Class Unions Must Rise Again: Firm Points of the Communist Left, 1974
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Class Unions Must Rise Again: Firm Points of the Communist Left, 1974
International Communist Party
The Union
Question
CLASS UNIONS MUST RISE AGAIN
Firm Points of the Communist Left
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 2, 6, 7, 1974-75)
We re-propose to the proletarians, to whom the advancing crisis makes
them feel the subjugation of their economic defence organisations to the
interests of the state and the capitalist economy, the classic approach,
the only one on the line of revolutionary Marxism, given by the Party to
the trade union question. This approach is based on the following
cornerstones, which are clear from all the texts that follow:
1) The trade unions after the Second World War, in all advanced
capitalist countries, are ‘tricolour’ trade unions, i.e. organisations
that put the defence of workers’ economic conditions and daily lives
after the defence of the interests of the national economy, the
capitalist state, democracy and social peace between classes. That is,
they are unsuitable and inadequate bodies even for the mere defence of
the immediate needs of the proletariat. Of these unions, however they
are labelled, the proletarians have nothing to defend and nothing to
save.
2) The dynamics of these ‘tricolour’ organisations continue to unfold
in the sense of their ever more complete insertion into the gears of the
bourgeois state, even in the formal organisational and legal sense. This
trajectory of theirs, which will lead them to become even formally mere
appendages of the state machine, unfolds to varying degrees in different
countries, and is irreversible unless the proletariat’s class struggle
is resumed.
3) Faced with this observation, not of today, but of twenty-five
years ago, not based on contingent events, but on a correct Marxist
analysis of the capitalist becoming, which today’s events only confirm,
the Party does not draw the inference to abandon work in these
organisms. In these organisations and outside them, the Party’s task is
to put forward to the proletariat the need for the resurgence of class
economic associations, i.e. workers’ bodies for the conduct of economic
struggles that are free from state and bourgeois influence.
This resurrection will be the result of the class returning to the
terrain of defending at least its most basic economic interests, with
the method of class struggle, against the pressure of capital.
It could be expressed in two senses: either in the reconquest,
‘perhaps with a beating’, of the present trade unions, a reconquest
which must not only mean a change of leadership, but a decisive
overthrow of the whole of the present policy in all fields of activity
and of the same organisational form of the trade unions; or ex novo,
that is through the reconstitution by the struggling proletarians of
economic organisations for the immediate struggle (outside of and
against the present organisations). These two possibilities cannot be
determined a priori: the prevalence of one rather than the other, or of
both at the same time, depends on the actual course of the class
struggle and not on voluntarist exercises.
4) One of the elements which distinguishes the class Party from all
the endless circles and small groups is the prospect of the resurgence
of class economic organisations, stemming from the resurgence of the
proletarian struggle and acting as a necessary and indispensable ground,
not only for the conduct by the Party of the revolutionary struggle for
power, but also for any notable strengthening of the Party’s influence
on the proletarian masses. Without the widespread emergence of
class-based economic bodies, not only will there be no revolution and no
conquest of power, but neither will there be the real, necessary
strengthening in an autonomous way of the Party and its influence on the
class.
5) This is what all our texts have said for the past 25 years. This
is what we have always told the proletariat. Those who do not agree with
this perspective, those who dream of traumas that would, by some unknown
magic, lead the working class to the revolutionary assault directly,
with a strong Party at the head of the masses and the conquest of power;
those who, worst of all, affirm that the forms of the future class
revival cannot be foreseen are naturally ‘free to follow any path that
diverges from ours’. It is enough that they do not refer to the
tradition of the Communist Left and the International Communist Party,
that they do not distort, in the Stalinist manner, our texts, that they
do not falsify what the Party has always affirmed: for the revolutionary
struggle to be resumed, for the Party to be able to strengthen its
influence over the proletarian class, and to come to lead it in the
final battle; for the workers themselves to be able to effectively
defend their living conditions against the bosses, the bourgeois state
and their opportunist lackeys, the resumption of struggles on the
economic and social terrain and the rebirth of the class unions is
necessary!
From the texts of the Left:
–
Political Platform of the Party
(1945)
–
The Historical Course
of the Class Movement of the Proletariat (1947)
– On the Thread of Time,
Trade Union Splits in Italy
(1949)
–
Revolutionary Party and Economic Action
(April 1951)
–
Theory and Action in Marxist Doctrine
(April 1951)
–
Characteristic Theses of the Party
(1952) – Part II
–
Preface to the ‘Characteristic Theses’
republished as a pamphlet (1962)
–
Theses on the Historical Duty
, Action, and the Structure of the World CP (1965)
The historical course of the class movement of the proletariat
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 2, 1974)
In the imperialist stage, capitalism, just as it seeks to dominate
its economic contradictions in a central network of control and to
co-ordinate, through an elephantiasis of the State apparatus, the
control of all social and political facts, so too does it modify its
action towards workers’ organisations. At first the bourgeoisie had
condemned them, at a second time it had authorised them and allowed them
to grow, at a third time it realised that it could neither suppress them
nor allow them to develop on an autonomous platform, and it set out to
incorporate them by whatever means into its State apparatus, into that
machinery which, while exclusively political at the beginning of the
cycle, became in the age of imperialism both a political and economic
apparatus, transforming the State of the capitalists and the bosses into
a capitalist State and a State-master. In this vast bureaucratic
scaffolding, places of golden imprisonment are created for the leaders
of the proletarian movement. Through the myriad forms of social
arbitration, of welfare institutions, of bodies with an apparent
function of balancing the classes, the leaders of the workers’ movement
cease to rest on their own autonomous forces, and are absorbed into the
bureaucracy of the State...
The proletariat’s own movement of economic organisation will be
imprisoned, using exactly the same method inaugurated by fascism, i.e.
tending towards the legal recognition of trade unions, which means their
transformation into organs of the bourgeois State. It will become clear
that the plan for the hollowing out of the workers’ movement, proper to
reformist revisionism (Labourism in England, economism in Russia, pure
syndicalism in France, reformist syndicalism à la Cabrini-Bonomi and
then Rigola-D’Aragona in Italy) coincides substantially with that of
fascist syndicalism, Mussolini’s corporatism, and Hitler’s
national-socialism. The only difference is that the former method
corresponds to a phase in which the bourgeoisie is solely on the
defensive against the revolutionary danger, while the latter corresponds
to the phase in which, due to the surge in proletarian pressure, the
bourgeoisie goes on the offensive. In neither case does it confess to
acting on its own class interest; instead proclaiming that it wants to
fulfil certain economic needs of the workers, and foster collaboration
between the classes...
Preface to the ‘Characteristic Theses’ republished as a pamphlet
(1962)
... In point 6, while every syndicalist theory is condemned, the
necessity of the Party’s presence and penetration of the trade unions
with a general communist union organisational layer is affirmed as a
condition not only of final victory, but of every advance and success.
In point 7 all this is reiterated, and the limited and local conception
of economic struggles dear to the traitors is condemned…
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 6, 1975)
The October 1974 issue No. 2 of this journal, under the title
‘
Class Unions Must Rise Again
–
Firm Points of the
Communist Left
’, contained five points that meagrely reiterated the
long-standing positions of revolutionary communism vis-à-vis the
workers’ union. In support of the short text, significant excerpts from
Party texts from 1945 to 1965 were published, limited in number only for
economy of typographical space, which also serves as a significant means
of the objective dictatorship of the counter-revolutionary
situation.
Ever since the
era of communist revolution
began, reforms,
the true and only means of existence of social-democratic political
movements, have served as an instrument to keep the working masses off
the path to revolution, to the point that the bourgeois State itself has
embraced a reformist policy, first with the fascist regime, then with
its natural, merely temporal extension, anti-fascism. A reformist policy
demands the abandonment of direct struggle, obstructs class
mobilisation, shifts the masses from class struggle to class
collaboration, and poses the problem of power not as the violent clash
of the proletariat against the State, but as incorporation into the
State to the point of becoming its form of government. This situation is
the same in every country in the world.
It is no coincidence that the workers’ trade union movement has been
mobilised to subordinate the very reasons for the union’s existence –
which are the immediate economic defence of the working class – to the
policy of reform in a thousand aspects: reform of housing, of the
school, and finally of the State. A trade union that operates in this
way evolves towards its integration into the State, ceasing even to
defend the worker’s living and working conditions, ceasing to be a
workers’ union, and transforming itself into a mere organ of the
State.
Having made this observation, which was also accurately examined and
described in ‘
The Historical Course of the Class Movement of the
Proletariat
’ in 1947 and in ‘
Trade Union Splits in Italy
’
in 1949, the Party did not come to the conclusion that the trade union
is outdated, no longer needed, and must be replaced by another political
body, rather it solemnly reaffirmed, in the wake of the communist
tradition from Marx to Lenin, that ‘
any prospect of a general
revolutionary movement will depend on the presence of the following
essential factors: 1) a large, numerous proletariat of pure
wage-earners, 2) a sizeable movement of associations with an economic
content including a large part of the proletariat, 3) a strong
revolutionary class party, which, composed of a militant minority of
workers, must have been enabled, in the course of the struggle to
oppose, broadly and effectively, its own influence within the union
movement to that of the bourgeois class and bourgeois power.
