Trotskyism: the politics of class struggle
does not confront the ruling class as a whole or its state machine. From these very earliest stages of working class organisation there has been a political tension, a contradiction within trade unionism which continues as a major issue in today's apparently very different movement. The wing of the move. ment which looks to pursue an out right and uncompromising struggle against the employers - a struggle which could, if politically developed and generalised, lead logically to revolutionary conclusions -comes under constant pressure from the economic facts of life (the need, in the absence of an immediate revolution, to cam sufficient to live from day to day under capitalism and from the larger section of workers who for the most part seck only to use trade union strength to secure certain concessions, reforms within the framework of capitalism. For this, normally majority, section of trade unionists, there is little or no thought of overturning the power and ownership of even one capitalist, let alone the whole system. The tension between these components of the workers' movement is
"Engels consistently pointed to the one-sidedness of trade union labour struggle, confronts class employers at the level of the workplace or company, but which does not confront the ruling class as a whole or its state machine" Page 17
"it is self-deceiving to turn to an idealistic conception of the working class "rank and file" as some kind of fount of ideological purity ... It can be simply a glorified way of urging the rank and file to stay at a political level they have already reached on their own" Page 18
by no means a simple or mechanical one. There is no 'pure' revolutionary class struggle wing to line up op posite a rival body of unadulterated reformists and class conciliators. On the contrary, trade union and other struggles over the decades have shown us that the same workforce under different conditions can be capable of swaying in either direction. Workers who at one point - given firm leadership - can be roused to peaks of class consciousness, self-sacrifice and militant action, can at other times vote reluctantly or otherwise to accept shabby deals rather than pursue what they see as a hopeless or useless fight.
The pressures comPromise are frequently developed into argued politics of class collaboration and a systematic line of confining workers to reformist demands by bureaucratic layers of full-time union officials and representatives, detached from the bitter realities of exploitation in the workplace, and finding a privileged position as professional go-betweens in dealings with the employers. But the same political and material pressures also bear down and find their reflection in many shop committees and among the union rank and file as a whole.
This should not suprise marxists, who argue that in class society, the ideology of the dominant class is reinforced by material relations of power and material institutions shaping the conditions of daily life, and is therefore itself dominant unless consciously overturned through the development of an alternative ideology.
This is why it is self-deceiving to tum to an idealistic conception of the working class "rank and file" as some kind of fount of ideological purity or any automatic political answer to the
Cof bureaucratic trade union and political leadership. While rank and file workers feel much more acutely the pressures that drive them into struggle, only a fight to develop a new political leadership in opposition to their existing bureaucratic leaders
offers any way forward.
Anything else is simply a glorified
way of urging the rank and file to stay at a political level they have already reached on their own: indeed political
currents today whose political mes-
sage centres on a largely non-political
reliance on the trade union "rank and
file" tend to counternose this to any
serious fight within the unions or the
wider labour movement to expose and
SUPPLEMENT replace the existing bureaucratic leadership. Ultra-left denunciations and phrases can in this way conceal an abstentionist political line (of which one obvious symptom is a refusal to stand against the right wing for office for fear of winning and then becoming contaminated by class collaboration!)
The marxist method consists in building on the inherent tendency to class struggle, the constant and recurring clashes of class interest between the union membership, the employers and the ruling class, and within this context raising demands and political analysis which generalise from but go beyond the experiences of those in struggle, to point towards revolutionary political conclusions.
The politics of reformism emerge most strongly as an obstacle to class struggle at the moments of sharpest crisis. In economic recession, the reformist leader meekly kow-tows to the "right' of the employers to safeguard their viability at the expense of their workforce, urging workers to "tighten their belts' and abandon resistance to redundancies and speed-up. Likewise in war time, the reformist rallies to the defence of the capitalist "fatherland', patriotically boosting the profits of the ruling bourgeoisie.
It was the reformist degeneration of the formally 'marxist' parties of the Second International, leading to their total capitulation in 1914 to the patriotic hysteria of World War One, which convinced Lenin and the Bol-
sheviks of the need for a new, Communist International that would con-
sistently uphold the politics of class
struggle and internationalism.
1919 in the aftermath of the vic-
torious Russian Revolution, recog-
nised the centrality of trade union
struggle, and went on to develop
detailed discussions and documents on tactics for work in the trade unions
and wider workers' movement. These
tactics went back to the