trade unions organise, mobilise and occa. sionally conduct sometimes very militant strikes while strenuously rejecting the slightest hint of socialist politics.
Even in Britain, where the link beMARXISM sacen most unions and we supposcary 'socialist" Labour Party has existed for almost 90 years, there are countless union activists who see no need to support Labour or embrace any socialist perspective.
Trade unions - especially in Britain, employed workforce - are not politically exclusive, but broad organisations refecting the social reality of capitalism. As Marx and Engels pointed out in The German Ideology:
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of sociely is at the same time the ruling intellec. Many union activists make no connection to politics not an expedient or a means of propaganda.
"In England one can speak of a genuine labour movement only in so far as won or lost, the strikes do not get the movement on a singic step rurtici.
Breaking the circle The challenge for socialists has always been to find ways of tapping the vein of militancy while challenging the stultify. ing culture of 'no politics in the unions' which has for so many decades tied workdoubt that Lenin is including left wing. militant trade union struggle as well as right wing reformism when be argues that:
...the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its becoming subordinated to bourgeors ideology, for the spontaneous working class movements bacc wonsa and trace unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence our task... Is to combat sportaneity, to divert the working class movement from this ... striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisic." of the Bolshevik Party were obliged to follow discipline in publicly implementing the policies centrally decided, but given the democratic right to debate and challenge these policies inside the Bolshevik Party itself.
Lenin consistently opposed any attempt to tum this method into a rigid, dogmatic or sectinan stance towards the working class. Though he led the fight from April 1917 for the Bolsheviks to change their name to the Communist Party and for une tomation or a new Communist International, he quick to oppose the sectarian deviations of the "Left Wing Communists", who mistook Lenin's approach, and tried to suosulute propagand or pal al tional work amongst broad layers of the working class. • Continued next issue
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 43 May 29 1993. Page 13