’
(‘
Revolutionary Party and Economic Action
’, April 1951).
This corresponds to the class ‘pyramid’ described in the theses of
the Second Congress of the Communist International of 1919, namely
‘
party, trade unions, class
’, in order of importance, which is
specified on the eve of the seizure of power as ‘
party, soviet,
trade unions, class
’; it translates Marx’s concept of the trade
unions as ‘a school of war’ and a ‘lever of revolution’ and Lenin’s,
view of the trade unions as ‘the transmission belt of the party’.
The party must work in the trade unions, even ‘reactionary’,
‘tricolour’, or ‘right-wing’ ones, remembering that they are still
workers’ unions, of wage earners only, with reactionary, tricolour or
right-wing leadership. This is the lesson of Lenin in ‘
Left-Wing
Communism
’, and the lesson of the Left reiterated in ‘
Theses on
the Historical Duty etc.
’ in 1965:
‘
It is an old thesis of left-wing Marxism that we must work in
reactionary trade unions in which workers are present, and the party
abhors the individualistic positions of those who disdain to set foot in
them, and who go so far as to theorise breaking the few, feeble strikes
that today’s unions dare to call
’.
In order to ‘work in the unions’ the party must participate in the
workers’ economic struggles, agitations and strikes, however few and
‘feeble’ they may be. This participation consists not only in the
physical presence of the party militants among the workers in struggle,
but also, together with the exaltation of the struggle itself, in the
ruthless criticism of the trade union policy of the central unions,
showing its subordination to the preservation of the present regime,
proposing a return to the use of the means of direct struggle and
economic demands common to the entire working class.
ECONOMIC DETERMINISM
The ‘
Theses on Tactics
’ formulated by the Left at the 1922
PCd’I Congress highlight, as is developed elsewhere in this issue of the
journal, the realistic and materialist basis of the very existence of
the party and its action. The economic needs that the capitalist
economy’s pressure on wage-labour induces,
obliges
workers to
organise an adequate defence, pushes them, in given historical
unfolding, in which the existence of the capitalist regime appears
untenable for the proletariat, to embrace the Party’s positions and
direction. Trade union organisation, the economic association of
workers, is therefore the product of these needs, indeed ‘
The real
fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever
expanding union of the workers
– writes Marx in the
Manifesto
–
[It] is helped on by the improved means of
communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the
workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just
this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles,
all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.
But every class struggle is a political struggle
’.
As long as capitalism, and thus wage-earners, exist, there will be
struggles and a ‘union’ of workers, whereby workers will fight against
the bosses and their organisations, hence the
political
struggle.
In ‘
Value, Price and Profit
’, Marx then warns the class not
to exaggerate to itself the successes of these struggles because it’s
‘
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
’. So Marx outlines the programmatic direction: ‘
They
ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable
guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing
encroachments of capital or changes of the market
’. When this
occurs, we have the deviationist phenomenon of syndicalism, of
workerism, which remain stuck and tied to effects. Marx therefore
concludes: ‘
They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it
imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the
material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical
reconstruction of society. 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”
’.
Not denial of the struggles against the ‘effects’, but rather,
struggling against the ‘effects’ of the bourgeois system, whilst
‘understanding’ that one must attack the causes, the very existence of
the present regime. The economic struggles, the class struggle belongs
to the workers, the organisation belongs to the workers,
understanding
the limited value of these struggles and
overcoming them belongs to the party.
In the General Statutes of the International of 1872, this concept is
enshrined: ‘
In its struggle against the collective power of the
possessing classes the proletariat can act as a class only by
constituting itself as distinct political party, opposed to all the old
parties formed by the possessing classes. This constitution of the
proletariat into a political party is indispensable to ensure the
triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate goal: the abolition of
classes. The coalition of the forces of the working class, already
achieved by the economic struggle, must also serve, in the hands of this
class, as a lever in its struggle against the political power of its
exploiters. As the lords of the land and of capital always make use of
their political privileges to defend and perpetuate their economic
monopolies and to enslave labour, the conquest of political power
becomes the duty of the proletariat
’.
Marx, again in 1871 in a letter to Bolte, reiterates the close
connection between the economic-material basis and political action
‘
[O]ut of the separate economic movements of the workers there
grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of
the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form,
in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these
movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are
themselves equally a means of the development of this
organisation
’.
Lenin, in the equally lucid and sharp pages of ‘
What Is To Be
Done?
’, fighting against spontaneism, syndicalism, but not denying
spontaneity and trade unionism, concludes: ‘
[Our] task [consists in
drawing…] the working-class movement… under the wing of revolutionary
Social Democracy
’. And he specifies:
‘
The workers’ organisations for the economic struggle should be
trade union organisations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as far
as possible assist and actively work in these organisations. But, while
this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that only
Social-Democrats should be eligible for membership in the “trade”
unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence upon the
masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the
struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions.
The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if
they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree
of understanding, if they were not very broad organisations. The broader
these organisations, the broader will be our influence over them – an
influence due, not only to the “spontaneous” development of the economic
struggle, but to the direct and conscious effort of the socialist trade
union members to influence their comrades
’.
The same concepts Lenin would reiterate in ‘
Left-Wing
Communism…
’ against the German workerists (K.A.P.D.) and all those
who would not work in the ‘reactionary’ trade unions. Lenin goes as far
as to establish that the trade union organisation is ‘
a formally
non-communist, flexible and relatively wide and very powerful
proletarian apparatus, by means of which the Party is closely linked up
with the “class” and the “masses”, and by means of which, under the
leadership of the Party, the “class dictatorship” is
exercised
’.
The party, therefore, works in the unions, penetrates them, tends to
their leadership, before, during and after the revolution. The Communist
International sets this as a condition of admission. The ninth of the
famous ‘21 Moscow Points’ sounds exactly like this: ‘
Every party…
must systematically and persistently develop Communist activities within
the trade unions, … councils ... [and] organise Communist cells the aim
of which is to win the trades unions etc. for the cause of
Communism
’.
TRADE UNIONS ARE IRREPLACEABLE
The workers’ economic associations will cease to exist when communism
has triumphed in the world, because, as we have seen, they constitute
the organisation, ‘the proletariat’s true class organisation in which it
fights its daily battles with capital, in which it trains itself’, as
Engels wrote to Bebel in 1875. They are so irreplaceable that the trade
unions are the natural battleground between the revolutionary communist
party and the other parties, because they are the recruiting ground of
the class army under the direction of the party.
The texts that have been compulsory so far, spanning over more than a
century, which crystallise the historical experience of the class in the
various phases of the transition of trade union organisation, do not
reveal any other organism capable of structuring the proletariat in its
elementary and basic action of economic defence. Perhaps the Soviets?
Not even the Soviets can replace the function of the trade unions,
because the Soviets, or equivalent organs, are political organs for the
conquest of power, they arise in the crucial phase of revolutionary
action which, as we have seen, cannot disregard elementary action in the
economic field, i.e.
the emergence of the Soviets has as its premise
the existence, the efficiency of the trade unions
, or, in other
words, of the working class organised on the economic terrain. This has
been true in absolutist Russia, in industrial Germany, in ‘civilised’
Italy, it will be true tomorrow anywhere on earth where the proletariat
will be on the frontline of the revolution, if Marxism is not dirty
water.
Maybe works councils? Not even, because they were limited to the
company at most, they could function as the company base of the economic
union. The old Chambers of Labour, for example, constituted a formidable
network because they brought together workers from different professions
and different companies in a unitary local central, so it was possible,
especially with the adequate penetration of the class party, to have an
overview of local class action. All the more reason for this positive
characteristic lies in the national trade union central, and tomorrow
international.
The reconstitution of such a class-driven network can easily be seen
as decisive to revolutionary mobilisation. Party work in this direction
must therefore be indispensable, within the limits of the material
conditions.
A CERTAIN REACTIONISM
It is Lenin who in ‘
Left-Wing Communism…
’ hammers the
infantile positions of the German ‘leftists’ and even goes so far as to
say that ‘
a certain “reactionism” in the trade unions is inevitable
under the dictatorship of the proletariat
’. Let alone that this
‘reactionism’ is possible in trade unions not controlled by communists.
‘
In countries more advanced than Russia
– Lenin argues –
a
certain reactionism in the trade unions has been and was bound to be
manifested in a far greater measure than in our country... The
Mensheviks of the West have acquired a much firmer footing in the trade
unions; there the craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened,
covetous, and petty-bourgeois “labour aristocracy”, imperialist-minded,
and imperialist-corrupted, has developed into a much stronger section
than in our country
.’
‘
That
is
incontestable
,’ Lenin commented.
This is incontestable, gentlemen ‘revolutionaries’ of the broken
‘sieve’.... ‘
The struggle
...
in Western Europe is
incomparably more difficult than the struggle against our
Mensheviks
...
This struggle must be waged ruthlessly
...
to a point when all the incorrigible leaders of opportunism and
social-chauvinism are completely discredited and driven out of the trade
unions
’. And it is indisputable that this struggle must be waged
against the labour aristocracy ‘
in the name of the masses of the
workers and in order to win them over to our side
...
against
the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the
working class over to our side
’.
