This pamphlet contains the six-part series “A Communist View of the Trade Unions,” which was published in The Call between May 31 and August 2, 1976. Except for several points of clarification and additions, the text remains as it was in the newspaper articles.
It is being published because of the great interest and enthusiasm with which the articles were greeted. A number of workers’ study circles were organized to follow the articles from week to week. Hopefully many more will do so now that the articles have been collected into pamphlet form.
The series was designed to accomplish several purposes. First, it was used to restate the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism concerning the trade unions which have developed through more than 125 years of communist experience and analysis.
Secondly, the series summed up the main features of the American labor movement. It focused on the development of the labor aristocracy and the bureaucracy based on it, showing the role played by this bribed stratum in chaining the workers’ movement with the shackles of reformism and trade unionism. In tracing this history, the articles analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist Party when it was a revolutionary vanguard leading the working-class struggle and also pointed out how the seeds of revisionism were sown.
Third, the articles provided important lessons drawn from the experiences of the October League and other Marxist-Leninists who have been carrying out the work of building a new communist party in the heat of the workers’ struggles over the past five years. These lessons will be extremely valuable for the work of the party that lies ahead in building factory nuclei and revolutionizing the trade unions.
The series took a close and self-critical look at the OL’s experience and work over the last few years, pointing out many of the great advances which have been made. For example, communists began to establish firm roots among the workers and led some of the most important strikes and trade union battles. Factory cells were developed in plants in dozens of cities, and a significant number of advanced workers were recruited to the communist movement. Marxist-Leninist agitation and propaganda inside the plants expanded greatly, especially with the weekly Call. Important advances were made in building multi-national unity through communist activity. Criticisms were deepened of both revisionism and petty-bourgeois ultra-“left” trends on the trade union question. Most significantly, a growing number of workers have been won to the side of revolution and the party.
While showing these important advances, the series also examined the weaknesses which developed in the OL’s trade union work, especially embodied in the line of “moving the trade unions to the left” instead of revolutionizing them. This line led to many rightist errors, in particular tailing after some of the more militant-sounding reformists while abandoning or downplaying communist independence and initiative.
To understand and correct these errors, it is crucial to take class struggle as the key link and draw a clear line of demarcation between the friends and enemies of the working class. The reformist and revisionist trade union leaders, no matter how militant they sound, stand on the side of the imperialists and defend their interests. They are the most effective defenders of the capitalist system, because they are in the ranks of the working-class movement and control the trade unions.
The unions cannot be revolutionized nor the workers prepared for revolutionary struggle without waging an uncompromising battle against the reformist and revisionist labor misleaders. The bulk of material in the trade union series, therefore, is aimed against these misleaders, because they are capitalism’s main props in the workers’ movement.
The entire U.S. trade union movement today is under bourgeois leadership that limits itself to nickel and dime reforms within the framework of capitalism. As George Meany himself put it, “We have no quarrel with this system at all .. . The only thing on which we disagree with the capitalist is how much do we get.”
This whole group of reactionary trade union leaders has increasingly become the target of rank-and-file opposition and struggle. To stave off this rising tide of class struggle in the union movement, the capitalists have begun to rely heavily on a new front line of labor lieutenants like Arnold Miller in the Mine Workers Union and Ed Sadlowski in steel. They present a more liberal and militant appearance than the old guard of Tony Boyle or I.W. Abel. But as the series demonstrates, the Millers and Sadlowskis are as wedded to the capitalist system as the leaders they replaced. Many honest militants and working-class fighters have learned through their own experiences that such leadership can never be relied on and that rank-and-file workers must seize hold of their own unions.
Communists must take the lead in turning the basic trade union organizations of the workers into storm centers of class struggle, instead of strongholds of class collaboration as they are today. In the course of the fight for communist leadership, the party will enter into all different arenas of trade union struggle, from elections to strikes, and may enter into tactical agreements with representatives of the trade union bureaucracy. But the purpose of such agreements is to gain access to the workers under the influence of the trade union reformists in order to win them to revolution and to the leadership of the party. At all times, communists must maintain their independence and initiative.
In order to win the broad masses of workers to fight to revolutionize the unions, communists must take on the task of exposing reformism and breaking its stranglehold on the workers’ movement. At the same time, the “communist” mask must be torn off the revisionists to reveal their reformist essence and their support for the interests of capitalism, especially capitalism of the Soviet variety.
The trade unions can never serve the cause of working-class emancipation as long as they are led by capitalism’s agents. This series of Call articles, while certainly only a beginning of the trade union analysis and program-development which must be undertaken by the new party, charts a clear direction for communist work in the trade unions.