Trotsky’s essay, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, can be found at www.trotsky.net

Trotsky’s pamphlet should be read in its entirety. Its central theme can be summarised by the following quotes:

“There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power. This process is equally characteristic of the neutral, the Social-Democratic, the Communist and “anarchist” trade unions. This fact alone shows that the tendency towards “growing together” is intrinsic not in this or that doctrine as such but derives from social conditions common for all unions.”…“The neutrality of the trade unions is completely and irretrievably a thing of the past, gone together with the free bourgeois democracy.”

Matt Wells examines how this theses applies to trade unions today

Marxism is a not a moral code and is more than a set of ideas. It is a method that, if applied correctly to the concrete situation, acts as a compass for the movement towards the transformation of society by the working class in the interests of humanity as a whole. Anyone can use a compass but it is still necessary to decide whether to continue heading north or to change direction.

It is only the working class that can overthrow capitalism and reconstitute society on socialist lines. The trade unions, for Marxists, are an expression of the organised working class. This is why the unions are a key consideration in the perspectives for changing society. 

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Trotsky’s short article, though unfinished, contains some vital lessons for the class conscious workers and youth. It was taken from notes found on Trotsky’s desk and was never finished due to his tragic death at the hands of one of Stalin’s thugs. The ideas it contains of course were a threat. This was the reason for Stalin’s pursuit of Trotsky, as his ideas represent the application of Marxism to the concrete circumstances of the organised working class, rather than the grotesque distortions of Stalinism or the misconceptions of reformism.

Although written in 1940, it is particularly relevant today. This is in spite of the trend identified by Trotsky having not been fully borne out. Trotsky did not have a crystal ball, just the method of Marxism which, when applied to the historical context, led him to draw a conclusion that trade unions were tending towards merging with state power. Major fascist movements and war across Europe shaped this view. Trotsky did not foresee the strengthening of Stalinism or the long post-War boom experienced in the advanced capitalist countries after the Second World War.

However Trotsky’s article sheds light on how, under the immense pressure of bourgeois i.e. capitalist society, the trade unions become obstacles on the road to workers’ power. Like the British Labour Party they are used by the ruling class to marshall the working class, to present their mounting an effective defence of previous gains. Although the unions are primarily defensive organisations, it is only through defending these gains collectively and extending them, that workers become aware of their power.

Well, if our own organisations, the unions, can be used against us in this way, how can we defend ourselves, still less change society? It is easy to see why people would turn away in disgust in seeing the results - the corrupt, degenerate bureaucracy selling the members down the river in exchange for the relative wealth and comfort of their positions and the spin-offs, lordships, knighthoods and so on.

But as Trotsky quite rightly puts it, ‘we cannot select the arena and the conditions for our activity to suit our own likes and dislikes’. This applies equally well to the Labour Party, and Trotsky goes into more detail in his ‘Writings on Britain’, which are essential reading and very accessible.

The unions may well be led by people fitting the description above. In recent times in Britain members of PCS, the civil service union, will remember Barry Reamsbottom and in AEEU (now Amicus-UNITE) his chum Sir Ken Jackson. These two were favourites of Tony Blair and it was not hard to see why. They had what seemed like an iron grip on the unions for years. If they couldn’t get away with a sweetheart deal with management, then they would take the line of least resistance. Even many activists felt that there could never be any change. But they were swept away by members at the ballot box. This was not spontaneous. It took years of struggle by those committed to the idea of a union that would be worthy of its name, a union that advances the interests of its members.

In PCS Reamsbottom even tried to depose his successor Mark Serwotka, proclaiming himself as the saviour of the union from the ‘extreme left’.  Having chosen not to stand in the election, Reamsbottom had signed an undertaking to leave with an extremely generous severance package. Serwotka was elected by the membership and even a high court judge found in his favour! It is no surprise that since the defeat of the right in PCS, the union has grown.

Over the past year, we have seen how the leaders of the large unions, UNISON, GMB and UNITE show how ‘reliable and indispensable they are’ to the representatives of capital in the New Labour government. While sabre-rattling in the conference hall, they showed their true colours in lining up behind Gordon Brown to ensure a non-contest in the Labour leadership campaign when the alternative candidate, John McDonnell was more in tune with the vast majority of their membership. Opinion polls confirmed this. Of course they hope that some crumbs will be thrown their way, in order that they can justify their position to the members, who after all pay their wages. In the current climate this is increasingly unlikely and they are in effect acting as their own grave-diggers in this sense, they will either have to express the will of the members who want action or be replaced by those who will.

This analysis is to be borne out inevitably as many of the leaders who have moved to the right, if not in words, but in deeds, will be swept away by members who, through their own painful experience of working conditions, pay and pensions being eroded, learn that a fighting leadership is required. The strike ballot in UNISON local government over a below inflation pay ‘award’ could not be avoided last year due to the pressure from the rank and file. But when it came to a simple majority in favour, the bureaucracy deemed it insufficient to call action. 2 % is a slender margin but it is enough in an election, and as anyone would say - ‘that’s democracy!’ One might argue that the possibility of a general election was more important to the leadership of UNISON than carrying out the will of the membership. The bureaucracy was desperate to wriggle off the hook. Next time round, the margin may not be so slender, particularly if the leadership fails in the delaying tactics and bureaucratic subterfuge that arguably reduced the turnout in the ballot. 

Trotsky explains that the character of the trade unions depend necessarily on the type of regime in they find themselves in. Western liberal democracies tend to operate in the ways outlined above, whereas in the countries dominated by the advanced capitalist world in which the national ruling class is too weak to assert itself, there is a possibility that Bonapartist regimes could lean on the poorer sections of the population for support. In this situation the trade unions might in fact enjoy the ‘patronage’ of the state. Where some crumbs may be brushed from the tables of the corrupt ruling bureaucracy to the toilers, the trade unions would act in the interests of the ruling class in the final analysis. For example, trade unions in Egypt are arms of the state and strikes are illegal. However, this has not stopped the heroic struggles of workers who have recently participated in wave of strikes,  which have been covered in Socialist Appeal and on our website. On the other hand, military-police dictatorship is the other possibility, where the state would seek to weaken any resistance by smashing the organisations of the working class.

It was Lenin who called for revolutionary socialists to work in even the most reactionary organisations, such as the trade unions set up by the tsarist secret police in order to control the masses. Like it or not, this was where large groups of workers could be found. Under the conditions of an autocratic monarchist dictatorship, independent, democratic unions would not have been possible. In his key work ‘Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder’, Lenin explained that the Marxists should enter these organisations to win the best workers to the ideas of Marxism. There was and is no other way. The Bolsheviks proved the correctness of these methods by eventually winning the masses and coming to power.

It is this same method, of winning workers to the ideas of socialism, by proving ourselves as the best fighters for our class, that we must employ today. It would be all too easy to set up unions, untainted by lack of respect for democracy, collaborationism, corruption and so on. Even better let’s have pure, left wing unions with a clear socialist programme to overthrow capitalism and change society! But this is not how things work unfortunately. Splitaway ‘red unions’ in Pilkington’s Glass works and on the docks failed miserably. In fact they may even serve the very causes they are set up to work against, by isolating workers who have drawn radical political conclusions from those who still have illusions in their traditional organisations. And that is the key. That is why we urge workers to reclaim these organisations as their own. Workers do not give up on their organisations lightly. They will cling to these organisations for a long time before they split, are transformed or it becomes apparent to the mass of workers that it is necessary to break with them.