A. Lozovsky
Today, the capitalist world has entered into a new phase in its development. Not only is the legacy of the war still with us, but its effects are felt more strongly every day. The contradictions that were already tearing apart contemporary society during the war have sharpened, and are developing along two different lines: on the one hand national imperialism, on the other, proletarian internationalism.
The major contradictions are expressed in the continuing struggle between the victors, first for the greatest exploitation of the vanquished, and then for the subjugation of the world: the Americans arm themselves against Japan, the Japanese against America, and the struggle centres on the Pacific Ocean. Who will be master of the Pacific, who will control the shores of this vast ocean? This is the bone of contention between the ruling classes of these two countries. On the European continent, the rivalry between France and England grows daily. France is equipping itself with vassals in order to maintain its rapacious control of the German people without the aid of England. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and the Baltic states are forced to act as the watch dogs of the French financiers, heightening the fears of the English bourgeoisie. England, having taken control of almost all of Turkey, as well as the sea lanes to India, has at the same time lost its stable control of India. While the revolutionary movement is developing in that country, England’s close neighbour, Ireland, continues its struggle for freedom. If we add to this the desire of Australia, Canada and South Africa for real independence from the metropolitan power, we have an understanding of all the contradictions presently expressing themselves in a concentrated form within the British Empire.
Russia, which used to be the world market’s biggest client, made an impact on the whole world when it tore away from the international system of trade. The surge in industrial expansion, foreseen just after the war, ended rapidly. Commercial markets were blocked, wholesale prices declined, and retail prices stagnated. The economy came to a standstill, numerous financial and industrial firms collapsed, and a prolonged crisis occurred, revealing with stark clarity the essential characteristics of the social struggle. The economic quagmire has resulted in reduced production and a general, united offensive by Capital against Labour. Throughout the world, the employers are trying hard to recover by throwing workers into the street, reducing wages and lengthening the work day, etc. The majority of workers have followed their reformist leaders, counting on peaceful evolution, on the slow but gradual increase in wages, on the gradual improvement in the conditions of work and on the social legislation elaborated by the League of Nations. This mass of workers, diverted from violent action by their hope for socialization and faith in the effectiveness of class collaboration, now find themselves facing the offensive tactics of the capitalist class and the systematic desertion of those who had raised their hopes for the fertile valleys of the promised land.
In these conditions, it is natural that the foremost questions on the agenda concern methods of struggle; how to push back the capitalists’ attack and organize the proletarian counter-attack. We must adapt our methods of struggle to the conditions of our time and create both offensive and defensive forms, keeping in mind the experience gained over the last few years. We must systematize the lessons of the revolutionary and the workers’ movement during the last decade. After serious study of this experience, and weighing all that we have learned from the past and present, we must introduce new forms and methods of combat. That new forms and methods of struggle are vitally needed is a fact not likely to be disputed by anyone. The complete bankruptcy of the old labour unions, their inability to carry on the forward march, as well as their total failure even to maintain previously gained positions, is glaring proof of the ineffectiveness of their methods of struggle. As a matter of fact, we cannot really talk of struggle, since all we have seen for the last few years is the leaders hobnobbing with the employers. All important strikes with reformists at their head broke out against the wishes of those gentlemen. Any revolutionary action was taken against their will. And each time the mass of workers were sure that negotiations were simply meant to stall things, and that the employers were using bipartite committees or similar bodies to try to divert the workers from gaining their main demands, they had to drag their leaders along in their wake. The new period, new conditions of struggle, and the unprecedented sharpness of social conflicts, call for new methods of struggle and a new way of approaching all the critical questions of the workers’ movement.
This development in the social struggle is provoking a muffled rumble of discontent in the working class, disturbances, and an explosion of protests. It is obvious that the old forms and methods of struggle are useless. Life is the best teacher, and life has shown that reformism springs not from concern for the interests of the working class, but rather for those of bourgeois society. Two years of discussions about socialization did not hurt the bourgeoisie at all, but they did serve to confuse the workers. Today even the most stupid of German reformists understands that two years of chit-chat about socializing the means of production and exchange have produced nothing. The bourgeoisie feels stronger than it did just after the war; from being on the defensive and gradually building up its forces, it has gone on the offensive.
What then is reformism’s essential weakness and error? Why is it a bankrupt line? Why have all the laborious discussions by the French CGT, the German Union Federation or the Amsterdam International, undertaken nationally and internationally, produced nothing? At present, even the German labour leaders are forced to remark on the unprecedented effrontery of the bourgeoisie’s offensive. Messrs. Jouhaux and Merrheim are lamenting the disloyalty of the French capitalists, who are lowering wages and sabotaging the law that guarantees the 8-hour day. The English trade-unionists as well now admit that the bourgeoisie thinks only of its own interests and laughs at those of the working class. These champions of collaboration are now forced to admit that their line has failed. Why? Because they based their tactics on discussions by the leadership in the name of the masses and not on direct action by the masses against the employers. The employers were not faced with a revolutionary organization overflowing with class hatred, but with a peaceful group seeking reforms through opportunist politics. They understood that this kind of organization did not threaten their interests, and that if under certain circumstances it was necessary to make some concessions, it would be easy later to take them back. Reformists try to lead the masses away from direct action. Our task is to make the action of the masses the cornerstone of our activity. This is only possible if we build our tactics on direct action by the masses.
What is direct action? By direct action we mean all revolutionary actions of the workers or their organizations, when they stand up as a class to the bourgeoisie, whether it be against one of its isolated detachments or the whole of the bourgeois state. Strikes, demonstrations, occupations of mills and factories, boycotts, the organization of strike squads and fighting detachments, hunting strikebreakers, the defacto imposition of workers’ control, armed insurrection; these are all forms of direct action. However, we should not insist, as the anarchists do, that immediate action is the only form of revolutionary action open to unions and parties. This is not so. The dominant viewpoint among the anarchists is still that only immediate action is worthy of attention, that parliamentary struggle is essentially opportunistic and bourgeois, that it is necessary every day to incite the working class to repeated strikes because strikes are useful regardless of their results. This point of view is profoundly erroneous and harmful. Direct action does not exclude parliamentary struggle, it is the basis for it. Of course, we are not talking about parliamentary struggle as understood and practised by the reformists and social-patriots, whose goal is to be equal to other political parties. This is no longer parliamentary struggle but an orgy of parliamentary verbiage; revolutionary workers must oppose this charlatanism violently and categorically. The task of the representatives of revolutionary organizations wherever they are, including in the bourgeois parliament, is to watch every step of their class enemies, to constantly expose them, to advance the consciousness of the masses by showing them the facts in their true light, to not let a single political act that exposes the dominant classes and the governments escape criticism. It is to brand each one of their acts and make parliament a rostrum for revolutionary speeches, not for the bleating of the reformists heard throughout the war and that we still hear today. Liebknecht’s parliamentary speeches, his revelations, are direct action on the same level as other revolutionary acts. It is also direct action to publish a revolutionary newspaper that attentively follows the life of the masses, generalizes their struggle and concentrates the attention of the lowly not on collaboration with the dominant classes, but on the overthrow of the capitalist system.
Revolutionary direct action is defined less by its form than by its content. A demonstration is in itself a direct action, but whether or not it is a revolutionary class action depends on its goals. As everyone knows, there are workers’ demonstrations that are nationalist in nature. During the last war, the workers of France, England, Germany, Austria, etc. organized demonstrations in honour of military victories on numerous occasions. Can we call these demonstrations direct actions? Yes, in the sense that they constituted direct actions against international proletarian solidarity, for the duping of the working class, and in support of the bourgeoisie. There can be demonstrations that do not contain a single speck of revolutionary spirit, that are simply manifestations of the conservatism of certain strata of the proletariat. Furthermore, there are other forms of public action that serve to dampen rather than sharpen class conflict. Thus reformism also has its forms of “direct action”. When we talk of direct actions, we mean those that oppose one class to another, that educate the working class by transforming it from a dependent class into a class having its own goals.
It is impossible to list all the forms of direct action, because in each country, in each important struggle, direct action can take on a variety of forms; but what is always characteristic about it, and what every union must keep in mind, is that only mass action can produce the desired results. It is only by organizing the masses in these kinds of movements that we can effectively bring the workers together and prepare them to win the final victory. The importance of direct action lies not only in the immediate results, but mainly in the fact that it unites the mass of workers. The working class is not uniform; it includes numerous intermediary strata with bourgeois conceptions. By involving different groups and isolated strata in a common struggle, direct action brings them closer together, like the links of a chain, and in this way the working class becomes more united. Unity can only be forged in the heat of the struggle and is the most important condition for proletarian victory and for safeguarding the achievements of the revolution. Just by looking around we can see the various forms of direct action: the British miners’ strike, the Italian workers’ factory occupations, the March insurrection of the German workers, the October Revolution in Russia—these are various forms of direct action by the working class. The extent to which these actions are successful depends on the objective conditions in each country and on the extent of revolutionary awareness and solidarity of the masses.
We should always keep in mind that the capitalists have always resorted to direct action; unlike many theoreticians of the working class, they do not fly off into dialectical intricacies nor do they construct philosophical structures against revolutionary acts. In the past, when the bourgeoisie represented progress and fought feudalism, it was a revolutionary class, and did not hesitate to use direct action to consolidate its domination. Similarly, the bourgeoisie does not hesitate now to use any direct action in its struggle with the working class. The present armed suppression of all strike movements and the sacking of all the workers’ organizations, in Yugoslavia, Romania, etc., the arrests and massacres of the leaders of mass movements (Spain), the trials and convictions of revolutionary workers by the bourgeois courts, the shooting of workers, the use of troops, as recently occurred in England, lock-outs, reductions in wages without prior notice, the lengthening of the work day, all these constitute direct action by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
It is clear that all this in no way stops the bourgeoisie from carrying on negotiations with working class organizations, or signing contracts, etc. The dominant classes do not hesitate to use any method in their struggle to consolidate their class power. They will simultaneously deploy their apparatus of moral and intellectual perversion (the yellow press, bourgeois schools, the church, elections, etc.) and that of physical oppression, in the form of the police, the army, the courts and all the other trappings of bourgeois dictatorship. Therefore, because the capitalist class has many different methods of fighting, we must not lock ourselves into just one form. Taking into account the concrete conditions at a given time and place, we must always apply those forms and methods of struggle that will give the maximum results in terms of winning new positions from the bourgeoisie and the greatest unity of the masses. This is the perspective from which we must view the means of struggle, whether it be signing contracts, parliamentary action, participation in arbitration or participation in any of the other institutions created by the bourgeoisie. Discussions and parliamentary speeches will have a positive result to the extent that the representatives of the working class rely on strongly united organizations capable of backing their demands and defending conquered positions through forcible action. Thus direct action is not in contradiction with other methods. It must be the basis of all the activity of working class organizations. Only in this way can each step forward made by the workers’ organizations or their representatives give the maximum results for the whole working class.
