Struggle within the workers’ union, 1964
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Struggle within the workers’ union, 1964
International Communist Party
The Union
Question
Struggle within the workers’ union in defense of the principles of revolutionary communism
from
Il Programma Comunista,
issue no 8, April 18, 1964
We publish here the statement with which comrade Settimo Balbi from
Trieste justified the impossibility of accepting leadership positions in
a mixed body which arose at the end of the III provincial congress of
the FIOM on the basis of a platforms of action conflicting with the most
fundamental class-based principles and with the action he carried out in
the union and in close contact with the workers and their demands and
political struggles.
It’s fully in keeping as much with our constant criticism of the
policies of the CGIL (and a fortiori of the CISL and UIL, which we
regard as avowedly bosses’ organizations) as much as to our general
position which not only does not exclude but postulates the conquest and
exercise of the leadership of the workers’ union as long as they are the
fruit of propaganda and battle action carried out in its ranks and
having as its effect the declared adherence of a current of proletarians
to the principles of working-class struggle which we advocate, never the
result of combinations, maneuvers and bargains which these principles
would distort, in the eyes of the workers themselves:
* * *
«The “concluding motion” presented by the FIOM at the III Provincial Congress in Trieste represents a programmatic platform
irreconcilable
with the nature and aims of the union of class.
«A trade union organization has the task of unifying the scattered
forces of the workers in the struggle in defense of their immediate
interests against Capital, and with a view to that
general
political
struggle which the proletariat will inevitably have to
wage, under the leadership of the revolutionary political party, for the
overthrow of bourgeois power and the establishment of the communist
dictatorship.
«All the points of the FIOM’s concluding motion at the provincial
congress contradict this end, which moreover reflects the general
political approach taken today by the General Confederation of
Labor.
«(1) The perspective of a final and violent struggle for the
overthrow of capitalist power and thus of its State is here substituted
by the thoroughly reformist and social-democratic perspective of the
“decisive participation and contribution of the workers” to so-called
governmental planning,
«(2) Proletarian interests and their defense are replaced by the
“interests of the country” (thus of Capital ruling the country, in
democratic mask no less than in fascist mask) or even of the city,
«(3) The grand vision of the revolutionary transformation of society
in the name of the proletariat and in the interest of a humanity finally
freed from the yoke of class divisions is replaced by a miserable and
lazy “reforms necessary for our country” (for why not just add “of the
beloved Fatherland”?),
«(4) On the strictly trade-union level, the motion doesn’t, even only
vaguely, mention the two cardinal problems of the
radical
increase of the wage-base and the
radical
decrease of the
work-day, while it calls for “bargaining” or “regulation” of those
production bonuses, piecework, incentives, divisions by qualifications
increasingly spaced apart from each other, which the union should
instead always propose to abolish,
«(5) It puts at the center of all issues the recognition of company
bargaining, which separates the workers of one production complex from
those of another, creates economic differentiations in the same
category, binds the proletarians to the company jail cell in which their
lives are consumed,
«(6) Reverses the principle that the interests of workers are
united
above any separation into companies, sectors,
qualifications and must be defended on a general and unified scale,
going from the union of the whole category to the company, not from the
company section to the union,
«(7) It thus favors that tactic of bargaining, or rather breaking up,
the proletarian struggles, to which are the cause
not of the vaunted
successes
of the workers, but their very real and unsuccessful
failures well represented by a contract that cannot even be enforced,
even recognized, after long and often violent battles,
«(8) It champions State industries and protects them, as if the
State were not, as long as the capitalist system is in force, the
“executive committee of the bourgeoisie”, and as if it hasn’t given
ample proof of this in the way it treats workers, entirely the same as
in private enterprises,
«(9) Finally, for the height of bastardization, it advocates “the
formation of a white-collar union within the FIOM”, when a century of
workers’ struggles, glorious and often bloody, teaches that the
white-collar categories either fight
together
with the workers
and within the framework and under the discipline of a single workers’
organization, or they drift away by allowing themselves to be carried
away by the current of petty-bourgeois prejudices, or they even become
the saboteurs and scabs of proletarian action. The task of the class
union is to inspire in the workers the sense and consciousness that
their interests can be defended only within the framework of defending
the interests of
all those exploited by capital
, it is never to
isolate them in an autonomous and competing organization.
«As can be seen, it’s not a question here of differences of detail,
but of
irreconcilable contrasts of principle
: it’s
either this or that side of the barricade, a barricade that the
“concluding motion” has the merit of having unscrupulously and
unabashedly brought up.
«Being unable to share the responsibility for the execution of such
a political line and its propaganda among the workers and convinced that
that line is against the
real
interests of the workers, I am
also in the impossibility of accepting union leadership positions, which
I will instead take up with enthusiasm the day a group of workers,
consciously siding with the political and demands-based platform of the
International Communist Party that I propagated in the union, will give
their full support to it, inspired not by personal sympathies or
momentary considerations, but by mature conviction, and in direct
contrast to the policy described above.
«Long live
Spartaco
! Long live the International Communist
Party!»
* * *
Our outlook and line thus remain: struggle within the workers’ union
in defense of the principles of revolutionary communism and with a view
to the formation of a current of proletarians aligned on them; conquest
of the levers of command as soon as the balance of power allows such a
current to assert itself on an unequivocal platform and in the firmest
adherence to Marxist postulates.
