Why is the Labor Question important for revolutionaries and class-conscious workers around the world, and especially important for revolutionaries and workers in countries like the United States? By “Labor Question” we mean the problem of elaborating a correct revolutionary position on a) the mass movement of the workers in their workplaces (the labor movement) and b) on the organizations which are, at least on paper, supposed to carry out that specific mass struggle for demands (the labor/trade unions). In our experience actually organizing workers, the question of why we should put particular emphasis on correctly understanding the labor movement has never come up. To them the importance of their struggles, and revolutionaries having correct analysis of and strategy in relation to their struggles, is self-evident. On the other hand, in line struggles with various “revolutionary” groups, the importance of holding a correct position on the Labor Question is continually downplayed as a secondary or marginal question in the modern context. In this article we hope to simply and plainly explain how the Labor Question is an essential question in our context because of the ways it is tied to the questions of making revolution in an industrialized country like the United States.

Because many of the most recent revolutionary peaks have occurred in semi-colonial and semi-feudal nations like China and Peru, where the peasantry was the main force of their New Democratic revolutions, and also because of the triumph of revisionism in the US Communist movement since at least the 1940s, a very simple truth about what the labor movement means to revolutionaries has been lost in our national context. For the longest time it was taken for granted that the International Communist Movement (ICM) was the direct historical product of the international labor movement, and that all proletarian revolutionaries needed to have a special focus on the labor movement and the trade unions in their work and when theoretically struggling over the correct strategy in their own revolutions. It was Marx himself who referred to early revolutionary “party organizations and party journals of the working classes” as “the most advanced sons of labor” in his Inaugural Address to the first convention of the First Communist International. He elaborated further in a letter to another German comrade that:

“The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.” [Letter to Bolte]

Similarly in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder Lenin wrote:

“The trade unions were a tremendous progressive step for the working class in the early days of capitalist development, inasmuch as they represented a transition from the disunity and helplessness of the workers to the rudiments of class organization. When the highest form of proletarian class organization began to arise, viz., the revolutionary party of the proletariat (which will not deserve the name until it learns to bind the leaders with the class and the masses into one single indissoluble whole), the trade unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features, a certain craft narrowness, a certain tendency to be nonpolitical, a certain inertness, etc. But the development of the proletariat did not, and could not, proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through reciprocal action between them and the party of the working class. The conquest of political power by the proletariat is a gigantic forward step for the proletariat as a class, and the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the old way, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are and will long remain an indispensable ‘school of Communism’ and a preparatory school that trains the proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organization of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to the separate trades), and later to all the working people.”

Thus it is easy to see how for great theorists of our ideology like Marx and Lenin, the “political movement” of the industrial proletariat (Communism) and their “highest form of proletarian class organization” (the Party), were historical products of the “separate economic movements of the workers” in the factories and industries. This is why Lenin specifically referred to the International Communist Movement as “the class-conscious vanguard of the international labor movement”.

This did not mean, as the syndicalists argued, that the trade unions could lead the proletariat to revolution all on their own. For that purpose the proletariat had created a new higher leading political organization, “in its image and likeness” as Gonzalo wrote, the Communist Party. Instead it simply meant that proletarian revolutionaries should hold the labor movement “in mind” when organizing and theorizing the conquest of political power for the proletariat because the trade unions were the first, and remain the primary (in the sense of their primitiveness), economic organizations of the workers, and as such “will long remain an indispensable ‘school of Communism’ and a preparatory school that trains the proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organization of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to the separate trades), and later to all the working people” (Left-Wing Communism).

This point was well understood even in the famously exceptionalist United States, prior to Browder’s liquidation of the CPUSA. US anti-revisionist, and trade-unionist, leader Bill Dunne wrote in his preface to the US edition of the Red International of Labor Unions (the Comintern’s trade union arm) famous text Problems of Strike Strategy:

“Revolutionary strike strategy—the strategy which must be worked out and applied by the Trade Union Unity League and its affiliated unions—is designed to secure the victory of the working class both in its everyday “bread and butter” struggles and in the political struggles into which every serious economic conflict now develops almost from the first day of battle.

[…]

To carry out the greatest mobilization of workers for each separate conflict, to be able to mass the whole striking power of our class on the weakest point of the enemy front in decisive conflicts, to carry through the offensive and consolidate our gains—these are the tasks of a revolutionary strike strategy.

First and foremost our strike strategy must be such as to achieve the maximum immediate results from each separate struggle while guaranteeing that no struggle remains isolated from the general direction of the class struggle as a whole. It is here that the revolutionary unions of the Trade Union Unity League (T.U.U.L.) come into sharpest conflict with the opportunist conception of strike strategy within our own ranks, which sees immediate “gains” for workers from the standpoint of the social reformists. This conception makes a false and mechanical distinction between the daily economic interests of the masses and the revolutionary aims, of the working class as a whole, that must be brought forward in every struggle.

