If we insistently return to the question of the work of our small Party towards the workers’ committees that have sporadically been formed in recent years, with varying events and fortunes, in some factories and categories under the impetus of proletarian struggles tending to move on classist bases – such as the CUB of railway workers in August 1975, the Hospital Workers’ Struggle Committee of autumn 1978, that of the air workers in 1979, or simply on the initiative of small groups of workers from various factories, such as the Workers’ Opposition and the recently formed National Committee Against Layoffs – it is not because we attribute a miraculous and paradigmatic value to these bodies, as forerunners or embryonic repositories of what the future immediate class organization of the proletariat should be. Nor is it because we harbor the delusion that today, in a situation of general stagnation of the class struggle, they can constitute a solid and valid point of reference for all those workers who, driven by the long but continuous deterioration of their living conditions, are inclined to abandon the official unions, disgusted by their defeatist and collaborationist policy, in order to give life to new organizations: this is a tendency that is still in its larval stage and that only the sharpening of contradictions resulting from the deepening of the global crisis of capitalism will tend to express in an extensive and complete form.

The real reason can be deduced in a straightforward and unequivocal manner from all the theses on the Party’s task in the various historical situations that it has elaborated in the course of its organizational life, drawing on the experiences and mistakes of a century and a half of struggle by the international workers’ movement. There are numerous quotations on this subject, but one that sums them all up is point 7, part II (“Tasks of the Communist Party”) from our characteristic theses of 1951: “The Party will never set up economic associations which exclude those workers who do not accept its principles and leadership. But the Party recognizes without any reservation 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 organizations with short term economic objectives with a large number of participants. Within such organizations the party will set up a network of communist cells and groups, as well as a communist fraction in the union. In periods when the working class is passive, the Party must anticipate the forms and promote 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 organizations. The Party always encourages organizations which favor Contact between workers at different localities and different trades and their common action. It rejects all forms of closed organizations”.

The Party therefore has – even in situations of extreme subjective weakness and unfavorable objective circumstances such as the current one – the historical duty to pay the utmost attention to all workers’ attempts, however hybrid, confused, and unstable they may be, to oppose the attacks of capitalist bosses and the state in an organized manner, in opposition to the official trade union centers. It must constantly strive to “anticipate the forms and promote the constitution of organizations with immediate economic aims”. This effort of anticipation, indispensable if we do not want to fall into a deleterious immobilist wait-and-see attitude, a prelude to passive tailism, can only take place in direct relation to active participation, compatible with the unfolding of the whole range of the Party’s tasks, and with its militants, both in the proletarian struggles that manifest themselves on the terrain of real class demands, and in the slow and necessarily troubled process of reconstruction of workers’ organizations that the struggles and proletarian needs in general materially express.

It is not on the basis of the number of workers involved in this process, nor of their specific political attitudes, that the decision to actively participate, not as mere spectators, in these bodies can be made, but exclusively on the fact that we are in the presence of workers, however many or few they may be, animated by the determination to do all they can to fight on the terrain of the class struggle against the bosses, in defense of their living and working conditions.

It is in the constant exercise of this task, in responding to all the tactical and organizational problems that from time to time arise as its action becomes more widespread and influential, that the Party enables itself to fulfill its function as the historical guide of the proletariat.

Given that it would therefore be detrimental to adopt a wait-and-see and nihilist position towards these working bodies, it is essential to be fully aware of the role that communists must play within them. The only condition that communists must impose on these bodies in order to act correctly is that they be open to all workers who accept the class struggle as a means of anti-boss and anti-capitalist action, regardless of their political views. They must precisely “reject all forms of closed organization”, avoid working towards the construction of party organizations, or party appendages, and, worse, multiple parties and political organizations, small trade-unionisms whose membership is based on the party program or, worse, a political compromise between various groups appealing to the proletariat. It cannot be stressed enough that any action of the Party within proletarian organizations can never be based on compromises of its own political program. The barrier separating the Communist Party organization from all other political groupings must always be clear to the workers who follow the Party’s line. No action may be taken by Party militants that could undermine this clear demarcation, on pain of encroaching on political compromises of the program, an irreversible error condemned by the Party with reference to the entire past history of the international communist movement.

