[Editor’s Note: The following is a joint statement by three organizations (Central Ohio Workers Alliance, Southern New England Labor Council and Working People’s Association of Charlotte) in response to the article by Comrade Saoirse entitled Some Preliminary Theses on Communist Work in the Labor Movement that was recently published in The Masses.]

Recently the comrades at The Masses published a document entitled “Some Preliminary Theses on Communist Work in the Labor Movement” that contained a number of erroneous, vague and rightist positions we felt were worth responding to.

The article is authored by Comrade Saoirse, and begins with a note from the editor stating: “…comrade Saoirse does not reflect the official line of the Revolutionary Maoist Coalition. [The article] has been submitted as part of the two-line struggle in our organization, and the broader two-line struggle in the Maoist movement in this country. We encourage submissions both from fellow members of RMC, and from other organizations which respond to this short piece.” Thus, we feel this article is worth responding to not only to contribute to the ongoing line struggle within the RMC, but also because holding the correct position on our work among the proletariat at the point of production (labor work) is key for the success of the communist movement, and ultimately, the victory of proletarian revolution in our country.

The positions contained within Some Preliminary Theses on Communist Work in the Labor Movement are not new and are, with some small modifications, basically just another version of the “boring from within” labor line held by US “leftists” going back a literal century, to the early 1920s. The Southern New England Labor Council has already written a piece entitled State Unionism in the United States, which attempts to disprove and put forward an alternative line, that contains extensive evidence against the theory and practice of the “boring from within” line. This response will be shorter, and will attempt to clarify and restate the differences between the State Unionism line our organizations uphold and the “boring from within line” upheld by Comrade Saoirse’s article and others in the hopes more revolutionaries around the country will embrace a correct and non-rightist approach to Communist work in the labor movement.

Comrade Saoirse writes:
“4. Given that a) the Communist movement is the movement of the proletariat, b) unions are the most basic organization of the proletariat, c) unions alone cannot liberate the proletariat, we understand that there must be thorough, consistent, and deliberate participation of Communists in the labor movement for the express purpose of transforming trade-union consciousness into Communist consciousness, and growing the Communist movement.
5. The growth and development of the unions and the union movement itself is not the goal of Communist activity in organized labor, but merely a by-product of the actual goal of building the Communist movement and developing Communist consciousness among the working class.”

Before getting into our criticisms, it is probably worth defining what exactly the “labor movement” is. We agree with Comrade Saoirse in a basic sense insofar as the “labor movement” can be defined as that segment of the spontaneous “movement of the proletariat” which has achieved what Lenin calls “trade union consciousness” and seeks to realize their daily demands through collective action and struggle against the employers. The problem is that it should not be necessarily taken as a given that the leadership, officials and agents of the AFL-CIO, SEIU and IBT, the American “union movement” as it currently exists, are synonymous with the spontaneous movement of the proletariat in our country.

While this might sound counter-intuitive, because all of these organizations call themselves “unions” and view themselves as the stewards of “organized labor”, the idea that an organization might call itself one thing, but objectively function as its complete opposite, is a central concept of Marxist philosophy. As Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, do we take for granted that the Communist Party of China under Xi Jinping is synonymous with the current Communist movement in China? We assume Comrade Saoirse would say no, but why? The modern CPC calls itself “communist”, has a powerful and long history of prior revolutionary leadership, has tens of millions of members and supporters throughout China, has political education courses with Marxist classics, and claims its ultimate goal is the achievement of a classless society (i.e. communism). But despite all this, it is pretty easy to see that the modern CPC is actually a bourgeois force in direct opposition to the Communist movement in China, much less synonymous with that movement.

In other mass movements in the US comrades would be hard pressed to make the same blatant rightist, tailist and opportunist errors they make with the workers movement. It is hard to find self-proclaimed Maoists who argue that doing work in women’s movement means organizing in coalition with the leaders and employees of the largest women’s rights organizations in the country (NOW, League of Women Voters, etc.), or that struggling against police brutality and racist discrimination means we must work in coalition with the leaders and employees of the NAACP and Black Lives Matter (BLM) PAC. We emphasize the term “leaders and employees” because nowhere does the State Unionism line argue we shouldn’t attempt to build shop floor machinery among and lead the masses already organized within the corporatist establishment unions. We simply say that our point of departure, and the basis for organizing, should be the workers themselves, our co-workers, not the leaders, agents and professional organizers of the state unions.

