Trade unions first arose out of the spontaneous battles of working people to defend themselves from the abuses and oppressive conditions imposed by the system of wage labour. Stripped of any means of survival other than the sale of their labor power; workers were forced to compete against each other, thereby enabling profit-hungry capitalists to drive down wages and force long hours and inhuman conditions on the people. In this situation of virtual enslavement, workers were bound to resist. In drawing together workers and teaching them through struggle the need for solidarity and unity against the onslaught of the capitalists, unions served as centers for organizing the working class as a whole.The capitalist class has taken increasing steps to try to ensure that workers remain reliable and loyal wage slaves. Revolutionaries point out that the historic task of the trade unions is to fight for the complete emancipation of labour from capital. Reformists, on the other hand, advances a programme designed to keep workers shackled as wage slaves, but simply better-paid wage slaves.
Associations of workmen of one type or another can be traced far back into history, but trade unions as we know them today date back only to the 18th century. Concerning the origin of trade unions, Marx points out how capital is concentrated social power, while the worker has only his individual labour power at his disposal. Therefore, the agreement between Capital and Labour can never be just. The only social force possessed by the workers is their numerical strength. This force, however, is impaired by the absence of unity. The lack of unity among the workers is caused by the inevitable competition among themselves, and is maintained by it. The trade unions developed originally out of the spontaneous attempts of the workers to do away with this competition, or at least to restrict it, for the purpose of obtaining at least such contractual conditions as would raise them above the status of virtual slaves. The immediate aim of the trade unions, therefore, was limited to waging the day-to-day struggle against Capital, as a means of defence against continuous abuses by the latter, i.e., questions concerning wages and working hours. This activity of the trade unions is not only justified but also necessary. It cannot be dispensed with so long as the capitalist mode of production exists. On the contrary, it must become general by means of creating and uniting trade unions in all countries. If the trade unions refrained from such struggle there would be no limit to the exploitation of the workers other than that of physical endurance. The workers would be reduced to the status of slaves.
Engels in 1881 wrote, “The time is also rapidly approaching when the working class will have understood that the struggle for high wages and short hours, is not an end in itself, but a means, a very necessary and effective means, but only one of several means towards a higher end: the abolition of the wages-system altogether”. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/05/28.htm#p2
Trade union organisation is as requisite as socialist organisation since it enables the workers to wage the class conflict on a higher plane and prepares the way for the higher Socialist organisation. Our struggle is to fight for genuine working class control of the trade unions. This is also a pre-requisite for the emancipation of the working class and the establishment of socialism. For all reformists such things as union democracy, the right to strike, etc., are goals in themselves rather than simply means for the complete emancipation of the working class from capitalist exploitation. John Maclean explained it:
“Effective unions will never exist till the workers are revolutionary Socialists, just as effective political action can never come till the masses are thoroughly class-conscious and are fully determined to stop all robbery by the moulding of present-day capitalism into the co-operative commonwealth.”
Trade unions are not revolutionary vehicles; they are capitalist institutions, not socialist ones.Trade unions organise workers as wage slaves selling labour power as a commodity. Marxists insists that the working class must also, in addition to their economic organisation, develop its political movement. To succeed in the class struggle, the workers will need more than economic organisation. They will need to be politically organised, using its‘political supremacy to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie’(Manifesto of the Communist Party). Marx nowhere deprecates the political dimension but, rather, insists upon it. The working class must convert its economic movement into its political movement if it is to challenge and overthrow the power of capital and the state. Where the political party is strong all workers feel themselves brothers; their solidarity is not limited to his trade or occupation. However, one can search in vain for the ‘ideal’ instrument of socialist revolution, since all organisational forms will be, to a greater or lesser extent, implicated in the environment it seeks to change. The ‘perfect’ form may be sofar removed from the society to be changed and the social practices of the workers as to be either irrelevant or an abstract tool leading to political alienation.
Rosa Luxemburg was also to find out that it was the trade unions who curtailed the radicalism of the party, not vice versa. The syndicalists failed to understand just how much trade unions are part of the capitalist system, organising workers as wage labourers whose labour power is a commodity. There is, therefore, a structural tendency for trade unions to be incorporated within the capitalist system as permanent bargaining organisations and as managers of the conflict surrounding the employment relation. Because of this, trade unions could not function as vehicles of economic emancipation. Workers’ economistic socialism offers a reformism from below against the social democratic parties’ reformism from above.
The Trade Unions were organisations aiming to increase the proportion of social wealth going to the working class, an aim which Luxemburg described as a 'sort of labour of Sisyphus' since it was doomed to frustration by the processes of proletarianisation, the growth of the productivity of labour and unemployment. Luxemburg earned the continuing enmity of Trade Union leaders for this phrase, but Luxemburg was surely right. In a capitalist economy, trade union power can be used to make gains in pay and conditions within the wages system, but cannot be used to abolish the wages system. Trade unions in their functions cannot go beyond a certain critical level, to the point at which they obstruct and subvert the mechanisms of accumulation and investment, the very premise of union demands. When this critical level is reached, unions have to convert the economic struggle into a general political struggle aiming to change the economic and political system, at which point they cease to be trade unions,or restrain their demand within what the system can afford. Luxemburg was therefore pointing to the limitations of trade unions as vehicles of change.This does not, however, mean that Luxemburg and socialists considered trade unions unimportant.