In this regard, it must be made clear that the intervention of Party militants must be carried out explicitly as revolutionary communists, without hiding behind the pretense of the “simple combative workers”, the Party’s task being not only to encourage immediate forms of proletarian organization, but also to transmit to them its influence, without which they would be easy prey to all forms and kinds of opportunism. The Party openly and consistently proclaims that it acts to win over these organizations, to direct them to the terrain of open confrontation with the class enemy, attracting workers who actively participate in them under the influence of the revolutionary political program, without, however, ever transforming their “open” nature, that is, without ever hindering the membership of non-Communist workers who are nevertheless combative and hold anti-collaborationist positions. Of course, the question should not be understood trivially in the sense that every militant must always and everywhere, in all his interventions, declare himself a communist, but he must modulate his actions in such a way that it appears as clear as possible that he is a communist. Only in this way is it possible to build the Party’s influence over these organizations.

The aforementioned remarks on the “open” nature of these bodies as a necessary condition for the work of communists do not, however, exclude the possibility that it may be necessary to act within workers’ bodies that tend to be “closed”. In such cases, the battle will be fought precisely to make them open to all workers.

Given these premises, it is natural that the type of intervention to be carried out within these bodies must be related each time to the actual situation and the type of problems that from time to time become the subject of discussion within the committees or of action towards the class.

The current situation of general apathy and detachment of the working masses from official opportunism, which does not yet translate into a generalized push for alternative class-based organization, but in which, nevertheless, a process of consciousness-raising is slowly beginning to take shape in some factories among small minorities of militant workers, and in which there are increasingly numerous examples of struggle outside and against the structures of the official unions, these same minorities end up falling prey to contradictions between the expression of struggle that they represent at certain moments and manage to coagulate around class demands, and the theorizations they deduce from these experiences. Thus, within these organizations, we often find ourselves faced with considerable practical obstacles and positions that deviate from the very classist approach that these organizations claim to fight for. It is the duty of communist militants to fight against these erroneous approaches which, if taken to their extreme consequences, can seriously harm the process of gradual recovery of the class movement, whose current contradictions and precariousness they are the expression of.

In particular, we are faced with two types of positions, only apparently opposed, both of which reflect the weakness of the class movement to which they claim to refer. On the one hand, there is the generally dominant position of considering the “simple” immediate economic struggle to be limited or even useless, believing that the workers’ vanguards, now crystallized around what is generally very imperfectly defined as a “class program” immediately place themselves on the so-called “political terrain,”, make the famous “qualitative leap”, and directly set themselves the goal of a political program to be agitated and propagated among the working masses.

This position, predominant among the adherents of the various heterogeneous groups of the so-called “area of Autonomy”, but also among other political groups that refer to Marxist positions, and perhaps to the communist left, is the most obvious reflection of the main negative characteristic of these workers’ bodies: that of being predominantly made up of politicized elements, a reflection of the weakness of the movement and the absence of numerous proletarian strata willing to fight on the class terrain. This characteristic tends instead to be considered by them as a positive fact, and they tend to consider these organizations as quasi-party or quasi-political organizations, in which political positions are mediated between the various member groups, and then acted upon on the basis of the resulting outcome.

Now, while it must be considered a positive fact that workers of different political tendencies organize themselves on the basis of defending the immediate economic interests of the class to which they belong, and, in this sense, we must encourage and promote this phenomenon, which goes in the direction of the union of proletarian forces against the class enemy, and which has always been the goal pursued by revolutionary communists, this same fact is to be considered an objective limitation, reflecting precisely the absence of numerous layers of workers willing to fight consistently on the terrain of defending their own interests. It is precisely in order to overcome this serious limitation that the committees must operate, and they can act consistently in this area precisely by not discriminating politically against the workers who approach them, precisely by characterizing themselves as bodies open to all workers on the basis of a classist program of demands that rests on objectives of the immediate economic defense of the class. The committees must be aware of the limitations they represent and act on the basis of this awareness.

It is precisely the attitude of those who consider an immediate classist program of demands to be limited that most seriously harms the classist life and class vitality of these bodies. This position derives from the purely idealist and profoundly anti-Marxist view of considering the phase in which workers place themselves on the defensive terrain to be “over”, and that the time has now come to move directly or simultaneously to political struggle. This is the most serious obstacle to be overcome within the committees, as it leads to the theorization of the “vanguard struggle”, which is deleterious and counterproductive to the effects of the resumption of the generalized class movement and to the denial of the indispensable daily struggle against its own exploitation by capital, the only “school of war” alone capable of enabling the proletariat to wage the offensive struggle against the strongholds of the capitalist State.

