Lenin on “Reactionary” Trade Unions: Chapter Six of “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder

One of the most difficult questions facing any socialist movement is its relation to the trade unions. Modern day trade unionism is an integral part of the capitalist system. It functions to further the interests of working people within capitalism by trying to get their commodity (labour power) paid for at the highest price possible in relation to its value. This price can be measured in wages as well as in benefits wrested from the capitalist class by means of negotiations, demonstrations, work stoppages, sit-ins, and strikes. Under capitalism, unions qua unions are not revolutionary organisations. Some unions and union members are even reactionary. In the US, for example, about 40 per cent of unionised workers voted for the Republican reactionary Mitt Romney in the 2012 general election.

In chapter six of his work “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Lenin address himself to the relation Marxists should have with the capitalist trade union movement. He refers to the trade unions under capitalism as “reactionary” because he was writing in a revolutionary period in which socialist as well as capitalist oriented trade unions both existed. This is not that time, so I shall dispense with using the term “reactionary” except in direct quotations.

At the beginning of this chapter, Lenin notes that the ultra-left in Germany consider it very revolutionary to condemn the German unions as compromising, nationalistic, and counter-revolutionary and declare that no communists should have anything to do with them. Lenin gives reasons why he thinks these ideas are wrong and just a lot of “empty phrases.”

Lenin first makes remarks about the situation in Russia. He does so to remind us

what the purpose of this work is –i.e., to apply “to Western Europe whatever is universally practicable, significant and relevant in the history and present-day tactics of Bolshevism.” We may not find as many things today, ninety years later and in non-revolutionary conditions as people in Lenin’s day found but there still are some practicable ideas in Lenin’s work.

One such idea is that as the struggle today intensifies, Marxist parties will start to grow into larger and larger mass parties (as happened to the Bolsheviks after 1917) and many of the new members will be “careerists and charlatans” out to feather their own nests with no real dedication to the workers. Lenin says they only “deserve to be shot” – a la the Chinese Communist Party’s response to extremely corrupt officials. This may be a little too “proactive” for our sensibilities these days, but we should be aware of such people and kick them out of the movement and warn the workers about them. If conditions become more revolutionary we can expect the working people to handle these types as they see fit.

Another point made by Lenin is really not so relevant in the current situation, but should still be mentioned in case the working class finds itself exercising state power in the near future. That is the relation of the workers’ party to the institutions of the state. We must not look at the state as some kind of independent institution that all political parties share in and whose main departments are headed now by one party, now by another or later by a combination of parties. The bourgeoisie is an unnecessary parasitical exploiting class with no useful role to play in modern society except to oppress working people and exploit them. This class will no longer have a role to play in the political life of a state controlled by workers so no state institution will make any political or organisational decisions without consulting with and taking guidance from the workers’ party.

With respect to the trade unions, Lenin says that the party “relies directly” upon them. Trade unions are formally non-party organisations but the ‘party’ in Russia (and presumably in any future workers’ state) controlled the leadership positions in all the unions and the unions carried out the party line. Of the millions of workers in Russia at the time, only a relatively small number (the most class conscious) were members of the party. The trade unions are the vehicle by which the party keeps in touch with the working masses and keeps the class unified in its struggle to defeat the bourgeoisie and build socialism. Under capitalism, the unions are not typically led by leaders committed to building socialism and thus the unions function to uphold bourgeois rule despite their struggles for better pay and working conditions.

Marxists should be in the union movement and hopefully get themselves elected to leadership positions by the rank and file. Marxists union members should be carrying on socialist education and agitation and explaining to workers why they will never be secure in their lives, jobs, or pensions under capitalism.

There are two main positions Marxists should push that will differentiate them from the opportunistic and pragmatic labour leaders. The first is to fight against the view that bourgeois democracy is the only form of democracy that should be supported. Direct workers’ democracy, in whatever form it takes (workers’ councils, Soviets, etc.), should be the ideal. The second idea to fight for is that the union movement should be politically “independent.” In Russia that would have amounted to workers having unions independent from the political power that was running the state. In our pre-revolutionary situation, the unions should support and be affiliated with political parties having a pro-working class agenda. An intellectually mature working class will have its own political party or parties reflecting working class values and led by working people themselves. In the US, it is absolutely scandalous that forty per cent of unionised workers voted for the Republican candidate in the election.