The organization of unions by industry is one of the essential points of our program of revolutionary action. The trade unions founded over the years were formed as self-defence groups within the working class and the original core of these unions were credit unions and associations that had as their purpose mutual aid rather than class struggle. Above all, these associations grouped individuals who practised the same trade and hence narrow corporatism marked the start of workers’ unions. However, the development of capitalism, the growth of employers’ organizations, the continual concentration of capital, the creation of joint stock companies, the grouping of capitalists by industry, the formation of cartels and trusts, all these factors together forced the trade union to group in larger organizations. It was the logic of class struggle that raised this question with the unions. Even before the war the oldest of the English trade unions, which were permeated with corporatism more than the other professional organizations, undertook the gradual merging of the isolated unions into more powerful federations to fight against the employers’ federations.
Thus the logic of the development of capitalism, and above all that of the higher stage of capitalism, forced the mass of workers into creating new forms of union organization. For example, the small professional organizations of the mechanics or the moulders could not effectively struggle against the metal employers’ federations. The employers’ organizations developed more rapidly, along the line of unification by industry, and it was during the difficult struggle against them that the workers learned to unite. The statistics for the post-war period show us that the broad working class masses are being won over more and more to the idea of creating industrial unions. In connection with this, the information published by Sidney Webb about England in the International Labour Review is most interesting. S. Webb gives a long list of unions that in the last few years have absorbed hundreds of small union groupings in related industries, always developing along the lines of industrial groupings. We have similar figures for other countries. However, the creation of industrial unions is being realized, very slowly. In Germany at the present time there are 54 centralized unions; in France the number is even higher; in America there are more than one hundred: in other words the phenomenon that we are witnessing is that of the transformation into industrial unions, rather than the creation of such unions. Now the struggle is so complicated in all countries that the rapid fusion of similar unions is a life and death question for the working class. In opposition to the centralized industrial union of the employers we must have the centralized industrial union of the workers. Here as everywhere else, the employers are much further advanced than the workers.
What then are the fundamental principles of an industrial union? They are very simple: all the workers and all the employees of a given company should be members of a single union. This very simple idea implies a major revolution in present union structures. Our slogan is “one company, one union”. If we apply this principle in a consistent manner, we would see that the entire contemporary economy could be divided into 15 to 18 basic branches. The IWW divides the economy into 14 groups. In Germany immediately following the November revolution, when both bipartite working groups composed of the bosses and the reformist union leaders, and revolutionary workers’ councils were created, both elaborated rational forms of organization. The German Union Central divided the entire national economy into 15 groups. The federal Council of Factory and Mill Committees of Berlin proposed 13 or 14 groups, basically the same thing.
The Russian unions have gone much further than the unions of all other countries on the question of structure, not in terms of abstract principles but their application to real life. The Russian unions group all the workers and employees in Russia in 20 national industrial unions. To go further, the merger of several similar unions and the reduction of the total number to 17 or 18 is being worked on at the present time. It goes without saying that the number of unions cannot be identical in every country. This depends on the technological development of each country, of its industries, the particularities of its economy and a whole series of purely national conditions. It is pointless to fix the same number of industrial unions for all countries; the question is to work in all countries for the creation of industrial unions and it matters little if one country has two or three industrial unions more or less. While the reformist leaders advance towards the creation of industrial unions at a snail’s pace, only when forced by absolute necessity, we must advance with revolutionary speed; we must struggle against craft-union mentality and corporatism in every factory and mill for it is a totally abstract and lifeless point of view. We must adapt the organic structure of the unions to the struggles the working class must undertake in the present period.
There is one more extremely important consideration that pushes us along the road to reconstruct our unions on industrial lines. The task of the working class is not only to make the social revolution, but to put the results of its victory over the bourgeoisie to use. Both in the course of this revolution and following it, the workers will have to face the questions of production in all their immensity. To maintain production at its pre-revolutionary levels and then increase it on the basis of collective work and the suppression of the private profits of the capitalists—this is the enormous task that will fall with all its weight on the unions. For the unions constitute the basis of the industrial structure of the new society, they are the backbone of the new apparatus of production. The systematic construction of the industrial apparatus of the socialist society is only possible if the unions are ready to undertake it. Thus the rebuilding of the unions by industry is not only the prerequisite for success in the struggle against the employers, it is also the prerequisite for the organization of production following the victory of the working class.
The experience of the last few years of revolutionary struggle has shown that the working class can triumphonly if it is organized in every factory and in every mill. What are the forms of communication that presently exist among the workers? Take the example of a large metal-works complex, Armstrong in England, Krupp in Germany or Schneider in France. In each of these companies there are many unions: the metalworkers belong to one, the woodworkers belong to another, the drivers to a third, the electricians to a fourth, the smelter workers (in England, for example) to a fifth and the transport workers to a sixth. Each of these unions maintains its own means of communications between its members and the leadership. In some places there are special collectors, in others the shop stewards collect, etc.
When conflicts break out in the factories, the workers are usually insufficiently organized and are not grouped in a single body, and of course only part of the workers are unionized. We know that most of the workers at Creusot are not unionized, that a very large percentage of the workers in the Krupp factories were, until very recently, members of Catholic unions, etc. So, not only are the workers disorganized by the fact that they belong to different organizations, but in addition, a large percentage of workers do not belong to any organization at all. Now, to triumph over the employers and above all over the bourgeois state, we must have the concerted strength of a maximum of the working masses. This triumph will not be possible until every mill and every factory has become a fortress of the revolution, until in the heart of every company we have created resistance groups, groups capable of both offensive and defensive action, groups capable of mobilizing the mass of workers at each installation of every company. Experience has shown that the best form for such an organization is the factory and mill committee or council, elected by the mass of workers regardless of their political or religious opinions.
An extremely interesting struggle has characterized the creation of mill and factory committees in Germany and other countries. These committees, which appeared in Germany at the beginning of the revolution, have scared the opportunist leaders of the German union movement, who have had to use all their skill and experience in organization to protect themselves. In Germany, there is an on-going discussion between the communists and the right wing over who should be allowed to participate in these committees: all the workers without exception, or just those workers belonging to free unions? The supporters of the German Union Central, reformists to a man, were and still are of the opinion that only those workers that belong to free unions should have the right to vote for the factory and mill committees, and that all other workers should not have the right to vote. On the other hand, members of the left have insisted on the necessity of letting all workers, regardless of their political opinions, participate in the elections.
It is curious to see how the reformists rationalized their intransigeance concerning the “non-aligned” workers. They would say: “you ask us to take part in committee elections alongside Catholic workers and those that are not conscious, but this is the most unacceptable type of collaboration with workers who are backward or sympathetic to the Catholics. We oppose such compromises.” It is striking how these people who are specialists in compromising with the bourgeoisie and who find nothing wrong with creating organizations in co-operation with the employers, do not in any way want to participate in organizations along with either Catholic workers or those who are not that conscious. Communists object to this false intransigeance, “If we want to draw the broad masses into our common political struggle, if we want the Catholic worker, by the logic of the struggle, to be swept up by the general current of the workers’ movement, we must let them participate in the elections for the factory and mill committees. It is an excellent thing to be intransigeant with the ruling classes and the bourgeoisie. But when we are talking about the backward strata of workers, when we are talking about workers who, because they are lacking in political consciousness, find themselves in Catholic organizations, we must act with the maximum of flexibility, the maximum spirit of conciliation in order to involve them in the general work of the organization where they can rid themselves of their prejudices.”
This struggle is not yet finished in Germany. While the reformists want to create factory and mill committees made up exclusively of the members of the free unions, the members of the Workers’ Communist Party of Germany are setting up their own factory organizations (Betriebsorganisationen) made up exclusively of their followers and then giving to these groups the high sounding name of Factory and Mill Committees. We must also reject this conception which perverts the very essence of factory and mill committees. Factory and mill committees that include all the employees of every factory are the most natural basis for industrial unions. The factory and mill committees grow organically into industrial unions. In this manner the development of an industrial union is closely related to the creation of factory and mill committees, which represent the most important weapon in the revolutionary struggle.
Obviously factory and mill committees can be built initially in different ways according to the country; but on the whole the structure of these committees stays the same. This structure is the following: the factory and mill committee is elected by all the workers in the plant. On the one hand it is a union body and oversees the application of all union decisions; on the other it is the organ that assures the workers’ control of production.
How must these factory and mill committees be created? They must be created in a revolutionary way. But what should we do about those committees whose creation is the result of a law (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia)? Should we participate in them or, because of their obviously bourgeois origins and the fact that they parallel our own committees, should we turn our backs on them?
For the revolutionary unions, not to take advantage of the factory and mill committees created by the bourgeois governments would be to act in a manner that is detrimental to our ends and injurious to the interests of the working class. The bourgeois governments do not create these committees out of meekness or because this organizational form pleases them more than any other, but because they’ve been forced to retreat under the pressure of the masses. They want to protect themselves against this organizational form, which they consider to be the most dangerous. The bourgeoisie of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in co-operation with the socialists have created factory and mill committees in order to make the workers collaborate with the bourgeoisie in rebuilding the capitalist economy. A brief examination of the legislation of these countries on such committees is enough to see that the bourgeoisie’s desire is to use the energy of the working class and its evident interest in production to increase the profits of the capitalists and consolidate social peace in the factories.
All these laws hold the danger of diverting the workers from the road of struggle to the road of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, but we cannot fight against these laws by deliberately staying on the outside. If the revolutionary elements withdraw, they will abandon millions of workers to the mercy of the bourgeoisie and its pseudo-socialist henchmen. Boycotting the legal factory committees is the worst way of abandoning the struggle. Hence the tactic of the German Communist Worker’s Party of calling for a boycott is extremely injurious and inadmissable from a revolutionary point of view. We should not forget that more than 17 million German workers participate in legal factory committees. The task of revolutionary unions and of sympathizers of the RILU is to bring their ideas and principles into these committees by taking part in elections and organizing active nuclei within the committees. So we can see that a boycott would serve only to separate the revolutionary groups from the mass of workers and would only give negative results.
Thus the creation of factory and mill committees on the one hand and utilisation of the legal factory committees on the other is the fundamental task of revolutionary workers sympathetic to the RILU.
Unemployment has always gone hand in hand with “normal” exploitation. Capitalist society has never known a period completely free of “normal” unemployment. There is always a certain number of workers in reserve. This is one of the employers’ principal weapons in their struggle to establish a system of “normal” wages. In this manner unemployment is characteristic of the capitalist method of production, making its elimination inconceivable without the elimination of capitalism. But the unemployment that the capitalist world is now experiencing goes beyond the normal limits. It is now on such a scale that it has caused even the most backward workers to question the general running of contemporary society. If we examine the unemployment statistics of certain countries we will see that we are dealing with an exceptional phenomenon.
Only twice between 1879 and 1906 did unemployment in England England exceed 10%: this was in 1879 (11.4%) and in 1886 (10.2%); in other years the figure varied between 2.1 and 9.3%.