A relentless battle must be waged against this tendency, not only because the Party has nothing to “politically mediate” with anyone, its rigid organization being closed to anyone who does not wholly share its political program and revolutionary strategy. This must constantly distinguish it from all other political groupings, on pain of sliding onto the terrain of the political united front between organizations, definitively condemned by the history of revolutionary communism, but also because it would end up destroying that minimum of class organization within which this tendency expresses itself.

Those who claim to be on a “more advanced” level than the rest of the class do not realize, however, that their “ultra-left” attitude actually drives workers away from taking the road of class action for demands, an obligatory road on the path of revolution and the achievement of higher goals. They thus end up falling into an adventurism as unrealistic as it is harmful, characterized by the inability to present themselves as a recognized workers’ vanguard followed by the workers, and isolating themselves from the “more backward” working masses.

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Another tendency typical of Autonomism but also practiced by those who, while correctly placing themselves among those who support the open character of these bodies, believe that they should act everywhere with the same immediate slogans, without taking into account the specific situations in which these bodies operate. The supporters of this thesis, rather than theorizing, express themselves more on the practical terrain, with an activist, voluntaristic, and therefore unrealistic approach, in the pretension that the subjective and perhaps exemplary action of the proletarian vanguards that have attained class consciousness could determine a process of radicalization of workers on anti-collaborationist and anti-opportunist grounds. These are the theorists of “minority struggles” at any cost, of sabotaging strikes everywhere called by the union, of “exemplary gestures” by a few conscious workers as a catalyst for other workers, or perhaps as a simple application rigidly consistent with their own “political maturation” and their own “revolutionary” convictions and ideas.

This approach, while it may be the expression of a genuine individual desire for action and struggle as a reaction to the general passivity of the class, becomes, when translated into the action of the bodies in which it manifests itself, counterproductive to their own development within the class, as it lacks a characteristic that is indispensable to a proletarian organization: the ability to evaluate, on the basis of real situations, the workers’ responsiveness to the specific slogans being agitated and to the actions to be undertaken, the ability to understand the degree of workers’ consciousness and combativeness that is expressed from time to time, or is expressed in extremely contradictory forms and potentialities in the various situations in which the committees find themselves operating.

This inability is not always subjective, in the sense that the individuals practicing it are incapable of making these indispensable evaluations, but is sometimes political, in that it derives from an erroneous conception of the function of immediate proletarian bodies and from a misunderstanding of the phenomenon of class struggle and the mechanisms that determine it. These workers end up with an inverted idea of reality instead of acting as conscious vanguards, they risk embarking on the same kind of “headlong rush” typical of those who deny the need for an immediate defensive struggle and for economic demands. They too fall prey to the illusion that it is a question of “proposing something more”, of acting on a higher level than the level of combativeness of the class. If practiced consistently, this attitude ends up leading to isolation among workers, to a detachment between the vanguard and the class that effectively cancels out the function of the former, which ends up closing itself off in its own “vanguard” convictions and conferring upon itself an abstract “consistent behavior” that becomes artificial if not constantly referenced, in the field of action, to the response it finds among the workers it addresses.

It is precisely in periods such as the present one, in which, faced with the sharpening of the contradictions of capitalism in crisis, that there is a widespread “positive passivity” of the class, positive in the sense that it passively manifests a growing detachment from opportunism, simultaneously with the emergence of combative minorities as a result of the worsening living conditions of the proletariat and, at times, even temporary expressions of struggle, albeit partial and episodic, that these same vanguards run the risk of separating themselves from the class and closing in on themselves or falling into unrealistic and adventurist attitudes.

The position that communists must uphold within the Committees is different. While the very serious tendency to deny or underestimate the importance of the class’s economic defense struggle must be combated, we must not underestimate the negative role that can be played by those who, on the contrary, claim to react to this tendency by throwing themselves headlong into an activist minimalism that abstracts from the real situation in which they operate and claims to constitute a point of reference or to polarize the the attention and militancy of the workers by drawing up specific platforms of demands at their desks, outside of any real possibility of mobilizing the workers around them, or by claiming to carry out actions alternative to those of the current unions at any cost, regardless of whether they may have any active support among the workers.

