Trade Union Reformism

Published in Il Comunista #37, 9th of June, 1921
Translated by the Solar Collective
Paginated by the Revolutionary Technical Collective

The organ of the General Confederation of Labour raises a hymn to the Textile Federation's initiative to sell a huge stock of textiles at very low prices. It is a hymn to the new functions that the trade union thus takes on, pushing the economic contradictions of the present crisis out of the vicious circle of their insolubility, jumping over all the layers of intermediary parasitism between production and consumption, replacing the lazy apparatuses of cooperation and consumer companies set up by the even proletarian public administrations.

We do not wish to demonstrate here what is in everyone's conviction, nor what the Trade Union Battles themselves fully recognise, namely that this is an attempt that does not pretend to contain the discovery of a universal remedy to the present crisis and to offer a way out of it of general application to all branches of production and to all countries - an attempt whose success is not yet assured, whose yield and repercussions are still unknown, and to which a negative solution could also be given from a technical and economic point of view.

Nor do we want to lose ourselves in a critical judgement from a tactical point of view on the Milan initiative that has made so much undeserved noise: We think that at the bottom of it, more than the exquisitely counter-revolutionary mirage of contributing to placating the discontent of the masses by lubricating the machine of their exploitation a little, so that it may resume a normal and tolerable operation, there is a little demagogy and a vain pursuit of easy popularity, if not also of some other lavish lucre for the bonzes of bureaucratic reformism of proletarian organisations and administrations.

But a few things must be said to illustrate the ‘trade union’ complacency of Battaglie Sindacali which, airing, as it always does, the Jacobin poses of extremist trade unionism, speaks with compassion of the corporate and municipal or state deeds of reformism, which also imbues all confederal organisation.

The insidiousness and danger in this tendency to realise an intervention of the great trade union organisations of the proletariat in the course of the machine of capitalist production, especially industrial production, clothed in a certain apparent programmatic audacity that could seduce some revolutionaries, while it is gaining ground in the conviction of the more intelligent part of the bourgeoisie and especially of that part of the bourgeoisie that most modernly and nimbly intends to defend not so much the external forms of institutions as the fundamental principle of the freedom of private production, that insidiousness and that danger are no less and no different from those of the open governmental political collaboration advocated by the reformists.

The trade union - the subject would merit a vast treatment in relation to the entire communist evaluation of the problem, which we will only touch on here - the workers' trade union is continually at the crossroads between two dialectically contrasting functions which continually intersect through the travails of the proletarian struggle: that of prime mover of a conscience and of a practice of collective action which is an indispensable premise of the further revolutionary movement; and that of an element of compensation for the absurdities arising with unceasing events from the movement of the capitalist mechanism of production.

In a period that can be considered closed since the Great War, the trade union has fulfilled the second function - we do not mean to say that it has not fulfilled the first - with its activity in the field of wage and labour market regulation. It is useless to return to the demonstration that this activity offers a momentary way out for capitalism from the game of the laws that dominate it and which, if there were not the resistance association of the wage-earners, would push their standard of living to such a low level as to make it materially intolerable.

This work of compensation could not and has not definitively averted the crisis of capitalism, which has now entered its acute stage. However, while the revolutionary part of the working class, seeing the trade unions' function of regulating the labour market superseded, wants to transport them into the field of their primary activity, using them to the maximum degree for the intensification of the political preparation for the conquest of the proletarian dictatorship, reformism does not cease to rely on the proletariat's economic organisations to turn their function into a work of neutralising the consequences of the bourgeois crisis and reorganising economic life without revolutionary shocks and crises.

There is no reformist who does not recognise that the traditional trade union practice of resistance and the winning of improvements in wages and working conditions is totally insufficient to break out of the ‘vicious circle’ of which Trade Union Battles speaks. And so the direction of reformism's efforts is another, and resolves itself in the attempt to entrust working class organisations with a broader task and a function that is more deeply intertwined with the production mechanism. They propose that the trade unions invest themselves not only with the way in which wage earners are compensated for their work, but with the administration of the companies in which they participate, with the possibilities of buying and selling raw materials and products, and under what conditions.

This is how the famous problem of workers' control over the production and management of capitalist enterprises arises - and it arises by force of circumstance, not just because of some diabolical plan of the reformists. A problem which, from the revolutionary point of view and by the Communist International, is considered only as a realisation that will succeed the conquest of political power and will be a start to the socialisation of the enterprises by the workers' state, as a postulate whose impossibility must be demonstrated within the framework of the capitalist system.

Reformism, i.e. the most intelligent and evolved form of thinking and defending the preservation of capitalist forms, wants to take over this tendency in order to make it yet another means of compensating for the bourgeois crisis. It exalts the trade union's entry into these new functions: to discuss and conclude with the industrialist the criteria of administration of the productive enterprise, to concern itself in agreement with it with the supply of raw materials and the disposal of products.

Naturally, this is presented as a ‘conquest’ of the working class, a ‘demolition’ of capitalist privileges and a supposed rapprochement to socialism. But even the right to trade union association was seen a few decades ago as a mortal wound to capitalist privilege, and the bourgeoisie fiercely contested it to the proletariat, but recognised it when it saw that there was no other way to stop the masses' movement turning to political and revolutionary conquests that would take everything from them.

The willing part of the bourgeoisie attempts to do the same with the principle of control. Implemented this, the arbitrariness of the landlord would theoretically diminish; but, in the hope of the bourgeois and social-democratic counter-revolutionaries, new terms of equilibrium would be found in the mechanism of private production and the life of capitalism would be prolonged by avoiding the revolutionary dissolution of the crisis provoked by the war.

In the direct contract concerning, for example, the sale of products, the capitalists demonstrate their good will to renounce part of the profit (an apparent renunciation because they come to this in the belief that it would be greater damage to their capital than the dynamic capacity of their expensive plants to perform) by fixing the criteria of sale in agreement with the trade union. This ‘opens up new horizons’ and this leads to the complacency of the trade union reformism of the confederalists, but actually broadens the horizons of capitalism. In union intervention in this administrative matter, the ‘master’ cedes something to the workers, but the principle of the autonomy of private companies survives intact.

This fundamental principle of capitalism will never be undermined, but it can be preserved from certain of its intimate reasons for disintegration, by state reformism, by the reformism of political collaboration, which awaits from the bourgeois state the regulation and curbing of the excessive greed of capitalist privilege.

The same is true, despite the brighter and more modern colours in which it drapes itself, for ‘trade union’ reformism, a welcome advisor to industrial fishermen in their moments of embarrassment.

Communists fight political and economic collaboration, in state and company, between the opposing classes. Communists warn the proletariat that state control of capitalist enterprises is a turlupinage, just as control offered and won by trade union organs is a turlupinage.

For the proletariat to control and regulate the problems of its economic and social life there is only one way: the conquest of political power with the weapons of insurrection. For it is only on such a basis that the conditions are created for the suppression of the system of private and autonomous production, the source of today's harshness and irremediable crisis, in order to replace it with socialist production.