‘
It would be absurd... to forget this most elementary and most
self-evident truth’
. It would be foolish to draw ‘the conclusion’
that ‘
because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character
of the trade union top leadership
...
we must withdraw from the
trade unions…
It would be foolish... [t]o refuse to work within
the reactionary trade unions... leaving the insufficiently developed or
backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary
leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie
’.
There is enough to reaffirm that communists do not back down from
work and the battle within the trade unions due to the fact that they
are directed by reactionaries, by counter-revolutionaries, by proponents
of a ‘tricolour’, ‘chauvinist’ policy. But ‘fools’ abound, and, in the
name of ‘revolutionary politics’, they would like revolutionary Marxism
to be converted into the recognition of an outright communist licence
given to the ‘practical ones’, to those who ‘make the revolution’, in
‘referendums’, in the multiple ‘social managements’ of State organs (the
school, ‘commuting leftists’, is an organ of the political State of the
bourgeoisie, not a ‘neutral’ organisation, nor even more so proletarian;
it is not conquered, it is demolished!), in the shady dealings within
the ‘generic revolutionary’ movement.
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 7, 1975)
In the previous issue we noted, in Marx and Lenin, that the economic
association of workers arises on the basis of the defence of the
physical conditions of the proletariat and that for these reasons it is
indispensable
to the proletariat, despite the ephemeral and
transitory character of the ‘conquests’ and a ‘certain reactionary
character’ of the trade unions. We have also revealed how, despite these
limiting aspects, communists
must work organised
in the trade
unions, transferring revolutionary directives into them, in order to
make them bodies not ends in themselves, but ‘levers’ for the
revolutionary political struggle against the capitalist regime.
PHASE OF STATE TOTALITARIANISM
With the appearance of fascism, the State prepares and equips itself
to absorb the workers’ unions, tends to subject them to its
dictatorship, giving them legal bargaining power, and progressively
incorporating them into its administrative machinery. The master-State
tends to monopolise all aspects of social and economic life, as well as
being the organ par excellence of political dictatorship. Capitalism
thus enters its third phase, that of imperialism, in which ‘
the
ruling bourgeois class, in parallel with the transformation of its
economic practice from liberalist to interventionist, has the need to
abandon its method of apparent tolerance of political ideas and
organisations for a method of authoritarian and totalitarian government:
and in this lies the general meaning of the present epoch
’.
This judgement of the Left in the immediate post-World War II period
(‘
The Historical Cycle of the Capitalist Economy
’) is reflected
in the ‘Historical Course of the Class Movement of the Proletariat’, in
the sense that the bourgeoisie ‘
modifies its action towards workers’
organisations
’, which it had previously ‘
authorised and allowed
to grow
’, because it ‘
understands that it can neither suppress
them, nor allow them to develop on an autonomous platform, and proposes
to frame them by any means within its State apparatus
’; in which
‘
gilded prisons are created for the leaders of the proletarian
movement
’. This process, which began with the advent of fascism,
continued into the post-fascist era, during which ‘
the very movement
of economic organisation of the proletariat will be imprisoned, using
exactly the same method inaugurated by fascism, that is, with the
tendency towards the legal recognition of trade unions, which means
their transformation into organs of the bourgeois State. It will become
clear that the plan to hollow out the workers’ movement, proper to
reformist revisionism (Labourism in England, economism in Russia, pure
syndicalism in France, reformist syndicalism à la Cabrini-Bonomi and
then Rigola-D’Aragona in Italy) essentially coincides with fascist
syndicalism, Mussolini’s corporatism, and Hitler’s national
socialism
’.
This process is ‘
irreversible
’, and is contained in the
general complex ‘
[of] the capitalist struggle to deprive future
revolutionary class movements of the solid basis of a truly autonomous
workers’ union framework
’ (‘
Trade Union Splits in Italy
’).
In this way today’s trade unions, even those claiming ‘red’ origins,
such as the CGIL for example, are sewn ‘on the Mussolini model’, i.e.
they are oriented in the sense of their total incorporation into the
bourgeois State machinery, whatever label they display. These trade
union centres ‘serve’ the State, as they serve it in England, America
and Russia, in the formula of the ‘national economy before all else’, of
the subjugation of the immediate interests of the working class to the
immanent interests of social preservation of the bourgeois class and its
regime. It is mere fiction to claim that, nevertheless, the trade unions
fight against the bosses, when we know that the fascist trade unions
arose ‘
playing on the national accord the motif of the fight against
the bosses
’ (see Mussolini’s useful and significant speech in
Dalmine), precisely because the dominant feature of the imperialist
phase is not so much the individual ‘employer’ as it is the system as a
whole, synthesised by its State leadership, which is forced, again for
the sake of preservation, to maintain a game of balance between the
different social forces and between the very class elements whose total
interests it represents. The capitalist regime is also willing to
sacrifice individual masters for the sake of its preservation, as Engels
taught when he foresaw in ‘
Anti-Dühring
’ the eclipse of the
bourgeoisie and its replacement by an army of serfs preyed upon by the
State.
HISTORICAL DIALECTICS
The process of absorption of the trade unions into the State, which
the Left has (called) ‘irreversible’, has made some people exclaim that
the time has come to turn their backs on the workers’ union and devote
themselves to the ‘political’ movement. We have already seen that this
attitude clashes inexorably with the party programme, but even before
that it clashes with Marxist doctrine. This position goes hand in hand
with the typically anarcho-syndicalist position that the political party
is outdated, the old ‘communist’ parties having passed into the service
of the bourgeois regime.
With Marx we pointed out that workers’ economic associations do not
arise out of faith, will, but out of the irrepressible necessity of
proletarians to defend their piece of bread and their jobs, against
which capitalism constantly presses, even though it knows it is urging
the working class to mobilise and thus open itself up to revolutionary
party initiatives. These conditions are as irrepressible as it is
irrepressible for
capitalism
to delay, restrain, oppose the
economic associationism of the proletariat, using the means, congenial
with its imperialist totalitarian phase, of capturing it, imprisoning
it, in its State machinery. This, however, does not suppress the
reasons, the root causes of the class contradictions that are precisely
irremediable in a bourgeois regime.
The masses will return to the struggle when they can no longer
tolerate the increasing and inexorable pressure of the capitalist
economy, which, despite all the retreats and tricks of the State,
ultimately proceeds to exacerbate its anarchic character. In the
economy, the State attempts to plan, which means to control these
irreconcilable contradictions of its own. It cannot disregard this
attempt, imposed on it by capitalist centralisation and concentration.
But any attempt is doomed to failure, even if it is ‘irreversible’, i.e.
even if capitalism can no longer return to liberalism, to the conditions
prior to its monopolistic phase.
We did not need fascism to arrive at these considerations.
Social-democratic reformism was already on this road, that of emptying
the class character of the workers’ economic movement. Fascism in fact
inherited the reformism of trade union piecards. Today, this line of
continuity persists.
It follows that the tendency of the State is to subjugate the
workers’ economic unions, and that of the class is to prevent it. The
class struggle, the relations of force will direct this contradiction,
and not the denial of antagonism, nor the abandonment of the worker’s
union into enemy hands forever, which would mean abandoning the
proletarian camp into the enemy’s hands.
Three positions clash in the proletarian economic movement. One that
denies the trade union, the one that advocates for the para-State union,
and the one that upholds the class union. To the first belong those who
consider the trade union outdated, such as those who advocate a party
trade union or corporate bodies replacing the economic union. To the
second belong the current trade union centres, which mystify their
‘autonomy’ in a mere opposition or formal non-subordination ‘to the
parties, to the government, to the bosses’, but claiming that they want
to subordinate the immediate workers’ interests to the ‘superior’
interests of the ‘national economy’, which means the State, of the
bourgeois class. The third is adhered to by those fighting for the
resurgence of a class-driven, red proletarian economic movement.
The policy of the first two groups is objectively convergent, both in
the current situation of unchallenged dominance of the tricolour
piecards, and in a situation where the need for the red union will be
overbearing. The first group refuses to oppose the ‘pro-statists’ by
dreaming of ‘new forms’, entrusting the overthrow of the enemy’s
dictatorship to
forms
rather than
forces
. It stands
outside Marxism and the field of revolution which, we will never tire of
repeating, draws its raison d’être from economic determinations and not
from the world of ideas. The battlefield is always the same, the
cornerstones on which the revolution rests are always the political
party, the class union, the pure wage-earning class. Not recognising
even one of them means leaving it in the hands of the enemy who will not
hesitate to use it, against the revolution. This is the story of the
last fifty years. To pretend, for instance, that because the proletariat
has become bourgeois (an infamous thesis beloved of the
extra-parliamentarians), we must go and find another ‘class’ to replace
it, and locate it in the kaleidoscopic existentialist jolts of groups of
idlers is to transform ourselves from ‘professionals’ of the revolution
into
mercenaries
of the counter-revolution, always ready to put
ourselves at the service of the first adventure.