No such distinction exists except in the minds of those who see a contradiction between the struggle for the everyday economic demands and the revolutionary necessity of connecting them with the proletarian struggle for power.

The problem of building the revolutionary unions of the T.U.U.L—the American Section of the Red International of Labor Unions—as well as the problem of building a mass Communist Party in the United States is largely a question of a correct strike strategy. With this is bound up the problem of destroying the reformist illusions of the American Federation of Labor and the social fascists of its Muste wing whose program is that of the Socialist Party.”

This recognition of the central importance of a correct position on the Labor Question as key to the “proletarian struggle for power” is maybe nowhere better seen in the resolutions and documents of the Third International itself, which outlined the essential need for revolutionaries and communists to have a correct understanding and approach towards the labor movement and trade union work specifically. For example, the Comintern’s Third Congress conceived of the struggle for “partial demands” using the following principal formula: “the economic needs of the working masses must be steered toward a struggle for control of production – not as a scheme for bureaucratic organisation of the economy under capitalism, but as a struggle against capitalism through factory councils and revolutionary trade unions”. Stalin, in his History of the CPSU(Bolshevik) wrote how in opposition to the Troskyites who sought to effectively liquidate the trade unions after the October Revolution: “Lenin and the Leninists drew up a platform of their own, entirely contrary in spirit to the platforms of the opposition groups. In this platform, the trade unions were defined as a school of administration, a school of management, a school of Communism.” This revolutionary Leninist position was expressed perhaps most directly and succinctly by the Comintern’s main red trade union leader A. Lozovsky who wrote in the pamphlet Marx and the Trade Unions (which should be read by every communist in the trade union movement):

“To define correctly the relationship between the economic and political struggle means to define correctly the relationship between the trade unions and the Party. While attaching tremendous significance to the economic struggle of the proletariat and the trade unions, Marx always stressed the primacy of politics over economics, i.e., stressed that which has been taken as a basis in the whole of the work of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International.

When we speak about the primacy of politics over economics, it does not mean the turning of the trade unions into a political party or the adoption by the trade unions of a purely party programme, or the abolition of all differences between the trade unions and the party. No, this is not what Marx said. Marx emphasised the significance of the trade unions as organisational centres for the broad working masses, and fought against piling the party and the trade unions into one heap. He believed that the political and economic organisations of the proletariat have one and the same aim (the economic emancipation of the proletariat), but each applies its own specific methods in fighting for this aim. He understood primacy over economics in such a way that, in the first instance, he placed the political all-class tasks of the trade unions higher than the private corporative tasks, and secondly, that the political party of the proletariat must define the economic tasks and lead the trade union organisation itself.”

It should be obvious by now that for the revolutionaries and communists of Marx, Lenin,and Stalin’s time, the Labor Question was essential in 1) their conception of where the international and domestic Communist organizations originated (the workers movement, in particular the labor movement), 2) their understanding of how the proletariat would struggle for and then conquer political power from the capitalists, 3) their understanding of how revolutionaries intervened in and lead the struggle for reforms and economic demands, and 4) how the workers were prepared for the tasks and victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The big caveat here is that it was largely in the industrialized or imperialist nations that the Labor Question took central stage in relation to how the struggle for political power was realized, economic demands won, and the dictatorship of the proletariat managed and established. In nations where semi-feudal and semi-colonial conditions prevailed, these processes were conceived as the New Democratic revolution, which revolved around the anti-imperialist alliance of the peasantry, petite bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie, led by the proletariat which also served to resolve the Agrarian/Land question in these countries. When Gonzalo and Mao do not always write in the same terms regarding the Labor Question as Lenin, Marx or the Comintern did, it is not because they viewed the trade unions and labor movement as universally less important in Maoism, but that in their specific national semi-feudal and semi-colonial contexts the process of people’s war and revolution was conceived of as “a peasant war that follows the road of surrounding the cities from the countryside” (General Political Line of the PCP). This can be seen in how their universal contributions regarding the definition and construction of the third instrument, the United Front, are explicitly theorized as tightly bound up in the particular mass movements of each given country, which in some countries is primarily the agrarian movement and in other countries the labor movement.

