The early trade unions were forged in the fight against wage slavery, but the capitalist class has succeeded for the present in turning the union movement into a reserve to defend that very system of exploitation.
The capitalists have consolidated, in the union leadership, a stratum of labor lieutenants who serve as the political detachment of the imperialists in the working class.
The line of trade unionism today dominates the organized labor movement and, as the communist leader Lenin wrote, trade unionism “means the political enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.” Where ruling class violence had failed to stop the powerful workers’ movement, trade unionism channeled the movement into a path of reformism, of acceptance of capitalism.
The leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), since the time of Samuel Gompers in the 1880s, has seen its role as trade union warriors vying directly with the communists for control over the labor movement. A recent article in AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News dates this battle back to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and shows how the AFL developed its political line and method to defeat their “direct rivals as leaders of the working class.”
Gompers was the first clear exponent of trade unionism in this country. He saw “the unions pure and simple” as the “natural organization” of workers to represent them in their struggles with the bosses and to serve as their lobby in influencing political legislation and affairs outside the workplace. Workers needed no other organization besides the unions, Gompers insisted.
At the heart of trade unionist ideology is the separation of the workers’ economic struggle from revolutionary political struggles. The rationale put forward that “labor is fundamentally an economic organization,” and as the AFL states, “political” questions should be left to the politicians in the bourgeois political parties. Transferred into practice, this view concludes that politics is not the concern of workers. “Members are far more concerned with bread-and-butter economic issues . . .” the AFL insists. This view, of course, leaves the question of political power, that is, of which class will rule society, as an already-settled one in favor of the bourgeoisie.
The trade union leaders do promote their own brand of politics in the unions. But this brand is trade unionist politics as opposed to the workers’ political struggle for power.
In waging only the trade unionist struggle, Lenin stressed how the working class loses its independence and becomes tied to the bourgeoisie and its political parties. This is the purpose, in short, of trade unionism, to restrict and paralyze the working class movement and turn it into a prop for the imperialists.
“The American trade union movement,” explained George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO and spokesman for capitalism within the labor movement, “is part and parcel of the American society which is capitalism. We have no quarrel with this system at all, Anyone who knows the history of American labor and American workers will understand this . . . The only thing on which we disagree with the capitalist is, how much do we get? That is the only thing.” Trade unionism glorifies the “guerrilla war”–the isolated, local skirmishes–between workers and employers. Some trade unionists and even capitalists pay lip service to the “class struggle,” which they characterize as an economic tug-of-war which may or may not include outbursts like strikes and walk-outs. But all this “struggle,” in reality, comes down to haggling for better terms, a few bones more or less thrown by the capitalists to their wage-slaves.
Bureaucratization of the unions developed hand in hand with trade unionism, binding it more closely to the capitalists and making the unions every day more dependent on red tape, legalisms, and government arbitration. In fact, with the expansion of the trade union bureaucracy came an equally elaborate government apparatus to “mediate” and “facilitate settlements” should labor disputes get “out of hand.”
Trade unionism has also meant the transformation of the unions into profitable business enterprises for the labor bureaucrats. Besides fat salaries like $132,000 for Teamster president Fitzsimmons, there are travel expenses, slush funds, conventions, international travel and government consultant fees. The amount of dues and pension money handled by the largest unions approaches many of the largest corporations in income.
These are only a few of the thousands of threads by which the labor aristocracy and especially the trade union bureaucrats are tied to the imperialist system. Having shackled the workers’ movement, they claim to be the main defenders of an “independent” trade union movement. Gompers in fact attacked the communists for wanting to rink the trade union movement to the revolutionary movement for socialism. Waving the banner of a “free” trade union movement, these class collaborators have turned “labor’s” political voice into open and complete support for the ruling class’ most reactionary imperialist aggression and expansion internationally.
The growth of U.S. imperialism was the basis for the development of the labor aristocracy and this whole bureaucracy of labor misleaders. Their survival depends on U.S. imperialism’s continued growth and expansion. On the domestic front, these trade unionists may preach varied reformist programs and measures but on the international front they are rabid supporters of all-out imperialist aggression. Even when the broadest masses of American people stood opposed to the Vietnam War, George Meany threw the AFL-CIO’s support behind continued escalation. Meany has led the AFL-CIO in a frenzy of buying Israeli war bonds to support Zionist expansion in the Middle East. And today, as the crisis throws greater numbers of workers into destitution, Meany has turned the blame against the nations and peoples of the third world and not the U.S. imperialists. The AFL-CIO has become the biggest backer of U.S. imperialism in its world-wide battle for hegemony against its chief rival imperialist power, the Soviet Union.
With clear self-interest at heart, U.S. labor lieutenants joined the world-wide war against socialism and national liberation, claiming that if the U.S. lost its colonies and neocolonies, this would jeopardize the! whole American way of life. What they really meant was that it would jeopardize the position of the labor aristocracy. That’s why, Meany explains, the AFL-CIO spends some 25% of its total income overseas–teaching the methods of class collaboration, spreading trade unionism’s treacherous ideology and, arm in arm with the CIA, sabotaging and splitting the working class movements in other nations, especially in the third world.
In World War II, when most of the world’s people were fighting to defeat Nazi fascism, the AFL traitors like Irving Brown and former Communist Party leader Jay Lovestone were actively at work in France, Italy and Greece, plotting to destroy the class-conscious workers’ movements–the very backbone of the anti-fascist resistance. With CIA money and backing they created phony labor federations, bought pro-U.S. lackey leaders and helped lay the groundwork for imposing the Marshall plan and other U.S. imperialist policies.
These traitors and agents of imperialism and fascism like to strike a pose domestically as reformers and liberals. A particular, danger which they pose today stems from their use of the growing attacks on the trade union movement as a means of rallying support behind their continued collaborationist rule.
For example, Teamster-grower attacks on the farm workers’ union have threatened to set back the struggle of these workers to unionize. At the same time, reformist leader Cesar Chavez has mainly channeled the struggle onto legalistic paths, election referendums and reliance on liberal politicians. While defending union rights is essential, the struggle cannot be allowed to remain under the slogan of “defend the unions.” The incorrect formulation a couple years ago by some communists, the OL among others, of a growing “fascist tide” and “fascist labor front” led Marxist-Leninists to raise defense of the union above and apart from the fight to revolutionize the unions.
While tactical alliances of different kinds must be formed at times to fight the increasing attacks against the workers’ movement in general, it is wrong for communists to disregard the class character of the trade unions as they are, without simultaneously waging a struggle against class-collaborationism and the labor misleaders.
Arnold Miller, for example, has tried recently to characterize attacks against him by pro-Boyle forces on the UMW International Executive Board as an attack against the miners’ union as a whole. In this way, he hopes to silence the rising struggle against his own sell-out policies. In the Miller election campaign a couple of years back, defense of die union against “right-wing attacks” was wrongly used to justify unprincipled alliance with Miller for the sake of “saving the union.”
The unions cannot be “saved” without smashing the hold of the misleadership. “The thinking worker,” Lenin wrote, “knows that the most dangerous of advisers are those liberal friends of the workers who claim to be defending their interests, but ate actually trying to destroy the class independence of the proletariat and its organization.” It is, he stresses elsewhere, an “absolute immutable duty” of all communists to preserve the ideological and political independence of the party of the working class. No task–building or defending the trade unions, winning a union drive or election–can ever be placed above the principal task of building and strengthening the vanguard party, the independent leadership of the working class.