The ability to be able to assess at the opportune moment what initiative to take towards the workers, with what specific slogans and on what particular issues to carry out agitation, to know how to take the right action at the right time, is certainly not a given once and for all, and least of all can it be sought in workers’ spontaneity or in any political program. Only constant action in the workers’ movement, in its daily problems, even very basic ones such as defending their living conditions from the attack of capitalism, the constant connection with the working class in whatever forms the situation allows, ultimately, only the living experience of action and struggle can progressively enable those more conscious and combative workers, who have set themselves the goal of working with dedication and constancy for the revival of the class movement, to acquire the ability to lead the struggles and movements of which they position themselves as the promoters, agitators, and consistent interpreters.

It is a qualification for the role of vanguard outside pre-established schemes of intervention that claim to be valid always and everywhere, regardless of the situation. This is the case with the prospect of strikes alternative to the union, whose realization must be worked on everywhere, but whose practical implementation requires very specific objective conditions: the widespread influence of workers’ committees, the availability of a non-negligible number of workers in support of the alternative action compared to the totality of the factory where the issue arises. In this sense, the pretension, often present in these bodies, to mechanically generalize positive experiences in particular local situations runs the risks of causing the entire organization to slip into unrealistic and adventurist positions which, if implemented, can only backfire negatively on the credibility that the body itself may have gained among small minorities of workers in other situations.

The right balance in the action and work of workers’ committees in general must therefore be sought constantly in close connection with the workers; in periods such as the one we are living through, it is a question of knowing how to wait for the class, without pretending to be able to artificially mobilize it with instructions and demands specifically “studied at the table” and then voluntarily imported into the workers’ ranks. To the advocates of “struggle at any cost”, of “demonstrative strikes even by a few”, as well as to the theorists of the “political qualitative leap”, the expression “waiting for the class” sounds defeatist, passive, immobilist. In reality, these accusations are dictated by a way of understanding this expression that is distorted by an immediatist and unrealistic ideology, incapable of understanding that “waiting” cannot be passive, and attitudes that truly understand it in this sense must be fought.

“Waiting for the class” rests on the basic consideration, which is really basic for those who, like many of these advocates, call themselves materialists and revolutionary communists, that the vast majority of workers are moving and will be moved under the impetus of the deterioration of their living and working conditions, and not because some “conscious vanguard” will have proposed to them a plan of action and struggle based on a series of classist and correct demands. Not only that, but it should not be overlooked that only the resurgence of a vast real class movement can give life to proletarian vanguards in the full sense of the term, only a vast movement of struggle based on class objectives and anti-collaborationist and anti-opportunist positions can give life to the stable and widespread organizational network that will have to characterize the future class unions, a process that can only express itself spontaneously in the wake of the rediscovered path of true anti-capitalist struggle.

This process, which, we repeat, can only take place spontaneously, must be “helped”, and in this sense, a significant task can be carried out by those workers who, already today, under the pressure of the general situation, set themselves the task of working and acting on class objectives, on the condition, which is truly fundamental for their very existence as vanguards, that they know how to maintain a constant real connection in all situations in which they have the opportunity to work systematically and in organizational terms.

Another question that often arises in these workers’ committees is the attitude to be taken towards the unions and, more precisely, what assessment should be made regarding the possibility of continuing to carry out within them and in relation to the Factory Councils, a certain amount of work on classist bases. Given that no prejudice can be placed on the membership of class-based committees towards workers enrolled in the official unions, it must be said that our position on this regard is very clear, unlike the ambiguous positions that are often expressed in these committees. We are not referring so much to the so-called “trade union left” and its function of covering up from the left, i.e. in more revolutionary language, the collaborationism and anti-worker policy of the official union confederations, but rather to the position of those who argue that the possibility of working in the unions cannot yet be ruled out, perhaps on the grounds that millions of workers are enrolled in them anyway. Put in these terms, the question is bogus and shows how little these people have actually understood about the involution of the union into the state and institutional networks of the bourgeoisie, an involution, one of whose main characteristics include the definitive elimination of any form of active union life involving the organization’s members. The relationship between members and the executive bodies of the union, even at the grassroots level, is now exclusively bureaucratic in nature.

There is no possibility for members to express themselves in any way within these organizations, nor is there any organizing activity that allows for a relationship with union members other than that which is possible in the factory, during assemblies, with any worker. Union membership therefore offers no possibility of work or contacts other than those in the factory.

