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The Positions of Revolutionary Communists in the Face of the Resurgence of Class Unions (“La posizione dei comunisti rivoluzionari di fronte alla rinascita dei sindacati di classe”, Il Partito Comunista, No.55, 1979) |
The following points were circulated at the so-called Lirico assembly, held in Milan on the 10th and 11th of February this year. The group of communist workers, who were supposed to illustrate them, were prevented from doing so by the underhand direction of the promoters of the so-called ‘workers’ opposition’ conference, which is discussed elsewhere in this newspaper. The behaviour of the leaders reminded us of that of the tricolour confederal piecards and convinced us once again of the profound difficulties that the class revival must overcome and that on this road of ostracism of a section of the workers, who have committed the crime of proclaiming themselves communists, it is absolutely impossible to recreate class union organs capable of moving the proletarian mass outside the influence of the false trade unions and workers’ parties.
Our text, while retracing and re-proposing with candour and loyalty toward the workers the positions of revolutionary Marxism, puts forward proposals to allow the coagulation of sincerely class-based forces, to prevent their dispersion or to serve as a cover for manoeuvres aimed at diverting the will of sincere workers disgusted by the policy of the national trade unions.
We are deeply convinced, educated by practical experience, that a class union opposition runs the risk of remaining suspended in the air, if an anti-tricolour directive is not given, implemented in the workplace, to oppose and defeat the policy of subservience to the bosses and their regime conducted by the trade unions and parties of the bourgeois regime.
We are also convinced that this class line will not be able to emerge victorious if the workers’ groups who intend to pursue it curl up defensively within their own particularities, while the class enemy strives every day to consolidate its anti-worker united front, and if they believe they can capture it by dint of conferences, meetings, congresses in which only rivers of words flow, useful only to those political parties and groups that toy with constitutional legality and parliamentary cretinism, a true bubonic plague that we thought had been beaten forever and which, instead, has returned, with the beautiful gift of rediscovered democracy, to afflict the working class.
If the prevalence of these legalitarian practices, which are summed up in the policy of the ‘trade union left’, denotes the immaturity of the times for a class revival, it is also true that one cannot remain indifferent or agnostic towards it, as if it did not originate from or in any case did not objectively descend from the need to paralyse a class initiative. This policy of the ‘trade union left’, of dissent authorised by the trade union centres, must be opposed and overthrown everywhere and in whatever form it manifests itself. It, since it belongs to parties whose primary objective is to build a bridge between the most radical and combative part of the working class and the regime union centres and false workers’ parties, is more treacherous than official trade union policy.
For a class union opposition to have any meaning, it must stand outside the tricolour trade union policy and outside the democratic practices of a trade union parliamentarianism that reduces class confrontation to chatter, to motions, all useless and debilitating forms.
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1 – The current trade unions are of the tricolour brand, continuers of fascist syndicalism, subordinate in political direction and practice to the capitalist State.
2 – The false workers’ parties, with their national, legalitarian policy, of peace between classes, of permanent alliance with the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie in a counter-revolutionary role, are solely responsible for the state of severe prostration and impotence of the working class.
3 – The proletariat, thus deprived of its fundamental class organs: the anti-capitalist workers’ union and the revolutionary Communist Party, is at the mercy of the bourgeois regime and an object of capitalism’s interest in preserving the present regime.
4 – The serious problem posed by the defeat of the proletarian revolution, the destruction of the ‘red unions’, and the passage of the communist parties of the Third International into the camp of counter-revolution is twofold: REBIRTH OF THE CLASS POLITICAL PARTY, which is a historical process based on theory, programme, principles, and aims according to the centuries-old lesson of revolutionary Marxism and derives from the struggles of entire generations of revolutionaries for the conquest of political power, the violent destruction of the bourgeois State, the establishment of the Proletarian Dictatorship; REBIRTH of the CLASS ORGANISATION however structured into new anti-capitalist trade unions, into new bodies of pure wage-earners with economic content, for the defence of the immediate interests of the proletariat from the continuous and growing pressure of capitalism.
5 – In recent years, the process of the integration of the tricolour unions into the bourgeois regime has been powerfully accelerated by the economic, social, and political crisis, which has led to rising unemployment, the proletarianisation of vast intermediate classes, terrorism, and instability in the government of the bourgeois state machine. This process, which has increasingly consolidated the trade unions in their function as pillars of the bourgeois regime, and consequently has pushed them even further to subordinate proletarian interests to those of the possessing classes, which is summed up today in the ‘policy of sacrifices’, yesterday in that of ‘national reconstruction’, tomorrow in that of the ‘defence of democracy’ or the ‘defence of the Fatherland’, THIS PROCESS IS NOW IRREVERSIBLE.