ORIGINAL POLICY OF THE LEFT
The first objective to which the true communist party aspires is
‘
to be the centre of the struggle and of the redemption against the
reactionary capitalist centralisation tending to impose itself on a
scattered and dispersed working class definitively abandoned to itself
by the opportunist bureaucracy
’ (from ‘
Theses Presented by the
PCd’I
–
4th Congress
’). The same text opens with the
peremptory assertion that ideological propaganda and proselytising are
not enough, but that it is necessary to participate ‘in all those
actions to which the proletarians are driven by their economic
condition’. In the ‘Lyons Theses’, in the face of the convenient and
defeatist position of penetration of the fascist guilds, the Left’s
watchword sounds peremptory: ‘
The watchword of the rebuilding the
Red unions must be issued in conjunction with the denunciation of the
fascist unions
’, which appeared not even formally as voluntary
associations of the masses, but true official organs of the alliance
between the bosses and fascism.
This position was taken up in the 1951 ‘
Characteristic
Theses
’, which formed the ‘basis of Party membership’ and were
binding on all. In them, after reaffirming that ‘the Party recognises
without any reserve that not only the situation which precedes
insurrectional struggle but also all phases of substantial growth of
Party influence amongst the masses cannot arise without the expansion
between the Party and the working class of a series of organisations
with short term economic objectives with a large number of participants.
Within such organisations the party will set a network of communist
cells and groups, as well as a communist fraction in the union’. After
this canonical reaffirmation of the Party’s centuries-old position with
respect to the proletarian economic movement, unchanged even in this
‘third’ imperialist phase of capitalism’s ‘irreversible’ tendency to
capture trade unions the ‘
Theses
’ state that ‘In periods when
the working class is passive, the Party must anticipate the forms and
encourage the constitution of organisations with immediate economic aims.
These may be unions grouped according to trade, industry, factory
committees or any other known grouping or even quite new organisations.
The Party always encourages organisations which favour contact between
workers at different localities and different trades and their common
action. It rejects all forms of closed organisations’.
This is the ‘revolutionary policy’ of the Left, which no other
self-styled political movement of the ‘left’ shares and which it
actually opposes, and which can be expressed in the formula of
‘reconquest, perhaps with a beating, of the current trade unions or the
resurgence of new ones’, capable of containing within them the network
of organised communists.
In this particularly depressed situation, the party does not expect
from its incessant and intelligent participation in workers’ struggles
an appreciable shift of forces, until the struggle movement recovers in
intensity and extension. It is in this class revival that the fertile
ground for the development of the party’s complex activity among the
masses of wage-earners is to be found, both to wrest the leadership of
the existing trade unions from the tricolour leadership and to
‘encourage’ new economic workers’ organisations in which the Party can
‘freely’ carry out its classist and revolutionary action.
Today, although the trade unions are practically foreclosed to
revolutionary communists, due to the overwhelming power of the tricolour
policy of the trade union leaderships, which also manifests itself in
forms of legal barriers – such as the infamous ‘delegation’, which
constitutes a true form of coercion, of the union’s tendency to
transform itself into a ‘compulsory’ union, a typical quality of the
fascist union – the communists do not abandon them voluntarily and carry
out their activity, not only in the sense of participating in workers’
struggles, but also in the relentless battle against the traitorous
policy of the central unions. This is one of the fundamental reasons for
the Party’s action, to show proletarians the harmful consequences of the
official trade union policy and to anticipate the imperative need for a
total overthrow of this policy.
This struggle is therefore a badge of the Communist Left against the
bourgeois State-opportunism bloc. The party knows that without decisive
influence over the organised proletarian masses it cannot even think of
a tactical plan. It must therefore penetrate them with its appropriate
trade union and factory organs. These group and organise the communist
proletarians under the party’s direct command and also involve
sympathisers. They constitute the party’s network in the class, and,
together with other specific organs expressed by the actual conditions
of the class struggle, they form a system comparable to that of the
circulation of blood in the human body, by means of which the body of
the class is unceasingly supplied with the life-blood of the programme,
the directive, the aims of revolutionary communism. It is in this way
that ‘revolutionary preparation’ is realised, and certainly not through
voluntarist and organisational exercises.
Through the groups, the party comes into contact with workers
organised by other political parties and movements on the economic and
struggle terrain. It is on this terrain that facts, actions, programmes,
intentions, wills and political aims are measured, in which the party
proves to the workers that it is the only one with a complete and
irreplaceable arsenal for the achievement of the effective, real and
complete emancipation of the class from capitalist exploitation.
It is evident that the forces of opportunism, allied with the
bourgeois State in the legalitarian bloc directing the workers’ trade
union and political movement, will not omit any means to prevent the
groups from arising and developing, just as they will put every obstacle
in the way of the propaganda and proselytising carried out by the party.
It is inescapable that the large-scale dissemination of the network of
communist groups will be one of the signs of the return of the working
class to the terrain of direct struggle, which is so fertile for the
penetration and development of the Party’s revolutionary action.
The groups do not replace trade unions or any other economic defence
organisation. The Party has no interest in setting up trade union bodies
made up only of communists, which it knows to be a minority of the
class, while it is aware that the victory of communism will be possible
on the preliminary condition that its influence is extended to the
masses not yet framed or controlled by the Party itself, a condition
which is presented to it in the united class economic organisation that
is ‘politically neutral’, in principle accessible to pure wage-earners
only, and in which it can carry out political and organisational work
freely.
TOWARDS THE CLASS UNION
The re-creation of these conditions that characterise the ‘Red Union’
does not depend on the party or its action, but finds its deterministic
impetus first in the return of the working class to the terrain of
general direct struggle. At this stage, the current trade union and
political leaderships of the proletariat will tend to huddle more and
more in defence of the capitalist regime, waving the old rags of the
defence of the economy, of unification against resurgent fascism to
protect the regained democracy, to cover up the only way in which the
bourgeois and privileged classes can maintain their economic, social and
political supremacy, i.e. by crushing the class, reducing their wages,
terrorising them with mass unemployment, misery, hunger,
disorganisation, the threat of a new war, with the strengthening of
State and irregular repressive forces. Their true face as servants of
capitalism will appear in all clarity to the masses. The workers will
have no choice but to defend their wages, their jobs, first of all by
clashing against their own leaders, and then by forging instruments and
forms of organisation and combat that respond to these immediate
needs.
The Party, in foreseeing this realistic development as of now,
qualifies itself to occupy a pre-eminent place in the class struggle and
in the new class organisation. For these reasons it must intensify its
critical action and battle against all non-communist politics, encourage
those class unrests which are raised by the approach of the
radicalisation of struggles and by the intensification of pressure on
workers, foresee and encourage all those forms of association which
stand in contrast and in opposition to official trade unionism and which
‘
favour contact between workers at different localities and
different trades and their common action. It rejects all forms of closed
organisations
’ (‘
Characteristic Theses of the Party
’,
1952). In this sense, recent and even less recent manifestations of
autonomous economic struggle in some industrial factories and among
railway workers are condemned to remain unfruitful episodes of class
development if they do not tend to link up with each other, to open up,
precisely, to workers from different localities and categories, breaking
down subjective preclusions of a political, party or even sectarian
nature. The linking of these thrusts could be the harbinger of the
reweaving of a class network that is as fertile as ever and could
represent a first step towards class economic organisations that are the
catalysts of the coming struggles.
AMONG A THOUSAND DECEPTIONS A SURE DESTINATION
What we have unfolded, incontrovertible in historical development and
Marxist tradition, inevitably leads to the safe prediction of the
classist regeneration or resurrection of the workers’ economic movement.
Aware that we constitute one voice in the bleak desert into which the
betrayal of false workers’ parties has transformed the fertile and lush
soil of social confrontation, we do not propose miraculous recipes, nor
do we squander our meagre forces in the face of the spell of modern
mirages, perhaps unaware that they are erasing the narrow but clear path
traced by our work.
This work, which consists of the conservation and preservation of
age-old doctrine, aims to keep the connotations of the proletariat’s
class action sharp and clear, when on all sides a thousand efforts are
being made to blur, corrupt and deform them, with the certain result of
prolonging the workers’ centuries-old state of subjection to the enemy,
under the pretext of ‘more modern’ visions, infallibly traceable to
bourgeois power.
Inexorably to be rejected are the protesting influences of sterile
and shapeless strata, who, lacking ‘a school of thought and a method of
action’ tested by the sure scrutiny of history, seek to denigrate the
class political party and the class union, in the name of a cheap
revolutionism that hides the eagerness to be among the first, the best,
the elected.
Similarly, the attempt to spread indeterminacy and uncertainty is to
be rejected, when on the other hand, the confidence and impudence of the
enemy gangs is to be countered, in the absence today of physical forces
of equal weight, by the certainty that the class will deploy on the
combat front in the perhaps not too distant future.
We must throw back, at the cost of a still prolonged silence, the
thousands of attempts, albeit generous ones, to get out of the ghetto in
which the revolution has been confined to so far, to lean on the
outlandish contortions of the dissatisfied pleiad of ‘backside workers’
and their aspirants, trying to bend the incorrupt doctrine to the
recognition of non-classist initiatives, committing the old mistake,
which marked the death of the Communist International, namely that the
petty-bourgeoisie can express an autonomous and independent political
movement, or worse, a ‘radicalism’ that provokes the classist revival of
proletarian struggles. The proletariat will return to the struggle under
the pressure of economic determinations, and not ‘pressed’ by idealistic
urges.
