[The following is an English translation of the second and final part of a 1929 text from L’Ouvrier Communiste on the unions, which can also be found in French here.]
Karl Marx described the origins of the trade union movement as follows: “the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages.” (Value, Price, Profit)
To defend itself against the “aggression of capital” directed against the standard of living of the working class, the proletariat is inclined to erect its resistance against the general trend of capitalism.
For Marx, in 1864, this economic resistance by the proletariat led to positive outcomes, in the sense that the rise in wages did not alter the price of commodities as a whole, and consequently corresponded to a general reduction in capitalist profits. Marx, in fact, opposed the thesis of the Englishman Weston, according to which wages regulate the price of commodities (if wages go up, prices go up, said Weston), by observing that this thesis is reduced to a tautology and by opposing it to his theory of exchange value. Clearly, this holds true fully for a ‘free’ market.
But if Marx was right in 1864 when monopoly was a mere tendency, it is no less true that monopolistic and trustified capitalism (which is not Bukharin’s capitalism without competition) has in its hands the means to hold back the fall in prices, or to forestall by their growth a decline in profitability in the event of a rise in nominal wages. In fact, for the working class as a whole, there has not been any growth in real wages for many years. The struggle for wage increases has ceased to represent a positive objective common to all workers. It only produces results for a limited number of workers, and only insofar as it does not provoke, through the generalisation of its success, a corresponding reaction from capital in the form of higher prices (i.e., to capitalist coordination, and then inflation).
For the proletariat, as a class, the trade union movement is a dead end in the current state of capitalism. Whereas in the last century the unions were organs for unifying the proletariat against the suppression of wages, today they are organisms that introduce inequality into the proletarian class. For many, they are a useless instrument, while for others they are a means to secure and safeguard privileges through class collaboration.
In itself, the trade union movement can be neither the whole “class struggle”, nor can it be the sole “school of socialism.” This was pointed out by Marx himself in the work already cited: the unions “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, when the evolution of the situation has turned the trade unions into organizations whose reactionary role in the face of the world revolution cannot be concealed, the right-wingers cling to an explanation based on the very nature of the trade union movement as an “elementary” movement of the working masses. Instead of considering that the political and ideological characteristic of an epoch are valid only within that epoch, and subsequently become counter-revolutionary – and that this is the case with trade unionism, which has undergone a continual regression since its legalization at the end of the last century – they pretend to make the bankruptcy of the unions into a bankruptcy of workers’ initiative and spontaneity, identifying the economic element with the spontaneous, and thus the arch-bureaucratic structure of the unions with an autonomous creation of the proletariat. Like Lenin, they argue that “the working class left to its own devices can only arrive at trade-unionist consciousness.”
Thus, for them, the proletariat responds only to a single facet of its reality, to certain aspects of its own condition, and in a way so incomplete as to imply definitive impotence, were it not for the providential intervention of the “professional revolutionary.”
In What is to Be Done, Lenin separates communist political thought from the historical development of the proletariat. For him, the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat is a reflection of socialist ideology, which is a “natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.” For Lenin, socialism was therefore “something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously.“
On this theoretical basis, it is easy to understand why Lenin arrived at the theory of trade-union conquest in 1919. He wanted to inject socialist consciousness into the unions from without. Lenin did not recognize any development of revolutionary consciousness.
This conception of consciousness treats it as an a priori, which does not evolve as the class struggle advances. In substance, socialist thought remains immobile. Indeed, if Lenin had simply envisaged the two processes of socialist thought and class struggle as separate (which would also be a mistake), evolving in parallel, he could not have spoken of an element imported from outside. How can you impose an element from outside if it does not belong there, if it develops in the struggle? But we can clearly see that for Lenin socialist thought is already something complete, an exact science to which the proletariat in no way contributes. The maturation of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses is therefore totally ruled out. They would, instead, merely have the possibility to absorb, to varying extents, the socialist consciousness that already hangs over their heads. Lenin failed to see that there is a relationship between the development of the class struggle and socialist thought—a relationship that has its own stages of maturation in which proletarian consciousness evolves and influences the development of socialist thought.
Lenin thus fell into metaphysics and absolute truths. This, incidentally, is the entire basis of his philosophical thinking! In his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, wherein he puts forward some valid arguments against Machism, he ignores the relativity of actual reality in the realm of the subjective and the objective. It may seem contradictory, therefore, that in this book it is above all the objective that is condemned to immobility. The same is true of What is to be Done.
This is one of the fundamental errors of the theory of trade-union conquest. It stems from the metaphysical rigidity of Lenin’s thought, which in turn stems from the objective conditions of Russia, where the revolution could not be purely proletarian. These are clear signs of the dubious nature of Lenin’s thought—semi-bourgeois and semi-proletarian.
The Marxist foundation has only this definitive aspect: the liquidation of the unchanging, of metaphysical immobility. It does not envisage conquest from above by the proletarian masses. Rather, it studies the forms of class struggle and draws conclusions from them, which have nothing to do with the so-called a priori strategy of Leninism. It does not impose dogmatic formulas, which then become weapons of reaction. Incidentally, for Marx, the working class can only break its chains by its own initiative and by its own strength. It is clear that Marx identified the development of proletarian thought with this strength. Communist thought is not simply a tradition of bourgeois intellectuals who have analyzed and condemned the economic and political structure of bourgeois society, but a force which is always in development, always becoming enriched by new elements.