In that sense we disagree with Comrade Saoirse that the “growth and development of the unions and the union movement itself is not the goal of Communist activity in organized labor.” The development, strengthening, elevation, and growth of the unionist struggle and the spontaneous workers movement is and should be a goal of the communist movement. The problem is the modern establishment “unions” are no longer really industrial or trade unions from the perspective of Marxist class analysis. They have become corporatist institutions of the “progressive” faction of the US capitalist class and bourgeois state apparatus that are maintained in order to control, pacify, and contain the militancy of the spontaneous workers movement. They are a key constituent of American bourgeois “democracy” and a key part of US domestic national security policy. They are bureaucratic workers associations: “state unions.” They have been transformed from “basic organization of the workers” into their opposite, a tool of the bourgeoisie meant to force the working-class to “collaborate” with management, the owners, and their bureaucratic apparatus.

Thus the call of the State Unionism line is not to abandon the trade union struggle. It is to re-create authentic trade unions and shop floor machinery where there are none (including in the already supposedly “organized” enterprises), and organize the unorganized under these new independent trade and industrial unions. In Latin America this process is already underway. Even Labor Notes describes how in Mexico the independent union movement that split from their dominant state unionist center has grown, strengthened and developed the Mexican labor movement, not weakened it.

We do not know Comrade Saoirse’s occupation or class background, but there are sections that to us demonstrate what seem to be a lack of experience organizing within proletarian workplaces:
“8. At our current early juncture, we must concentrate our forces principally among the industrial proletariat, who a) have the strongest unions in which we can do true mass work; b) most easily embrace Communist ideology due to their basic condition of working at the point of production where, not only is the international plight of all workers most apparent, but so too is the basic contradiction between socialized production and private accumulation most obvious; c) as a class, have regular and consistent contact with all other strata of society. This does not mean we neglect other issues or strata, only that we must presently engage other issues/strata through the industrial proletariat.

9. We must work directly in the unions and shops as much as possible, and avoid being mere “outside agitators” as best we can…”

Contrary to what Comrade Saoirse writes, the reality readily apparent to almost anyone that has worked in the nation’s factories, construction sites, warehouses, and workplaces of the “hardcore” proletariat is that the industrial proletariat in the United States is legally represented by some of the most corrupt, most apathetic, and most reactionary “unions” in the entire country. In fact, the reality is that most of the strongest “unions” in the US are actually located among the middle classes, the petty bourgeoisie, in particular among cops, teachers, nurses, and employees of the state and national bureaucratic apparatuses. The state unions which organize the working class, whether it be in the industrial, agricultural, extractive, service, logistics, or educational and medical sectors are structurally rotten to an extent even the petty bourgeois unions are not. Many are indeed powerful, but in a reactionary bourgeois sense. Their leaders and agents make back-door deals with organized crime, owners, and management, their enforcers physically threaten and attack those that challenge their leadership, they actively sabotage worker militancy not controlled and orchestrated by them, their contracts explicitly reward complacency and class collaboration, and the gap between their college-educated organizing staff and internal bureaucracy and the workers they are supposed to represent is enormous.
Our organizers and supporters have worked in these places, some have even been elected union officers themselves, played the “boring from within” game, and seen for themselves the farce that is the contemporary American “union” movement.

It is for this reason in large part that only 6% of the American private sector is currently a member of an establishment state union. What then would the “boring-from-withinists” have us do with the 90% of the American workforce not currently within one of the state unions? Is it the task of communists in the labor movement to expand the SEIU, IBT and AFL-CIO until they cover a majority of US workers? And then what? They purge us and we start over again in fifty years?

Comrade Saoirse writes that we should only work against and break with the state unionist leaders and their organizers in “extreme circumstances.” We would like to know what constitutes “extreme” in their opinion. Would covering for and ignoring the injuries and deaths of workers on the job be “extreme”? Would presiding over decades of economic stagnation and retreat for the working class be considered extreme? Are threats, blacklisting, and physical violence extreme? Are integration with, collaboration with, and endorsement of not only the capitalists and bourgeois politicians, but the military and national security apparatus extreme? How many betrayed, threatened, silenced, injured, and dead workers and revolutionaries would it take for these comrades to start to re-organize the trade unions starting with the workers, on the shop floor, and not the committees, agents, and leaders of the current corporatist unions? Does the literal integration of the establishment state unions into the capitalist economic system through life insurance schemes, retirement funds, union member/family credit and banking networks, and the mass stock and bond purchases with dues money give the boring-from-withinists pause in terms of how a revolutionary is supposed to “revolutionize” organizations which increasingly take on the characteristics of literal financial institutions? How reactionary, rotten and class-collaborationist would the structure of state unionism have to become before it would no longer make sense to grow, defend and expand it whenever possible?