6 – Firm in this critical analysis of more than fifty years of historical experience, according to which the present trade unions, having abandoned the field of class struggle against capitalism, have degraded themselves into agencies for the placement and bargaining of the labour force for the maintenance of the balance between classes (social pacifism), the communists hold that no discipline is owed to these trade unions, just as they once proclaimed that it was non should be owed to the fascist ones, the progenitors of the current democratic, populist, nationalist ones.
7 – From this it follows that any loyal ‘opposition’, internal or external, to the tricolour unions, which sets itself on the terrain of legalitarianism, of democracy, of the peaceful conquest of the leadership of the trade union centres, must be regarded as deceptive and anti-worker. In particular, it must be emphasised as a ‘left-wing’ cover for the despicable anti-proletarian function of the tricolour trade unions, that self-styled ‘trade union left’, which, with a hybrid and appealing language, serves as a brake on the workers’ impulses generated by the continuous betrayal of trade union piecards. Also to be rejected is the temptation, proposed in various forms by overexcited and headless groups, to replace the class organisation of the proletariat with bodies halfway between Party and trade union.
8 – Therefore, for the proletariat, the only class road presents itself: RECONSTRUCTING EX NOVO ITS ORGANS OF ECONOMIC DEFENCE, ITS CLASS ORGANISATION, OUTSIDE AND AGAINST THE DIRECTIVES OF THE OFFICIAL UNION CENTRES AND THEIR LOYALIST OPPOSITIONS.
9 – Therefore the struggle against the policy of sacrifices, planning, mobility, defence of the national economy, and the democratic regime is the real ground for direct confrontation with the enemies of the working class, who, from the tricolour unions to the false workers’ parties, from autonomous unions to avowedly bourgeois parties, from local institutions to the central State, have constituted a REAL ANTI-PROLETARIAN POLITICAL REGIME, A SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND POLICE REPRESSION AGAINST THE WORKING CLASS.
10 – The establishment of workers’ groups inside and outside workplaces on these elementary positions is a positive fact that deserves the coordinated solidarity of all those forces that feel the need to rearm the class with its first and indispensable organ of battle: the proletarian economic association to defend the immediate interests of wage workers.
11 – To achieve this result, communists do not place ideological or party prejudices before them, but point out that it is achievable in a serious and combative organisation of pure wage-earners, whatever party and ideology they adhere to, starting from the factories and workplaces to consolidate into higher organs, capable of class directives and initiatives with the objective of winning the adherence of the proletariat.
12 – The reconstruction in the workplace of class economic organs with the task of defending the workers’ condition, in open confrontation with company management, is a primary and urgent task in order to reweave a real class network capable of resisting the capitalist bosses’ offensive, linked outside the factories in a centralised organisational structure that ensures a united, coherent, and disciplined action. In this respect, the example of the hospital workers’ struggle, which lacked active and real solidarity, despite the chattering praise of convenient ‘opponents’ from other categories, and which was defeated under the aspect of the resumption of the proletarian struggle due to the joint intervention, in a united front, of all the instruments of bourgeois democracy, trade unions, PCI, PSI, DC, etc., factory councils, regional and municipal bodies, was symptomatic and represents the only example on a national scale of the return to direct struggle of a category of workers.
13 – Communists, in the face of rising unemployment and the rising cost of living, propose the coalition of proletarian forces around a minimum programme of class demands, the only realistic ones, unifying all proletarian categories of employed and unemployed workers: a) FULL WAGES TO THE UNEMPLOYED according to the principle of the general obligation to work which capitalism only respects when it suits it and denies when it touches its wallet. b) HIGH WAGE INCREASES, INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL i.e. higher increases for the worst paid categories. c) GENERALISED REDUCTION IN WORKING HOURS WITHOUT REDUCTION IN WAGES. d) REFUSAL OF ANY INCREASE IN EXPLOITATION, NO TO MOBILITY, RESTRUCTURINGS, PROFESSIONALISATION.
This minimum programme will have to be implemented through the mobilisation of proletarians in direct action, outside the intrigues and diplomatic balancing acts of parties, union piecards, and the government. The workers’ opposition must not submit to the illusory and unproductive democratic practices within the current trade unions, nor be reduced to a sterile movement of opinion, information, and propaganda with words in the assemblies, but must everywhere tend to the agitation and mobilisation of the working comrades, without waiting for the formal expression of numerical majorities in assemblies orchestrated by the piecards.
14 – Only the revolutionary power of the class Dictatorship will bring the serious problems afflicting the proletariat to a certain dissolution, but it is by struggling and working for the realisation of this minimum programme, outside illusory schemes and bombastic phrases, that a class organisation capable of directing and leading the proletariat in the struggle for its emancipation from capitalism can be reconstructed.
Communist Workers’ Groups of the International Communist Party, “Il Partito Comunista”