MARXISTS have always had to fight inside broader, non-marxist organisations to win the support of the best This means winning over workers whose initial position is to abstain from politics or to embrace the social democratic politics of their existing mass leaders.
From very early after the successful Russian Revolution, Lenin, Trotsky and the leaders of the new Communist Third International argued that marxists had to adopt a combined approach.
They needed to produce their own, openly revolutionary propaganda to attract the maximum recruits to the new Communist parties; but they also needed to fight for tactical positions designed to secure a united front with the reformist workers and their organisations and lead ers against the capitalist counter-offensive.
The Theses of the Cominter spelled MARXISM out in laborious detail that the united front was not in any way simply an exposure cry of the reformist union and social democratic leaders.
It was a serious attempt to rally the majority of the proletariat in united class action. through which they couk team their real strength while dealing significant blows against ine capitalists aro their machinery. Workers could leam more through these experiences of actual struggle than they would ever absorb through leaflets denouncing the treachery of their Icaders..
Under Lenin and Trotsky the new Ina series of transitional demands, designed 1977 Grunwick strikers to connect with real issues and struggles facing the working class, and to lead to new forms of organisation, mobilisation and struggle, putting the workers on the road to power.
Organised force
The task was seen as winning the majority of the working class to the banner of socialism - through the determined political intervention of marxists as an organised force within the trade unions. bringing in the ideas and programme of socialism 'from without".
The early Comintern and later the Trotskyist Left Opposition were to spell out consistently the basic starting point for any struggle to root socialism in the mass movement: workers would not be convinced by abstract pronganda from forces which stood on the sidelines of the fight.
Marxists could only hope to convince militants of their policies and programme if they were seen to be concerned with the problems faced by the workers and tremisches acure in the front ranks of the day-to-day battles in the unBut this has never meant marxists simply becoming trade union activists. immersing themselves in union work for the sake of it. Lenin tionary model • should not oc a trade union secretary, but a tribune of the people, able Apex dismanci to react to every manitesStation of tyranny and repressions, no matter where it takes place, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects."
Trotsky, too. was clear in opposing any lapse from marxism into syndicalism was sufficient:
"Were the proletariat as a whole capable of grasping its historical task immediately, it would need neither party nor trade union. Revolution would be born simultaneously with the proletariat."
He stressed the importance both of revolutionaries being organised and of the adherence to discipline as a counter to the pressures towards incomoration into the bureaucracy:
Discipline "In the trade unions the Communists. of course, submit to the discipline of the party, no matter what posts they occupy. This does not exclude but pre-supposes their submission to trade union discipline. measuring the role of the party in the unions..... But the principal enterion is the general influence of the party on the working class, which is measurca by the circulation of the Communist press, the attendance at meetings of the party, the number of votes at elections and... the number of working men and women who respond actively to the party's appeals to struggle."
Ideological laboratory Years later, again arguing against syn. dicalism, Trotsky declared:
"The Left Opposition considers that to influence the trade union movement, to help it fix its correct onentation, to permeate it with correct slogans is impossi. ... which besides its other attributes. the central ideological laboratory of the working class.
"The correctly understood task of the Communist Party does not consist solely of gaining influence over the trade unions.. but in winning, through the trade unions, an influence over the majority of the working class."
An immediate obstacle to any real initiative reaching beyond individual and local union bodies to appeal to wider layers of the working class is the role of the trade union bureaucracy, which developed to its present level of importance only during and after the 1920s.
Union bureaucrats. increasingly a de finable privileged layer resting on the back of mass and strengthening trade openly reactionary opponents of class struggle.
Or they may be 'left' reformists - like the TUC "lefts" who were cultivated by the British Communist Party in 1924-26, but who so dismally failed to challenge the right and connived at the cell-out of the 1926 General Strike. plored some of the political strands running through the union and social democratic bureaucracy as he attempted to correct the blunders of the British CP. left to opportunist right under directions from the Kremlin.
The carly CP clearly saw its role as intervening as a disciplined, organised force workine inside the unsons: but the politics of Stalinism tured this into a negative role, leading to the squandering of opportunities to build a class struggle challenge to the bureaucracy.
Concluded next issue
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 44 June 12 1993. Page 13