The Trade Unions and the ICFI's Mistakes

The Trade Unions and the ICFI's Mistakes

(Note: This 2024 Edit has been subject to various small edits.)

The modern ICFI's understanding of the trade unions, rooted to a great extent in the analysis presented in, among other key texts, Globalization and the International Working Class, an important contribution to Marxist theory in that it has exposed the material basis for the defeats suffered by the trade unions, is however not without its flaws. The binary distinction introduced by the ICFIs analysis - trade unions as workers organizations in an earlier period, and non-workers organizations in the present - is undialectical. It is undialectical because it does not accurately reflect reality and leads to incorrect conclusions in practice. 

What this categorization misses is a more thorough understanding of the unity of opposites within the unions. A reading of the text shows that a certain unity of opposites is not unnoticed by the ICFI, for example: The unions are described as "handing back to the employers gains won by previous generations." This contradiction is reflected in the major conflict between the bureaucracy and the rank and file. But if the unions are handing back gains, that means there are still some gains preserved within the unions that are left to be handed over.  Even in a typically corrupt union for example, the union can still serve as an obstacle to employees being terminated at will. This is part of the reason why, despite being "tools of management," employers still spend millions of dollars to prevent their workers from joining them.  

Further, as the text notes, the picture within the trade unions in the earlier parts of the 20th century is not a rosy and romantic one. To the extent that the trade unions were "workers organizations," they generally remained antagonistic to "the class struggle and to social revolution."  Correspondingly, this manifested itself in the struggle between the bureaucracy and the rank and file. This struggle then is not so new. It would perhaps be more accurate then to describe the trade unions, as mere trade unions, of a previous period as "bourgeois workers organizations." Working class in form - as an organization of workers as workers - with a bourgeois content, mere trade unionism, which Lenin called the "bourgeois consciousness" of the working class. This reflects more accurately, as we shall attempt to point towards, the contradictions inherent in the trade union form. For the ICFI, and Steiner and Brenner we might add, the content of the trade unions is "the working class membership" (content, it appears, is interpreted quite mechanically.) Despite and even because of all of this, the Trotskyists of the past never rejected union work.

Clearly, the modern trade unions, rooted in the nation-state, have experienced a qualitative degeneration as a result of globalization. How did this happen? Let us turn, again, to a significant work of the ICFI on the trade unions: David North's Why are Trade Unions hostile to socialism?. In this work, North purports to analyze the relationship between the form and content of trade unionism...

Are there any other significant Marxist texts addressing a relationship between form and content? There are! Trotsky, in his The Revolution Betrayed, masterfully analyzed the contradiction between the socialist forms of property in the Soviet Union and their non-socialist content owing to their fatal circumscription by low level of productive forces and the isolation of the revolution. 

(It is worth mentioning here that North, in his magnum opus, The Heritage We Defend, makes the mistake of saying that Trotsky "always rejected" that "socialist property forms existed inside the USSR." This is easy enough to disprove by simply reading Trotsky (and Lenin): "Itself born of the contradictions between his world productive forces and capitalist forms of property, the October revolution produced in its turn a contradiction between low national productive forces and socialist forms of property." )

In Trotsky's analysis of this contradiction between form and content, it is not the form which threatens to overwhelm the content, but rather the deficient content which threatens to overwhelm the form. This prediction was realized with the liquidation of the USSR. From a workers' state, the USSR became a capitalist state. North, however, does not suggest that the form of the trade union has fundamentally changed. Instead, for North, it is the trade union form itself that is ultimately responsible for the modern, degenerated state of the unions. If we permit ourselves to counterpose Trotsky to North in this way (though there are certainly limits to this formal procedure), North's exposition of the relationship between form and content seems confused, muddled and upside down. 

This diversion into philosophy may seem unnecessary, but a wrong theory can lead to first class historical blunders. This can be seen in the WSWS' gloating over failed unionization attempts, its abstentionism from any struggles to unionize or build new unions, and even in calling for workers to "Vote ‘No’ to the UFCW-backed union at Alabama Amazon facility!"[1] These antics have led to Trotskyists being subject to accusations of being "scabs" and have isolated us from sections of the working class. The modern unions and their program of mere trade unionism, fatally circumscribed by nationalism, may have experienced a qualitative degeneration, but the workers involved in unionization efforts do not consider themselves either dead or degenerated, and quite rightly so. 

It is argued that the presence of the unions will strangle the class struggle. This argument reflects a skepticism in the ability of the working class to resist the bureaucracy. In fact, the ICFI has had the most success with its campaigns for rank-and-file committees amongst unionized, rather than non-union workers. Let us return to theory and try to get our bearings... 

The astute reader will notice that our illustration of Trotsky's thought above is insufficient. The Soviet Union, lacking in socialist content, did not immediately transition from a workers state resting on socialist property forms into a capitalist state resting on bourgeois foundations. The "non-socialist content" degenerated quantitatively and qualitatively over time, and this was mirrored in qualitative changes in the state form in which the socialist property forms were embedded. From a genuine workers state, the Soviet Union changed form, and degenerated into what is known to Trotskyists as a Degenerated Workers State.

In response to this change, and to preserve and advance on the gains (socialist forms of property) on which the Stalinist bureaucracy parasitically based itself, Trotsky came to propose a program not of reform, but a program of political revolution, of violent rebellion against and overthrow of the bureaucratic caste. Similarly, the ICFI proposes a rebellion by rank and file union members to overthrow the degenerate, nationalist trade union bureaucracies. We agree with this. However, Trotsky never failed to defend the Soviet Union, nor to recognize the significance of its extension and the "bureaucratic impulse" this could provide. As Trotsky noted: "A revolutionary party which failed to notice this impulse in time and refused to utilize it would be fit for nothing but the ash can."

Returning then to our earlier categorization of the unions as "bourgeois workers' organizations," what needs to be added? The modern unions, fatally circumscribed by the nation-state, have experienced a degeneration. This degeneration affects the content of the trade union, trade unionism itself - the fight to merely attain the best rate possible for labor power - which remains fundamentally bourgeois but which, restricted to the national labor market in conditions of globalized production, leads to a qualitatively intensified separation of interests between the bureaucracy and the rank-and-file. However, as the upswing in unionization efforts and increasingly positive opinion polling show, history is not done with the union form so much as its nationalist restriction. For these reasons we might categorize the modern unions as "degenerated bourgeois workers organizations." The implications of this category in light of our analogy (this should be understood as highly provisional and makeshift, but sufficient for conveying our political tasks) to Trotsky's categorization of the Soviet Union as a Degenerated Workers State, should be obvious to the educated reader.

The call for workers to form "rank-and-file committees" is not new, and has a long history within the Trotskyist movement, as does ruthless criticism of the union bureaucracy (see, for example, The Bulletin.) However, it is precisely within the unions, where they are most needed to defend the remaining gains preserved within the unions against the nationalist bureaucracy, that the necessary point of building rank-and-file committees is most sharply posed. This is precisely the point at which the ICFI tells us to abandon ship - vote no to unionization attempts, do not join unions, and abstain from any efforts to unionize and build new unions! (Further, the possibilities of international trade unionism must be addressed.) In this way the movement has risked "missing the boat" of history. In any case the fight, as ever, remains to impart to the struggles of the workers and their organizations a revolutionary and political content and to fight whenever necessary for new organizations opposed to and against the compromises of all nationalist, reformist etc. bureaucracy.