Taking the argument that trade unions are not political or revolutionary organisations but organisations for the sale of labour power. This is true, but is it not possible that, with the movement of the class, they could be more than economic organisations. Marx himself entertained this notion, and one needs to understand why. Marx understood that trade unions come too much to concentrate upon the economic struggle with capital whereas they should be looking to abolish capitalist relations; the wages struggle should be converted into the struggle for the abolition of the wages system. It is argued that the trade unions cannot do this. But Marx’s argument needs to be understood. For Marx, it is not the organisation, of any kind, that acts but the working class as the subject and creative agency. The working class itself converts its economic struggles and interests into the revolutionary socialist objective. The argument that trade unions are merely organisations for the sale of labour power can be considered as failing to appreciate the political inherent in the economic, the political potential of the wages struggle, the possibility of converting the economic movement of the class into the political. It is akin to arguing that the working class exists permanently as the class of labour power and is incapable of becoming the revolutionary class challenging capitalist relations.
The militancy, the consistency of purpose, the determination, the willingness to confront the authorities and the energy, vitality and discipline and the self-sacrifice displayed by the workers expressed something much more profound than ‘economism’. Certainly, economic issues were to the fore – wages, poverty, unemployment, speed up, overtime, managerial practices. Yet in the spirit of revolt workers are protesting against their exploitation and dehumanisation; the workers are contesting not poverty but their status as wage slaves. The workers are affirming their human dignity and are coming to assert the class power which derived from the increasing unity, development and maturity of the class.
“There is no possibility of achieving economic freedom, nor even of taking any steps towards that end, unless the workers themselves are conscious that what they suffer from, as a class, is economic subjugation and consequent exploitation by the capitalists. Moreover, unless the workers themselves protest against this subjugation and exploitation, and themselves form organisations for the specific purpose of persistently fighting the enemy until freedom shall be won –then all else is as nothing." wrote Tom Mann
But it must be made clear that neither industrial organisation, nor Parliamentary action, nor both combined, can achieve the emancipation of the workers unless such emancipation is definitely aimed at.
“Political and industrial action direct must at all times be inspired by revolutionary principles. That is, the aim must ever be to change from capitalism to socialism as speedily as possible. Anything less than this means continued domination by the capitalist class.” Tom Mann explained.
Far from putting its faith in the spontaneous revolt of the working class, still lest the voluntarist uprising of the political party, the syndicalist argument conceives revolution as a process in which the workers develop their intellectual, organisational and technical ability to assume control of the new social order. The workers thus come to create the foundations of the future social order within the shell of the present society. Hence the importance of the point that the workers will possess the capacity to carry on production having ejected the employing class. The workers, in short, from dehumanised and degraded under capitalist relations, would become capable of directing their own lives, taking the future in their own hands and assuming control of the new social order. The power of the state and of capital is indeed to be challenged and overthrown and this does require political organisation. But political activity with a socialist aim has to have a social basis if it is to be effective. The industrial (self) organisation of the working class, enabling it to exercise responsibility and initiative in the old and the new society, is the foundation of socialism. Proletarian autonomy has to emerge as the essential control of the revolutionary process.
“The worker has but one problem before him, and that is how to control production in theinterest of himself and the community. And in the same way as he thinks it is his right to vote for the election of Parliament or a Municipal Council, so must he acquire the right to elect the organisers of industry, viz., managers, foremen, and all others necessary for the successful conduct of wealth production.” Tom Mann
The railway worker Charles Watkins who founded and edited the Syndicalist Railwayman newspaper, writes “The first prerequisite to a scientifically organised, vigorously conducted working class movement is a clearer understanding on the part of the workers of the actual relation existing between themselves and the capitalists, and a more intelligent appreciation on their part of theimportance of the class struggle. To gain these, the workers must rely on their own experience and on the knowledge gained through the study of industrial history and working class economics. But even without a knowledge of economic theory, the workers will find their class instincts far more reliable as a guide than much of the advice tendered by some of their ‘leaders’.”
Apparently, everyone’s forgotten the role of resistance. Resistance isn’t simply important; resistance is everything. There’s a myth suggesting that companies pay their employees all that they can afford to pay them. That is patently false (which is why it’s a myth). They pay their employees as little as they can get away with. Union membership is at an historical low because there is not enough resistance to keep it from shrinking. Profits are high, but resistance is low. Unions need to mount a counter-offensive, and they need to do it now.
A workers’ party that is of any use is one that recognises that the workers are robbed by the capitalist, and understands how that robbery takes place; and is one that is organised to prosecute the class struggle politically until socialism is attained. Such would be a socialist party based on Marxist principles. All other parties, no matter how named, and of whom composed, are useless.
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