The advances in revolutionary thought are subordinate to the development of the class struggle. It is not true that the working class, left to its own devices, can only arrive at a trade-unionist consciousness. The Italian example, where all the political forces that claimed to be for the working class played a counter-revolutionary role, proves that the spontaneity of the working class surpassed all of the ideological elements that were involved. In Germany, and even in Russia, the councils are the decisive proof of this.
The artificial constitution of communist parties in France and elsewhere has in no way raised the ideological level of the proletariat. Consciousness is influenced by the proletarian struggle; it is conditioned by the dialectics of antagonistic forces. Let the proletarian class be aggressive, let its attacks become more and more furious, and we shall witness a new flowering of socialist thought. It is true that the strength and dynamism of the masses can still be felt in the period of the ebb of revolutionary forces, when the weapon of criticism continues its incessant investigation. But if the aforementioned ebb becomes a prolonged stagnation, then we will witness an increasingly intense decomposition, or unraveling, of these political organizations.
But why, if consciousness and the political forms of class struggle are a mere part of revolutionary development, did the proletariat not triumph in its last offensive against capitalism? We have already answered this question elsewhere. For us, it is because the proletariat had not yet acquired a sufficient degree of experience, of revolutionary consciousness. It was not because a truly revolutionary party was lacking, but precisely because the premises of such a party were lacking. Should we accept that it is impossible for the working class to develop its political consciousness? Rosa Luxemburg considered this problem in an article written before the war and replied in the negative: it was not possible for the proletariat to attain as a class the ideological level reached by the French bourgeoisie before the revolution. The proletariat does not have the economic means to achieve this. It is true that the proletariat does not yet have the material means to develop science in the same way as the bourgeoisie did before the revolution; it does not have the possibility to develop its intellectual forces to the point of making them a lever for a new technical and social upheaval of society. But this observation should not lead us to a total denial of the spiritual forces of the proletariat, which have already given proof of their power. Already, in her speech on the program, Rosa Luxemburg was beginning to see clearly that revolutionary energies are rooted in the living mass of the proletariat. She also condemned the “conquest” of the trade unions from without.
It is precisely because a century of economic struggle has provided the requisite basis of experience to understand that this method (i.e., trade-union conquest) – given the international development of capitalism – does not in itself offer a solution, that organizations based on this method can only end participating in class collaboration.
Apart from the reformist organizations, which are inescapably linked to bourgeois politics, there are still organizations which place themselves on the same terrain of economic struggle. These are the so-called ‘red’ unions, industrial organizations or unions (in Germany, for example) which attempt to take up a kind of struggle that has been completely abandoned by the reformist unions. They affirm that a degeneration of their tactics is impossible because, in the present situation, the struggle for partial demands outside the limits of compulsory arbitration must become a revolutionary struggle. And they conceive of the development of factory and industrial organisations as a reaction to reformist collaboration. By this very fact, they do not see the necessity of revolutionary development for the councils, the new forms of organization of the proletariat, to emerge.
The comrades of the German General Workers’ Union (A.A.U.) approach the matter in this particular way. They no longer see factory organisations as superior forms of class struggle, forms which in themselves resolve the contrast between the struggle for a loaf of bread and the struggle for revolution, but as organizational forms that replace the classic trade union when these, through their tactics, have succumbed to class collaboration.
But a new form of organization is not an eternal safeguard against the slide into opportunism. If, moreover, these organisations propose to transform the economic struggles of the proletariat into a revolutionary movement, why don’t they do so without leading the proletariat to compromise with the bosses? Participation in any partial struggle of the proletariat is undeniably necessary, but the constitution of permanent organizations based on lower forms of class consciousness and struggle no longer has any reason to exist at a time when the revolution must be able to emerge at any moment. Any organization which tries to save the working class through deception, when this can only happen through the seizure of power, is, by virtue of this, an agent of counter-revolution.
This is precisely why the Leninist method of deceiving the masses, of helping them to deceive themselves, in order to gain their (misplaced) confidence and put oneself at their head, is a reactionary method that enchains workers’ consciousness to the errors of the past and provides a bulwark for the counter-revolution.
We are well aware that people will object that even trade-union reformism is ahead of the masses, that the masses are passive and cannot be brought directly into the field of political struggle. This is to assume that the masses cannot mobilize themselves for the attack, under the shock of events. And in that instance, the ramparts that would be built “in front of the masses” will only be obstacles under their feet, at the hour of revolution.
If today’s political parties and unions concern themselves chiefly with the part of the proletariat that is currently able to obtain something from capitalism, or that imagines it can, why would the lower and deeper layers of the working class, who have nothing to hope for, and who understand this innately, come to join these organizations? To convince them, they must be deceived, made to believe that they will gain something by fighting in a reformist, conciliatory, or even aggressive manner. Why not tell them the truth?
Why not tell them that the unions are the organs of the labour aristocracy? That the different ‘socialist’ and ‘working-class’ parties are compromised by their adaptation to the regime they propose to abolish? That the proletarian class, during the mortal crisis of capitalism, must concretize the results of its experience in the factory organizations, realize for itself the accelerated historical developments which confront it with its task or its suicide, and throw itself wholeheartedly into the fight in which proletarians “have a world to win”, and, “nothing to lose but their chains.”
L’Ouvrier Communiste N°4/5 – November 1929
The first part of this article can be found in English here and French here.
League of Internationalist Communists 