International Communist Party
The Union
Question
Struggle within the workers’ union in defense of the principles of revolutionary communism
from
Il Programma Comunista,
issue no 8, April 18, 1964
We publish here the statement with which comrade Settimo Balbi from
Trieste justified the impossibility of accepting leadership positions in
a mixed body which arose at the end of the III provincial congress of
the FIOM on the basis of a platforms of action conflicting with the most
fundamental class-based principles and with the action he carried out in
the union and in close contact with the workers and their demands and
political struggles.
It’s fully in keeping as much with our constant criticism of the
policies of the CGIL (and a fortiori of the CISL and UIL, which we
regard as avowedly bosses’ organizations) as much as to our general
position which not only does not exclude but postulates the conquest and
exercise of the leadership of the workers’ union as long as they are the
fruit of propaganda and battle action carried out in its ranks and
having as its effect the declared adherence of a current of proletarians
to the principles of working-class struggle which we advocate, never the
result of combinations, maneuvers and bargains which these principles
would distort, in the eyes of the workers themselves:
* * *
«The “concluding motion” presented by the FIOM at the III Provincial Congress in Trieste represents a programmatic platform
irreconcilable
with the nature and aims of the union of class.
«A trade union organization has the task of unifying the scattered
forces of the workers in the struggle in defense of their immediate
interests against Capital, and with a view to that
general
political
struggle which the proletariat will inevitably have to
wage, under the leadership of the revolutionary political party, for the
overthrow of bourgeois power and the establishment of the communist
dictatorship.
«All the points of the FIOM’s concluding motion at the provincial
congress contradict this end, which moreover reflects the general
political approach taken today by the General Confederation of
Labor.
«(1) The perspective of a final and violent struggle for the
overthrow of capitalist power and thus of its State is here substituted
by the thoroughly reformist and social-democratic perspective of the
“decisive participation and contribution of the workers” to so-called
governmental planning,
«(2) Proletarian interests and their defense are replaced by the
“interests of the country” (thus of Capital ruling the country, in
democratic mask no less than in fascist mask) or even of the city,
«(3) The grand vision of the revolutionary transformation of society
in the name of the proletariat and in the interest of a humanity finally
freed from the yoke of class divisions is replaced by a miserable and
lazy “reforms necessary for our country” (for why not just add “of the
beloved Fatherland”?),
«(4) On the strictly trade-union level, the motion doesn’t, even only
vaguely, mention the two cardinal problems of the
radical
increase of the wage-base and the
radical
decrease of the
work-day, while it calls for “bargaining” or “regulation” of those
production bonuses, piecework, incentives, divisions by qualifications
increasingly spaced apart from each other, which the union should
instead always propose to abolish,
«(5) It puts at the center of all issues the recognition of company
bargaining, which separates the workers of one production complex from
those of another, creates economic differentiations in the same
category, binds the proletarians to the company jail cell in which their
lives are consumed,
«(6) Reverses the principle that the interests of workers are
united
above any separation into companies, sectors,
qualifications and must be defended on a general and unified scale,
going from the union of the whole category to the company, not from the
company section to the union,
«(7) It thus favors that tactic of bargaining, or rather breaking up,
the proletarian struggles, to which are the cause
not of the vaunted
successes
of the workers, but their very real and unsuccessful
failures well represented by a contract that cannot even be enforced,
even recognized, after long and often violent battles,
«(8) It champions State industries and protects them, as if the
State were not, as long as the capitalist system is in force, the
“executive committee of the bourgeoisie”, and as if it hasn’t given
ample proof of this in the way it treats workers, entirely the same as
in private enterprises,
«(9) Finally, for the height of bastardization, it advocates “the
formation of a white-collar union within the FIOM”, when a century of
workers’ struggles, glorious and often bloody, teaches that the
white-collar categories either fight
together
with the workers
and within the framework and under the discipline of a single workers’
organization, or they drift away by allowing themselves to be carried
away by the current of petty-bourgeois prejudices, or they even become
the saboteurs and scabs of proletarian action. The task of the class
union is to inspire in the workers the sense and consciousness that
their interests can be defended only within the framework of defending
the interests of
all those exploited by capital
, it is never to
isolate them in an autonomous and competing organization.
«As can be seen, it’s not a question here of differences of detail,
but of
irreconcilable contrasts of principle
: it’s
either this or that side of the barricade, a barricade that the
“concluding motion” has the merit of having unscrupulously and
unabashedly brought up.
«Being unable to share the responsibility for the execution of such
a political line and its propaganda among the workers and convinced that
that line is against the
real
interests of the workers, I am
also in the impossibility of accepting union leadership positions, which
I will instead take up with enthusiasm the day a group of workers,
consciously siding with the political and demands-based platform of the
International Communist Party that I propagated in the union, will give
their full support to it, inspired not by personal sympathies or
momentary considerations, but by mature conviction, and in direct
contrast to the policy described above.
«Long live
Spartaco
! Long live the International Communist
Party!»
* * *
Our outlook and line thus remain: struggle within the workers’ union
in defense of the principles of revolutionary communism and with a view
to the formation of a current of proletarians aligned on them; conquest
of the levers of command as soon as the balance of power allows such a
current to assert itself on an unequivocal platform and in the firmest
adherence to Marxist postulates.