The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines (Part 4)
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Not Respectables but Revolutionists!
In Part 4 we continue by examining the U.S. economic decline, its consequences for foreign policy and domestic, particularly electoral politics and how these influence mass consciousness.
Elections? Where does power really lie?
Workers have no class independent party! The question of which economic/social class will rule won’t be on the ballot in 2024. The working class and specially oppressed castes and the sex/class of women have no road to power through these elections. Our only path to power is class struggle against the capitalist class, the capitalist state, the patriarchy and all its agents in media, education, academia, and even in social justice and workers organizations.
Where is the party committed to escalating the class struggle for a workers government? Who takes up the fight against inter-imperialist and proxy wars? Where is the mass movement organizing worker-led mass assemblies? How are those committed to putting people’s needs over profit ever going to legislate and execute just ends? What kind of worker’s government can initiate the overdue environmental restoration and ensure an equitable economic plan is developed and enforced under workers democratic control? Such is the type of party we need and that is the party the entire capitalist state is determined to prevent from emerging. Those leaders in the workers movement who throw in with the bosses on this accord, willingly or unwittingly must be exposed and rejected. The following is aimed at the class enemy within the working class movement.
Generations of leaders who should have known better have neglected, betrayed and rejected working class political independence. Choosing to feather their own nests they betray our class interests at home and internationally. Knowing full well the Democratic party is firmly in the hands of big capital, and that big capital in the USA is imperialist and parasitic to the core, the trade union leaders traded class struggle and political independence for a pets’ position under the bosses table.
The labor bureaucracy and imperialism
Following the end of the Stalinist approved no strike pledges during WWII the labor bureaucracy broke their shaky armistice with the reds in the unions, submitted to and participated in the McCarthyite witch hunt and cold war, and never looked back. The bureaucracy subordinated the workers movement to U.S. imperialism via American Federation for International Labor Development and other AFL-CIO foreign policy programs. Rather than educating the members about the crisis of capital consolidation, and the role of the finance capitalist class behind mergers & acquisitions, plant closures and offshoring, the memberships were whipped up against foreign workers for ‘taking their jobs.’
Wall Street’s traders celebrated profits from the offshoring, de-industrialization and creating the ‘rust belt.’ In response, the UAW in concert with the Democrats, drove xenophobic fervor against China, breaking most if not all of the working class’s latent internationalist leanings. NATO bombings such as of Serbia and Libya in the 80’s and 90’s didn’t raise an eyebrow. With the end of the selective service draft, protests against the Iraq wars, while massive at the outset, did not gather momentum like during Vietnam. The criminal 9/11 attack hardened social imperialist patriotism and effectively ended the Vietnam syndrome and aversion toward overt foreign interventions ever since. Poisoned by patriotism and nationalism, the working class has not become a class-for-itself. Yet every outbreak of class struggle offers an inner logic, a materialist dialectic, which can lift the veil and crush nationalism with internationalism; likewise individualism can be overcome with solidarity and economist syndicalism with revolutionary socialism! Every strike can become a school of revolution when revolutionaries bring their program into the struggle.
Considering the upcoming elections we will have to review not only the objective conditions of the terminal crisis of capitalism but the subjective condition of the working class consciousness, most significantly, the crisis of the leadership of the working class. Revolutionary workers cannot go around the mass organizations of the workers and oppressed. We have to challenge their class-peace leaderships with a class struggle transitional program. The road to workers power is ultimately through self-organization and self-defense in every workplace, school and workers’ community, drawing balance sheets from class struggles and applying the lessons of class experience. Workers councils, workers self-defense guards and a mass workers party are our class’s historic experience on the path to a workers’ government. Workers and the oppressed won the right to participate in elections in ‘bourgeois democratic states.’ Those rights were not a gift. They were won by class struggle against the ruling class, white supremacy and patriarchy.
Likewise the struggles necessary to resolve the contradictions of Socialism or Extinction, will be won by a mass movement which can only be led to a socialist solution by the working class. Revolutionary workers must use the elections to popularize the revolutionary role of the working class and the organization of its vanguard fighters. The trap is sprung and the struggle for socialism is set back whenever workers agency is surrendered to political blocs and alliances with political representatives of the capitalist class and its ideology in elections, in political combinations, mass movements and in the trade unions.