However, it is not sufficient just to maintain contact with the workers and the people in general through the trade union movement. Lenin says that other types of non-party organisations have to be set up and institutions developed whose membership consists of workers and petty bourgeois elements who are not members of the party. In the West, these organisations have been given the uncharitable name of “front groups” by the bourgeoisie. Their real purpose, according to Lenin, is to allow the party to understand the “temper” of the people and “to come closer to them, meet their requirements” and “promote the best among them” to leadership positions. This is a thoroughly democratic way for the people and the party to interact for the common interests of the working class and its allies.

In Russia, all of this party work was carried out by means of the Soviets which Lenin

says are a form of democratic expression far superior to anything created by bourgeois democracy. While making these remarks Lenin also mentioned exactly what type of workers’ rule is involved in the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (DP). The DP is not a dictatorship of all the working people, or a dictatorship of workers and peasants. In Russia it is “a dictatorship of the urban proletariat” and the DP is meant to lead the agricultural population (a backward majority) towards supporting the rule of the urban working class. It has, as one of its main functions, to lead the mass of poor peasants and to wage “a systematic struggle against the rich, bourgeois, exploiting and profiteering peasantry, etc.” In the West of the 21st Century, such a DP has no existential basis and would not make a good role model for the type of workers’ democracy required to establish socialism.

In Lenin’s day such a DP was required. The Russian Marxists had arrived at these ideas after 25 years of intense struggle against the Russian feudalists and bourgeoisie and from their point of view the ultra-left antics of some German “Communists” and others of pitting “leaders” against the “masses” and advocating abandoning the trade union movement and also other forms of legal struggle sounded like “ridiculous and childish nonsense.”

Lenin admitted that the old bourgeois craft unions and distinctions between workers are a legacy left to socialism by capitalism and that the trade unions too are riddled with bourgeois attitudes and prejudices. But he said this is the material we have to work with and it will take years and years of work to develop the industrial unions of the future which will represent whole industries and lead to the abolition of the division of labour between people.

This goal is the goal of fully developed Communism and in 1920 only the first steps were being taken. Lenin warned that, “to attempt in practice, today, to anticipate this future result of a fully developed, fully comprehensive and mature communism would be like trying to teach higher mathematics to a child of four.” This warning was another in the species of not trying to skip stages and prematurely try to bring about remote future possibilities. Perhaps all the errors of Soviet collectivisation and also of the Maoist ‘Great Leap Forward’ could have been prevented had Lenin’s views been taken seriously.

Lenin here seems to reject the whole idea of “social engineering” and the idea of creating “the new Soviet man.” He says we have to build socialism with the type of people “bequeathed” to us by the capitalist system and not try to build it “with human material specially prepared by us.” If Lenin’s successors had followed this advice they would have been much more tolerant of the frailties of human nature and open to different ideas and notions of how to go about building on the foundations of socialism created under his direction. They could have avoided the paranoia and purges of the 1930s and 40s.

Reflecting again on the trade unions, Lenin remarks that they evolved out of the primitive isolation and disunity of the early working class and were an essential form of working class organisation that developed to unify and unite workers and give to them class consciousness. He adds that it is the Communist Party which is the highest form of working class organisation and which expresses the highest level of class consciousness and the trade union movement, born as it was under capitalist conditions, has revealed that compared to the revolutionary class conscious workers it has backward tendencies related to narrow minded craft interests.

Lenin uses the term “Communist” in relation to the Party in a way which leads me to think he didn’t really believe Communist parties had arrived at a stage of development where they deserved to be called “Communist.” He says “the Party will not merit the name until it learns to weld the leaders into one indivisible whole with the class and the masses.” I don’t think that ever happened in the Soviet Union but the reasons for this failure to weld an indivisible whole are too complex to discuss here.

At any rate, whatever the limitations displayed by the trade union movement, this movement was indispensable for the development of the working class and every capitalist country has produced trade unions which represent the interests of the working people in the economic contest with the capitalists. The unions will be necessary in the transfer of the management of the economic life of socialist countries to the working class and eventually to all working people. For this reason, Lenin calls the unions a “school of communism” that will be the training ground for workers in the building of socialism.

Nevertheless at the present time there are many backward attitudes and ideas floating about in the ranks of the trade unions and many of these attitudes will remain when working people eventually gain state power. How should we deal with these regressive attitudes, both now and in the future? Repression was not an option favoured by Lenin. He says these backward attitudes are “inevitable” considering the historical context in which the unions were formed. Not to understand this is to show complete ignorance of the role of the party. It would be “folly” to either evade this problem or try to “leap over it” [even a ‘great leap forward’ won’t work].

