The following remarks were prepared by Party comrades working within the Class Struggle Action Network, for a coordination meeting of the “For a Fighting Workers Movement” which met to discuss various questions regarding the workers movement in the United States.

What is the state of the current workers movement?

This is not a simple or easy question to answer. To evaluate the state of the workers movement today we must consider 1) it’s development in relationship to the capitalist economy, its state and political parties over the course of history 2) the unique characteristic of the economic struggle in the development of the larger struggle for the emancipation of the proletarian class. In short the relationship between the unions, the workers defensive struggle and the revolutionary class political party.

The Historic Course of the Class Struggle

The union movement has always developed in fits and starts, encountering periods of great growth, matched with periods of stagnation and regression to the point of near total extinction. Yet as Marx notes in the Communist Manifesto, the continual advancement of communications technologies under capitalism, alongside the ever intensifying crisis of capitalist economy guarantee the periodic explosive reemergence of the workers' defensive struggle and of its organization in ever more advanced and centralized forms.

The union movement achieved its most advanced form during the revolutionary wave of the last century when class unions across the world coalesced around the first few congresses of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern). Even if today we have only small sprouts of combative class unionism, historical experience points to a future reemergence of class unions that will not only explode beyond the confines of what currently seems possible, but exceed their predecessors in their organizational sophistication and class combativity.

The Three Historic Phases: illegalization, Toleration, Subordination

We can broadly characterize the union movement in the U.S. and across the world as moving through three successive historical phases: that of illegality, tolerance, and today subordination. Likewise we can make a distinction between different types of unions which emerged alongside the historical maturation of productive forces in capitalist economy.

The early craft unions emerged out of the guild structures in the period of manufacture, the union federations followed, linking together the fragmentory craft unions into the general trade union movement. Industrial unions later exploded onto the scene and began to organize large sections of unskilled industrial workers in the late nineteenth century, as industrial production began to fully dominate the economy. As these unions began to clash with industrial capital, industrial capital began its merger with finance capital. The developed union movement soon had to confront capital in its imperialist stage which simultaneously required labor peace to ensure wartime production, and accrued enough superprofits to develop national labor aristocracies. The labor movement would subsequently experience a major split between the class unionist wing and the wing of class-collaborationist “yellow unionism”.

The historical experiences of this confirms a basic reality, that the level of combativity of the working class masses is tied to the course of the capitalist economy. The union movement, experienced its apex of militancy and organization during the revolutionary crisis in which a global clash of the working class against the capitalist class occurred wherein the working class was defeated. The current situation in the union movement is thus based on a balance of class forces wherein the capitalist state with its regime union apparatus rules totally hegemonic. Thus only a generalized crisis of capital can give birth to a renewed class movement; however, this movement will itself be a development on the past so long as it is led by its revolutionary class party which can hand down the lessons of struggle.

During the first phase of the union movement, early unions emerged from the breakdown of the old guild and artisan system as industrial capitalism proletarianized masses of workers who could no longer survive as independent producers. These first unions remained on narrow craft union lines and tended towards monopolistic characteristics of a minority of skilled workers defending against unemployment by controlling hiring. The National Labor Union attempted to move beyond this narrow organization and unite workers on a national basis around demands such as the eight-hour day. Under William H. Sylvis, who corresponded with Karl Marx and the International Workingmen's Association, the NLU emphasized racial unity and and a focus on economic defense organization. However, after Sylvis’s death the movement increasingly drifted toward electoral reformism and alliances with bourgeois political currents such as the Greenback Party contributing to its collapse during the crisis of the 1870s.

The period also came to be defined in the U.S. by the Open Shop movement which was an employer-led campaign that sought to keep workplaces free from union control and prevent workers from being required to join a union as a condition of employment. Through the Open Shop movement, American employers united around the principle that unions should neither be recognized nor negotiated with, seeking instead to prevent their establishment altogether. This coordinated effort to destroy independent worker organizations produced some of the most violent labor conflicts in U.S. history, including the Ludlow Massacre, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Homestead Strike, and the Pullman Strike.