Controlling the elections and the two party system is the power of the capitalist class which funds and directs its two parties! These parties (and occasionally others as well), which try to look so different, are totally incapable either of ruling alone or in consort with each other. Neither can they resolve the unfolding crisis of the capitalocene, nor can they resist the rise of the China/Russia bloc slowly displacing U.S. hegemony. Workers are not being told by the ever-ambient bourgeois media that the Democrats historically are the war party, and the AFL-CIO tops don’t acknowledge this truth either. Currency and trade wars can easily turn into hot wars putting the question Socialism or Extinction on the calendar.
Disarming the working class in front of the elections:
The workers carry an immeasurable weight of frustrations, episodically triggering events that explode into sustained class struggles. The masses show their willingness to escalate the struggle over and over. But without consolidating lessons along the way and advancing the struggle to higher and higher forms of self organization including public assemblies, workplace committees, self defense mobilizations, and workers councils, the masses get worn out and the tidal wave of struggle ebbs. Occupy, BLM, ‘Red For Ed,’ organizing at Starbucks and Amazon and the preparation for UPS, ILWU and UAW contract negotiations and potential strikes all activated workers, youth and oppressed people. When activated, the unspoken is verbalized then shouted; the hidden is revealed and solidarity in action turns mice on the shop floor into lions on the picket lines.
This is a conundrum for the bosses, the labor bureaucracy, and the Democratic Party. How to appear in the workers camp while serving the interests of the party leadership firmly in the ruling class camp? Stooges, charlatans and labor fakers appear across the board to ensure that frustration manifesting on the streets and shop floors does not get out of hand. Texting campaigns, petitions and supporting ‘labor friendly’ Democrats are the tools of these fakers.
Economism in the workplace, class collaboration in the political sphere:
The trade union leadership, obsequious to U.S. imperialism, slavishly waves the Red White and Blue on foreign policy and mediates the militancy of the workers at home. Leadership requires the membership to pledge allegiance to the flag at every meeting, a legacy of the witch hunt. Whether you realize it or not, the flag follows the imperialist dollar and the troops, our daughters and sons, follow that flag into gunfire overseas. Is that what you want?
The conditions replicate in almost every unionized workplace: contracts lapse, grievances and violations of contract mount, inflation eats away at the base line wages set in the last contract and as the declining rate of profit squeezes the bosses, they squeeze us with speed ups, staff reductions and forced overtime. Decertification campaigns and in-house anti-union compulsory meetings are increasingly used to break the spirit of young workers. Who tells you to accept this!?
When we finally get to negotiation time the bosses stall as long as they can to pay us under the old contract, push us past breaking until we look for second jobs and beg for overtime…then they got us where they want us… tired, frustrated and desperately needing a bump to pay for all the necessities of life.
No sooner than the workers pass a strike authorization vote the bureaucracy is busy putting water on the fire. Sure they will whoop it up in practice pickets, but when it comes time to sell out they retail the TA’s to the members for approval and show us their true colors. The biggest and strongest unions are not immune to the sell out’s. 360,000 Teamsters are discovering this at UPS right now! Let’s be clear, the union tops are professionals, many got their degrees in labor studies departments where they became proficient at concessionary bargaining and telling us what we can’t do! They tell us what we can’t do not only because they have written off class struggle, the fight for workers power and a workers government because THEY DON’T WANT IT!
How many times do we hear that a strike has been authorized after working 6 or 12 or 18 months without a contract. That is the bosses’ first victory in the war and the sellout leaderships, happy with their monthly negotiations, allow them to drag knowing the longer we have to wait, the easier it will be to sell us a shitty deal. One or three day strikes are regularly promoted as ‘militant tactics’ used by nurses to squeeze but not cripple management, while scabs are allowed to skirt the picket lines and enter the back door. The two gate systems at union construction sites, allowing for non-union construction workers to enter, are the same ruse undercutting workers’ power at union job sites and in the broader class struggle. These practices are now decades old and so ingrained in the labor-faker/management circus that they no longer trigger cognitive dissonance in the ranks.
Contracts that don’t make up for the lost time out of contract (even with back pay and signing bonuses) DON’T keep up with inflation and we sign off on raises that project into the future as if some crystal ball gives an accurate projection of inflation across the life of the contract.