It is on this ground that the class unions will have to and will rise
again for the revolution to resume its march.
International Communist Party
The Union
Question
CLASS UNIONS MUST RISE AGAIN
Firm Points of the Communist Left
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 2, 6, 7, 1974-75)
We re-propose to the proletarians, to whom the advancing crisis makes
them feel the subjugation of their economic defence organisations to the
interests of the state and the capitalist economy, the classic approach,
the only one on the line of revolutionary Marxism, given by the Party to
the trade union question. This approach is based on the following
cornerstones, which are clear from all the texts that follow:
1) The trade unions after the Second World War, in all advanced
capitalist countries, are ‘tricolour’ trade unions, i.e. organisations
that put the defence of workers’ economic conditions and daily lives
after the defence of the interests of the national economy, the
capitalist state, democracy and social peace between classes. That is,
they are unsuitable and inadequate bodies even for the mere defence of
the immediate needs of the proletariat. Of these unions, however they
are labelled, the proletarians have nothing to defend and nothing to
save.
2) The dynamics of these ‘tricolour’ organisations continue to unfold
in the sense of their ever more complete insertion into the gears of the
bourgeois state, even in the formal organisational and legal sense. This
trajectory of theirs, which will lead them to become even formally mere
appendages of the state machine, unfolds to varying degrees in different
countries, and is irreversible unless the proletariat’s class struggle
is resumed.
3) Faced with this observation, not of today, but of twenty-five
years ago, not based on contingent events, but on a correct Marxist
analysis of the capitalist becoming, which today’s events only confirm,
the Party does not draw the inference to abandon work in these
organisms. In these organisations and outside them, the Party’s task is
to put forward to the proletariat the need for the resurgence of class
economic associations, i.e. workers’ bodies for the conduct of economic
struggles that are free from state and bourgeois influence.
This resurrection will be the result of the class returning to the
terrain of defending at least its most basic economic interests, with
the method of class struggle, against the pressure of capital.
It could be expressed in two senses: either in the reconquest,
‘perhaps with a beating’, of the present trade unions, a reconquest
which must not only mean a change of leadership, but a decisive
overthrow of the whole of the present policy in all fields of activity
and of the same organisational form of the trade unions; or ex novo,
that is through the reconstitution by the struggling proletarians of
economic organisations for the immediate struggle (outside of and
against the present organisations). These two possibilities cannot be
determined a priori: the prevalence of one rather than the other, or of
both at the same time, depends on the actual course of the class
struggle and not on voluntarist exercises.
4) One of the elements which distinguishes the class Party from all
the endless circles and small groups is the prospect of the resurgence
of class economic organisations, stemming from the resurgence of the
proletarian struggle and acting as a necessary and indispensable ground,
not only for the conduct by the Party of the revolutionary struggle for
power, but also for any notable strengthening of the Party’s influence
on the proletarian masses. Without the widespread emergence of
class-based economic bodies, not only will there be no revolution and no
conquest of power, but neither will there be the real, necessary
strengthening in an autonomous way of the Party and its influence on the
class.
5) This is what all our texts have said for the past 25 years. This
is what we have always told the proletariat. Those who do not agree with
this perspective, those who dream of traumas that would, by some unknown
magic, lead the working class to the revolutionary assault directly,
with a strong Party at the head of the masses and the conquest of power;
those who, worst of all, affirm that the forms of the future class
revival cannot be foreseen are naturally ‘free to follow any path that
diverges from ours’. It is enough that they do not refer to the
tradition of the Communist Left and the International Communist Party,
that they do not distort, in the Stalinist manner, our texts, that they
do not falsify what the Party has always affirmed: for the revolutionary
struggle to be resumed, for the Party to be able to strengthen its
influence over the proletarian class, and to come to lead it in the
final battle; for the workers themselves to be able to effectively
defend their living conditions against the bosses, the bourgeois state
and their opportunist lackeys, the resumption of struggles on the
economic and social terrain and the rebirth of the class unions is
necessary!
From the texts of the Left:
–
Political Platform of the Party
(1945)
–
The Historical Course
of the Class Movement of the Proletariat (1947)
– On the Thread of Time,
Trade Union Splits in Italy
(1949)
–
Revolutionary Party and Economic Action
(April 1951)
–
Theory and Action in Marxist Doctrine
(April 1951)
–
Characteristic Theses of the Party
(1952) – Part II
–
Preface to the ‘Characteristic Theses’
republished as a pamphlet (1962)
–
Theses on the Historical Duty
, Action, and the Structure of the World CP (1965)
The historical course of the class movement of the proletariat
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 2, 1974)
In the imperialist stage, capitalism, just as it seeks to dominate
its economic contradictions in a central network of control and to
co-ordinate, through an elephantiasis of the State apparatus, the
control of all social and political facts, so too does it modify its
action towards workers’ organisations. At first the bourgeoisie had
condemned them, at a second time it had authorised them and allowed them
to grow, at a third time it realised that it could neither suppress them
nor allow them to develop on an autonomous platform, and it set out to
incorporate them by whatever means into its State apparatus, into that
machinery which, while exclusively political at the beginning of the
cycle, became in the age of imperialism both a political and economic
apparatus, transforming the State of the capitalists and the bosses into
a capitalist State and a State-master. In this vast bureaucratic
scaffolding, places of golden imprisonment are created for the leaders
of the proletarian movement. Through the myriad forms of social
arbitration, of welfare institutions, of bodies with an apparent
function of balancing the classes, the leaders of the workers’ movement
cease to rest on their own autonomous forces, and are absorbed into the
bureaucracy of the State...
The proletariat’s own movement of economic organisation will be
imprisoned, using exactly the same method inaugurated by fascism, i.e.
tending towards the legal recognition of trade unions, which means their
transformation into organs of the bourgeois State. It will become clear
that the plan for the hollowing out of the workers’ movement, proper to
reformist revisionism (Labourism in England, economism in Russia, pure
syndicalism in France, reformist syndicalism à la Cabrini-Bonomi and
then Rigola-D’Aragona in Italy) coincides substantially with that of
fascist syndicalism, Mussolini’s corporatism, and Hitler’s
national-socialism. The only difference is that the former method
corresponds to a phase in which the bourgeoisie is solely on the
defensive against the revolutionary danger, while the latter corresponds
to the phase in which, due to the surge in proletarian pressure, the
bourgeoisie goes on the offensive. In neither case does it confess to
acting on its own class interest; instead proclaiming that it wants to
fulfil certain economic needs of the workers, and foster collaboration
between the classes...
Preface to the ‘Characteristic Theses’ republished as a pamphlet
(1962)
... In point 6, while every syndicalist theory is condemned, the
necessity of the Party’s presence and penetration of the trade unions
with a general communist union organisational layer is affirmed as a
condition not only of final victory, but of every advance and success.
In point 7 all this is reiterated, and the limited and local conception
of economic struggles dear to the traitors is condemned…
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 6, 1975)
The October 1974 issue No. 2 of this journal, under the title
‘
Class Unions Must Rise Again
–
Firm Points of the
Communist Left
’, contained five points that meagrely reiterated the
long-standing positions of revolutionary communism vis-à-vis the
workers’ union. In support of the short text, significant excerpts from
Party texts from 1945 to 1965 were published, limited in number only for
economy of typographical space, which also serves as a significant means
of the objective dictatorship of the counter-revolutionary
situation.
Ever since the
era of communist revolution
began, reforms,
the true and only means of existence of social-democratic political
movements, have served as an instrument to keep the working masses off
the path to revolution, to the point that the bourgeois State itself has
embraced a reformist policy, first with the fascist regime, then with
its natural, merely temporal extension, anti-fascism. A reformist policy
demands the abandonment of direct struggle, obstructs class
mobilisation, shifts the masses from class struggle to class
collaboration, and poses the problem of power not as the violent clash
of the proletariat against the State, but as incorporation into the
State to the point of becoming its form of government. This situation is
the same in every country in the world.
It is no coincidence that the workers’ trade union movement has been
mobilised to subordinate the very reasons for the union’s existence –
which are the immediate economic defence of the working class – to the
policy of reform in a thousand aspects: reform of housing, of the
school, and finally of the State. A trade union that operates in this
way evolves towards its integration into the State, ceasing even to
defend the worker’s living and working conditions, ceasing to be a
workers’ union, and transforming itself into a mere organ of the
State.
Having made this observation, which was also accurately examined and
described in ‘
The Historical Course of the Class Movement of the
Proletariat
’ in 1947 and in ‘
Trade Union Splits in Italy
’
in 1949, the Party did not come to the conclusion that the trade union
is outdated, no longer needed, and must be replaced by another political
body, rather it solemnly reaffirmed, in the wake of the communist
tradition from Marx to Lenin, that ‘
any prospect of a general
revolutionary movement will depend on the presence of the following
essential factors: 1) a large, numerous proletariat of pure
wage-earners, 2) a sizeable movement of associations with an economic
content including a large part of the proletariat, 3) a strong
revolutionary class party, which, composed of a militant minority of
workers, must have been enabled, in the course of the struggle to
oppose, broadly and effectively, its own influence within the union
movement to that of the bourgeois class and bourgeois power.
’
(‘
Revolutionary Party and Economic Action
’, April 1951).