The second phase, that of tolerance, developed as capitalism expanded and increasingly required stable mechanisms for regulating labor relations and containing class struggle. Out of the defeats and repression following events such as the Haymarket affair emerged the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers. Despite it’s future problems, the AFL initially represented an advancement from the old Knights of Labor. The AFL refused affiliation with any political parties, organizing itself as an exclusively working class organ of defense centering wage and workplace conditions struggles. Yet, emerging as it did in a period where there was no clear international Marxist party center, it inevitably drifted towards opportunism. Over time it increasingly consolidated around conservative craft unionism, collective bargaining, and collaboration with employers and the state while excluding large sections of the immigrant industrial working class. Worker unions such as the Western Federation of Miners, American Railway Union, American Labor Union, United Metal Workers, United Brotherhood of Railway Employees, frustrated with the increasingly conservative direction of the AFL eventually sought to create a new class pole for the labor movement to regroup around, forming the Industrial Workers of the World. As the AFL leadership tied itself directly to the capitalist state and the Democratic Party through labor-management collaboration and wartime production boards, the IWW faced brutal repression, imprisonment, and destruction. The capitalist class thus began to broker deals tolerating some unions that bent the knee and demonstrated subordination, while violently suppressing those who continued to put forward a real program of class defense.

The final phase, subordination, fully developed during the twentieth century amid the global counter-revolution. The Wagner Act of 1935 and the subsequent system of labor boards, certification elections, collective-bargaining contracts, and no-strike clauses progressively transformed the established unions from relatively autonomous organs of workers' economic defense into institutionalised regime unions integrated into the legal apparatus of the capitalist state. Historical developments such as the National Labor Relations Board framework, wartime no-strike pledges, and the postwar contract system are examples of how the established unions became institutional mediators of the sale of labor power, helping stabilize capitalist production by channeling class struggle into legally regulated forms compatible with the needs of national capital.

The Post-War Crisis and Labor Notes Origins

By the late 1960s and 1970s, as the economic crisis of that period exploded and ended the post-war prosperity, many of the major American unions such as the United Auto Workers and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters had consolidated into massive institutions controlled by small cliques of boss-linked leaders, where rank-and-file workers often had little direct control over contract bargaining and in most cases could not even meaningfully vote on contracts before implementation.

Yet the deepening economic crisis of the 1970s, and a slew of contracts bargained by leadership offering paltry wages, produced a wave of rank-and-file rebellion expressed through wildcat strikes such as the U.S. Postal Strike of 1970 and repeated Teamsters wildcats, where workers acted outside official union channels and in defiance of both employers and boss-linked union leaderships as workers demanded real raises in the face of declining living standards.

These struggles ultimately did not develop into a real overhaul of the established unions, nor to the foundation of new grassroots unions, but to a new labor-left reform current that sought to democratize the unions and challenge entrenched leadership, largely through pressure campaigns, electoral reform slates, and closer alignment with liberal Democratic politics rather than through a break with the legal framework of labor regulation itself.

Thus the militant energies of the class were diverted away from consolidating themselves around a union program that coherently embraced an independent class orientation and instead coalesced around a reformist grassroots wing of labor left that while presenting itself as progressive nonetheless reproduces many of the same basic errors of class collaboration that extend back to the roots of the yellow unionist tendency.

The Current State of the Labor Movement

Today, the labor movement remains shackled to the edifice of the regime union. While attempts are made by small groups to revitalize the I.W.W. it remains highly influenced by opportunist currents, fragmented and lacking mass energy. While disillusionment with the established unions and the new found “left” leadership in recent years is growing, the overall organization, fighting capacity and leverage of the class has not grown significantly, contained as it is within the established union framework.