The UPS strike-that-wasn’t does not bode well for upcoming contract negotiations in other big industries. The two tier system was allowed to stand, air conditioning for trucks is being phased in but not installed immediately during the heatwave, $25 for part timers is still a poverty wage, but new hires WON’T get $25 and will start at $21, with increases over time! Is there a clear path to full time? No, there is a schedule of upgrading for some and you can expect this to be a part of the TA management will backslide on. Is it the workers choice? It is questionable now!
No mention of 30 for 40, no COLAs which should be in every contract and apply to ALL members! Do the raises amount to anything significant? Eighteen percent for the full-time drivers (only!) will scarcely cover projected inflation and provide no catching up for the post-COVID inflation… a class struggle leadership would turn this contract negotiation into an industry wide organizing drive spreading to FedEx, Amazon, DHL etc. AND carry this fight for class struggle unions organization by DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED STRIKE COMMITTEES with immediately recallable delegates! We notice the varieties of petty-bourgeois socialism, now as ever, show their puerile lack of confidence in what the ranks could accomplish if armed with a revolutionary leadership and transitional program!
How were vast layers of the working class brought to the bosses’ side of the class struggle?
Marx explained the crisis in terms of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the countervailing tendencies. Too much capital was shown to be chasing too little opportunity in saturated home markets. Capital became an overproduced commodity, it had to go outwards to survive. Finding raw materials and cheap labor abroad, by treaty or war, capitalism in the most advanced industrial and financial centers became imperialism in the periphery. Parasitic in nature, capital invested abroad brought super-profits home. That is, profits above and beyond those which could be made at home, were extracted as surplus value from the production process abroad.
Superprofits rolled into the imperialist centers. They rapidly accelerated industrialization of agriculture, proletarianization, class stratification, concentration of capital and elevated conditions of life. Science and engineering were developed as transportation, communications, housing and education were employed to serve the expanding needs of capital. Living under the umbrella of the most advanced capitalist development, workers born in the imperialist industrial centers benefited relative to the rural workers and those in the colonies and semi-colonies.
Class struggle brought higher wages through unionization in skilled craft unions. Industrial unions raised up the conditions of lower skilled workers as well. Foremen, shop men, higher skilled technicians were paid sufficient to shift their class allegiance. Millions more, of the less skilled, including immigrants writing home with remittances, were paid sufficient to shed their internationalism and identify with the ‘land of opportunity’ class society arrangement. That there are aristocratic layers, within and without the bureaucracy does not taint the class as a whole, as we know firsthand.
Today, in the U.S., left Professor Charlie Post and the Denver Communists have taken on the task of defeating Lenin’s theory of the labor aristocracy. Their foils are schematic Maoists and Third Worldists who have written off the workers in the imperialist nations for their role as the labor aristocracy of the world, a layer of workers so totally integrated with the imperialist overlords that only their best, most conscious specially oppressed layers can become allies of the workers of the world, centered today in the global south. One pole in this debate tries to reclaim the revolutionary role for imperio-centric workers, denying the labor aristocracy as a factor. The other writes off the workers in the imperialist centers altogether. Does it need to be said we reject these two arguments?
As early as the turn of the 20th century, Daniel De Leon spoke of and identified what he called the ‘false plebs’ as the labor fakers who transmit the bosses ideology within the workers’ movement. This is found in his Two Pages from Roman History. By the FDR presidency of the 1930’s -1940’s Trotsky identified the increasing integration of the trade union movement into the capitalist state. This regression away from the self interest of workers as one world class laid the basis in thought and then in economic relative well being for the concept of the ‘middle class’ worker. Luxuries become necessities, and what was a concession hard-won in the past becomes a minimum for the worker’s mere replication of her or himself. “Already new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth….” said Trotsky in 1938, long before you needed a car or cell phone to keep a job!
But since the 1955 AFL-CIO unification the false plebs have characterized unionized workers as ‘middle class’ exactly as part of popularizing its pro-imperialist agenda. This means the exploitation of the Global South is fine with the union tops and supporting layers who have stock portfolios that take advantage of imperialism’s quest for super-profits. The state itself tells the Union what stocks they can invest pension funds in and the rank-and-file is excluded from the discussion. At best, members get to discuss benefits distribution at contract vote time. It is important to remember what the ‘middle class’ left doesn’t know, that pensions and benefits are deferred wages in differing forms.
