The Unions in the Age of Imperialism and the Future Reemergence of the Class Union

Across history, the relationship between trade unions and the bourgeois state has passed through successive phases corresponding to the historically developed phase of capital. At first prohibited outright, then tolerated, the established unions were eventually subordinated once capitalism entered its imperialist phase. In this final phase which predominates today, most of the existing unions are no longer merely pressured from outside by the bourgeois state. They are structurally integrated into the state and into the management of production through a combination of legal regulation, material concessions, and the systematic corruption of leadership. This works to shift the existing unions function from defending workers against capital to negotiating for capital the terms in which labor is sold. Instead of class defensive organs, such unions merely become the human relations firm for the boss.

This degeneration is not due to mistaken leadership or individual betrayal. It flows from the centralization of the forces of the bourgeois class in its State, which is the political content of fascism, the true political nature of capitalism in its imperialist phase ("Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State". - Mussolini). As long as unions remain confined within bourgeois legality which sets the terms of struggle, to follow a collaborationist union line, they will subordinate workers’ interests to those of Capital.

Yet this historical degeneration is not irreversible in principle, nor does it negate the necessity of unions as defensive organs of the proletariat. Class unions, properly understood, are not permanent institutions carried intact across epochs. They reappear on a general scale only when objective conditions force the working class back into open, large-scale conflict.

When crisis sharpens exploitation, destroys reformist buffers, and renders collaboration untenable, workers are driven to recreate organs of immediate defense, often outside, against, or in rupture with the existing union apparatus. These organs typically arise directly from struggle itself, not from organizational blueprints. They are marked by mass participation, militant strike action, demands around wages and conditions, and hostility to state mediation. As capitalist contradictions intensify and growing sections of the proletariat are compelled onto the terrain of struggle simply to secure their means of existence, legality, arbitration, and social peace lose their material foundation. Only under such conditions can defensive organizations assume a genuinely class character and the resurgence of class unions on a wide scale become possible.

The failure of unions today to respond forcefully to the ongoing decline in workers’ wages and conditions is rooted less in the absence of pressure than in the continued ability of capitalism to stabilize a slow and steady deterioration without provoking sharper economic cataclysm. Since 2020, real wages have moved unevenly, emergency state intervention after the pandemic temporarily propped up incomes, while labor shortages allowed workers to demand nominally higher wages, but the inflation surge of 2021-2022 quickly erased those gains as housing, food, energy, and healthcare costs rose faster than wages. More recent modest real-wage improvements have not reversed cumulative losses, and living standards remain precarious. Yet this decline has been partially cushioned by monetary policy, residual savings, credit expansion, and until recently expanded social programs. These mechanisms function as indirect wages, allowing unions to manage discontent through contracts and negotiations rather than confrontation. As long as deterioration remains gradual and mediated, workers integrated into the regime unions and the political frameworks of the bourgeois are structurally incapable of breaking with passivity or mobilizing class-wide resistance.

What is the Class Union?

The re-emergence of class unions will not take the same form as the stable, industry-bound, legally recognized unions familiar today. Depending on how struggle unfolds in each national context, class unions may arise either through the reconquest of existing unions by workers united behind an insurgent class program overthrowing legalist reformist leaderships, or through the creation of entirely new organs outside and against the established apparatus.

When capitalism enters a phase of acute crisis and legality ceases to regulate class conflict, new proletarian defensive organs tend to arise as fluid, interconnected networks rather than fixed institutions. In such moments, class organization may take the form of workers’ assemblies, strike committees, inter-factory councils, and territorial bodies, linking workplaces, sectors, and regions without regard for juridical boundaries. These organs coordinate strikes, mutual defense, and material support across the class, functioning as a network of struggle that converges and consolidates only later, if conditions permit. This is not a regression to “disorganization,” but a higher form of proletarian association corresponding to the breakdown of contracts, legal representation, and industry segmentation.

Such networked class organs do not replace the revolutionary party, nor can they substitute for political organization. Their strength lies in their mass character and immediacy; their weakness in their instability and susceptibility to confusion once the immediate pressure eases. This is why the role of the party is indispensable, not to build unions by decree or to substitute itself for mass organs, but to provide programmatic continuity, to oppose any return to legal subordination and class collaboration, and to link economic struggle to the broader revolutionary movement while advocating for these emergent networks to grow into centralized and well organized international bodies of proletarian defense. Without the party, newly formed class unions risk oscillation, degeneration, or reabsorption once the balance of forces shifts.

Furthermore, only with the active participation of the party in the trade union movement, through its fellow workers, is it possible to wage a consistent, determined, and effective struggle within the existing unions, capable of accelerating the process of rebirth of the class-based unions.

The National Character of Union Integration

In Italy, due to the strength of the labor and communist movement after World War I, the bourgeoisie first had to destroy the class-based unions and replace them with state unions, known as “corporations.” This was done through fascism. But the democratic republic that emerged after fascism inherited the political content of fascism, namely the subjugation of the interests of the working class to those of national capitalism.

The CGIL, reborn in 1944, was formally free, but its subjugation to national capitalism – that is, its nature as a “regime union” – was guaranteed by its leadership by the Stalinized Communist Party (since 1926).

In other countries, due to the weaker strength of the labor and communist movement, existing unions became “regime unions” without the need for their destruction, as happened in Italy and also in Germany. (The part about CCNL and the organizational structure is not completely correct. We could have a talk about it. Anyway the problem is not an organizational issue, but a political one).