During the World War the number of unemployed declined sharply. It dropped to just 0.4% in 1916. Unemployment took off in the period following the war, as can be seen in these statistics from the first two quarters of the last two years:
|
|
1920 |
1921 |
|---|---|---|
|
January |
2.9% |
6.9% |
|
February |
1.5% |
8.5% |
|
March |
1.1% |
10.5% |
|
April |
0.9% |
17.6% |
|
May |
1.1% |
22.2% |
|
June |
1.2% |
23.1% |
The percentage of unemployment in July varied between 6.8% (construction) and 93.2% (potters).
In Belgium the unemployment rate in 1903 was 3.0%; in 1904 2.8%; in 1913 2.9%; in 1914 3.9%.
|
|
1920 |
|---|---|
|
September |
5.8% |
|
October |
6.4% |
|
November |
8.3% |
|
December |
17.4% |
|
|
1921 |
|---|---|
|
January |
19.3% |
|
February |
22.7% |
|
March |
31.5% |
|
April |
31.2% |
In the United States of America unemployment has taken on unbelievable proportions: according to the Washington Labour Exchange, in September 1921 there were more than 6 million unemployed, including 700,000 demobilized soldiers.
In Norway:
1903 5.5%
1914 2.4%
1916 0.9%
1919 1.6%
1920 January 2.4%
1920 December 6.5%
1921 January 10.5&
1921 April 14.7%
In Denmark:
1912 7.5%
1916 4.9%
1919 10.7%
1920 December 5.1%
1921 January 13.7%
1921 May 18.6%
At the Congress of Unemployed, held in Copenhagen August 5, 1921, some cities were named where 80% of the workers were without work.
In France, where the unemployment statistics are consciously miskept, though unemployment may well be less evident than in England and America, it is nonetheless much higher than the norm. The same is true for Italy and Czechoslovakia.
In Germany before the war, unemployment did not rise above 3.5%; at the beginning of the war it reached 22.4% but then rapidly dropped to below pre-war levels. From 1915 to 1920 the rates for the month of January were as follows: 6.5%; 2.6%; 1.7%; 0.9%; 6.3%; 3.4%; and 4.5%. In May of 1921 unemployment varied between 1.5% (painters) and 9.4% (harness-makers). In comparison with England and America, the rate in Germany is low. Why? Because it is a country with a weak rate of exchange and cheap labour.
Alongside full unemployment exists partial unemployment. There are whole companies in which there are only three or four days work a week and because the workers can’t work full weeks, naturally they don’t receive full pay.
By its scale, present unemployment is an exceptional phenomenon and therefore requires us to take up exceptional means of struggle. What are the governments now doing to fight unemployment? In some countries they grant aid to the unemployed, start public works, adopt measures to facilitate emigration; this is the furthest even the most liberal of the governments is willing to go. It should be stated that the reformist trade unions look at unemployment from the same point of view. The Italian CGT has formulated the following demands: (1) A public loan to help the unemployed; (2) This loan should be covered by the employers; (3) Immediate organization of public works.
The Special Conference of the Unemployed held in Rome at the beginning of September, in addition to the aformentioned demands, formulated ones concerning the colonization of the interior of the country and the direct participation of the mass of workers in the management of the large industrial concerns.(*) This is the program of the left-wing of the reformist union movement; as for the right-wing trade unionists, they do not go any further than state subsidies, public works and reduction of the female work-force. In revolutionary unions the slogan of re-establishing trade relations with Soviet Russia is very widespread. Russian orders would no doubt do something to diminish unemployment, but it would not be all that significant. Unemployment would continue to threaten the working class. What is to be done?
The only remedy to unemployment is socialism. But as long as the social revolution has not occurred, as long as the socialist system is not established, it is essential that the unions adopt a series of practical measures to involve the broad working masses in the struggle against unemployment. What practical means and which slogans should the unions formulate in order to reduce unemployment and fight against it? First of all, and this should be the fundamental slogan of the entire struggle, the unemployed must be paid by their employers, either singly or collectively, and by the state, or by committees of the respective industrial branches. The unemployed must not be left off the companies’ books. The company must be forced to support them until it can provide them with work. Because unemployment has reached such enormous proportions that it is affecting millions of workers, the slogan of participation of the unemployed in the production process is sure to meet with energetic and genuine co-operation from the broad masses.
On the question of unemployment selfish interests and class interests collide with each other. There are a certain number of workers who are not attacked by unemployment. Skilled workers are generally in a better position, hence it is difficult to bring them into the struggle for the participation of the unemployed in the production process. Furthermore, some workers fear that such a participation would result in a reduction of their own wages. Revolutionary unions must thrust aside these conservative tendencies. Including the unemployed in the productive process, sustaining them at the expense of the company or of the entire branch of industry, must be the central point of agitation and propaganda. The fate of the unemployed is entirely dependent on the fate of those that have work, and the great danger lies in a rupture between the movement of the unemployed and the workers’ movement in general. In this sense the creation of special organizations for the unemployed do not always provide the desired results. It is true that ordinarily these organizations are most revolutionary. They are more determined and more energetic than the organizations of workers who are employed, because they concern themselves exclusively with the problem of unemployment. However, all too often the creation of separate organizations opposes employed workers to those without work, and rather than enabling the workers to assist in the struggle to improve the lot of the unemployed, it awakens antagonism between workers and the unemployed. The creation of such separate organizations outside the framework of the unions should therefore be considered with great caution. This does not in any way mean that we should limit ourselves to the restricted actions of the conservative and reformist unions. The unemployed must constantly work with the unions in their branch of industry.
Along with demonstrations against bourgeois municipalities or the bourgeois state—demonstrations demanding the handing over of closed factories to the workers, the institution of workers’ control, unemployment insurance, free food for children, the lowering of rents, public works, etc.—there should be actions organized by the unemployed and the revolutionary minority aimed at the heads of the union bureaucracies and at socialist municipalities. If the latter are really socialist, they can, under certain circumstances, saddle the rich with a local income tax, allow the unemployed the use of state premises, house the unemployed in the homes of the wealthy, refuse to pay the state municipal income tax, etc.
During their campaign against unemployment, the unemployed and the revolutionary unions must keep in mind that no matter what measures they succeed in having applied within the framework of capitalist society, these measures cannot resolve the unemployment question. The point is to wage a struggle against unemployment, as the resolution adopted by the RILU’s First Congress emphasizes, not with the employers but against them, not just by peaceful measures under a capitalist regime but by open class struggle; the question of unemployment will not be resolved through co-operation with the bourgeois state, but through its destruction and the setting up of a proletarian dictatorship. Repudiating the identity of interests between workers and employers, the First Congress of the RILU considered the question of the struggle against unemployment from the general class point of view. Convinced that unemployment will only be eliminated by a social revolution, the First Congress of the RILU concludes its resolution on unemployment with the following call to the unemployed:
“You were the first victims of the struggle—be the advance guard in the attack. But don’t forget, that you can win only by attacking in close ranks with the rest of the workers, defending the interests of the entire working class. The workers at the bench must not hope to escape the lot of the unemployed. The fight of their unemployed brothers must be the fight of all workers, and the red unions must resort to all measures to ensure that the fight of the unemployed be waged under the banner of the unions, that fighting detachments consist both of the unemployed and of their comrades who are still employed.”
The employers have been using the quagmire in the world market and the economic crisis to squeeze the working class in a vise-like grip. During the war and the period of “Sacred Unity”, the bourgeoisie had hoped to see the workers become more respectful, but their hopes have been smashed. While it is true that the “Sacred Unity” created profound confusion in the minds of the workers, the period since the war has been characterized by a great growth in unions and an unquestionable increase in the workers’ demands. In the first year after the war, the bourgeoisie was forced into a retreat, a so-called voluntary retreat that was credited to the particularly liberal opinions of the League of Nations. But everyone knew that the law establishing the eight-hour day resulted from the fear of a mass movement and the desire to reduce the internal social struggle by making a few concessions. This period of retreat is already over. The reformist unions took on the responsibility of supporting and consolidating capitalism and raised the hopes of the ruling classes, which, as soon as a favourable economic situation presented itself, launched a full-scale offensive against all the concessions they had been forced to grant following the war.
One of the most effective measures in the fight against the workers is the closing of factories and reductions in the number of work days. When the workers are solidly united, when they form a tightly-knit group, the only way to break their solidarity is to close the factory. Reducing the number of work days halves the workers’ standard of living forcing them to quieten down and worry about their material interests rather than general political questions. This is the old policy of lockout under new conditions. In the old days lockouts were declared in order to reduce wages and production costs. While still resolving the questions of wages and the work day, lockouts now serve much larger ends. Lockouts are a form of the bourgeoisie’s political offensive. They are now an attempt to cow the workers, weaken the cohesion of the working class and save the bourgeoisie from the nightmare of imminent revolution. Growing daily more revolutionary, the millions of workers organized in unions constitute a constant threat to the stability of exploitation. Aside from the economic advantages, the bourgeoisie receives very important political advantages from reductions in the number of work days and the closing of factories.
How can we fight against this epidemic of reduced work weeks, against this epidemic of factory closings? Of course factory shutdowns create one type of unemployment and so all the forms of struggle against unemployment are equally valid in this case. But beyond this, there are a whole series of measures that should be under taken in order to effectively block the closing of a factory. In this regard, all of the means have not yet been tried. First of all, while protesting in the most vigorous fashion against the closing, the union must demand the right to carry out all necessary investigations in order to establish whether the factory can truly no longer continue to operate. How to prepare for this? How to wage the campaign? The workers of every factory must elect a special commission of inquiry into the real causes of the closing as soon as it appears that the owners have the intention of closing it down. This commission must be elected by all the workers in the factory, both men and women. Its task is to discover the true motives for the closing, without regard to the opinions of the employers. It is not difficult for full time workers in a mill or factory to determine these causes. They know the supplies of raw materials, they are aware if there are orders or not, etc. In order to establish if the closure is necessary, there must be a series of control commissions established; one for the raw materials, one for energy supplies, one for orders, one for receipts, etc. We cannot let the employers or joint stock companies close down a factory whenever they feel like it, because in fact, companies are nothing more than the result of the workers’ collective labour.
Obviously we must keep in mind that this type of action will be met with the most frenzied resistance on the part of the employers and the bourgeois state. Attempts by the workers to verify whether a factory closing is legitimate will be considered an attack on the rights of private property, out-and-out anarchism, etc. But if the workers were frightened of having their actions condemned by the employers, they would never do anything. Can the workers really establish the motives for the closing of a factory? We should not forget that this is an extremely difficult question, that the worker is placed in extremely unfavourable conditions vis-à-vis the employer, that the verification itself will arouse the opposition of the entire bourgeois state, police, courts, etc., that the employers’ organizations will undertake a series of measures against such sacrilege. Under no circumstances should we close our eyes to the difficulties, but neither should we exaggerate them. We must not think that it will be impossible for the workers to establish the motives behind the closing of their factory. The workers will not be able to determine all the financial connections between such and such an employer and the banks, because naturally the employers do not make the mistake of giving the workers access to such sacred information. But even considering the incomplete nature of the information that can be gathered and the dogged resistance that will certainly be encountered, the attempt must nonetheless be made in an energetic manner. Because this is the only way that all the workers, independent of their political convictions, can be forged into a single block that will oppose the employers’ political offensive.