Therefore we look at the layers of the class most responsible for the transmission of acquiescence in (‘what’s good for me’) or support for U.S. imperialism and note that these are either highly paid, long hours workers or ‘easy street’ critical skill personnel. Thus we can speak of a labor aristocracy as the layer of workers who directly benefit from U.S. imperialism.
Who blocks the political independence of the working class?
The major defining feature of U.S. politics is that the working class has no independent voice expressing its historic class political consciousness. The two main parties are explicitly capitalist and when touched by populism both play to a working class base of millions. For decades the ruling class mythology perpetuated by the schools, media, and the two capitalist parties was that there was no such thing as the working class.
The capitalist propagandists have campaigned since 1848 against Marx’s scientific definition of the working class in order to theoretically disarm the workers, re-named post-WW2 the middle class. The ‘middle class’ in the 20th century American lexicon are consumers and home mortgage holders, an up and coming ‘gentry’ owning a ‘piece of the rock’, anything but a class of workers. The bosses’ propagandists fought hard to convince workers’ their interests were the same as the capitalists. Even the aforementioned union leaders fell in line and dropped the term working class; preferring the terms “middle class” and “consumers”, all united under the big Democratic tent.
As consumers, ‘Buy American’ campaigns were promoted by the bureaucracy rather than sit down strikes to occupy factories that were being outsourced and shut down. UAW and other unions castigated first Japan and now China for taking jobs while ignoring the recurring systemic crisis causality. Who is it who addresses the need of the worker to survive these crises, each time recurring when she or he is older? Not the top dollar carnival barkers of the bosses’ social order!
But the 2007-10 crash and the subsequent recovery, pumped up by quantitative easing, proved Democrats could not resolve the structural crisis. Obama continued Bush’s Federal bail out policy pumping up the market with newly minted money. But first, extravagant bonus parties were held by hedge fund counterparty billionaires who were first in line for the new money “easing” to the tune of Trillions, while many “middle class” people found themselves homeless as mortgage-backed-securities prices were allowed to collapse. As the fictitious capital was used speculatively but not invested in production, it devalued the holdings of the ‘middle class,’ exploding life in workers families and on main street while kicking the crisis down the road for the big capitalists and derivative traders who bet against the market on its way down and for it on its climb back up.
Hillary was so distasteful, even to lifelong liberals and progressives, and when she turned the word ‘deplorables’ on her opponents workers felt her class privilege aimed at them. Clinton’s record on NAFTA and subsequent trade deal plans, her support for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement which favored capital over labor put nails in the coffin of her campaign in rust belt states. Workers correctly sensed there was no one to vote for and didn’t.
To save her campaign the DNC had to crush the Sanders alternative and use Bernie, the DSA, celebrity BLM figures and other activists to sheepdog their followers back into the fold, to no avail. Despite winning the popular vote against Trump the Democrats could not inspire the millions of poor and working class non-voters who regularly sit out the elections to put them over the top in the electoral college. Too many workers had had it with the Democrats bailing out the banks at their expense, imposing the two tier system cutting wages to increase profits and ‘save’ the auto industry with the tools of state capitalism. Also known as socialism for the rich.
With the rise of Trumpian populism the Republicans brought the term ‘working class’ back into the lexicon. Leaving aside the Marxian quality of class defined by its relationship to the means of production, the Republicans’ ‘working class’ had no such definition. Rather it pandered to that layer of white men, living in economic quintiles far below the CEOs and their top managers. Their frustrations were stirred up to fear that they are being replaced by Jews, Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant workers. Modern day conspiracies abound on their social media feeds, theories which when unraveled read like recycled bits and pieces from the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ driving true believers to wanton acts of violence against those being ‘othered’.
This phenomenon is now so regular as to get a sociological term, i.e. ‘stochastic terrorism.’ We can hardly track all the instances of racist and state stochastic terror which occurred just during the writing of this report. We call for Union-based, Labor Black and Brown Community Defense Guards! Liberalism, post the 1/6/21 quasi-fascist insurrection, has championed “gun control,” support for the police, and elections! We all see the results, and the fascist outfits recruit.