This impossibility is not, however, a purely formal and bureaucratic fact but exquisitely political, insofar as it reflects within the organization the nature of the union, which is now irreversibly part of the regime, and therefore with an organization structured in such a way as to exclude and reject any class influence and penetration, constituted vertically and horizontally for the sole purpose of transmitting to the rank and file the directives of the democratic regime’s paid agents in workers’ clothing. The rank and file themselves are rigidly aligned on tricolor politics and have the sole task of implementing these directives with the utmost efficiency.

The vitality of the debate on the issues of the labor movement and its demands which characterized the life and activity of the old class unions of the first postwar period, and which was faintly reflected in the second postwar period, naturally stifled by the now tricolor approach of the union, has now definitively given way to a rigid bureaucraticness whose sole objective is the repressive efficiency of the territorial and factory apparatus. In fact, there is no longer any relationship between the member and the union’s bureaucratic structure other than the deduction of dues from the salary via the infamous check-off signed once and for all by the worker to the company where he or she works.

To get an idea of the bogusness of union membership, just consider that, as admitted by more than one of the leaders of the three major unions and as can easily be seen in any factory, thousands of workers are members out of pure habit. If membership had to be renewed every year, the number of members would plummet. To think, under these conditions, that there is still work to be done within these bodies is, at best, pure illusion. In fact, the only result of such an attitude is to make workers believe, consciously or unconsciously it matters little, that the official unions are not yet definitively in the hands of the bosses and the State, that there is still a remote possibility of winning them back to the class struggle.

On the contrary, there are an increasing number of cases that demonstrate, without any doubt, that the defense of the most basic interests of workers can only be expressed outside and against the union structure, and it is for this perspective that communists must work, even within small workers’ committees.

The factory councils deserve a slightly different discussion. We will not go into their history here, suffice it to say that they are the only representative body of workers whose members are elected directly by the workers in all factories. Consequently, they can reflect the mood of the workers, in the sense that, faced with tensions and discontent in the factory, and especially when faced with an organized reaction by workers to demands alternative to those of the union, it is not impossible that some department delegates may side with the workers in struggle, while it is certainly impossible that the union will interpret demands contrary to its reformist and pro-boss policy. In small and medium-sized companies, where the FC is not always completely controlled by the union, it is possible that some of them may take anti-collaborationist positions. It follows that it cannot be ruled out today that useful work can be done in these bodies, even as delegates, if there is a certain amount of support from the workers, nor can it be ruled out that a member of a workers’ committee set up in opposition to the union can at the same time hold the position of delegate and carry out consciousness-raising work among other delegates within the FC. The very expulsion from these bodies of delegates who reject the union line can have a positive effect on the workers, and is in any case preferable to refusing to join them from the outset.

However, it should be noted that the piecards have recently decided to introduce the so-called “anti-terrorism” precondition: this is in reality an initiative that requires newly elected delegates to be members of the union or, in any case, to declare their willingness to join and accept the union’s line and objectives in order to be recognized by it. This is an important “turning point” because with it, the unions aim to exclude from the FC those workers who do not want to renounce the most consistent methods of class struggle, and therefore the most combative workers, who are not easily tamed by the piecards’ line. The FC would also even formally become organs of the union in the factory, belonging entirely to its organizational structure and, as such, impervious to class struggle. The workers’ “blank ballot” elections themselves thus become a farce, because in reality the workers are prevented from nominating those coworkers who reject the aforementioned precondition, in particular the communists. FCs thus tend to empty themselves of all class content and irreversibly crystallize into an anti-worker function.

If the slogan “outside and against the union” cannot be set as a prerequisite for membership to any workers’ committee, as it would presuppose that every proletarian who approaches it is automatically fully aware of the precise anti-worker function of the union, communist militants must work to ensure that it becomes the dominant approach in terms of class action, and to ensure that these bodies are clearly oriented towards the prospect of the resurgence of organs for the immediate defense of workers, of the class union, fighting thoroughly against those who place themselves on the ambiguous and convoluted terrain of “inside and outside the union” or, conversely, those who claim that these small committees are already in themselves a new union and must aim in the short term to establish themselves as a class union. Instead, we are witnessing the first organizational symptoms of very small layers of militant workers, which would be more accurately defined as nuclei of the future class union, and which the Party must help to fully and consistently express the anti-opportunist and anti-capitalist charge that they potentially possess, working to ensure that they move without hesitation in the correct classist direction of the revival of immediate proletarian economic organization, an indispensable step, together with the development of the Revolutionary Party, of its influence over the proletariat, and therefore over the path of the communist revolution.