Aside from the normal difficulties, these control commissions will have to deal with the theory of commercial secrets; it is absolutely essential in all of these investigations to adopt as a practical slogan the abolition of commercial secrets. Under the circumstances the most important thing to do is to create authoritative control commissions the moment the first information is received concerning the eventual closing of a factory, and to unite all of these control commissions by industrial branch into a single controlling body covering all workers in each branch of industry. Isolated control commissions can be easily destroyed. But if the idea of unity all these bodies into a single organization is put forward at the same time that control commissions are created in a series of factories, the workers’ strength will grow considerably. Factory closings should be the starting point for a movement to create control commissions in the particular factories and in whole branches of industry.
Today, factory closures are often used as a way of fighting, or rather repressing workers. The most effective way for workers to fight this form of repression exerted by the bourgeoisie is to occupy the factory. But we must point out that this action is among the most drastic possible. If factory and mill occupations are to be advantageous to the workers they must be extremely well-organized, and a series of special conditions must be in place. The workers used and are still using occupations in the struggle presently developing in all countries. This was the case in the Russian Revolution, where this type of action was used against the bosses even before the October Revolution. A recent case in point is the great movement of Italian workers to take over the factories in the last months of 1920.
To counter the capitalists’ threats of lockout, the vanguard of the Italian proletariat—the Milan metalworkers—occupied the factories threatened with closure. The example of the Milan workers was followed by workers from other cities, not just by metalworkers, but by some workers from the chemical, textile, and other industries. Soon the movement had spread to all of northern Italy, and most of the big industrial factories were in the hands of the workers. Things proceeded in complete order. The mill and factory committees which were immediately set up and the factory commissioners who were appointed showed great organizational capability and business sense. Protected by workers’ guards, the factories operated at full capacity. At the same time, the rural proletariat in Polesino and other agricultural regions took over landed property, without interrupting the work underway.
But, at the most decisive moment, the CGT leaders agreed to begin talks with the government. At the conference called by government minister Giolitti, they accepted a miserable plan for workers’ control and held out a conciliatory hand to their class enemy, who grabbed it like a drowning man clutching at a straw.
The movement had been sabotaged. The offensive was repulsed, the workers were defeated. After the defeat, all the counterrevolutionary forces were organized. Fascism grew out of this movement.
Specific cases of workers taking over the factories occurred in France, Germany and England. In September, 1921 at Browne, in England, flour mill and bakery workers took over their plant after the bosses refused to give in to their demands. The work went on as usual. Bread was sold for a lot less; production picked up because unemployed workers were rehired. At the door of the plant a notice was put up saying: “Mill and factory of the Browne Workers’ Soviet. We make bread, not profits.” The history of post-war workers’ struggles is full of such examples. But only in Italy did factory occupations take on a character of mass action, sweeping all the workers into the struggle.
The bourgeois state responds to factory occupations with savage hatred and armed resistance. For this reason the operation must be very well organized; the majority of the workers must play an active role. The idea of occupying the factories is extremely popular among the working masses, and the task of revolutionary unions is to show in practice that production can continue without the employers. When the control commission discussed earlier becomes convinced that the boss is closing the plant for repressive reasons and that production can certainly be carried on, it must give a detailed report on the question to all the workers. It proposes continuing production, though this, of course, is only possible if raw materials and certain material conditions are present.
In large enterprises there is usually a big enough reserve of raw materials to last a fairly long period of time. The biggest problem is the lack of working capital. Even if the bourgeoisie doesn’t immediately attack a factory occupation with armed repression—and if the workers’ movement takes on large dimensions this will certainly occur—financial difficulties can break the workers’ action. Therefore, the revolutionary unions and the leading group in charge of the takeover must first and foremost make sure it has sufficient financial resources and working capital, if only initially. Here we can use the methods adopted by the Italian workers, which were in part also used by the Russian workers: the sale of goods stored in the company’s warehouses, loans from sympathetic cooperatives using the same goods as a guarantee, etc.
But the simple act of occupying the workplace can only be effective if it serves as the starting point for widespread agitation among the masses and for open struggle. We must always remember that it is easier to take over a workplace than to hold it because the workers’ economic offensive can only be consolidated after a political victory, in other words, after the destruction of the bourgeois state and the seizure of power. The basic error trade unionists make is that they present revolution as the occupation of the workplaces, factories and mills while completely ignoring the bourgeois state apparatus. When the Italian workers took over the workplaces in late 1920, they took only a single step forward. And in fact what happened? In a whole series of regions the workers took over the workplaces and set out to produce. But at the same time the bourgeois government continued to function with all its apparatus, its army, its police, and its justice. The bourgeois parties and the bourgeois press also continued to exist and operate, carrying on their anti-socialist propaganda and preparing all the enemies of socialism to march against the workers. As for the workers, after having taken over the workplaces, they stopped half way. They believed that almost everything had been accomplished, whereas in fact, the occupation of the workplaces was nothing but a single step in the struggle. Control of a workplace cannot be maintained unless the working class seizes political power at the same time it seizes economic power, unless it destroys the old bourgeois institutions and replaces them with new revolutionary structures.
The link between politics and economics has never been shown so clearly as at the end of last year in Italy. If the anarchists weren’t metaphysicians they would be forced to accept our point of view on the unbreakable link between politics and economics and reject their childish idea of revolution.
Of all the working class’s methods of struggle, the occupation of the workplaces is the most serious. This is why it must be used with the greatest precautions, only after the relative strength of both sides has been most carefully analyzed and local conditions examined. In a situation of generalized revolutionary enthusiasm a factory occupation can have good results. In a situation where the atmosphere is one of dull calm, where the working class shows passivity and reaction, where the employer acts unchecked and where there is neither latent protest nor desire to struggle among the wide masses, a factory takeover can soon lead to defeat. In such a case the workers would be isolated from the rest of the working class, not just physically and materially but morally. It is also possible that they would remain isolated strategically.
The occupation of the factories should not be undertaken unless it can be picked up and supported by workers from other enterprises. This support should be shown in different ways, beginning with monetary and material aid and going as far as resolutely preventing the transport of troops and disorganizing the anti-worker forces. If the idea of occupying the factories is not surrounded with this kind of sympathetic atmosphere, if the working masses are not moved with sufficient revolutionary fervour, the occupation can be quickly liquidated. What’s more, this can leave the workers extremely bitter and destroy their self-confidence. Thus this method, which is of such great importance for the revolutionary struggle, should be used only if the most minute study of all conditions of the struggle shows the possibility, perhaps not of complete victory, but at least of holding the workplace for a relatively long period. To gain the sympathy of the masses, the price of the manufactured products must be reduced: this is the best propaganda for the expropriation of the factories.
Factory occupations not only bring on purely external difficulties, but above all difficulties of an internal nature. The workers must resolve the problem of managing the workplaces, the problem of the division and payment of labour. They must deal with a whole series of questions which were previously posed only in theory but which must be answered in practice from the very first day of the occupation.
It is best that the factory committee take over the management of the plant and that a representative of the corresponding union participate in the committee. For other questions of internal organization, such as the distribution of wages and so on, the participation of the unions is indispensable if common interests are to triumph over local ones. We must remember that takeovers of factories, insofar as they take on a mass character, can quickly disorganize the bourgeois regime because this is the ruling classes’ most vulnerable point. As long as the struggle occurs outside the workplaces, as long as it is aimed solely at changing the forms of administration, the boss does not feel threatened, property remains sacred and untouchable, and changes occur only on the upper political level, without affecting the basis of the economic system. The Russian October and the impending revolutions in Western Europe differ from the great French Revolution; the slogan “property is sacred and inviolable” has been replaced by the slogan “property is neither sacred nor inviolable”. Factory occupations are the most explosive concrete example showing that private property can be violated: they destroy the masses’ religious belief in private property. As they become a mass movement they express the greatest possible threat to the bourgeois regime, and under no circumstances can the working class renounce this means of struggle.
The masses themselves must occupy the workplaces; the greatest possible number of workers must take part in this movement; every single factory occupation must become the cause of the entire working class; the conflicts between workers and bosses resulting from recent occupations must be sharpened; finally, one single goal must constantly be in our sights: the destruction of private property once and for all. The factory occupation can be an excellent way of struggling against the bosses’ repression, but it goes far beyond any local protest. It is the most explosive manifestation of the coming social revolution.
The struggle presently sharpening in all countries is developing in reaction to wage reductions and deteriorating working conditions. The workers may well be backward, and reformist illusions may well be widespread among the working masses, but the constant deterioration in working conditions is provoking a muffled feeling of protest in them. Threatened with a decline in their standard of living, not only the reformist organizations but even the Catholic unions and the state employees unions, which have always been further to the right than reformist socialism, are in opposition to the ruling classes and the state. The struggle of the working class pivots around the questions of wages and working conditions. We would be committing a serious error if we ignored this great mass movement under the pseudo-revolutionary pretext that it is merely over a question of money. This anarchist contempt for the basic needs of the mass of workers uses revolutionary packaging to cover a reactionary content. We are not revolutionary if we are not with the masses in their struggle. It is characteristic of our time that the struggle for the preservation of established conditions goes beyond the limited framework of unionism, in that the workers face the organized employers and the bourgeois state.
Only those raising the masses to the level of communist awareness in the daily struggle are worthy of being called revolutionary. It follows from this that the revolutionary unions must focus their attention on the capitalists’ attempts to reduce wages and worsen working conditions. But we must not limit ourselves to just demanding the re-establishment of the former working conditions. In all countries, these former conditions were below the needs of the workers. We must not only defend the former conditions but continually aspire to better ones. This is why raising the standard of living of the masses must now be one of our practical tasks. The working class was weakened tremendously during the war; the percentage of sickness has increased greatly in all countries and infant mortality has gone up considerably. The results of the war will be felt for years to come and this is why we must restore the standard of living of the masses and never accept its reduction as has happened in almost all countries.
As they reduce wages and worsen working conditions, the employers and their ideologues argue that this is necessary because of the growing intensity of competition in the world market and in the interests of industry and the national economy. The workers of the Allied countries have fallen into a trap of their own making. At present, destitute Germany is, if not the supplier of cheap labour, the supplier at least of cheap merchandise. The collapse of the value of money and the impoverishment of the mass of workers of Germany and Austria has made the transfer of orders to these countries very profitable for the capitalists of Britain, France and the USA. Many Americans are closing their factories and transferring their orders to German companies. Profiting from the reduction in cost of manpower, certain British entrepreneurs are even ordering machinery and other goods from Germany. Naturally the world market determines wholesale prices and this in turn influences working conditions. But the unions that base all their policies on competition are very wrong. They are making the working conditions of the workers depend on forces which are beyond their control. The French, English and American workers who reached agreements with their own bourgeoisies are at present the victims of their own “victories”, since the lowering of the standard of living of the German workers automatically brings about a lowering of that of the English, French and American workers.