Since Nixon’s “southern strategy” and the deindustrialization of the midwest the Republicans picked up a large share of white male wage workers’ votes. The Democrats for the most part still have the support of the union bureaucracy, its membership, periphery and specially oppressed layers of the working class. The Republicans also gained the support of that intermediary layer of workers whose precarity is based on the decline of the small businesses, inherent in capitalist consolidation. With the failure of social solutions to periodic crises of capitalism, many across the spectrum of highly skilled, technical labor and managerial layers were attracted by an individualist philosophy of Horatio Alger entrepreneurialism hoping after hype to elevate themselves above their working class origins and achieve the American Dream. An American Dream that divides the home owning workers from the permanent renters whom they work alongside everyday.
The American Dream was not for a 40 hour a week job with a scrape-by-wage and a two week vacation which you can’t afford to travel during. No, the American Dream was that after mom and dad worked themselves to the bone their children could get schooled and follow their dreams and join a generations’ long climb over the other workers in their social class ladder quintile by quintile. The workers’ innate tendency toward social consciousness and solidarity leading to socialism was overcome by the sheer weight of the entrepreneurial individualist petty bourgeois mythology sold in every school, church, self help group and sales cult. Individualist hope springs eternal, even as the zombie firms and entrepreneurial failures stack up, exploding in a thousand ways, from failed pyramid marketing schemes and social media ‘influencers’ to dead end gig jobs, the reckoning has arrived.
Small layers of the intelligentsia, and petty bourgeois seeking left or right reforms to capitalism grouped themselves in the Green and Libertarian parties. The fake socialists of the DSA have a permanent stall next to the toilets in the Democratic Party convention hall, having promised their membership an opportunity to debate the ‘hard’ vs ‘soft’ break from the Democrats well into the next century.
As for genuine working class organizations there are none of significance. The CP, SWP, PLP, African People Socialist Party (APSP), PSL, WWP, FRSO, FSP, Socialist Action (SA), SocAlt,IG, ICL and others never consolidated their gains from the 1960’s and 1970’s and became increasingly marginalized. It is highly unlikely that any of the existing leaderships of any of these organizations will contribute to the building of a politically independent mass workers party. Such a party will have to be built by the rank and file’s class struggle confronting the politics, theories and practice of every significant leadership layer holding the mass of workers back on the national and international level.
In the U.S. today the most significant blockage to working class political independence is in the leadership of the trade union movement, a leadership entrenched in the Democratic Party, remnants of the grand FDR coalition. It takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’, doing the dirty deed in every union hall, pushing the ‘team concept’ (labor management peace), concessionary bargaining, selling losses as wins, and celebrating it all on Labor Day, inviting the Democratic candidates to eat the workers beans! Then they round us up to canvas for these politicians. Most insidiously we witnessed Angela Davis inducted into the ILWU Local 10 at the Juneteenth rally, inviting and promoting a Democratic Party candidate for Oakland City Council to the dias, in front of a banner calling for a workers party placed there by backslapping Jack Heyman, happy as a clam to be at the celebration, calling for the workers party like a good IG sympathizer, but not criticizing Angela and the other leaders who stand year over year for the capitalist Democrats.
Even left outfits like Labor Notes block the fight for political independence, having staked out an economist slot for themselves as teachers of labor activists; teachers who exchange the strategic goal of socialism for the immediate goal of training day to day trade union basics. Basics which the AFL-CIO, Change to Win and Teamsters should be teaching in every union local but rarely do, leaving those tasks to professionals schooled in labor studies at the university. Craft unions teach apprentices the ‘Team Concept’ complete with a militant cynicism. Labor Notes methods remind us of the reformist SPD leader Eduard Bernstein who wrote Evolutionary Socialism and told the workers “The Final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything.”
At the Labor Notes labor schools you won’t find its organizers preparing an independent workers party, instead you quickly find yourself surrounded by the locally entrenched Democratic Party labor hacks. They advocate reform caucuses for democracy in the union but not class struggle caucuses with a transitional program that turns workplace struggles into class-wide fights. Side by side with them you learn how to read a contract or press a grievance, not assert stop work rights or kick off a wildcat strike to win on the spot, but only how to negotiate in the back room! Only in their history workshops, maybe led by an errant anarchist, you may hope to hear about general strikes. But the goal of Labor Notes is not to apply the organizational power of the general strike to gain class political independence during upsurges of class struggle; objectively they disarm the workers like every other bureaucrat, limit the Trade Union movement to the confines of capitalist social relations of production. Industrial unionism in the main was built by SIT-DOWN STRIKES!
