By the early 19th century, the traditional feudal organization of European society was rapidly changing. Small farmers (peasants) were losing their rights, their economic situation was becoming increasingly desperate, and many were driven off their land. The peasantry was consequently becoming proletarianized, and its numbers were forced to work in the factories, mines, and mills of the emerging capitalist class. The wages were low, the hours long, and the conditions brutal in these jobs; but the workers had to compete fiercely with one another for even these miserable jobs. All economic and political power was in the hands of the capitalist, the factory owner, and the workers were little better than mere slaves.
Over time, the workers came to realize that they had to organize themselves to fight back against the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist system. Socialist ideas spread their influence throughout the working class, and many saw a socialist society run by workers as the only real solution to their problems. Spontaneously, the workers began to gravitate towards the organization of trade unions as a minimal solution to their increasing misery. These basic organizations of the class could help workers to cut down competition for jobs among themselves and reduce the ever-present fear of being laid off or fired whenever the capitalists felt like it.
The primary function of these early trade unions was economic-defensive in their nature, as is the case with most unions, but many of the early leaders of these organizations were socialists who saw in the trade unions a basic class organization which could be used as a lever in overthrowing the capitalist system itself. Thus, from the beginning the trade unions were seen as organizations which had a political function to perform as well.
The trade unions in the United States developed somewhat later than those in Europe, and were strongly influenced by the labor liberalism prevalent in the British trade union movement. The early trade union centers in the U.S., like the Knights of Labor, were more openly socialist in their orientation and were based on the antagonism between capital and labor. But as the U.S. emerged as an imperialist power around the turn of the century, a new type of trade union canter and a new type of trade unionism began to develop. The movement for socialism became increasingly divorced from the trade union movement.
The result was the emergence of “business” trade unionism, which was based on a partnership between labor and capital. The leaders of this type of unionism, such as Gompers, did not push for an independent workers party as leaders in the early U.S. trade unions had done, but rather worked to keep the trade union movement firmly under the hegemony of the capitalist parties. The trade union center which developed this type of approach was the American Federation of Labor.
Business trade unionism is the dominant form of unionism in the United States today, with all the trade union centers committed to the present political and economic system. Even the more “left”-leaning of the labor leaders like Winpisinger and Fraser are no better than right social democrats, who toy with the idea of a labor party, while working energetically within the Democratic Party. Even if they do eventually form a third party, just like the labor parties in Great Britain, Australia and other capitalist countries, such a party will not be dedicated to doing away with the capitalist system.
What this kind of pragmatic political orientation means is that the economic-defensive function of trade unions has to predominate, since the capitalist system itself is not challenged. Under such leadership, the U.S. trade unions in general do not function on the basis of the fundamental antagonism between labor and capital, but practice a form of class collaboration. The no-strike deal made by the USWA with the steel companies in the Experimental Negotiating Agreement is one prime example of this orientation.
With the further development of US imperialism into a more consolidated form of state monopoly capitalism, many leftists have come to the conclusion that trade unions are now hopelessly class collaborationist and have been integrally tied in with the state. One prominent form that this argument takes is that the trade union apparatus in the OS is an arm of the bourgeois state.
There is no contradicting the way that the trade union apparatus has become chained legally and become dependent for its existence on containing the class struggle within respectable bourgeois limits. The bourgeoisie has sought to fetter and shackle the trade unions in a thousand and one ways in order to prevent them from functioning as class organizations.
The argument, however, which puts forward the line that trade unions are just arms of the state fails to conduct a dialectical analysis of the nature of trade unions and recognize their dual aspects. Trade unions are organized around the heart of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism – the contradiction between social production and private appropriation, or between labor and capital. Each of the aspects of this contradiction can only exert itself by weakening the other aspect and overcoming it, which is the normal dialectical development of an antagonistic contradiction. Therefore, no matter how much the present trade union leaders want to collaborate with the capitalists, the capitalists will keep pushing for a greater rate of profit and seeking to depress the price of labor power down to or below the social level of necessity.
The unavoidable resolution of this antagonistic contradiction necessitates that new leaders of the trade unions, communists, must come forward eventually to lead the working class in overthrowing the capitalist system. But, even prior to the emergence of Marxist-Leninists as leaders of the class, the present leaders of the trade unions must respond to the fact that the unions have to represent the interests of the working class against the capitalists. Although the primary aspect of the present leadership is class collaborationist and they have allowed the trade union apparatus to become increasingly co-opted and integrated into state monopoly capitalism, still the aspect of the unions as organs of class struggle, as potential political and economic organizing centers of the working class, continues to exist and develop.
The trade unions cannot help but function to a degree as, at least, economic-defensive organizations, because the working class cannot help but try to defend its day-to-day needs against attacks from the capitalist class. The Marxist-Leninist position on trade unions is that they have the potential to operate as an agency through which the secondary aspect of the contradiction (the working class) can act to weaken the principal aspect of the contradiction (the bourgeoisie), and eventually eliminate this principal aspect. To deny that this is possible is, in effect, to deny the revolutionary potential of the working class itself.
The degree to which there develops a revolutionary movement among the working class will also be the degree to which the trade unions will be able to function as organs of class struggle, fulfilling both economic and political functions as organizing centers of the proletariat. If the proletariat cannot even take over its own basic class organizations, such as the trade unions, it will have little hope of ever seizing state power.
The key question is the revolutionization of the working class itself. As this develops, the trade unions will operate more effectively as economic-defensive organs, and also become increasingly political and anti-capitalist in their orientation. Therefore, it would be misleading to imply that it is enough for communists to just work within the trade unions, even if they regarded them as the organizations that will overthrow the bourgeoisie. The latter is an anarcho-syndicalist view. While avoiding this “left” deviation, we should not fall into the prevalent right errors in working in trade unions. Too often, communists make the focus of their work narrow economic and reformist issues, and tail after some militant-sounding trade union reformist, sacrificing their own independent communist platform. Me must fully understand how these economist and reformist errors hold back the class and learn how to combat them in our communist work.
A lot of confusion on how to carry out communist work within trade unions stems from confusion about the limitations as well as the potential of the trade unions themselves. It is a bourgeois orientation to emphasize the economic-defensive functions of trade unions without pointing out how operating as political centers is also part of the very nature of trade unions. Trade unions can act as real political centers of the working class only under the leadership of, and linked with, the communist party. Trade unions cannot become revolutionary organizations per se, but they can serve a function as “schools of communism” which can help to politicize the working class and help to support the political party of the class. Just as trade unions are indispensable organs for the successful prosecution of the day-to-day fight of the working class against capital, so they are even more important as organizations which can help the communist party promote the abolition of the very system of wage labor itself.
The consolidation of the forces of the working class developed through the economic struggle has no significance except insofar as it can serve as a lever in the hands of the class in its revolutionary struggle against the political power of the capitalist class. Those communists who belittle the political functioning of trade unions as organizing centers which must take up general class tasks only serve inadvertently to strengthen the chains which presently shackle the trade unions in the U.S. to the bourgeoisie.