The separation of revolutionary education from the labor movement does not eliminate PWOC’s communist work among labor activists. PWOC is able to recruit small numbers of workers, just like the national sect groups, and give them a communist education in study groups.
But revolutionary education unintegrated into labor work cannot be very effective and this is crucial in the long run. Lacking effective revolutionary education, PWOC’s labor strategy fails to effectively build a revolutionary workers’ movement and a vanguard party out of the labor movement. This is the real, long-run significance of their errors and it holds serious implications not just for labor work, but also for PWOC’s entire party-building effort.
Moreover, a careful examination reveals that PWOC’s theory has, at best, lost sight of the long run goals of a revolutionary movement and vanguard party. While PWOC’s theory often sounds quite revolutionary, it fails to consistently guide practice toward these goals. Specifically we will show:
1) The stated goal of PWOC’s work in the unions is not at this time to build a revolutionary workers movement; at this time their goal is, instead, the militant transformation of the unions and only at a later time do they aim to directly develop a workers movement with revolutionary consciousness.
2) More important, the fusion PWOC aims to create is not a fusion of communist ideology with the workers movement; the fusion they describe only amounts to a fusion of militant reformism.
The long term goal of their strategy is to “revolutionize the trade unions.” “Bureaucracy, class collaborationism and racism must be eliminated and democracy, class struggle unionism and class unity established in their place.”[45] While this describes a militant union, it should be clear that this “revolutionized union” is neither objectively nor subjectively revolutionary.
PWOC’s goal of the revolutionized union is based on the model of the CIO unions of the 30’s. “Those labor unions that have come closest to approximating the ideal of class struggle unionism...have been the ones where communists have boon allowed more or less free and open participation. .. We can see the correlation of communism and the development of class struggle unionism in the UAW of the 1930’s, the Fur and Leather Workers Union, in the UE as well as any other unions in the U.S.”[46]
PWOC feels that these unions approximated, if not actually achieved, the goal of the “revolutionized union.” Yet even the militant CIO unions failed to establish a widespread reformist, socialist consciousness, let alone a revolutionary movement.
PWOC advances the goal of the revolutionized union as the first stage in a stage theory of revolution. “The proletariat cannot develop to the higher levels of class struggle without participating and learning from the lower levels. The proletariat cannot construct Soviets without first transforming the trade unions into revolutionary class struggle organizations which consistently pursue a Class Struggle trade union policy.”[47] PWOC suggests that our main task now is the institutional reform of the unions and later, in stage two, a revolutionary workers movement can be directly built.
But this stage theory lacks clear logical and historical validity. We must seek to build a revolutionary workers movement–a working class movement which understands the limitations of our current system and is subjectively prepared to take power from the capitalist class. Only such a movement can, given the right conditions, construct Soviets, for example. And to become subjectively revolutionary, workers must indeed understand the limits of the unions; they must understand that the reform labor movement cannot meet some of their basic demands. But the institutional reform of the unions does not necessarily have to preceed the development of such a revolutionary movement, and institutional reform efforts may even detract from efforts to build a revolutionary movement.
Indeed, the CIO’s “revolutionized unions” were hardly springboards to Soviets. These unions supported Roosevelt (as did the CP). And communist loaders in the UAW were easily and effectively red-baited as early as 1941, suggesting that workers in these unions were quite far indeed from revolutionary consciousness.
Moreover, historically revolutionary workers’ movements have been built without going through PWOC’s stage of institutional reform at all. The Revolutionary Shop Stewards in Germany demonstrated this in 1918. The German unions and Social Democratic party wore highly bureaucratic reformists that supported Germany’s role in World War I; the union leaders made a no-strike pledge with the government. The Revolutionary Shop Stewards emerged in 1914 as a group opposed to the war and its hardships on the workers. They grew until they led general strikes against the war, helping topple the government and Germany’s war effort, and they played a key role establishing Soviets which brought in the new “democratic socialist republic.” In all this, the Shop Stewards were opposed, often covertly by the union bureaucrats and they had to counter the bureaucrats’ efforts to mislead. Yet this was all done without recapturing the unions and replacing the bureaucrats. The fatal flaw of this revolution was not the failure to “revolutionize” the unions; rather, it was the absence of a revolutionary party–the “socialist” party brought to power ended up betraying the revolution and murdering thousands of revolutionary workers.
It would have been a clear mistake for the German Shop Stewards to focus their efforts on institutional reform of the unions and replacing bureaucrats. This could only have held back the developing revolutionary movement. Thus the institutional reform of the unions by itself may well be a diversion from the task of building a revolutionary workers’ movement.
This demonstrates PWOC’s lack of clarity about the long range goals of labor work. Our goal must be to build a revolutionary Workers’ movement, not another CIO, and this goal must guide our work from the outset. We cannot afford to build a militant labor movement today and hope to somehow, convert it to a revolutionary workers’ movement tomorrow; rather, we must aggressively strive to develop workers’ revolutionary understanding today.
PWOC’s stage theory justifies their practice, their failure to effectively integrate revolutionary education into their labor work. The unions can definitely be a “school for communism”, but then we must not predominately focus the education of labor militants on what they already know well–the problems of the labor movement. Rather we must use the reform labor struggle to teach far-reaching lessons on the entire social system. Then we will develop a revolutionary workers movement rather than another CIO.