Would you guess, judging by a Labor Notes seminar? Indeed reading Labor Notes one finds a lot of celebration and promotion of strikes, practice picket lines and reform movements but nary a critique of how the lack of political independence barricades the movement against going class wide, against turning every strike into a school for socialist revolution! They are the modern incarnation of Bernstein. Where is our Red Rosa?
Having been incorporated into the Democratic Party, the union leaderships act not only as a transmission belt of capitalist ideology into the working class but as a bulwark set against any movement toward political independence, especially any advances in class struggle that expose their role as the bosses’ enforcers in the workers organizations.
The bureaucracy acts to stop every attempt by the workers to fight for their own party. The excuses are varied. “Now is not the time!” “You will split the progressive forces and let the right win.” “We tried but it didn’t work.” “The workers are not ready!” “A program of class struggle will lead to defeats.” There is no end to the excuses the labor fakers will come up with in the bosses service. We will stoop so low as to answer them all. We will show who their bosses are. Show they have no path out of the crisis. And will demonstrate the role played by the misleaders and how only a transitional program of class struggle for a workers government can end the terminal crisis we identify as the Capitalocene. The Capitalocene is unfolding with these three elements: recurrent and deepening economic crisis, rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe, and inter-imperialist war.
There is renewed interest in a labor party but every time it comes up dozens of voices emerge to shout it down. How did the Labor Party Advocates (LPA) fail and create so many cynics out of subjectively revolutionary militants? Tony Mazzocchi and his lieutenants refused to run candidates and stifled discussion of the program, saying it was a matter for the founding party convention’s discussion ONLY. This despite calls from the ranks at every meeting for program discussions and decisions. Despite the elementary logic that to build the party you would have to be able to answer the question ‘what is the party FOR?’ Of course if LPA was never meant to be anything other than a pressure group on the edge of the Democrats, then you would not want the rank-and-file elaborating a militant program!
Chris Townsend, a retired UE staffer, was active with the LPA and recently presented his version of that history at The Virginia Worker forum. Ever the Stalinist he claims to have worked with Mazzocchi to oppose those he labeled “windbags and disruptors,’’ Trotskyists and militant workers who attended LPA meetings and advocated to run labor candidates for office now and raised elements of a working class program. Townsend claims the entire project was a decade too early. Which makes us insist, what could there have been to lose by running candidates a decade too early? Here we see American Stalinism post-Dimitrov, ever in support of popular front type politics, supporting pressure groups, even at times with their own separate ballot lines, such as the New York Labor Party of the 1940’s and The Working Families’ Party of the 1980s. These were funnels delivering votes to Democrats, not Class-for-itself parties! Those early candidates would have paved the way for a Labor Party emerging in 2000, 2010 or 2020 but now we have nothing but old fart cynics telling us what they tried back in their glory days! It is up to us to call the game they are running on the uninformed!
In the labor bureaucracy various tendencies of the socialist movement staked out a left pole. Many Stalinists found administrative positions for themselves in the unions and federations where they could make common cause with other centrist and reformist elements. This layer in the bureaucracy acts as a pressure relief valve whenever the workers start to stir and they shoot down the viability of political independence and the transitional program of class struggle as ‘ultra-leftist sectarianism.’ Of course they blame the missed opportunity of the LPA on a combination of those pushing to run labor candidates and the ‘fact’ that the workers were not ready! Not a glance in the mirror for this lot no–for them they are the resolution of the crisis of leadership of the working class and their job is make sure the class does not jump the gun.
Mystified past is of no use; Workers have no need for nostalgia
Trotsky wrote in Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay:
“Democratic unions in the old sense of the term, bodies where in the framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist. Just as it is impossible to bring back the bourgeois-democratic state, so it is impossible to bring back the old workers’ democracy. The fate of the one reflects the fate of the other. As a matter of fact, the independence of trade unions in the class sense, in their relations to the bourgeois state can, in the present conditions, be assured only by a completely revolutionary leadership, that is, the leadership of the Fourth International. This leadership, naturally, must and can be rational and assure the unions the maximum of democracy conceivable under the present concrete conditions. But without the political leadership of the Fourth International the independence of the trade unions is impossible.”
Already, in the FDR days when Trotsky wrote this, it was becoming impossible to wage political struggle within the unions without a total collision with leaderships who were integrated into the project and policies of the bourgeois state. In our time we have called out leaderships who are Democrats first and trade unionists second (or somewhere down their list of identifiers.)
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