect, of the State.

From then on, a situation stabilizes whereby social reformism puts itself under the aegis of the State, expects its achievements from it and no longer relies on the action and struggle of the proletarian masses. Its method becomes that of guaranteeing the legality of the workers’ movement, receiving in return from the State (and also at the expense of individual capitalists) the material means of silencing workers’ demands. In the epoch of momentum of capitalist production this is possible to achieve, and thus the conditions are created whereby in the epoch of crisis the entire proletarian organizing apparatus finds itself under State control and aimed against even the slightest workers’ demands.

The party’s call for the defense of living and working conditions and the organization of workers on the class terrain rests on this real historical basis: every effort in this direction is an effort in the direction of the revolution, and the workers perform the basic act of their deployment on the terrain of the revolution by organizing to defend their living conditions.

The trade union evolution that we have described leads us to the conclusion, already established by the International and taken up by Trotsky in “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”: the existence of “independent” trade unionism, that is, of trade union bodies which, while not directed by a revolutionary orientation, while in the hands of reformist or petty-bourgeois parties, can conduct the struggle on the economic terrain in a consistent manner is no longer possible in the imperialist phase of capitalism. In the imperialist epoch, the economic struggle is more rapidly transformed into a political struggle than before, since its very manifestation and generalization bumps against the very foundations of the capitalist regime. As a result, any trade union body is immediately confronted with the problem of the State: either it agrees to limit the proletarian struggle within “legality”, and by that means to restrict and stifle it for the benefit of conservation, or it transcends the limits of bourgeois legality and moves to the revolutionary ground, which means at the same time extending, strengthening and generalizing the battle that the proletariat wages in defense of its economic conditions.

This situation means that all parties and all political directions devoted to the preservation of the regime are enemies of a broad, consistent manifestation of the proletarian economic struggle, and that only the revolutionary class party is its most ardent supporter. The trade union function is fulfilled and integrated only when the class political party is at the head of the trade union bodies, says the 1945 “Party Platform”, and indeed there is no other way.

The inference to be drawn from this is certainly not that because of this, the trade union is no longer necessary and that the trade union struggle can no longer exist. In fact it’s the opposite: the proletarians will return to the struggle for the defense of their economic conditions, and in it they will reconstitute the bodies suited to this defense, the class unions; these bodies, by definition open to all proletarians, by definition organizing the mass of the proletariat on the basis not of conscience but of material necessity, will find themselves placed by the situation itself before the alternative: either to submit again to the influence and control of the State, which is tantamount to the influence and control of the opportunist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties, or conversely to shift their action to the ground of illegality by submitting to the only truly illegal political direction, that of the class political party.

In our view, the existence of class unions, therefore, in the imperialist epoch has even greater importance than it might have had in past epochs: if in the past it was possible to maintain the defense of the immediate objectives of the proletarian struggle opposed to the highest revolutionary achievements, and even to make them a diversion against them, this is more difficult in the imperialist epoch, when the transition of the class union, of the red union, to the influence and direction of the party is more immediate and must take place under pain of the proletarian economic bodies losing their own class features, that is, abdicating the very elementary function for which they arose.

Within the economic organisms that the class will be forced to express in its return to the battle, a struggle will be fought between those who wish to keep action within the limits of bourgeois legality, and thereby extinguish and stifle it, and the direction of the party which, by pushing for the strengthening and generalization of the proletarian struggle, will allow these organisms to be brought to the revolutionary terrain.