If we believe in the universality of people’s war, we know there is no peaceful, slow, gradual path to revolution. During the course of fierce class struggle, during wartime, the bourgeois state will do everything in its power to keep communists out of the corporatist unions it controls. The State Unionism line flows from the Maoist theory of revolution, and allows for us to maintain tactical, strategic, and political independence while at the same time reaching the widest number of workers possible. It allows us the flexibility to work within both organized and unorganized workplaces, and in all proletarian, semi-proletarian and lower petty bourgeois sectors work towards strengthening, developing and elevating the spontaneous working-class movement. It allows us to do all this without betraying the workers we claim to want to organize for revolution by selling them out to those who wish to pacify and control them.

The first point in Comrade Saoirse’s list has the same fundamental problem that plagues the social democratic and revisionist groups. It simply does not answer the first question materialists should ask: whose class interests are served by this organization? The class legitimacy of the corporatist state unions is simply taken for granted–after all, what communist would oppose a “basic organization of the workers”? The question should not be “are there workers in the organization”, it should be what is this organization actually doing? There were national socialist and fascist unions. Would an analysis of the NSDAP or the Democratic party or the Second International parties start with “the political party is the highest form of organization of the proletariat”? Obviously not: that would be pettifogging, not materialism. It amounts to substituting metaphysics for a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. The main issue is that it doesn’t acknowledge (and consequently doesn’t really have a plan for) the existing political divisions in the trade union movement, and that the state union line is both descriptive in that it explains how the pro-imperialist unions developed in the US and prescriptive in that it advocates a return to shop-floor organizing and turning away from all policies aimed at jockeying for positions in the bourgeois state and its offshoot organizations.

The state unionism line is in many ways just a demand for revolutionaries and communists in the labor movement to return to the method of class struggle and turn away from the method of class collaboration, to embrace proletarian strategy and tactics and reject bourgeois strategy and tactics.

To illustrate what we mean concretely: what do many “leftists” attempting to do labor work for the first time currently do? They start out with some light “union solidarity work”, walk on a few picket lines, and slowly build connections with the business agents, elected officials and professional organizers of the state unions they meet. They jump straight into running in union officer elections and participating in the committees and leading bodies of the existing state unions if they already work at an “organized” workplace, and if they work at a “non-organized” workplace they often go straight into a campaign collecting signatures for a NLRB petition to unionize their workplace under a current establishment union. They, on a structural and political level, first become state-sanctioned NLRB-recognized representatives of the workers, or close confidantes and allies of those representatives, and then from there attempt to negotiate on the behalf of their co-workers and do “communist work in the labor movement.” They begin with the establishment state union structures and NLRB, and from there work their way “down” to organizing on the shop floor with their co-workers. These comrades have thus from the very beginning violated Lenin’s fundamental principle for labor work: “The basic rule, the first commandment, of any trade union movement is not to rely on the ‘state’ but to rely only on the strength of one’s own class.”

In contrast, the State Unionism line calls for revolutionaries and communists to begin in the buildings, begin with their co-workers on the shop floor, and develop their actions, campaigns, and future unionist activity (whether that be independent unionism in the unorganized workplaces/sectors or fractional work within the existing state union bargaining units) on the basis of the strength and machinery they collectively organize there, among “one’s own class.” As New Labor Press attempts to lay out in their draft Shop Unit Guide, revolutionaries in the labor movement should begin their work by creating bodies and organizations of their co-workers and other like-minded militant/class-conscious workers they know. They should construct shop units, shop papers, workers study/discussion circles, and on the basis of that work build grievance committees, strike committees, and organizing committees (the reality is that even in the already “organized” sectors, outside of contract negotiation time these bodies don’t exist even on paper in unionized workplaces). They should systematically investigate their workplaces and sectors, learn from and incorporate their co-workers into these bodies and fractions, and establish an independent class-conscious political line that will serve as the anchor of the practical work to come. They should advance the demands of their co-workers, expose those who betray the workers, and uncompromisingly develop concrete campaigns and actions of class struggle to win those demands and defeat their class enemies. They should do all of this while never liquidating the organizing strength of their co-workers once these actions are “done”, and never becoming a tool of the bourgeoisie in achieving “labor peace” within their workplace.

We hope this response is helpful and useful for comrades trying to understand and put into practice the State Unionism line. A “revolutionary movement” without a correct line for work among the working-class is an oxymoron. The decisions and lines we take now will reverberate for decades to come.

For a combative, class-conscious, and independent U.S. labor movement!

Central Ohio Workers Alliance
Southern New England Labor Council
Working People’s Association of Charlotte