A big difference between the wages in the various industrialized countries cannot last long. A leveling-out results according to the average of the lowest wages. Capital looks for manpower at the cheapest price. If they do not find any in their own country, they order the items and commodities from outside the country. This shows that the theory of economic patriotism created during the war, and still cultivated, is nothing more than a dish especially cooked up for the people. As for the ruling classes, they are patriotic only when it is to their advantage and brings them definite profits. Even if these profits increase to the detriment of national production, no employer would be disturbed by the fact. Capital is international. Its country is where there are great profits to be pocketed.
All these questions about competition in the world market, though they are important, cannot play a decisive role in the workers’ determining their own standard of living. Revolutionary workers cannot base themselves on the question of which exploiter, their own or the foreign, receives the most profits. They must always take as their starting point the fact that the competition between national capitalisms has always existed and will always exist and can only be eliminated by social revolution. The lowering of the working masses’ standard of living so that national capitalism does better in the world market is a capitalist tactic supported by leaders of the reformist unions. The connection between the reformist unions and national capitalism is so strong that as soon as there is a crisis in the world market, the leaders of the reformist unions take it on themselves to look for ways of reducing expenses in order to meet competition, either by increasing productivity or by some other means. It is true that this aid, given to the bourgeoisie to assure it high dividends at all times and under all conditions, is accompanied by verbal protests against reductions in wages. After these verbal protests the negotiations start and the leaders of the unions consent to wage reductions of 10, 15% and more. These wage reductions and the absence of even the slightest desire to struggle are the characteristic of the tactics of most of the present leaders of reformist unions. If this tactic continues to be applied, collaboration between the bourgeoisie and unions can only grow, obviously at the expense of the mass of workers.
Up until now, collaboration has meant that the workers have received only minute crumbs of the billions pocketed by the employers. Now that the profits have gone down slightly, the employers are attempting not only to take away those crumbs, but also to make the full weight of the crisis bear down on the backs of the workers. To resist this tactic the revolutionary unions must bring the broad masses into the struggle. In all unions, regardless of the composition of their leadership, the questions of the standard of living must be raised. We must unite the broad masses of workers, including the most backward, into a single front in the practical struggle for an increase in wages and improvements in working conditions. On these purely economic and practical grounds, revolutionary unions and supporters of the Red International of Labor Unions must prove that they are the firmest and most perseverant defenders of the interests of the whole working class; in every country we must draw up and popularize a series of measures for the improvement of working conditions. We must create a program of practical demands around which all workers can be united. We must apply this program using revolutionary methods and unmask the present union leaders who neither want to, nor know how to concretely defend the basic vital interests of the mass of workers.
It is certainly possible that in organizing resistance to worsening working conditions revolutionary unions will suffer defeats, but these will be only temporary defeats, suffered during the struggle and not because we gave up. Every concession given out of good will towards the employer, any giving up of the resistance must be denounced in a most determined and energetic manner. Raising the standard of living must not remain an abstract slogan, but must be the practical slogan of the sharpest struggle. And when revolutionary unions have brought the largest number of workers into the struggle to raise their standard of living, when they have succeeded in influencing the workers that are in the reformist unions and in tearing them away from the control of their leaders, then the struggle to raise the standard of living can play a great role in preparing for social revolution.
Social conflicts have reached such a sharp point in all countries that it will not be difficult to show the workers the link between the raising of their standard of living and the struggle for workers’ power. A concrete economic program, elaborated in a specific social and political context, if applied with revolutionary methods, will necessarily unify the broad masses in the struggle against the ruling classes and will prepare the workers to take economic and political power in their respective countries. This implies that the workers’ struggle to raise their standard of living should serve as the starting point of the larger struggle to destroy exploitation itself.
The offensive that the bourgeoisie is presently waging on all fronts has one objective: to throw the burden of the economic crisis onto the shoulders of the proletariat. When they propose wage cuts not only do the reformist unions agree to these reductions of 15, 20, 30% or more, but they consider this quite normal despite the fact that the cost of living is not going down.
The bourgeoisie will not wait for a reduction in the cost of living before starting to reduce wages. Le Temps (The Time), the unofficial organ of the French bourgeoisie, even invented a special theory according to which wages had to be lowered first, so that the cost of living would drop automatically. This brazen theory is not being sufficiently fought, and when resistance does develop, it is only among those workers directly affected by this tactic of our class enemies. We see cases where the working class does not protest at all, others where it agrees to wage reductions, and others still where it protests, organizes demonstrations, and goes on strike; but, because all these movements are only partial, the bourgeoisie breaks the working class bit by bit, and continues to apply its policies. We saw examples in England, where the miners stayed out on strike for over three months in an attempt to break the bourgeoisie’s attacks. The most tragic point of the strike was when the railway and the transport workers, who had been allies, refused to support them. The day of their refusal has gone down in the history of the English working class movement as “Black Friday”. This day must serve as a terrible example of how not to struggle against the bourgeoisie’s systematic attempts to lower wages.
In an era of economic crisis, where the employers have molded their united front, partial movements are doomed to defeat from the start. The fact that strikes in England, Germany, France, and in America are breaking out in isolation, immediately dooms this movement to failure. Right now (September 1921), 60,000 workers are striking in northern France. This strike was provoked by wage reductions; but as we can see, while the textile workers are on strike, other workers—railway, gas and streetcar workers, in other words, all the categories of workers on whom the contemporary state depends for its existence—continue working. Under these conditions, the textile workers will inevitably be crushed. We saw this during the latest conflicts in Germany; and we have seen the same thing in other countries. Workers fighting in isolation, in detachments, in little groups, are defeated; for in an economic crisis, the bosses can wait, they can allow themselves the luxury of prolonged strikes. In order to resist them, we must organize the involvement of those workers who are most necessary to social activity. It is not a question of organizing general strikes frequently, nor is it a question of pushing frequent actions; what is essential is that workers of each country, through a long unyielding struggle, prepare detachments of the exploited for these actions. We must not wait until working conditions in this or that category worsen, because in periods of economic crisis a strike by the workers of a particular region or branch of industry or company cannot have a decisive importance. Under these conditions there are certain workers that we must bring into a protest strike; public utilities workers, electrical, gas, streetcar, railway, port, navigation workers, etc. They are the ones who must be in the front ranks of the fight against the bourgeois tactic of lowering wages, in order to consolidate acquired gains.
Reformist unions cannot see the problem in this light. They are used to going into a struggle alone. They have been stripped of all class sentiment. English workers are, first and foremost, miners, textile workers, woodworkers, and only afterwards just simply workers. The same corporatist feelings are being developed by the German workers and can also be seen in French and American workers, etc. Reformists divide up the working class vertically into isolated groupings. Their corporatist sentiment is stronger than their class affiliation. This is why in the most critical hours, only certain categories of workers fight, while others remain inactive spectators of the duel, and often do not understand their error until their brothers’ resistance is already broken and aid is possible only with enormous difficulty.
The task of revolutionary unions is to always give conflicts a general character. Without always calling for a general strike, we must understand that under certain conditions, it becomes an absolute necessity that a detachment of workers from the public utilities enter into the struggle and this is justified by the class interests of the proletariat. It follows that we must pay great attention to workers from these branches of the national economy. We must undertake the transformation of these groups into the principal instruments in the struggle, not only for basic improvements in our standard of living, but to carry out the tasks that are specific to the proletariat as a class.
The isolation between different categories of workers on the national level also exists on the international level. Present conflicts go beyond national boundaries. The bloody encounters between Labour and Capital have an international importance; this is why we must wage the struggle on an international scale. In this realm, the situation is worse than within the national framework. The link between workers of the same branch of industry in different countries is even weaker than that between the workers of different branches in the same country. We saw this clearly during the last miners’ strike: the German, French and Belgian miners didn’t lift a finger to help their English comrades. Without exception, we can see the same thing happening in all conflicts. The international secretariats that now exist for different branches of industry do not play any role during these conflicts. From time to time, they bring together delegates from each country; the delegates exchange a few official speeches, and once this is done, return to their countries to continue doing what they did before, that is, taking care of national policies without even thinking of international working-class solidarity.
It is impossible to wage the international struggle against the capitalist offensive in any one branch of industry without creating revolutionary international industrial federations. These federations must take the leadership of the workers’ offensive and defensive movements in all branches of industry in all countries. Yes, this problem poses great difficulties; but the question of social struggle cannot be resolved from a strictly national point of view. It must be dealt with from an international perspective. As for the international industrial federations, like all other international revolutionary organizations, they are one of the most important tools in the defensive and offensive battles of the working masses in their struggle for final emancipation.
In the struggle against the growing crisis certain union organizations follow the path of least resistance by driving women out of the places they hold in industry. During the war, hundreds of thousands, millions of women were drawn into industrial activity. The number of women involved in production grew considerably in almost all the capitalist countries. At the end of the war, when industrial production slowed down, when the unions should have shouldered the task of women’s interests in the same manner as they should defend men’s interests, there were unions in certain countries that took it upon themselves to throw women out of work. In England alone hundreds of thousands of women workers were thrown out of work in this way.
This division of the exploited according to sex is obviously a left over of the conservatism that still persists among the masses of the workers. It was not that long ago that many union organizations refused to admit women, probably considering that they were unworthy of membership. Women’s struggles for the right to join unions were very painful, and in certain countries provoked the formation of separate women’s organizations whose aim was to gain recognition from the men in the same industry.
The revolutionary unions, for whom all workers are part of the same family of the exploited, must firmly and unreservedly oppose this extremely reactionary viewpoint on women workers. Even on this question, elementary as it may seem, there are serious divergences between revolutionary and reformist unions. It is not sufficient to oppose the policy of laying off women first; it is necessary to look at women’s work in the same light as men’s work. In many unions there still exists a double policy for wages, one for men and one for women. Men with the same qualifications as women earn higher wages, not because they produce a greater number of products, not because they are more qualified, not because they have a higher productivity rate, but simply because they are men. And women earn lower wages simply because they are women, that is to say, the most backward of the exploited.
The division of the proletariat according to sex should not exist, as far as the revolutionary unions are concerned. As for wage policy, workers should be categorized according to their degree of qualification. The slogan “Equal wages for equal work” should be proclaimed and put into practice. In some places, the struggle to reduce production costs, particularly in times of crisis, takes the form of reducing the wages of the most backward categories of workers, especially of women. In certain cases, especially when women are badly organized, they are the first to fall victim to the developing crisis. Unions must take all these facts into consideration in their daily work, not only when the crisis begins, but constantly. In a special resolution, the Red International of Labour Unions emphasized that winning over the broad masses of working women is critically important for the social revolution. Social revolution cannot be achieved until women workers in great numbers have become active comrades in struggle. For without the millions of women now working in industry, it is very difficult to win power and to maintain it.
