It is not uncommon to hear dismissal of trade unions among leftists: too conservative, don’t mobilise enough, too eager to make deals with employers and so on. The issue for Communists is not whether these criticisms are true; it is rather that they miss the point.
Unions reflect a market where buyers and sellers of labour power haggle over the price and terms under which that commodity is sold. The extent to which unions pursue objectives beyond this—a politics of social democratic reform or socialist transformation—varies widely across magnitude, time and place, tending to be secondary to immediate struggles over wages, conditions, security: all imposed by the brute reality of the labour market and the cruel experience of labour as a commodity. Politics are delegated by unions to favoured parties, to none at all, or to individual members.
Facing real constraints in the labour market, while attempting to maintain a relationship with another party who’d prefer they didn’t exist at all, unions must negotiate the immediate interests of their members where there are ongoing opportunity costs to be struck on wages, labour productivity and relationships (all things being equal, for example: push wages too high, profits fall, unemployment occurs—such are the laws of a capitalist market).
Deals must be struck, members defended, members organised, bargaining strategies developed. The resources available to do this are variable and constrained. And unions must hold together a heterogeneous mass of workers drawn from the population, with a diversity of views and expectations.
Limited resources sometimes even mean trade-offs between the institution itself, officer interests and members. In total, such pressures inhibit development of a coherent and sustained political consciousness to see beyond immediate priorities. This is why Communists think such consciousness comes independently through the political party form.
Rather than demanding the unions be “radical”, the Communist attitude to the union movement must be to work within the structures that present themselves and, confronting immediate pressures noted above, instil confidence among members that those of the Communist outlook are the most reliable and best representatives of labour’s concerns on terms, conditions and usage of labour power. As the SED used to say: “Where a party member is, there, too, is the party.” People will only give their confidence to those they believe best represent their material interests.
Unions must remain the primary non-party sphere of activity for communists, since they are the only existing institutions in our societies where workers come together collectively. To withdraw from this sphere because it fails to match ultra-leftist sensibilities, or to reduce it to one terrain of social struggle among many, is not Communist—it is ‘left activism’.
Constraints of the labour market can be overcome only by a political party capable of politically articulating those industrial interests through state forms, not by creating left-wing micro-unions, isolating oneself from the mainstream of unionised labour by slagging them off, or opining that unions have to be radical or redundant. If unions were radical, there would be no need for a Communist Party.