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 smashing the regime union apparatus in full, 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 spontaneous thrusts must develop into well organized and centralized defensive organs of the class which can coalesce the fighting energies into well executed and combative generalized strike actions sufficient to strike at the heart of the enormous monopoly enterprises of modern day capitalism.

What is necessary now is to develop nuclei and prefigurative structures of the future class union movement. Uniting the existing grass roots class formations into a united front from below, under a united program of combative class unionism.

What are the main issues within the union?

Boss Linked Leaders, The Labor Aristocracy and the Regime Unions

First let us establish the fact that today society is divided between two classes: the proletarian and the bourgeois. There is not a separate “class of bureaucrats", which have a fundamentally unique class orientation from these two classes, but instead a layer of opportunist boss-linked leaders who run the unions serving the employers interests.

Boss-linked leaders may be either paid union staffers, democratically elected leadership who in turn act as employers within the regime union firms or even cronyistic cliques within the union membership who tie themselves to the boss and see themselves as comanageing the workplace. The manner in which this dynamic operates is different in each union. The problem is not just bureaucrats and “staffers”, unions having paid staff is not itself a problem. The issue lies in how established leadership ties itself to the boss, coaches workers into seeing a common interest in keeping the enterprise successful, while compelling workers to remain hitched to established labor union law, habituating generations to these fundamentally class collaborationist practices, creating a vision of the union that is restrained to a pathetic shell of cretinistic boot-licking. The problem is not an imagined third class of "bureaucratic" interlocutors holding the unions hostage, nor is it merely the structure of the unions or its particular decision making method.

Keep in mind that the boss-linked leadership are often elected into power by the workers not merely due to the lack of cultural or theoretical development of the masses, not do to a lack of courageous individuals willing to break the mold, but due to the fact that many of these workers find their program the most agreeable as prevailing conditions don’t compel them to feel required to take more drastic actions in mass as of yet. This is made possible because of the material realities of the imperialist system which through the hyper-exploitation of workers in other nations, the capitalist class is able to “share” a chunk of its profit to pay off a large swath of the workers, creating a wide aristocratic layer by providing relatively better wages for a small group while ruthlessly exploiting the masses.

It is the wage differential that is essential in the labor aristocratic dynamic that keeps workers divided between the haves and the have nots. All American workers know they get paid better than their immigrant counterparts, and the immigrant comes here because they know they will be paid better than their fellows at home, the material reality and existence of the labor aristocracy is seen and felt by all workers but completely invisible to the professed leaders in the unions and among the opportunist parties. Thus the reality is that many workers, without the presence of a viable and strong class union, see their immediate material interests best served by these programs of class collaboration and they will only revolt when they see the potential benefits of risking rebellion outweigh those of the false promises of opportunism. Yet we can rest assured that crisis ridden capitalism will guarantee conditions for such a revolt will certainly arise in the future.

Attempts at addressing the union issue on the basis of “democracy”, merely aims to change a decision making process. Yet as we have shown, such alternation means nothing if the overall objective economic and social conditions have not been changed. Such methods of altering the “form” of the unions cannot alone restore their class content; they only reconfigure what is already there. There is not a greater level of worker militancy than meets the eye waiting to be unlocked and unleashed, simmering just below the surface. Prevailing objective economic conditions inform the subjective realities of the class. This is why the union democracy movement is the movement of liberal reformism, because it presents the working class’s problem as a problem with the form of decision making in the unions. If the form can merely be reformed to open up the unions to greater worker participation then surely through democracy the workers movement will be saved. For the reformers, the form must be fixed first, then later we can get to the content. They quietly tell us to rest assured they agree on the point of “anti-capitalism” but they are taking the reasonable route and us the ideologues are reckless dogmatists. All that is needed is the proper activist technique, the right amount of zeroing in “meeting workers where they are at” (really meaning to lower themselves to the lowest common denominator) and carefully step by step moving them incrementally to ever greater degrees of carefully charted action escalations. All the workers movement needs are more training and workshops, to skill itself up. In the meantime we shouldn’t scare workers with words such as “capitalism” or “class”.