PWOC sees the most militant CIO unions as a model. Yet after more than 12 years, communism was very quickly and thoroughly purged from the CIO. By contrast, it took the Nazis, mass murders and concentration camps to undo the fusion of the German workers movement. While these two movements faced vastly different conditions, this brings into question exactly what PWOC considers an adequate fusion. We shall see that PWOC’s partybuilding theory also justifies their failure to integrate revolutionary education into the labor movement.
PWOC is an important force in arguing that partybuilding is a process of “fusing communism with the workers movement.” More concretely, this is described as “The merger of the concrete application of Marxism-Leninism to the practical problems facing the working class with the most advanced fighters drawn from (but not out of) the movements of the working class and the oppressed nationalities.”[48]
PWOC elaborates this concept as follows:
The process of fusing communism with the workers’ movement can be expressed as the process of building a communist current in the working class. Now a communist current is a mass phenomena and not merely a handful or even two handfuls of communists working secretly in the trade unions...A few hundred workers who are being systematically drawn into the political struggle constitute the masses for us at this time. And not every worker who is a part of a current is a communist. But all of the workers who make up the current are open to the viewpoint of communists on any given number of questions that face the workers’ movement. A communist current is a fully developed united front.[49]
PWOC then describes the communist current by contrasting it with a rank and file caucus. A communist current in a particular plant would differ from a caucus in three ways:
1. The communist current would be united around the complete Class Struggle Program. This includes the part calling for “independent political action”, meaning, workers would participate in a mass people’s party.
2. In the communist current, communists will have “freedom of agitation. Communists will be able to participate openly in the rank and file movement”.
3. In the communist current, “communists will have established their leadership.”[50]
But this “communist current” is not a communist movement within the working class! It does not represent the fusion of communist ideology with the workers movement. The workers in the “communist current” merely accept the Class Struggle Program and are “open to the viewpoint of communists” on practical problems facing the movement. Again, Class Struggle Program has been substituted for revolutionary ideology. The “communist current” PWOC seeks to build only represents the fusion of militant reformism with the workers movement.
The limited nature of the “communist current” can be seen again where PWOC gives a concrete example of fusion. At one particular plant, we are told, about 250 workers take the Organizer.
If we did a scientific study of the people who read the Organizerand the people who follow and support the rank and file movement, I’m sure that we would discover a great overlap of these two forces So to a certain extent you can see it. There’s a certain amount of fusion beginning to take place between a mass movement and a communist movement.[51]
Thus PWOC sees fusion when labor activists read a newspaper largely filled with labor articles which fail to mention communism. Unfortunately, PWOC forgets that it has not completely fused communism with the Organizer.
Indeed, PWOC is confused over what particular ideology must be fused with the workers’ movement. While sometimes they say communism must be fused with the workers* movement, other times it is the “concrete application of Marxism-Leninism to the practical problems facing the working class” which must be fused. In PWOC’s most explicit writings this “practical application of Marxism” even becomes a new form of communism: fusion requires the creation of a special “workers’ communism” which shows the workers “how to consolidate and organize themselves, how to best prepare themselves for their struggle against capitalism...how to pick the most favorable time to join the battle and how to win.”[52]
But there is a tremendous difference between fusing communism and fusing the “practical application of Marxism-Leninism”. Apparently the “practical application of Marxism-Leninism” to the labor movement consists of the “correct” program, the “correct” form of organization (the rank and file caucus), and the “correct” tactics. But the trade union militant who agrees with these things does not necessarily accept communist ideology. Fusing the “concrete application of Marxism-Leninism” with the workers movement amounts to, at best, teaching workers to become good trade union militants.
But it is communist ideology, not its mere application, we must propagate among the workers. Hot that workers must necessarily be trained in all aspects of communist ideology such as Marxist philosophy or historiography. Rather we seek to build a practical, political movement and as such we must minimally educate workers to those ideological questions necessary to demarcate the communist movement from the political movements of other ideologies (reformism, liberalism, populism, anarchism, etc.). Thus, for example, workers must be educated on the nature of our revolutionary goals, on the sort of movement necessary to reach those goals, on the real limits of what can be achieved under the present political and social system, and on how the masses can be brought to see the need for revolution. (We leave the important elaboration of the precise education workers need to further movement discussion.) Training workers in Class Struggle Unionism, while important, is clearly insufficient to demarcate revolutionary ideology from militant reformism; revolutionary political exposures are a crucial part of workers’ education.
Thus it is apparent that PWOC does not have an adequate theory for partybuilding. It has failed to precisely spell out the particular revolutionary understanding workers must attain, and the methods, organization, and analyses necessary to teach them these lessons.. Instead, PWOC’s elaborate labor and fusion strategies generate much practical activity which is unfortunately misdirected. What we need is a fully developed strategy to fuse revolutionary communist ideology with the workers movement.
[45] Trade Union Question, p. 18.
[46] Trade Union Question, p. 45.
[47] Trade Union Question, p. 47.
[48] The Organizer, October-November, 1976, P. 22.
[49] Trade Union Question, p. 46.
[50] Trade Union Question, pt 47.
[51] Trade Union Question, p. 51.
[52] The Organizer, January-February, 1975. p. 12.