- sometimes by repressing class-conscious militants,
- sometimes by integrating union leaders into negotiations and co-management, which allows them to escape exploitation and, in some cases, enrich themselves.
The bourgeois states reinforce these employer tactics and systematize these methods:
- applying pressure and repression through all legal, police, and military means at their disposal against combative militants,
- integrating trade union leadership into various state bodies that provide lucrative positions for bureaucrats. In some cases, former union bureaucrats even join bourgeois governments (e.g., Lula in Brazil).
As the Communist International established, the nature of the bureaucratic apparatus dominating most unions is no different from that of so-called reformist parties. Both are forms of the labor bureaucracy. Whether the opportunist union apparatus is linked to bourgeois labor parties or directly to bourgeois parties, it remains an agent of the bourgeoisie within the working class.
In general, trade union bureaucracies address men more than women, nationals more than immigrants, and skilled workers more than precarious ones. Some union bureaucracies organize only specific trades (“craft unionism”). Some confederations even admit police organizations as if they were workers like any other. All corrupt “reformist” apparatuses trust the national state and preach pacifism… to the exploited. Trade union bureaucracies spread the poison of chauvinism: patriotism, protectionism, discrimination against foreign workers, and border closures.
During economic growth, trade union leaderships and reformist parties claim credit for the concessions that the proletariat wrests from the bourgeoisie. During recessions, they accept negotiating layoffs, wage cuts, and attacks on social gains. In every crisis, they betray the working class. Bureaucrats channel militancy into brief stoppages of a few hours or a day, or into isolated, fragmented movements—sector by sector, workplace by workplace, company by company. Then, they blame the masses for the defeats that they themselves have orchestrated.
Political and trade union bureaucracies, as parasitic layers of the workers’ movement, call on the working class to rely on elections, referendums, and supreme saviors. When grassroots pressure becomes too strong or spontaneous struggles erupt, union leaderships work to prevent mass strikes, general strikes, and unified action by all the exploited. A general strike weakens and threatens national capitalism. It raises the question: which class should govern the country?
In Niger, trade union leaderships subordinated the proletariat to the military junta in 2023. In France, the united trade union leaderships (CFDT, CGT, FO, SUD, UNSA, FSU, etc.) blocked a general strike in 2023 to defend pension rights (with the help of the PS, PCF, LFI, flanked by LO, the NPA, RP, etc.), leading to a severe defeat. In Bangladesh, trade union leaderships failed to support the student movement in 2024. In Britain, competing trade union leaderships affiliated with the TUC prevented a general strike for wage increases in 2024 (with the help not only of the Labour Party but also of the SWP, SP, RCP, etc.). In Argentina, trade union leaderships (CGT, CTA) blocked the general strike against Milei (aided not only by the PCA but also by the PTS, PO, MST, NMAS, etc.), enabling the government to impose brutal austerity on the proletariat and dismantle social gains.
For the proletariat to fulfill its historical tasks, as a dominated and exploited class, it must have its own party, distinct from all others, as clearly stated in the 1872 resolution of the International Workingmen’s Association (First International). The party is the most conscious form of workers’ self-organization. Without an experienced and recognized revolutionary party intervening among them, other types of organizations (cooperatives, mutual aid societies, unions, councils) remain weak, co-opted by capitalism, or impotent. Communists are the current within the workers’ movement that consciously expresses, at all times, the general interests of workers—the fraction that defends the program of revolution and internationalism.
As explicitly affirmed by the Communist International and, later, the Fourth International, no communist organization can stand apart from mass trade unions under the pretext that their leadership is corrupted by the exploiting class, authoritarian, and contemptuous of workers’ democracy. One of the most important tasks of organizations fighting globally for socialist revolution is to work inside mass unions to break the influence of their bureaucracy—openly when possible, clandestinely when necessary. No revolution can be carried to victory without fulfilling this task on a broad scale.
Yet, since the destruction of the Communist International by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the degenerated USSR, few organizations have undertaken this effort. One feature of generalized opportunism is the tendency to make pacts with the union apparatus and integrate into it. Centrism refuses to combat corrupt and treacherous bureaucracies, to act within mass unions against class collaboration, against the negotiation of capitalist and governmental attacks, against co-management, and for workers’ self-organization and self-defense against strikebreakers, police, military forces, and fascist gangs.
Revisionists call on the masses to support bureaucrats’ maneuvers to derail struggles: limited strikes, fragmented strikes, referendums, voting for popular fronts or even outright bourgeois parties. The only time centrists dare to oppose a trade union decision is when the bureaucracy is internally divided. Then, they side with one faction against another, presenting it to the masses as trustworthy—until that faction, having displaced the old leadership, betrays in turn. For example, in the 1980s, in France, the PCI (now PT & POI) split the FEN on behalf of FO, while the LCR (now NPA and RP) and LO helped the PCF split it to found the FSU.
A union cannot serve the interests of workers if it is controlled by the bourgeois state, the bosses, or a bourgeois party. Union independence! No compulsory state arbitration in strikes! No state interference in union affairs!
A union cannot serve both capital and labor. Break with all co-management structures and permanent consultation bodies with the bosses and the government!
A union must prioritize the most exploited and oppressed layers: informal workers, the unemployed, immigrants, women, national and religious minorities. Equal rights for all workers! Protection for women workers! Unionization of the unemployed and the informal sector!
The proliferation of competing reformist unions weakens the proletariat. One democratic, class-struggle union per workplace! One democratic, class-struggle federation per industry! One democratic, class-struggle confederation per country! One international democratic, class-struggle trade union!
Unions are generally in the hands of a bureaucracy that tolerates no challenge to its monopoly over the organization and its practice of class collaboration. Against union bureaucrats, the union must become a framework for elementary workers’ united front struggle. Trade union democracy! Right to tendencies! Elected and recallable officials! Full-time union officials’ pay should match the average wage of the workers they represent! Rotation of leadership! Expulsion of traitors!
Everywhere, especially where unionization rates are low or union divisions exist, revolutionary communists must work, when mass struggles break out, to bypass old leaderships and ensure that workers themselves control their struggles. General assemblies that decide! Elected committees! Strike pickets and self-defense of demonstrations, strikes, and union offices! Coordination of workers’ committees!
The activity of communist fractions within mass unions cannot be separated from revolutionary action in workplaces and public administration. There is only one program—identical within unions and throughout society. It is a program against the corrupt bureaucracy, against the bourgeois agents within the workers’ movement. This program contains both elementary economic and democratic demands and transitional demands leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat and world socialism. For without social revolution, the bourgeoisie will destroy the environment and unleash a third world war.