To change the form, they must never openly touch the content of the true violent nature of capitalist state and the gun it holds at the head of the workers. All that scary talk won’t win any new adherents, because to look at the reality of the problem would be to burst a bubble in all the bravado and solutionering. To solve this issue they smartly choose to petition and seek grounds of reasonable collaboration with their supposed enemy who they implicitly recognize they cannot beat in a real struggle. The unbridgeable chasm between the interests of the workers and the bosses? No problem, so long as they do not alienate their coalitional partners in the petit-bourgeosis.

Yellow unionism, sets as its goal achieving economic equality with the class of its exploiters. The forces of class unionism on the other hand recognized the fundamentally incompatible interests of the working class and the employers and that ultimately it is a historic struggle of forces which must result in the victory of one class and the extinction of the other.

The elements of yellow unionism however; would work to converge the social power of opportunism with the coercive power of the capitalist state, forming the basis of what we call the “regime union” in the post-war order, which in the age of imperialism have become the hegemonic form of union across the world.

Regime unions, despite their formal organization as unions, nonetheless no longer function as authentic defensive organs of the working class. Instead in practice they operate as the human relations branch of capitalist enterprises negotiating the sale of labor power for the firms through the collective bargaining framework, labor-boss workplace comanagement agreements, formal grievance procedures, purging of communist leadership and most importantly the regulation and taming of strike conduct.

Saturated and saddled with navigating the rules and regulations of the capitalist state, pressured to conform to its edicts by coercive and conformist forces on all sides, formal top down conquest of such organs via electoral and tactical maneuvers of small groups of militants within the unions must be ruled out as hopeless. Thus only a mass movement of workers from the bottom up which clashes with the established leaders and completely smashes the regime union's internal life has any potential of turning these organs back to useful ends for the class.

Nonetheless, the regime union offers one thing of value, membership remains exclusive to workers and workers alone, thus we cannot surrender agitation within open forums and meetings of such organizations as a means of advocating for the independent class organization of workers. As it is workers at the base who constitute the sole membership of even the regime unions, the workers still have the potential to reorganize themselves, abandoning their false leaders and shedding their conformism to the union regulatory apparatus which has habituated them to the narrow program of demoralization and class defeatism when the proper objective conditions arise.

Why Aggressive Wage and Reduction of Work Day Demands are Critical

Let’s reaffirm a basic fact, in capitalist society workers must sell their labor power in exchange for a wage in order to obtain the basic necessities of life or starve. Workers join unions primarily out of an economic self-interest, in order to defend their wages and working conditions. This self-interest transforms into a sense of class as the workers enter into conflict with the employer and as social solidarity arises.

In capitalist society workers encounter each other as individual sellers of their alienated labor power on the “labor market”. As such, workers are not only exploited by the bosses but also put into direct economic competition with one another to obtain the highest paying jobs, achieve “job security” against layoffs, etc.

As workers face declining conditions, the capitalists promise the dominant ethnic, gender and racial groups privileges and material stability if it joins it in stepping on the neck of its fellow workers. Yet these economic conditions are the same conditions which can inversely lead to masses of workers unifying around their shared economic interest against the class of exploiters. This is why it is critical to combat social chauvinism with aggressive wage demands that elevate all workers are prioritized by worker militants.

The program of right opportunism cannot be combated by using the familiar vocabulary of liberal bourgeois moral outrages but by exposing the real shared material economic interest between all workers. Such methods were first by the First International when anti-immigrant waves spread through the U.S. in the late 1800’s, it worked to create a common wage demand between continental workers immigrating to the U.S. and domestic American workers. These sorts of methods also underwrote the fight for the 8 hour work day which brought together the American and diverse immigrant groups in the late nineteenth century into a common fight.