This corresponds to the class ‘pyramid’ described in the theses of
the Second Congress of the Communist International of 1919, namely
‘
party, trade unions, class
’, in order of importance, which is
specified on the eve of the seizure of power as ‘
party, soviet,
trade unions, class
’; it translates Marx’s concept of the trade
unions as ‘a school of war’ and a ‘lever of revolution’ and Lenin’s,
view of the trade unions as ‘the transmission belt of the party’.
The party must work in the trade unions, even ‘reactionary’,
‘tricolour’, or ‘right-wing’ ones, remembering that they are still
workers’ unions, of wage earners only, with reactionary, tricolour or
right-wing leadership. This is the lesson of Lenin in ‘
Left-Wing
Communism
’, and the lesson of the Left reiterated in ‘
Theses on
the Historical Duty etc.
’ in 1965:
‘
It is an old thesis of left-wing Marxism that we must work in
reactionary trade unions in which workers are present, and the party
abhors the individualistic positions of those who disdain to set foot in
them, and who go so far as to theorise breaking the few, feeble strikes
that today’s unions dare to call
’.
In order to ‘work in the unions’ the party must participate in the
workers’ economic struggles, agitations and strikes, however few and
‘feeble’ they may be. This participation consists not only in the
physical presence of the party militants among the workers in struggle,
but also, together with the exaltation of the struggle itself, in the
ruthless criticism of the trade union policy of the central unions,
showing its subordination to the preservation of the present regime,
proposing a return to the use of the means of direct struggle and
economic demands common to the entire working class.
ECONOMIC DETERMINISM
The ‘
Theses on Tactics
’ formulated by the Left at the 1922
PCd’I Congress highlight, as is developed elsewhere in this issue of the
journal, the realistic and materialist basis of the very existence of
the party and its action. The economic needs that the capitalist
economy’s pressure on wage-labour induces,
obliges
workers to
organise an adequate defence, pushes them, in given historical
unfolding, in which the existence of the capitalist regime appears
untenable for the proletariat, to embrace the Party’s positions and
direction. Trade union organisation, the economic association of
workers, is therefore the product of these needs, indeed ‘
The real
fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever
expanding union of the workers
– writes Marx in the
Manifesto
–
[It] is helped on by the improved means of
communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the
workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just
this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles,
all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.
But every class struggle is a political struggle
’.
As long as capitalism, and thus wage-earners, exist, there will be
struggles and a ‘union’ of workers, whereby workers will fight against
the bosses and their organisations, hence the
political
struggle.
In ‘
Value, Price and Profit
’, Marx then warns the class not
to exaggerate to itself the successes of these struggles because it’s
‘
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
’. So Marx outlines the programmatic direction: ‘
They
ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable
guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing
encroachments of capital or changes of the market
’. When this
occurs, we have the deviationist phenomenon of syndicalism, of
workerism, which remain stuck and tied to effects. Marx therefore
concludes: ‘
They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it
imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the
material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical
reconstruction of society. 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”
’.
Not denial of the struggles against the ‘effects’, but rather,
struggling against the ‘effects’ of the bourgeois system, whilst
‘understanding’ that one must attack the causes, the very existence of
the present regime. The economic struggles, the class struggle belongs
to the workers, the organisation belongs to the workers,
understanding
the limited value of these struggles and
overcoming them belongs to the party.
In the General Statutes of the International of 1872, this concept is
enshrined: ‘
In its struggle against the collective power of the
possessing classes the proletariat can act as a class only by
constituting itself as distinct political party, opposed to all the old
parties formed by the possessing classes. This constitution of the
proletariat into a political party is indispensable to ensure the
triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate goal: the abolition of
classes. The coalition of the forces of the working class, already
achieved by the economic struggle, must also serve, in the hands of this
class, as a lever in its struggle against the political power of its
exploiters. As the lords of the land and of capital always make use of
their political privileges to defend and perpetuate their economic
monopolies and to enslave labour, the conquest of political power
becomes the duty of the proletariat
’.
Marx, again in 1871 in a letter to Bolte, reiterates the close
connection between the economic-material basis and political action
‘
[O]ut of the separate economic movements of the workers there
grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of
the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form,
in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these
movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are
themselves equally a means of the development of this
organisation
’.
Lenin, in the equally lucid and sharp pages of ‘
What Is To Be
Done?
’, fighting against spontaneism, syndicalism, but not denying
spontaneity and trade unionism, concludes: ‘
[Our] task [consists in
drawing…] the working-class movement… under the wing of revolutionary
Social Democracy
’. And he specifies:
‘
The workers’ organisations for the economic struggle should be
trade union organisations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as far
as possible assist and actively work in these organisations. But, while
this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that only
Social-Democrats should be eligible for membership in the “trade”
unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence upon the
masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the
struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions.
The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if
they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree
of understanding, if they were not very broad organisations. The broader
these organisations, the broader will be our influence over them – an
influence due, not only to the “spontaneous” development of the economic
struggle, but to the direct and conscious effort of the socialist trade
union members to influence their comrades
’.
The same concepts Lenin would reiterate in ‘
Left-Wing
Communism…
’ against the German workerists (K.A.P.D.) and all those
who would not work in the ‘reactionary’ trade unions. Lenin goes as far
as to establish that the trade union organisation is ‘
a formally
non-communist, flexible and relatively wide and very powerful
proletarian apparatus, by means of which the Party is closely linked up
with the “class” and the “masses”, and by means of which, under the
leadership of the Party, the “class dictatorship” is
exercised
’.
The party, therefore, works in the unions, penetrates them, tends to
their leadership, before, during and after the revolution. The Communist
International sets this as a condition of admission. The ninth of the
famous ‘21 Moscow Points’ sounds exactly like this: ‘
Every party…
must systematically and persistently develop Communist activities within
the trade unions, … councils ... [and] organise Communist cells the aim
of which is to win the trades unions etc. for the cause of
Communism
’.
TRADE UNIONS ARE IRREPLACEABLE
The workers’ economic associations will cease to exist when communism
has triumphed in the world, because, as we have seen, they constitute
the organisation, ‘the proletariat’s true class organisation in which it
fights its daily battles with capital, in which it trains itself’, as
Engels wrote to Bebel in 1875. They are so irreplaceable that the trade
unions are the natural battleground between the revolutionary communist
party and the other parties, because they are the recruiting ground of
the class army under the direction of the party.
The texts that have been compulsory so far, spanning over more than a
century, which crystallise the historical experience of the class in the
various phases of the transition of trade union organisation, do not
reveal any other organism capable of structuring the proletariat in its
elementary and basic action of economic defence. Perhaps the Soviets?
Not even the Soviets can replace the function of the trade unions,
because the Soviets, or equivalent organs, are political organs for the
conquest of power, they arise in the crucial phase of revolutionary
action which, as we have seen, cannot disregard elementary action in the
economic field, i.e.
the emergence of the Soviets has as its premise
the existence, the efficiency of the trade unions
, or, in other
words, of the working class organised on the economic terrain. This has
been true in absolutist Russia, in industrial Germany, in ‘civilised’
Italy, it will be true tomorrow anywhere on earth where the proletariat
will be on the frontline of the revolution, if Marxism is not dirty
water.
Maybe works councils? Not even, because they were limited to the
company at most, they could function as the company base of the economic
union. The old Chambers of Labour, for example, constituted a formidable
network because they brought together workers from different professions
and different companies in a unitary local central, so it was possible,
especially with the adequate penetration of the class party, to have an
overview of local class action. All the more reason for this positive
characteristic lies in the national trade union central, and tomorrow
international.
The reconstitution of such a class-driven network can easily be seen
as decisive to revolutionary mobilisation. Party work in this direction
must therefore be indispensable, within the limits of the material
conditions.
A CERTAIN REACTIONISM
It is Lenin who in ‘
Left-Wing Communism…
’ hammers the
infantile positions of the German ‘leftists’ and even goes so far as to
say that ‘
a certain “reactionism” in the trade unions is inevitable
under the dictatorship of the proletariat
’. Let alone that this
‘reactionism’ is possible in trade unions not controlled by communists.
‘
In countries more advanced than Russia
– Lenin argues –
a
certain reactionism in the trade unions has been and was bound to be
manifested in a far greater measure than in our country... The
Mensheviks of the West have acquired a much firmer footing in the trade
unions; there the craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened,
covetous, and petty-bourgeois “labour aristocracy”, imperialist-minded,
and imperialist-corrupted, has developed into a much stronger section
than in our country
.’
‘
That
is
incontestable
,’ Lenin commented.
This is incontestable, gentlemen ‘revolutionaries’ of the broken
‘sieve’.... ‘
The struggle
...
in Western Europe is
incomparably more difficult than the struggle against our
Mensheviks
...
This struggle must be waged ruthlessly
...
to a point when all the incorrigible leaders of opportunism and
social-chauvinism are completely discredited and driven out of the trade
unions
’. And it is indisputable that this struggle must be waged
against the labour aristocracy ‘
in the name of the masses of the
workers and in order to win them over to our side
...
against
the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the
working class over to our side
’.