In addition to the tasks already mentioned, unions have several special tasks in relation to female and child labour. Among these are: protection of women’s and children’s working conditions, protection of pregnant women, of mothers, etc. The tasks of red unions regarding this question are set out in the resolution on organization adopted by the First International Congress, as well as in a special resolution. The following point from the Congress’s resolution should be used as the basis for union work with women workers:
“The followers of the Red International of Labour Unions must pay special attention to the organization of women workers into the revolutionary trade union movement. No separate organizations for women shall be created. The proletariat is a single entity, and as a class must build its organizations according to industries, disregarding the sex of the toilers.
“Women workers, being the most backward category of toilers, are more exploited than the men, and the reformist unions, following the course of least resistance, are establishing their wages not according to qualification or productivity, but according to the sex of the workers. When a crisis breaks out, the conservative unions take the initiative of firing the women first. This harmful anti-working class policy must be met with stubborn resistance. The working woman is our fellow in exploitation and our aim is to make her an active fighter for the social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The only unions worthy of being members of the Red International of Labour Unions are those which have freed themselves from the old prejudices concerning female labour, as well as all other questions, and have taken up the fight to safeguard and defend it, with the sole aim of increasing the army of social revolution with new and tireless fighters recruited from the exploited and oppressed women workers.”
The old leaders of the labour organizations often say and write that the bourgeoisie will stop its offensive before breaking contracts. In general, the reformist leaders consider contracts to be the greatest conquest of the working class. Many leaders cannot even conceive of labour organizations having any other aim. John Mitchel, a well-known American labour leader, stated openly in his pamphlet, Organized Labour, that the principal task of labour organizations is to move forward from individual contracts to collective contracts. Obviously, collective contracts are an advance over individual contracts.
Previously, the employer dealt directly with one isolated, and accordingly powerless, seller of labour power. He determined the wage and the working conditions he wished. Labour organizations have the task of defending the interests of the working class. They act as the collective sellers of the workers’ labour power, as interested parties in the buying and selling of workers’ energy and knowledge. It took a very long struggle, spread over several decades, for unions to gain recognition and the right to sign contracts not only for their members but also for all workers in their industry. And this is still far from being the case everywhere. The long, sharp struggle to replace individual contracts by collective contracts resulted in the development of the following conception among the union leaders: contracts have an absolute value, a universal significance, they are the key to bringing order to the anarchy of production and establishing social peace, thanks to the approval of the state.
In short, for reformist unions the contract is the goal. They aim to sign contracts for long periods of time, because they believe the act of signing a contract adequately guarantees its fulfillment. But in truth, we must consider contracts as temporary truces. We must struggle firmly against the overestimation of contracts. We must see them as a short armistice in the struggle between Labour and Capital. Never in the social struggle have the employers been stopped by the necessity of respecting formal obligations. Now that the offensive is developing everywhere, we can see how the employers manage to break contracts. Only those without any understanding of class struggle can lull themselves into thinking that a signed contract can oblige the employers to carry out all its provisions. Workers must see the contract in the same way as the employers do. The contract is essentially a provisional agreement between two enemies, and the two sides openly state that when the situation is favourable they are prepared to make a new, more advantageous agreement. Each side respects the contract to the extent that it has no other choice. Did contracts help the English miners or textile workers? No. Whenever the bourgeoisie has seen the possibility of doing something to better its own interests, it has done it, leaving the jurists and the bought-off writers the task of coming up with legal justifications for its acts. We can see the same thing in America, in France, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, etc. Employers have the same nature everywhere. They are not metaphysicians; they are real politicians, and are not inclined to make fetishes out of contracts. However, there are a great number of metaphysicians among the workers, especially among their leaders. In seeking to avoid struggle under all circumstances, they tend to exaggerate the value of contracts. For reformists, contracts lessen class contradictions and replace class struggle. In reality this is both theoretically and practically false. Labour contracts are a product, a result of class struggle. They cannot replace it, any more than a house razed by an earthquake can be considered to be the same thing as the earthquake itself.
There are indeed contracts that are narrowly corporatist and contrary to the class spirit. We can find clearly reactionary tendencies in these contracts: refusing work to newly-qualified or foreign workers, refusing work to women workers and limiting or reducing their wages, etc. There are even contracts between workers and employers (they are called “alliances”) that are aimed against consumers. These kinds of contracts are the result of social peace, not class struggle.
On the one hand there is the position that idealizes contracts, that transforms them into an end in themselves or a fetish, but on the other hand, there is the position that contracts are useless or even harmful. The anarchists propagate this idea, supporting it with all their revolutionary extremism. “Revolutionary workers must not discuss with the bosses.” That is the basis of this tactic. This conception of contracts is just as absurd and harmful as the preceding one. We don’t discuss with the enemy during a war as long as we have hopes of definitively defeating it. When we cannot defeat it, we must sign a truce with it. The same applies to class struggle: the danger lies not in the fact that the workers’ representatives talk with the employers, but in the way they talk to them, in the nature of the truce agreed upon, and in their behavior after the signing of the contract. If we consider the contract as an end in itself, the working masses will not prepare themselves for the coming war; they will lull themselves with illusions about the stability and the durability of the contract. But, if the unions see the contract as a temporary armed truce, and tirelessly continue to struggle, the agreement can be beneficial (of relative benefit, we admit) to the working class. Thus, the danger does not lie in discussions with the employers nor in contracts: the question is in whose name these discussions are undertaken, and how the unions use the armed peace to prepare for the coming class war.
While the bourgeoisie speaks so frequently about peaceful development and about the criminal nature of all violence in economic conflicts, they themselves are now setting up special organizations, composed of representatives of the bourgeoisie and mercenaries, to directly confront revolutionary workers on strike. In the pre-war period, economic conflicts usually ended more or less peacefully. There were often confrontations with scabs, certain groups of workers used violence against strike-breakers, but in general, these big strikes ran their course peacefully, under the protection of police bayonets. The workers’ greatest victory on the question of the right to strike was winning the right to organize their own detachments to try to convince strike-breakers not to go back to work, and generally to exert moral influence on them.
In the present post-war period, the bourgeoisie is not respecting its old legal framework. In every bourgeois country, special strikebreaking organizations, made up of spoiled sons of the bourgeoisie and mercenaries, have been set up to sabotage strikes and disorganize the working class masses. In some countries these organizations are active both during and after strikes. In Italy, small groups (fasci) were created to defend “special and national interests”. These groups, made up of small landowners, bourgeois intellectuals, rich peasants and of all sorts of declassed elements, quickly attracted all the enemies of the working class, and with the state’s kindly aid, succeeded in unleashing a regime of white terror, commonly known as “fascism”.
The fundamental task of fascism is to destroy the revolutionary leaders of the working class and demoralize the working class masses. The assassination of hundreds of workers and their leaders, the destruction of workers’ organizations, setting fire to their buildings, the creation of parallel scab federations—these are the concrete results of fascist activity. Fascism is international... In Spain, the “somaten”, with the help of the police, systematically assassinate revolutionary workers. These mercenary gangs break into houses and cafes, ruthlessly killing “dangerous militants”. With government aid, assassinations are carried out in prisons or immediately after workers have been freed.
In England, the White Guards (the Volunteers) destroyed the people’s kitchens set up for the striking miners. The “somaten” in Chile and in Argentina burned certain workers alive for refusing to denounce the propagandists who put forward economic or political strikes. In the United States, the bandits in the leagues’ civilian, the Ku Klux Klan, are actively involved in the sourch for the West Virginia “rebel miners” much in the same way that their ancestors hunted down Indians in the same region. They pour tar over the most active leaders of the “Industrial Workers of the World”, and then burn them alive; they bring gangs of ‘agents provocateurs’ into strike-bound regions, and when necessary, provoke incidents in order to turn over to the judicial system those they want to suppress.
In Germany there are two types of organizations: secret societies and officer leagues which aim to restore the monarchy. They make use of government tolerance to organize the murder of the most energetic revolutionary workers and communists. The German working class can count hundreds of victims killed by these organizations of assassins...
In addition, there exists a legal organization of strikebreakers, an Organization of Technical Aid to Sabotage Strikes. This organization has its headquarters in Berlin: at its head is a superintendent named by the government and directly under the jurisdiction of the minister of the interior. This is how the organization is structured: the country is divided into 16 regions, which in turn are subdivided into more than 80 sub-regions. More than 1000 local groups with over 170,000 members direct the actions in each of the localities. “Technical aid” was used on 521 occasions up until January 1, 1921: 88 cases were reported in electrical stations, 49 in gas works, 34 in the rail industry, etc.
Similar White Guard and strike-breaking organizations exist in all countries: in France, the “Civilian League”, in Hungary, the “Hungarian Watchmen”; in Poland, the “Sokols” organization, “Bdiouvki”, etc. And they also exist in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Everywhere, alongside the state repressive apparatus there exist volunteer White Guard companies to fight against the coming revolution. And there are also the yellow unions that have existed for a number of years.
By themselves, these gangs are not a great force. But their strength lies in the fact that in every country the government outfits them, arms them and gives them funds. Thanks to the state aid they receive, these groups, though insignificant in terms of force and numbers, have a large enough influence in struggles. All organizations of strike-breakers and of assassins, now present throughout Europe and America, must at costs be destroyed. Their continued existence endangers the very existence of workers’ organizations.
What line of conduct must the working class and revolutionary unions adopt on the question of White Guards? How to fight? Revolutionary unions must take a stand on this question. In Italy, the General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), in agreement with the Socialist Party, has gone so far as to conclude an armistice with the fascists. The fascists didn’t respect the truce. Once again Socialist Party and CGIL pacifists and Tolstoians showed that they understood nothing about the basic conditions of social struggle that provoked the creation of these organizations of assassins. The Socialist Party and the CGIL leaders have taken up the Tolstoian point of view: we must temporize, the violence of the employers’ organizations of thugs will provoke a strong reaction in society, democratic government will be obliged to intervene to re-establish order, etc. This point of view is marked by hopeless pessimism. It’s the philosophy of suicide. The working class cannot and must not ever have a passive, Tolstoian attitude towards this highly important social phenomenon. Today, these assassins’ organizations play the role of strikebreakers and murderers. Today, the White Guard is taking form and is getting organized.