In Germany, union integration is achieved through a highly disciplined legal framework centered on Sozialpartnerschaft (social partnership). The Tarifvertragsgesetz (Collective Agreements Act) gives legally binding force to sectoral agreements negotiated by unions and employers’ associations on a national scale. Strikes are lawful only in support of collective bargaining and only after contracts expire. Political strikes and national general strikes are illegal. At the workplace level, the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz (Works Constitution Act) mandates Betriebsräte (works councils), which are legally required to cooperate with management in the “interest of the enterprise.” Unions thus bargain at the sector level, while works councils administer labor discipline at the firm level.

In France, union density is low, but preserved through state-managed representativity. The Labor Code (Code du travail) defines which unions are “representative” and allows the state to extend collective agreements signed by a minority of workers to entire sectors. The state plays a central role through national negotiations and legislative intervention, as seen in repeated pension reforms. General strikes are legal. Yet they are largely ritualized by the unions’ opportunistic leaderships, functioning as pressure mechanisms within negotiations.

In the United Kingdom, a mix of historical practices and later legal changes gradually drew unions into the orbit of the state. Early national and industry-wide bargaining encouraged unions to focus on maintaining stability within their sectors rather than acting independently against employers. After World War II, especially in the public sector, unions became involved in centralized wage talks with the government, further tying them to state decision-making. From the 1980s onward, strict labor laws, requiring strike ballots, banning secondary action, and allowing courts to penalize unions, forced unions to control their own members in order to avoid legal and financial consequences. Together, these developments turned unions into regulated participants in state-managed labor relations, limiting their ability to act freely and reinforcing their role as mediators rather than independent vehicles of worker struggle.

Outside Western Europe, the integration is more overt. In China, unions are direct organs of the party-state, and independent organization is illegal. In Russia, formal pluralism masks effective state supervision and repression. In all cases, unions persist as institutions precisely because they no longer function as organs of class struggle.

Union Integration in the U.S.

The United States followed a different path. There is no constitutional recognition of unions, no mandated representation, and no sectoral bargaining imposed by law. Instead, union integration occurred through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and its enforcement body, the National Labor Relations Board. This framework did not impose compulsory unionism in a corporatist sense; it conditioned union survival on legality. Certification granted exclusive representation rights only in exchange for strict compliance with procedural rules, arbitration mechanisms, and the suppression of generalized strike action.

This system was completed after the Second World War through the convergence of law, repression, and prosperity. The NLRB regime fixed unions within procedural limits and tied their existence to state recognition. The Red Scare eliminated militants and expelled communists from the unions. At the same time, imperialist super-profits and postwar reconstruction allowed capital to raise wages, stabilize employment, and expand social programs just enough to dull the hunger that drives mass class struggle. Collaboration did not appear as capitulation but as common sense.

Established unions, already moving toward reformism before the war, were completed as organs of bourgeois order in this period. Bound to contracts, integrated as appendages to the Democratic Party, and dependent on legality for their survival, they became mediators between labor and capital, managers of labor peace, and electoral machines. This integration was not imposed mechanically; it was embraced by union bosses who sold a bill of opportunism and class collaboration as the most effective path towards improvements in workers standards of living contra the hard fights promised by real class struggle. Militants in unions who refused this path, such as the IWW, which rejected state recognition and opposed the first world war, were crushed through raids, blacklists, and outright muder. The lesson was legality meant survival; independence meant persecution and death.

The NLRB did not outright abolish the possibility of class unions; it made that possibility socially costly and improbable in a moment of capital’s reconstruction. Operating outside the legal order remained possible, but only under conditions of desperation no longer present in the postwar period. The belly was filled, and the fist unclenched. The absence of class unions today reflects not merely bad leadership or mistaken tactics, but a historical balance of forces in which legality, repression, and material concessions dissolved proletarian independence. Defensive class organs reappear only when legality fails and collaboration no longer feeds. Yet even such conditions are insufficient without revolutionary leadership. Without the party, struggle remains episodic and defensive, easily reabsorbed once immediate pressures recede.

The Party and the Unions

It would be a fatal error to conclude that activity within existing unions in the United States should be abandoned in principle. Precisely because these organizations remain, despite their degeneration,one of the few spaces where workers are assembled as workers, they cannot be ignored. This intervention takes the form of building united fronts of class and combative forces: rank-and-file caucuses, oppositional groupings, and militant minorities resisting arbitration, no-strike clauses, and subordination to the political parties of the bosses while pushing for the extension of strikes, their unification above companies, categories, and territories, with the goal of achieving the capacity to deploy a general strike.

In certain moments, such forces may even temporarily capture leadership positions, not to administer labor peace, but to strengthen the workers’ struggle. The Communist Party fights within the labor and trade union movement to ensure that these achievements in terms of organizing the workers’ struggle become as strong and stable as possible.

The party can choose which unions to intervene in where there are multiple trade union organizations in a given category, sector, region, or company, and it does so according to the criterion of how amenable they are to the party’s trade union agenda. Where this is not possible, the party instructs workers to join the only existing union and fights within it to spread its trade union agenda.

The recent weakening and political attack on the NLRB by the bourgeois itself has already begun to erode the stability of the legal regime, opening space for broader, coordinated action that partially escapes regulatory control. Such moments signal not the revival of legal unionism, but its exhaustion.

The direction remains to push workers toward rejecting the framework of class collaboration and, where conditions permit, to forge new class unions rooted in direct struggle. But such organs cannot be created out of thin air. They will arise only through the convergence of mass action and revolutionary leadership. Until then, work within the unions remains a necessary, if constrained, front of the class struggle, and the preparation for its future rupture.