‘
It would be absurd... to forget this most elementary and most
self-evident truth’
. It would be foolish to draw ‘the conclusion’
that ‘
because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character
of the trade union top leadership
...
we must withdraw from the
trade unions…
It would be foolish... [t]o refuse to work within
the reactionary trade unions... leaving the insufficiently developed or
backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary
leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie
’.
There is enough to reaffirm that communists do not back down from
work and the battle within the trade unions due to the fact that they
are directed by reactionaries, by counter-revolutionaries, by proponents
of a ‘tricolour’, ‘chauvinist’ policy. But ‘fools’ abound, and, in the
name of ‘revolutionary politics’, they would like revolutionary Marxism
to be converted into the recognition of an outright communist licence
given to the ‘practical ones’, to those who ‘make the revolution’, in
‘referendums’, in the multiple ‘social managements’ of State organs (the
school, ‘commuting leftists’, is an organ of the political State of the
bourgeoisie, not a ‘neutral’ organisation, nor even more so proletarian;
it is not conquered, it is demolished!), in the shady dealings within
the ‘generic revolutionary’ movement.
(
Il Partito Comunista
, No. 7, 1975)
In the previous issue we noted, in Marx and Lenin, that the economic
association of workers arises on the basis of the defence of the
physical conditions of the proletariat and that for these reasons it is
indispensable
to the proletariat, despite the ephemeral and
transitory character of the ‘conquests’ and a ‘certain reactionary
character’ of the trade unions. We have also revealed how, despite these
limiting aspects, communists
must work organised
in the trade
unions, transferring revolutionary directives into them, in order to
make them bodies not ends in themselves, but ‘levers’ for the
revolutionary political struggle against the capitalist regime.
PHASE OF STATE TOTALITARIANISM
With the appearance of fascism, the State prepares and equips itself
to absorb the workers’ unions, tends to subject them to its
dictatorship, giving them legal bargaining power, and progressively
incorporating them into its administrative machinery. The master-State
tends to monopolise all aspects of social and economic life, as well as
being the organ par excellence of political dictatorship. Capitalism
thus enters its third phase, that of imperialism, in which ‘
the
ruling bourgeois class, in parallel with the transformation of its
economic practice from liberalist to interventionist, has the need to
abandon its method of apparent tolerance of political ideas and
organisations for a method of authoritarian and totalitarian government:
and in this lies the general meaning of the present epoch
’.
This judgement of the Left in the immediate post-World War II period
(‘
The Historical Cycle of the Capitalist Economy
’) is reflected
in the ‘Historical Course of the Class Movement of the Proletariat’, in
the sense that the bourgeoisie ‘
modifies its action towards workers’
organisations
’, which it had previously ‘
authorised and allowed
to grow
’, because it ‘
understands that it can neither suppress
them, nor allow them to develop on an autonomous platform, and proposes
to frame them by any means within its State apparatus
’; in which
‘
gilded prisons are created for the leaders of the proletarian
movement
’. This process, which began with the advent of fascism,
continued into the post-fascist era, during which ‘
the very movement
of economic organisation of the proletariat will be imprisoned, using
exactly the same method inaugurated by fascism, that is, with the
tendency towards the legal recognition of trade unions, which means
their transformation into organs of the bourgeois State. It will become
clear that the plan to hollow out the workers’ movement, proper to
reformist revisionism (Labourism in England, economism in Russia, pure
syndicalism in France, reformist syndicalism à la Cabrini-Bonomi and
then Rigola-D’Aragona in Italy) essentially coincides with fascist
syndicalism, Mussolini’s corporatism, and Hitler’s national
socialism
’.
This process is ‘
irreversible
’, and is contained in the
general complex ‘
[of] the capitalist struggle to deprive future
revolutionary class movements of the solid basis of a truly autonomous
workers’ union framework
’ (‘
Trade Union Splits in Italy
’).
In this way today’s trade unions, even those claiming ‘red’ origins,
such as the CGIL for example, are sewn ‘on the Mussolini model’, i.e.
they are oriented in the sense of their total incorporation into the
bourgeois State machinery, whatever label they display. These trade
union centres ‘serve’ the State, as they serve it in England, America
and Russia, in the formula of the ‘national economy before all else’, of
the subjugation of the immediate interests of the working class to the
immanent interests of social preservation of the bourgeois class and its
regime. It is mere fiction to claim that, nevertheless, the trade unions
fight against the bosses, when we know that the fascist trade unions
arose ‘
playing on the national accord the motif of the fight against
the bosses
’ (see Mussolini’s useful and significant speech in
Dalmine), precisely because the dominant feature of the imperialist
phase is not so much the individual ‘employer’ as it is the system as a
whole, synthesised by its State leadership, which is forced, again for
the sake of preservation, to maintain a game of balance between the
different social forces and between the very class elements whose total
interests it represents. The capitalist regime is also willing to
sacrifice individual masters for the sake of its preservation, as Engels
taught when he foresaw in ‘
Anti-Dühring
’ the eclipse of the
bourgeoisie and its replacement by an army of serfs preyed upon by the
State.
HISTORICAL DIALECTICS
The process of absorption of the trade unions into the State, which
the Left has (called) ‘irreversible’, has made some people exclaim that
the time has come to turn their backs on the workers’ union and devote
themselves to the ‘political’ movement. We have already seen that this
attitude clashes inexorably with the party programme, but even before
that it clashes with Marxist doctrine. This position goes hand in hand
with the typically anarcho-syndicalist position that the political party
is outdated, the old ‘communist’ parties having passed into the service
of the bourgeois regime.
With Marx we pointed out that workers’ economic associations do not
arise out of faith, will, but out of the irrepressible necessity of
proletarians to defend their piece of bread and their jobs, against
which capitalism constantly presses, even though it knows it is urging
the working class to mobilise and thus open itself up to revolutionary
party initiatives. These conditions are as irrepressible as it is
irrepressible for
capitalism
to delay, restrain, oppose the
economic associationism of the proletariat, using the means, congenial
with its imperialist totalitarian phase, of capturing it, imprisoning
it, in its State machinery. This, however, does not suppress the
reasons, the root causes of the class contradictions that are precisely
irremediable in a bourgeois regime.
The masses will return to the struggle when they can no longer
tolerate the increasing and inexorable pressure of the capitalist
economy, which, despite all the retreats and tricks of the State,
ultimately proceeds to exacerbate its anarchic character. In the
economy, the State attempts to plan, which means to control these
irreconcilable contradictions of its own. It cannot disregard this
attempt, imposed on it by capitalist centralisation and concentration.
But any attempt is doomed to failure, even if it is ‘irreversible’, i.e.
even if capitalism can no longer return to liberalism, to the conditions
prior to its monopolistic phase.
We did not need fascism to arrive at these considerations.
Social-democratic reformism was already on this road, that of emptying
the class character of the workers’ economic movement. Fascism in fact
inherited the reformism of trade union piecards. Today, this line of
continuity persists.
It follows that the tendency of the State is to subjugate the
workers’ economic unions, and that of the class is to prevent it. The
class struggle, the relations of force will direct this contradiction,
and not the denial of antagonism, nor the abandonment of the worker’s
union into enemy hands forever, which would mean abandoning the
proletarian camp into the enemy’s hands.
Three positions clash in the proletarian economic movement. One that
denies the trade union, the one that advocates for the para-State union,
and the one that upholds the class union. To the first belong those who
consider the trade union outdated, such as those who advocate a party
trade union or corporate bodies replacing the economic union. To the
second belong the current trade union centres, which mystify their
‘autonomy’ in a mere opposition or formal non-subordination ‘to the
parties, to the government, to the bosses’, but claiming that they want
to subordinate the immediate workers’ interests to the ‘superior’
interests of the ‘national economy’, which means the State, of the
bourgeois class. The third is adhered to by those fighting for the
resurgence of a class-driven, red proletarian economic movement.
The policy of the first two groups is objectively convergent, both in
the current situation of unchallenged dominance of the tricolour
piecards, and in a situation where the need for the red union will be
overbearing. The first group refuses to oppose the ‘pro-statists’ by
dreaming of ‘new forms’, entrusting the overthrow of the enemy’s
dictatorship to
forms
rather than
forces
. It stands
outside Marxism and the field of revolution which, we will never tire of
repeating, draws its raison d’être from economic determinations and not
from the world of ideas. The battlefield is always the same, the
cornerstones on which the revolution rests are always the political
party, the class union, the pure wage-earning class. Not recognising
even one of them means leaving it in the hands of the enemy who will not
hesitate to use it, against the revolution. This is the story of the
last fifty years. To pretend, for instance, that because the proletariat
has become bourgeois (an infamous thesis beloved of the
extra-parliamentarians), we must go and find another ‘class’ to replace
it, and locate it in the kaleidoscopic existentialist jolts of groups of
idlers is to transform ourselves from ‘professionals’ of the revolution
into
mercenaries
of the counter-revolution, always ready to put
ourselves at the service of the first adventure.