The world bourgeoisie was more capable than the workers of weighing the lessons of the Russian revolution. The capitalists, with the help of the whole state apparatus, are organizing their White Guards. They know very well that in the final battle that will take place in all countries, he who is better organized and can act rapidly and energetically will emerge victorious. They are training their white organizations right now. Through their early massacres they are learning how to break the workers’ insurrection. It is a mark of pure imbecility in these conditions to do what the reformist union leaders are doing—to limit the unions to the old methods of struggle during strikes, being satisfied with pleading for a truce and calling for calm. During great social conflicts, workers must immediately create local fighting units, their own detachments, their local strike guards who must fight energetically the organized employers and their strikebreakers. The White Guards will continue to destroy workers’ organizations and disrupt the revolutionary movement until the workers’ organizations have created these kinds of fighting units, which oppose the strength of the workers to that of the sons of the bourgeoisie. This is the answer that the workers’ organizations must give: the creation of strikers’ fighting units, of special teams to fight against the sabotage of strikes, of detachments to wage war against bourgeois assassins.
The facts reported daily in the press show that the workers are far behind the employers in this area, as in many others. The employers have their fighting organizations in every country, and not one strike of any importance goes by without their active intervention. But we see only a small number of conflicts where the workers fight back adequately against the employers’ attacks by creating special strikers’ fighting units to combat the employers’ organizations. The slow development of such organizations is due entirely to reformist ideology, which, up to the present, has dominated the union movement in many countries. According to a trade unionist, a German reformist, or a “reasonable” French syndicalist, workers must not use means of struggle that are forbidden by bourgeois law. Observing the law during struggles is the foundation of their tactics. Calm, for the love of God! That’s the slogan constantly repeated in the reformist press.
Obviously, calm is a good thing, but only if it’s a disciplined calm in the course of revolutionary actions. Discipline and calm aren’t an obstacle to the revolutionary struggle, but are in fact its very basis. In this light, every revolutionary worker, every revolutionary unionist, will always call on the workers to be disciplined and calm. But what kind of calm do the reformists preach to the workers? As far as they are concerned, ideal calm means a strike where the workers stay passive. Even if the strike involves a large number of workers—and reformists are often forced to lead large strikes—observing the law is still the be all and end all of the Amsterdam leaders’ tactics. But we don’t make a fetish out of legality. The fascists and the other White Guard organizations aren’t covered by any bourgeois law. But nonetheless today these illegal organizations are having a very great effect on economic struggles. We must quite frankly follow the example of the bosses and create workers’ fighting units that are outside of the law to carry out the decisions of competent union organizations. The workers’ movement can only protect itself from constant pogroms, encouraged not only by the bourgeoisie but also by the reformist unions, by organizing strikers’ fighting units, and by having an extremely serious and attentive attitude towards the developing bourgeois White Guards. The First Congress of the Red International of Labour Unions was right a thousand times over when, in considering the changing conditions of the social struggle, it passed a resolution saying that “the organization of special strike units, special self-defence units” is a question of life and death for the working class.
During social conflicts, a series of practical and concrete tasks face the strikers’ fighting detachments that must be created by the labour organizations to defend themselves against all attacks by White Guards and strikebreakers. It is not sufficient to post lookouts and set up picket lines to carry out agitation and propaganda work among the strikebreakers as is already done in many countries. These tasks must be carried through to the end; during the strike, the strikers’ detachments must block both the delivery of raw materials and finished goods to the factory, and the shipping out of manufactured goods. The employers will try to launch an offensive against the workers once they have accumulated a certain reserve of manufactured products, and once they have ensured the production of these goods in other factories. At these times, complete unity exists among the employers. They consider it their class duty to help each other in the struggle, and in this way they have often brought about the defeat of the workers.
Immediately after the February revolution in Russia, the workers devised new methods of action against the employers. Whenever a conflict arose, whenever the workers downed tools, the strikers’ fighting guards—or Red Guards, as they were called in Russia—were immediately organized. Their tasks were, on the one hand, to see that the strikebreakers could not enter the factory and, on the other hand, to ensure that the factories could neither deliver their merchandise, nor serve their customers from already existing reserves. This method of disorganizing commerce, of preventing the filling of orders and of setting up obstacles to prevent the delivery of ordered merchandise quickly made a strong impression on the employers. If the workers hesitate before the many laws that protect the rights of the employers, their struggle becomes increasingly difficult. Obviously we must take advantage of all legal possibilities, we must exert the greatest possible effort to ensure that no paragraph of the law, no matter how weakly it defends the workers’ rights, remains unused. But it would be a great mistake on the part of the workers to think that the law cannot be broken.
All contemporary legislation in bourgeois countries is based on private property and the protection of the interests of the employers. But the social legislation of recent decades has resulted in a partial limitation of these rights, insomuch as it gives certain rights to the workers. This social legislation is the result of a long and relentless struggle on the part of the working class, and it would be pure folly to ignore existing rights or to consider the gains that have been won as negligible or unimportant. No, this is not the point of view from which to approach the question of the short term struggle for working class demands. The workers must hold on firmly to the territory they have already conquered and must always look to extending that territory, to gaining new positions.
Obviously, no law foresees the organization of fighting detachments of strikers, and it is probable that in stopping the delivery of orders, the workers will come face to face with the ferocious resistance of the whole state apparatus. But if the working class wages its struggle only according to what is permitted, it will never rise out of its state of serfdom; workers have never been given anything but what they themselves have conquered, often in harsh and bloody battles. This is why it is necessary to approach these new forms off struggle realistically. Naturally, such a method carries with it great difficulties: it can be used as an excuse for provocations. Under these conditions, the White Guards and strikebreakers may try to draw the workers into a trap. The bourgeois state apparatus may be directed against the workers who dare to strike a blow at the sacred interests of private property. But there are no means of struggle that our enemies will not try to turn against us. Whoever fears the risks must take up the reformists’ point of view and sit, arms crossed, doing nothing; then, obviously the danger will be minimized. Yet even if we take up the reformists’ point of view and use no illegal actions, always staying within the boundaries of the law, the working class still has no guarantee against illegal actions by the employers and the bourgeois state.
We need only look at the situation in “democratic” America in order to realize that the reactionaries are not full of empty words, but are men of action; they do not hesitate to use any violent measure if they consider it the least bit useful. The social struggles of the last year in America reveal many horrible incidences of violence practised against revolutionary workers. Strike leaders are shot down in the streets. They are tarred and feathered and burnt alive. They are driven naked hundreds of kilometres into the forests and flogged. All this is done by the employers’ organizations with the support of the federal powers. Clearly, the bourgeois jurists will never say that these crimes are legal; nevertheless, each time such cases are revealed, it is always the workers and never their torturers who are found guilty for one reason or another. We are led to believe that workers like to be tarred and feathered and burnt alive. This is how bourgeois justice reacts each time it is called to examine cases where the interests of the workers clash with those of the employers. The theory of legality at all costs as preached by the leading organs of the contemporary union movement can only be explained by the reformists’ weak hearts and soft heads.
Revolutionary workers must scorn this tendency to make a principle out of fear; they must follow their own road, using all the means at their disposal to fight the bourgeoisie. For this method to succeed, we must hit the employer where he is most vulnerable, in his pocketbook. And to achieve this, the active participation of transportation workers is essential. No matter how well-organized a given group of workers may be, they will never succeed in isolating the factory or region concerned if the transport workers continue to carry the goods. The factory must be isolated in such a way that no transport worker will deliver goods to the factory or site of conflict. Labourers should refuse to unload cars, etc. It is only with this kind of close solidarity between revolutionary unions of different trades that different factories and regions where strikers are fighting can be economically isolated. With the united action of the unions concerned, the strikers’ fighting detachments can play an extremely important role. We must, however, remember that these units of strikers are organizations of self defence, and that it would be extremely harmful if they began to destroy machines and generally engage in sabotage. For the anarchists sabotage plays a decisive role in the struggle. But workers are the heirs of the bourgeoisie and to destroy machines means to destroy their own wealth. The idea of machine smashing arises when sufficient solidarity has not been built among the workers; in such a situation certain comrades think that individual heroes can replace the heroism and creative spirit of the masses. For example, the pamphlet entitled “How We Will Make the Social Revolution” written by two former anarcho-syndicalists, Pataud and Pouget, is based on the disruption of production by purely mechanical means, with the aim of bringing about the sudden outbreak of a social revolution. Revolutionary unions allow for the heroism of advanced elements of the working class, but they formulate their tactics according to the enthusiasm of the masses, their solidarity and their persistence in the struggle. This is why the strikers’ fighting detachments can only play their role inasmuch as they are linked to the mass organizations and function under their direct control. This is not possible with individual actions.
The entire economic struggle of the working class in the present period must concentrate on the control of production. Without control over the factories, none of the problems facing the working class today can be solved. Unemployment, factory closings, etc.—all these are linked to the question of controlling production. There can be no compromise on this question, no middle road, nor a kind of control that is easily acceptable to both employers and workers.
What does it mean to control production? It is not a question of formal financial control, nor of setting up some kind of review board that once or twice a year examines the accounts or the various memoranda of the company. This is not control over production, it is not even a substitute for control; it is merely a caricature of the concept of workers’ control. Control over production means putting all the different operations of the factory under the control of the workers: industrial, technical, financial, and commercial operations. In a word, the many and diverse forms of contemporary productive activity must be closely controlled by the workers.
But isn’t this kind of control, organized by the workers, a violation of the rights of private property? It constitutes an interference by the workers in a domain which, from time immemorial, has belonged to the employers, a holy place closed to the workers. Yes, control over production does mean that workers meddle in the relations of private right. But this meddling has become an historical necessity, and it must occur in the interest of preserving the working class. The tremendous waste of productive forces and assets that occurred during the war, and which continues to this very day, will cease only when the working class is in direct contact with production, when it is not just another element in the economy but a direct sharer in it, when it is not just another part of the machine, but the conscious director of the industrial machine. The transformation of the working class from a class in itself to a class for itself, as Marx describes it, will obviously occur only after the socialist revolution, after the establishment of a socialist regime. But the very existence of this regime will depend on the direction taken in the near future by the workers, in their attempt to establish control over production, control over the capitalist economy.
The idea of control over production was born long ago, well before the war. It gained credibility in all countries during the war when the bourgeois state, serving the interest of the capitalist class, controlled different branches of the national economy in order to protect and maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie as a class. The government subordinated the different elements of the ruling class to the overall interests of the class. State control became the dominant economic ideology during the whole war period. The end of the war was marked by the end of state control, by the dismantling of the coercive economy and by the free play of all the capitalist forces. But this free play given to the forces of capitalism now runs counter to the specific interests of the working class. From this the idea emerged during the war period, and especially during the Russian revolution, of establishing real and not fictive workers’ control. At the present time the idea of control over production is so widespread that even the bourgeois governments are forced to take up the question. When, at the end of 1920, the Italian workers occupied a number of factories for a period of several weeks, Giolitti made a statement on workers’ control and even submitted a bill to Parliament on the subject.