The role of the party is to educate and enlighten the backwardness that living under capitalism will inevitably imprint on large sections of the working people. The Party’s job is to win the support of the masses and to maintain and extend that support through education and example. Clearly, shooting people or sending them to a gulag was not a good way of eradicating backward attitudes and reactionary ideas. It will take many years of patient work and struggle to carry out that mission. Presumably the party that fails in this mission will not be around in the long run.

Lenin thinks the labour leadership in the more advanced countries of the West are more opportunist and play upon the credulity of the workers more so than those in backward Russia. This is because Russia was going through a real revolutionary awakening and the vast majority of the workers chose to follow the Bolshevik wing of the Marxist movement rather than the Menshevik wing which was opportunistic and social chauvinist. Lenin is particularly vitriolic when he refers to the Western labour leaders calling them “the craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened, covetous, and petty-bourgeois ‘labour aristocracy,’ imperialist-minded and imperialist-corrupted” leadership.

This type of leadership has to be fought against and completely driven out of the trades union movement. Marxist trade unionists still have that daunting task before them.

Taking all this into consideration, Lenin warns that the attempt of Marxists to assume political power “should not be made” until the majority of workers are firm supporters of the Party. This stage in the struggle will vary “in different countries and in different circumstances; it can be correctly gauged only by thoughtful, experienced and knowledgeable political leaders of the proletariat in each particular country.” It is still the case that the primary mission of Marxists to educate the working people and remind them that, while it is necessary to work in bourgeois trade unions, and to contest bourgeois elections (to counter the right wing and protect the interests of the working class) these forms of bourgeois democracy are not a solution to the problems of exploitation, unemployment, and preventing war, and must be replaced with real democratic institutions based on working class political power. The faux democracy of the West is part of the problem, not part of the solution leading to human liberation from capital.

It is of course the case, Lenin says, that Marxists uphold the interests of the working people against the opportunistic labour bureaucrats (“the ‘Labour Aristocracy'”). This is “an elementary and most self-evident truth.” The ultra-left’s error is to think that because some unions, or even most unions, in the West have a pro-capitalist leadership, Marxists should abandon the trade unions and create artificial organisations to compete with them. This is infantile. The only way to help the workers better understand what the issues are is for Marxists to work in the labour movement with them and expose those “agents of the bourgeoisie in the working class movement.” Lenin particularly likes Daniel De Leon’s (leader of the now moribund Socialist Labour Party) formulation: “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class.”

Lenin maintains that Marxists cannot leave the backward workers to the mercy of these capitalist labour leaders or under the influence of those workers Engels described as having “become completely bourgeois.” Lenin’s reference is to a letter Engels sent to Marx in 1858 in reference to British workers. I’m going to quote it because, with a few slight adjustments, Engels’ observations holds true for many workers today in the West.

Engels wrote to Marx from Manchester on October 7, 1858 that, in effect labour leadership could move to the right, because “the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie.

For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable. The only thing that would help here would be a few thoroughly bad years.”

The bad years are once again upon us, I hope we can make the best use of them.

With regard to the trade union movement, Lenin finds the ultra-left “Marxists” to be acting in a “frivolous” manner with regard to mass work. Their “ridiculous ‘theory'” of not wanting to work in the union movement betrays a fundamental principle of mass organization which is to work wherever the masses are to be found. Marxists have a duty to work in the union movement and to educate the workers by exposing the baseness and class collaborationist nature of the pro-capitalist labour leaders. The nature of this type of work has to be fine-tuned and take into consideration the specific features of the working class and its history in each country but it cannot be ignored.

It is particularly childish of the “Left opposition” to demand brand new unions be set up with but one requirement for membership: accepting the Soviet system and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin said that although the Communists have been running Soviet Russia for almost three years it would nonetheless be ruinous for them to make such a demand on Russian workers. “The task,” he says, facing Marxists “is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly ‘Left’ slogans.”

Not only should Marxists work in the trade union movement, but Lenin even favoured Marxists, following the idea of being where the masses were, joining the Black Hundreds (the Russian KKK of the time) so as to win the backward workers and peasants away from that organisation. I cannot, however, envision leftists in the US flocking to the Tea Party Movement to enlighten its working class members and win them away from the reactionary Republican party (however correct that tactic might be).

So much then for Lenin’s views on the relation that a Marxist party should have with the trade union movement. In my next article I will next examine his views about working in bourgeois parliaments.

Thomas Riggins is the associate editor of Political Affairs online and also writes for People’s World

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This post was written by Thomas Riggins