ORIGINAL POLICY OF THE LEFT
The first objective to which the true communist party aspires is
‘
to be the centre of the struggle and of the redemption against the
reactionary capitalist centralisation tending to impose itself on a
scattered and dispersed working class definitively abandoned to itself
by the opportunist bureaucracy
’ (from ‘
Theses Presented by the
PCd’I
–
4th Congress
’). The same text opens with the
peremptory assertion that ideological propaganda and proselytising are
not enough, but that it is necessary to participate ‘in all those
actions to which the proletarians are driven by their economic
condition’. In the ‘Lyons Theses’, in the face of the convenient and
defeatist position of penetration of the fascist guilds, the Left’s
watchword sounds peremptory: ‘
The watchword of the rebuilding the
Red unions must be issued in conjunction with the denunciation of the
fascist unions
’, which appeared not even formally as voluntary
associations of the masses, but true official organs of the alliance
between the bosses and fascism.
This position was taken up in the 1951 ‘
Characteristic
Theses
’, which formed the ‘basis of Party membership’ and were
binding on all. In them, after reaffirming that ‘the Party recognises
without any reserve that not only the situation which precedes
insurrectional struggle but also all phases of substantial growth of
Party influence amongst the masses cannot arise without the expansion
between the Party and the working class of a series of organisations
with short term economic objectives with a large number of participants.
Within such organisations the party will set a network of communist
cells and groups, as well as a communist fraction in the union’. After
this canonical reaffirmation of the Party’s centuries-old position with
respect to the proletarian economic movement, unchanged even in this
‘third’ imperialist phase of capitalism’s ‘irreversible’ tendency to
capture trade unions the ‘
Theses
’ state that ‘In periods when
the working class is passive, the Party must anticipate the forms and
encourage the constitution of organisations with immediate economic aims.
These may be unions grouped according to trade, industry, factory
committees or any other known grouping or even quite new organisations.
The Party always encourages organisations which favour contact between
workers at different localities and different trades and their common
action. It rejects all forms of closed organisations’.
This is the ‘revolutionary policy’ of the Left, which no other
self-styled political movement of the ‘left’ shares and which it
actually opposes, and which can be expressed in the formula of
‘reconquest, perhaps with a beating, of the current trade unions or the
resurgence of new ones’, capable of containing within them the network
of organised communists.
In this particularly depressed situation, the party does not expect
from its incessant and intelligent participation in workers’ struggles
an appreciable shift of forces, until the struggle movement recovers in
intensity and extension. It is in this class revival that the fertile
ground for the development of the party’s complex activity among the
masses of wage-earners is to be found, both to wrest the leadership of
the existing trade unions from the tricolour leadership and to
‘encourage’ new economic workers’ organisations in which the Party can
‘freely’ carry out its classist and revolutionary action.
Today, although the trade unions are practically foreclosed to
revolutionary communists, due to the overwhelming power of the tricolour
policy of the trade union leaderships, which also manifests itself in
forms of legal barriers – such as the infamous ‘delegation’, which
constitutes a true form of coercion, of the union’s tendency to
transform itself into a ‘compulsory’ union, a typical quality of the
fascist union – the communists do not abandon them voluntarily and carry
out their activity, not only in the sense of participating in workers’
struggles, but also in the relentless battle against the traitorous
policy of the central unions. This is one of the fundamental reasons for
the Party’s action, to show proletarians the harmful consequences of the
official trade union policy and to anticipate the imperative need for a
total overthrow of this policy.
This struggle is therefore a badge of the Communist Left against the
bourgeois State-opportunism bloc. The party knows that without decisive
influence over the organised proletarian masses it cannot even think of
a tactical plan. It must therefore penetrate them with its appropriate
trade union and factory organs. These group and organise the communist
proletarians under the party’s direct command and also involve
sympathisers. They constitute the party’s network in the class, and,
together with other specific organs expressed by the actual conditions
of the class struggle, they form a system comparable to that of the
circulation of blood in the human body, by means of which the body of
the class is unceasingly supplied with the life-blood of the programme,
the directive, the aims of revolutionary communism. It is in this way
that ‘revolutionary preparation’ is realised, and certainly not through
voluntarist and organisational exercises.
Through the groups, the party comes into contact with workers
organised by other political parties and movements on the economic and
struggle terrain. It is on this terrain that facts, actions, programmes,
intentions, wills and political aims are measured, in which the party
proves to the workers that it is the only one with a complete and
irreplaceable arsenal for the achievement of the effective, real and
complete emancipation of the class from capitalist exploitation.
It is evident that the forces of opportunism, allied with the
bourgeois State in the legalitarian bloc directing the workers’ trade
union and political movement, will not omit any means to prevent the
groups from arising and developing, just as they will put every obstacle
in the way of the propaganda and proselytising carried out by the party.
It is inescapable that the large-scale dissemination of the network of
communist groups will be one of the signs of the return of the working
class to the terrain of direct struggle, which is so fertile for the
penetration and development of the Party’s revolutionary action.
The groups do not replace trade unions or any other economic defence
organisation. The Party has no interest in setting up trade union bodies
made up only of communists, which it knows to be a minority of the
class, while it is aware that the victory of communism will be possible
on the preliminary condition that its influence is extended to the
masses not yet framed or controlled by the Party itself, a condition
which is presented to it in the united class economic organisation that
is ‘politically neutral’, in principle accessible to pure wage-earners
only, and in which it can carry out political and organisational work
freely.
TOWARDS THE CLASS UNION
The re-creation of these conditions that characterise the ‘Red Union’
does not depend on the party or its action, but finds its deterministic
impetus first in the return of the working class to the terrain of
general direct struggle. At this stage, the current trade union and
political leaderships of the proletariat will tend to huddle more and
more in defence of the capitalist regime, waving the old rags of the
defence of the economy, of unification against resurgent fascism to
protect the regained democracy, to cover up the only way in which the
bourgeois and privileged classes can maintain their economic, social and
political supremacy, i.e. by crushing the class, reducing their wages,
terrorising them with mass unemployment, misery, hunger,
disorganisation, the threat of a new war, with the strengthening of
State and irregular repressive forces. Their true face as servants of
capitalism will appear in all clarity to the masses. The workers will
have no choice but to defend their wages, their jobs, first of all by
clashing against their own leaders, and then by forging instruments and
forms of organisation and combat that respond to these immediate
needs.
The Party, in foreseeing this realistic development as of now,
qualifies itself to occupy a pre-eminent place in the class struggle and
in the new class organisation. For these reasons it must intensify its
critical action and battle against all non-communist politics, encourage
those class unrests which are raised by the approach of the
radicalisation of struggles and by the intensification of pressure on
workers, foresee and encourage all those forms of association which
stand in contrast and in opposition to official trade unionism and which
‘
favour contact between workers at different localities and
different trades and their common action. It rejects all forms of closed
organisations
’ (‘
Characteristic Theses of the Party
’,
1952). In this sense, recent and even less recent manifestations of
autonomous economic struggle in some industrial factories and among
railway workers are condemned to remain unfruitful episodes of class
development if they do not tend to link up with each other, to open up,
precisely, to workers from different localities and categories, breaking
down subjective preclusions of a political, party or even sectarian
nature. The linking of these thrusts could be the harbinger of the
reweaving of a class network that is as fertile as ever and could
represent a first step towards class economic organisations that are the
catalysts of the coming struggles.
AMONG A THOUSAND DECEPTIONS A SURE DESTINATION
What we have unfolded, incontrovertible in historical development and
Marxist tradition, inevitably leads to the safe prediction of the
classist regeneration or resurrection of the workers’ economic movement.
Aware that we constitute one voice in the bleak desert into which the
betrayal of false workers’ parties has transformed the fertile and lush
soil of social confrontation, we do not propose miraculous recipes, nor
do we squander our meagre forces in the face of the spell of modern
mirages, perhaps unaware that they are erasing the narrow but clear path
traced by our work.
This work, which consists of the conservation and preservation of
age-old doctrine, aims to keep the connotations of the proletariat’s
class action sharp and clear, when on all sides a thousand efforts are
being made to blur, corrupt and deform them, with the certain result of
prolonging the workers’ centuries-old state of subjection to the enemy,
under the pretext of ‘more modern’ visions, infallibly traceable to
bourgeois power.
Inexorably to be rejected are the protesting influences of sterile
and shapeless strata, who, lacking ‘a school of thought and a method of
action’ tested by the sure scrutiny of history, seek to denigrate the
class political party and the class union, in the name of a cheap
revolutionism that hides the eagerness to be among the first, the best,
the elected.
Similarly, the attempt to spread indeterminacy and uncertainty is to
be rejected, when on the other hand, the confidence and impudence of the
enemy gangs is to be countered, in the absence today of physical forces
of equal weight, by the certainty that the class will deploy on the
combat front in the perhaps not too distant future.
We must throw back, at the cost of a still prolonged silence, the
thousands of attempts, albeit generous ones, to get out of the ghetto in
which the revolution has been confined to so far, to lean on the
outlandish contortions of the dissatisfied pleiad of ‘backside workers’
and their aspirants, trying to bend the incorrupt doctrine to the
recognition of non-classist initiatives, committing the old mistake,
which marked the death of the Communist International, namely that the
petty-bourgeoisie can express an autonomous and independent political
movement, or worse, a ‘radicalism’ that provokes the classist revival of
proletarian struggles. The proletariat will return to the struggle under
the pressure of economic determinations, and not ‘pressed’ by idealistic
urges.
It is on this ground that the class unions will have to and will rise
again for the revolution to resume its march.