There has been much talk of workers’ control in England, where all sorts of government commissions have taken up the question with the participation of the unions. Workers’ control has been discussed in France, where the Metalworkers Federation has put together a pitiful project that exposes the poverty of the ideas of the Federation’s leadership; their project does not contain an atom of understanding of the meaning of workers’ control. In Germany especially, the question of workers’ control and control over production has been discussed. But it is strange that the more said about workers control, the more this control takes on a vague and ambiguous character. All the republican governments of Germany, in which both the social-democrats and the union leaders have played an active and important role, have solemnly promised to institute this control over production. Yet not a single German worker can say precisely what this control represents. Workers’ control does not exist in any bourgeois country; it can exist only as a direct weapon of the masses in their revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie, as a counterweight to the bourgeoisie. No control is possible on the basis of agreements, for what agreement can there be between the workers and the bourgeoisie? Could there be such an agreement that gives workers control over the company’s industrial development and commercial operations? The employer would never consent to this; it would mean interference in the most sacred domain of private property.
Thus, as long as we are talking about control reached by agreements, we are talking only about control in form that will give nothing to the workers because it will be harmless to the bourgeoisie. This is why the slogans of control over production or workers’ control must be applied directly in a revolutionary way. We must understand that on this question the workers will be faced with the bourgeoisie’s most determined and most violent resistance. It’s fine to ask for concessions concerning female and child labour, even concerning unemployment insurance. But to ask the bourgeoisie to give real control to the workers goes, for them, beyond the realm of possibility. We would have to be very naive to hope that workers’ control could be established without violent resistance on the part of the ruling classes. Should this fact stop the workers from struggling? Obviously not. The working class is not so naive as to expect voluntary concessions from the bourgeoisie. The working class never has and never will gain easy victories in any aspect of its struggle. It is clear that in the struggle to control production, victories will be even more costly than those won in other areas, for if in politics there exist many different forms of government (republic, constitutional monarchy, absolute monarchy, etc.), in economics it is autocracy that up to now has ruled the day. Autocracy reigns in the factories of all countries: in constitutional England, in democratic America, in republican France and in social-democratic Germany.
The reformists like to talk about economic democracy, or the establishment of a republican form of government within the mills and factories. In his book “Industrial Democracy” the well-known English reformist Sydney Webb long ago put forward the idea of democratic relations in production. But what does this democracy in production, this republic in the factory, mean? How should we understand it? If we take these words literally, the true republic will exist when the workers take over control of production and transform the employer into a technician. The limits of democracy in this field were reached in Germany where bipartite labour organizations were established, composed of equal numbers of workers’ and employers’ representatives. The German unions even developed a whole theory on the legal equality of employers and workers, called the theory of bipartite rights; workers and employers are equal, their organizations are of equal value, hence they participate in everything in equal numbers. Of course, representatives of government are still included, but, as we know, these representatives are above classes, they guarantee the interests of society as a whole. This theory of bipartite rights, based as it is on the protection of private property and on the management of the country’s resources by a clique of industrial tycoons, can only result in complete failure. What equality can exist between the workers, who have nothing, and the bosses, who have hundreds of millions? We could talk of equality only if the workers had the same rights over the management of the country’s wealth as have the employers’ organizations and their state. If the German Union Central, which gave birth to this idea of parity, could, as the representative of the entire German union movement, have the same control over coal mines and metallurgical factories of the province of Westphalia-Rhine as have the Stinnes, the Krupps and others, if it had control over the whole German textile industry, if not a single mark could be issued by any German bank without its consent, then we could talk of bipartite rights. But to speak of parity and equality, of workers’ democracy and workers’ control today, when one side has in its hands all the existing resources of the country while the other side views these operations as a passive spectator, is nothing but a mockery of the most basic demands of the working class.
The working class is not interested in the idea of bipartite rights nor is it looking for some kind of vague workers’ democracy. And this is how it regards the whole industrial process. Workers’ control must be established by the workers themselves and the organization of control boards must be accomplished without any kind of authorization. The control board will supervise everything that occurs in the factory as well as all its external relations. Thus, while establishing control over production, the workers must also undertake the more difficult aspect of workers’ control, that is control over finances. The First Congress of the Red International of Labour Unions adopted a detailed resolution the gist of which is expressed in the following brief propositions:
“1. Workers’ control is an essential and important school for preparing the broad masses of workers for socialist revolution.
“2. In all capitalist countries, workers’ control must be the war cry of the union movement; it should be used energetically as a means of exposing commercial and financial secrets.
“3. Workers’ control should be widely used in order to transform the unions into fighting organizations of the working class.
“4. Workers’ control should be used to rebuild unions on the basis of industry as opposed to according to craft, which is an antiquated system harmful to the revolutionary workers’ movement.
“5. Workers’ control is incompatible with the principle of bipartism put forward by the bourgeoisie, with nationalization, etc. It opposes the dictatorship of the proletariat to that of the bourgeoisie.
“6. In establishing technical, financial or joint control and during factory occupations, it is essential to attempt to draw the most backward elements of the proletarian masses into the discussion of issues concerning control. At the same time, in the process of achieving control, it is necessary to identify the most active and able workers and to prepare them to play a leading role in organizing production.
“7. In the organization of the day to day aspects of workers’ control, the unions must give leadership to the factory committees; they must link and combine the work of the factory committees of plants in the same industry, and thus prevent the inevitable attempts to encourage factory patriotism that occur when control is local.
“8. Right from the outset the unions must help the factory committees, elaborate special conditions, discuss the question in the daily press, and carry out broad agitation explaining the necessity of workers’ control in the factories. They must not only explain the committees’ tasks, but also report to factory meetings, local conferences, etc. the results of control of both individual plants and group of plants.
“9. In order to carry out these tasks within unions that have not adopted the platform of the Red International of Labour Unions a single revolutionary centre must be created. This centre must pay particular attention to the work of transforming craft unions into industrial unions, and to maintaining the revolutionary character of the struggle for workers’ control.
Whoever wants to establish real and not imaginary control over production must take the road indicated by the Red International of Labour Unions. Otherwise, we will not have workers’ control over production, but rather a strengthening of the bourgeoisie’s control over the workers.
This antiquated idea has once again been put forward as a way of resolving all the ills of society. In France, England and Germany there are workers’ profit-sharing programs, and philosophers and social reformers think they will be able to use this to reconcile the irreconcilable, that is, satisfy the working class without hurting the employers.
The idea also carries some weight in certain labour circles, among those who avoid and fear struggle, those who consider that the bourgeoisie will be eternally indispensable to society, those who see no further than an agreement with the bourgeoisie for the sharing of surplus value, for all of these backward elements of the working class (and there are many backward elements, even in the most advanced capitalist countries) profit-sharing is a solution that enables them to escape the present impasse. It is the favourite notion of the Catholic unions.
It is hardly necessary to show that this idea does nothing but deceive the working class. The numerous experiences of workers’ participation in profit-sharing in different countries have shown that the only result of such a system is the increased exploitation of the workers, who work at maximum intensity in the hope of increasing their share of profits. Usually this profit-sharing means that the workers are offered an insignificant percentage of the profits. In every case, such agreements do no more to resolve social problems than do the endless discussions about socialization which are so fashionable these days. Workers’ participation in profit-sharing presupposes the existence of profits, in other words the preservation of the capitalist system, whereas the task of the working class consists in suppressing capitalist relations and abolishing capitalist society itself.
According to the social-reformists, the bourgeois liberals and the workers who listen to them, surplus value produced by the working class must remain the basis of class relations; therefore, it must be given an eternal character by having the worker share in the surplus value he has himself produced. How can such a charitable reform be achieved? This question was the subject of debate at the seventh session of the International Parliamentary Trade Conference held in Lisbon from May 25 to May 28, 1921 and presided over by the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs Nillo Barette. Commission Secretary Paul Delombre, former French trade minister, insisted that industrialists of good faith introduce profit-sharing for workers, without state interference and without giving workers the right to control the companies’ operations. Delombre declared, “Profit-sharing is one of the most efficient means of achieving social progress, because it assures harmony between Capital and Labour, and assures the workers’ interests in the smooth running of the concern.”
During the debates, the deputy Malla (Salonica) stated that, “one of the principal objectives of profit-sharing is a rise in productivity.” Malla considered the system to be primarily of commercial and not social interest.
Sir Douther Randles, an English Member of Parliament, said that English unions are opposed to profit-sharing and there is little likelihood that it will become widespread in England. “Profit-sharing,” he said, “may be considered a practical method for assuring that Labour will collaborate with Capital, but it should not be compulsory.”
Oulir, head of the Czechoslovak delegation, called attention to his country’s mining legislation and said that workers took part in profit-sharing and played an important role in managing production due to the institution of factory councils, arbitration boards and joint commissions.
Ministers Bertrand (of Belgium), and Sorel (of France), and Portuguese Member of Parliament Quimernas warned the conference against placing too much hope in profit-sharing.
In conclusion the following resolution was adopted:
“1. The Conference considers that profit-sharing can be recommended as having the same value as other measures which lead to collaboration between Labour and Capital.
“2. Participation in profit-sharing should not be considered an act of generosity on the part of the employer towards the workers, nor should it be obligatory for anyone.
“3. The Conference considers that participation in profit-sharing is desirable only when it is freely accepted by the workers.”
There is no need to comment on all of this speech-making on profit-sharing to which the social-reformists, jurists and professors of France, Belgium, England and Germany are now devoting themselves; the sole aim—consolidating social peace for the self-interests of these bourgeois social-reformers—is all too obvious. The revolutionary trade unions’ position with regard to this theory is clear and simple. The issue is not in any way the quantitative reduction of surplus value, but its abolition. And it is essential to declare an uncompromising war against such shameful deception of the working masses. The workers’ attention must be concentrated, not on how surplus value can be shared between workers and employers, but on how they will rid themselves of a class that lives entirely from surplus value.
In fighting against this bourgeois invention, the conduct of labour leaders in particular must be watched. It is quite natural and does not surprise us that the bourgeoisie should wish to trick the working class with illusory charity; but that some union leaders should seize upon this theory like a lifeline is unparalleled shamelessness and duplicity. For example, Clines, one of the leaders of the British Labour Party, in his June 28 speech in Parliament, took up the defence of his idea, declaring that “the increasing popularity of the principle of workers’ participation in profit-sharing can only serve to ensure the peaceful development of industry, improve production and develop a feeling of fairness”. This single example is enough to expose how deeply rooted bourgeois ideas are in the minds of a great number of workers, how great the influence of bourgeois ideology is over the proletariat. Luckily for the proletariat, the bourgeoisie itself opens the eyes of those who are blind. With this question as with all others, the logic of the situation obliges bourgeois reformists, and the liberal labour politicians who support them, to expose the emptiness of their principles and practice. They can wax eloquent about profit-sharing, but the concrete results will never be more than downright miserable; therefore even the most backward worker, however deeply rooted might be his desire to see bourgeois society prosper, will soon discover in practice that participation in profit-sharing for him can only be a mirage and nothing more.
In order that this “great reform” might produce even minimal tangible results, all surplus value would have to be distributed am