Trade Union Reformism

Published in Il Comunista #37, 28th of October, 1921
Signed by Amadeo Bordiga
Translated by the Solar Collective
Paginated by the Revolutionary Technical Collective

The Communist Party supports at this time, in the difficult situation in which the Italian proletariat finds itself, the need for ‘proletarian unity’ and the proposal of the proletarian ‘united front’ for action against the economic and political offensive of the ruling class. This attitude, which is perfectly consistent with the principles and methods of the party and the Communist International, is however not always clearly understood by all and not even by all the party militants, and it is sometimes given a value other than its true value, deforming it in such a way as to clash with the entire harmonious whole of our party's tactics.

To understand this question properly without falling into simplistic and damaging interpretations and attitudes, it is enough to go back to the foundations of our concept and method of proletarian action. Revolutionary communism is based on the unity of the struggle for the emancipation of all the exploited, and at the same time it is based on the well-defined organisation into a political party of that ‘part’ of the workers who have the best consciousness of the conditions of the struggle and the greatest decision to fight for its ultimate revolutionary goal, thus constituting the vanguard of the working class.

It would show that those who would find a contradiction between the invocation and the union of all the workers and the fact of separating a part of them from the others, organising them in a party with methods that differ from all those of the other parties, and even those that call themselves proletariat and call themselves revolutionary, would show that they have not understood our programme, because in truth those two concerts only have the same origin.

The first struggles of the wage labourers against the ruling bourgeois class are struggles of more or less numerous groups for partial and immediate ends.

Communism proclaims the need to unify these struggles, in their development, so as to give them a common goal and method, and speaks for this of unity above individual occupational categories, above local situations, national or racial boundaries. This unity is not a material sum of individuals, but is achieved through a shift in the direction of action of all individuals and groups, when they feel they constitute a class, i.e. they have a common purpose and programme.

If, therefore, in the party there is only a part of the workers, nevertheless in it there is the unity of the proletariat, since workers of different trades, of different localities and nationalities, participate in it on the same level, with the same aims and the same rule of organisation.

A formal federative union, of trade unions, or perhaps an alliance of political parties of the proletariat, while having greater membership than the class party, does not achieve the fundamental postulate of the union of all workers, because it lacks cohesion and unity of purpose and methods.

However, communists affirm that trade union organisation, the first stage of workers' associative consciousness and practice, which sets them against the bosses, albeit locally and partially, precisely because only a further stage of consciousness and organisation of the masses can lead them to the terrain of the central struggle against the present regime precisely because it gathers workers together by their common condition of economic exploitation, and by bringing them closer to those of other localities and trade union categories, they start to form class consciousness; the union organisation must be a single one, and it is absurd to split it up on the basis of different conceptions of the general proletarian action programme. It is absurd to ask the worker who organises for the defence of his interests what his general view of the proletarian struggle is, what his political opinion is; he may have none or an erroneous one, this does not make him incompatible with the action of the union, from which he will draw the elements of his further orientation. That is why the communists, just as they are against the splitting of trade unions when the majority of the adherents or the cleverness of the opportunist leaders give them an unrevolutionary directive; so they work for the unification of the trade union organisations that are divided today, and tend to have in every country a single national trade union centre.

Whatever the influence of the opportunist leaders may be, trade union unity is a favourable coefficient for the spread of ideology and political revolutionary organisation, and the class party does in the bosom of the unitary trade union its best recruiting and its best campaign against the erroneous methods of struggle that are being proposed to the proletariat from elsewhere.

The Italian communists support proletarian unity because they are convinced that within a single trade union body the work of orienting the proletariat towards the political programme of the Communist International will be done more quickly and successfully.

While on the same plane as the Red Trade Union International the Italian communists are working for the unification of the trade union organisations of the Italian proletariat, they just as energetically uphold, even before achieving this organisational unity, which is fraught with many difficulties, the need for the overall action of the entire proletariat, now that its partial economic problems in the face of the bosses' offensive are merged into one: that of common defence.

Once again the communists are convinced that showing the masses that there is only one postulate and only one tactic to face the threatened wage reduction, unemployment and all the other manifestations of the anti-worker offensive, will make easier the task of demonstrating that the proletariat must have a single programme of revolutionary offensive against the capitalist regime, and that this programme is the one outlined by the Communist International: the struggle led by the class political party against the bourgeois state, for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

From the ‘united front’ of the trade union-organised proletariat against the bourgeois offensive will arise the united front of the proletariat on the Communist Party's political programme, proving in action and in the relentless criticism of it insufficient to any other programme.

Trade union unity and proletarian united front against the current offensive of the bourgeoisie are stages that the proletariat must go through for its training to fight according to the teachings of history on the path traced by the communist vanguard.

Trade union unity and the proletarian united front, the Communist Party supports them precisely in order to make its programme triumph, quite different from all the others that are proposed to the proletariat, in order to make its criticism of the betrayals of the social-democracy, and also of the syndicalist and anarchist errors, more evident.

It is a gross misunderstanding to exchange the formula of trade union unification and the united front with that of a bloc of proletarian parties, or of the direction of the action of the masses in contingent cases or in general movements by committees arising from a compromise between various political parties and currents - to imagine that they imply a truce on the part of the communists to the rebuke of the social democrats and the criticism of any other method of action that makes the proletariat lose its clear vision of the revolutionary process.

It would be ridiculous for home-grown communists - as has been done for so long on all sides and to the enormous detriment of the proletariat's revolutionary preparedness - to rush at every small or large occasion to pay homage to something, some body, some attitude, some aim which, in the ultra-philist phrase, stands ‘above the parties’.

Communists never ‘hide’ their party, their political militia, their inviolable discipline. These are not things they should be ashamed of, under any circumstances; for they are not dictated by self-interest or a mania for political omertà, but only by the good of the proletarian cause; for they are not a concession made to the unconfessed demands of the proletariat's ‘division’, and are instead the very content of the proletariat's unification in its emancipation effort. Trade union unity and united front are the logical development and not a covered-up form of repentance of the work of the Italian communists in constituting and strengthening the weapon of the revolutionary struggle, their party severely defined and delimited in doctrine, methods, and organisational discipline and aimed in the interest of the revolutionary unification of the proletariat's struggle against all deviations and errors.