Despite his context for example, Mao himself stated that even in the largely rural Jiangxi Soviet that the “[Jiangxi] Soviet workers are organized in their strong class trade union which is the pillar of the Soviet power”. Moreover the universal principles of their theoretical contributions, which include concepts like “the masses make history” and “people’s war is a war of the masses and can only be accomplished by mobilizing the masses and relying on them”, help demonstrate the importance of the Labor Question in an industrialized imperialist nation like the US. In Mao and Gonzalo’s works, the principle remains that all revolutionary processes, whether they be the construction or reconstitution of the Communist Party or the preparation and course of people’s wars, occur within and as part of the class struggle and among and connected with the masses. This can be seen in the PCP’s conceptualization of the United Front serving as a central foundation for the construction of the New State during and after the period of people’s war. In semi-colonial semi-feudal countries this meant that the people’s war occurred within the context of the mass anti-imperialist movements and mass peasants movements, within the context of the Agrarian and Colonial Questions.

In a country like the US where there is no discernible peasantry, where the vast majority of people live in cities and towns and where even in the rural areas the agrarian production is organized along industrial capitalist lines rather than feudal lines, it is the proletariat which becomes both the main and leading force. In our context our primary movement for economic demands is not the movement for land reform, but the real movement for demands at the point of production i.e. the labor movement. Thus, for proletarian revolutionaries in the United States, the Labor Question takes on the same central importance it did in the theory and literature of Marx and Lenin’s time, but must now be combined and enhanced with new theoretical developments like the universality of people’s war, concentric construction, the creation of the New State in the process of people’s war, etc. Thus it is in the application of these universal components to their respective national contexts that material questions like the Labor Question emerge as vital and unavoidable, demonstrating how Marxism is a living science that cannot be reduced to abstract, lifeless, metaphysical dogma.

In the United States, owing to the extreme backwardness of the trade union movement, the application of these revolutionary ideas is severely resisted by the labor bureaucrats. Naturally, this class struggle is reflected in the struggle to reconstitute the Communist Party, through the refusal to break with state unionism, Trotskyism, labor-liberalism, and numerous other revisionist conceptions of the trade union struggle. The fact remains that the proletariat cannot organize socialism under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, which controls the labor movement in the United States through a number of state, semi-state, and non-state institutions, chief among them the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor. The struggle between the revolutionary proletariat and the labor aristocracy is a fundamental Marxist idea, yet few people see the connection between the blind obedience to state-backed labor institutions that persists among the so-called “communist movement” in the US and the failure to reconstitute the Communist Party in the US.

It is worth noting that, according to Lenin, “Without close contacts with the trade unions, and without their energetic support and devoted efforts, not only in economic, but also in military affairs, it would of course have been impossible for us to govern the country and to maintain the dictatorship for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years” (Left-Wing Communism).” The revisionists today are not bothered in the slightest by the military collaboration between the bourgeois intelligence agencies and law enforcement and the state union leadership, which was resoundingly rejected by the masses in June of 2020 when protesters attacked the AFL-CIO headquarters during a protest against police brutality. (About which then-President Richard Trumka said, “Attacks like the one on the AFL-CIO headquarters are senseless, disgraceful and only play into the hands of those who have oppressed workers of color for generations and detract from the peaceful, passionate protesters who are rightly bringing issues of racism to the forefront.”) Furthermore, Lenin said, “But now, precisely now, especially after the political revolution, which has transferred power to the proletariat, the time has come for the trade unions, as the broadest organisation of the proletariat on a class scale, to play a very great role, to take the centre of the political stage, to become, in a sense, the chief political organ. For all the old concepts and categories of politics have been upset and reversed by the political revolution which has turned power over to the proletariat” (Report at the Second All-Russia Trade Union Congress ).” Thus, according to Lenin, the trade unions are absolutely critical both during and after the seizure of power by the proletariat. The revisionists preach the dying out of the class struggle, and thus they logically accept the dying out of the trade unions as organs of the class struggle, and their substitution with bureaucratic welfare schemes. Maoism, on the other hand, recognizes the intensification of the class struggle even under proletarian dictatorship, and thus Maoists logically demand the development of the trade unions, not simply as tools for struggling over “bread and butter” issues under capitalism, but as organizations of the proletariat that take on new political and economic responsibilities in the course of the revolution and socialist construction and cultural revolutions that follow. It scarcely needs explaining that in order for the trade unions to play their critical role in the class struggle they require correct class leadership. This leadership is the party of the proletariat, the Communist Party.

This is why Maoists cannot accept the reduction of the labor question to that of a secondary, tactical issue to be decided at some later date. Attempts to dodge the question by refusing to differentiate between the representatives of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the trade union struggle, refusing to differentiate between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary trade unions, or simply failing to demarcate oneself from revisionism on the labor question means in fact betraying the revolutionary aim of the communist movement. With even the most basic review of our ideology, we can see how the Labor Question is tightly bound up in how major components of Marxism will be applied and practiced in our conditions, and is also a historically significant question which played a central role in the creation and development of the International Communist Movement. Not only is the labor movement and the trade unions strategically and tactically important to us. On a theoretical level, they are integral to applying universal concepts of Marxism, like party reconstitution/construction, to our national context.