Legality and Mass Action

“For the workers, the Essen and Bochum events represent a highly instructive chapter on economic peace, legality and mass action.

The employers, in their ever-increasing awareness of power due to the indulgence of the trade union reformists, in their trust in the bourgeois bloc authorities and the economically peaceful labor courts, simply disregarded the arbitration award.

The trade union leaders, on the other hand, are the willing slaves of the legality of the bourgeois state. The declaration of binding force, pronounced by the labor minister of the bourgeois bloc cabinet, creates “law” and “right” for them, even if the law and right of the working class go to hell over it. The dead letter of an arbitration award carries so much weight for them that they appeal not to the power of the working class, but to the labor courts loyal to business, even when business obviously breaks the award.”

The above sentences were written in the “Rote Fahne”1 on January 8 on the occasion of the spontaneous strike by steel workers in Bochum and Essen against the refusal of several iron employers to implement the Düsseldorf arbitration award as agreed. The union leaders of the DMV2 portrayed this dispute over the interpretation of the arbitration award as a “rear-guard action” in order to at least somewhat mitigate the after-effects of their shameful capitulation before the arbitration order. But in vain: — the DMV — sanction for the work stoppages in Bochum and Essen did not mean a temporary interruption of the union's powerlessness.

With their appeal to the “labor courts” of the capitalist state for the literal implementation of the iron arbitration award by the employers, the union bosses have just proved that they regard the proletarian class struggle as a part of capitalist legality in every case. The trade unions in Bochum-Essen were not concerned with a conscious struggle against the obvious workers' fraud of the arbitration policy, but only with restoring constitutional respect for the disregarded state authority. After all, the strict recognition of a compulsory state tariff is a thousand times more important to the trade union leaders than the question of how the workforce should practically turn the employers' tariff breaches into their own push against the system of arbitration fraud. By appealing to the bourgeois “labor courts” against their recalcitrant collective bargaining counterparts in the exploitative camp, the trade union law enforcers of the capitalist arbitration dictatorship are doing nothing more than performing the economically peaceful comedy of a workers' struggle in order to reassure the rebellious proles with the lentil dish of capitalist democracy through this pseudo-radical trick. The trade union “action” in Bochum and Essen only amounted to this distraction of the workers from the planned attack against the employers' front, only to this dispute about the “right” and “law” of capitalist arbitration practice.

Therefore, when the “Rote Fahne” once again denounces the failure of the trade union bosses and places the question of “legality and mass action” in the foreground, it will certainly be applauded by large sections of the working class. But as correct and necessary as such ruthless criticism is, the KPD is, as usual, only telling half the truth. The KPD conceals the fact that the social-democratic trade union leaders today are “the mindless slaves of the legality of the bourgeois state” because the trade union organizations themselves have become a living part of capitalist society. The KPD conceals the fact that the arbitration dictatorship of the capitalist state is firmly anchored in the trade union statutes and therefore the “trade union reformists must appeal not to the power of the working class but to the labor courts loyal to the company”. The KPD conceals the fact that every trade union, as a party to collective bargaining, is obliged to abide by arbitration awards and must therefore stab in the back all those proletarians who break through the framework of capitalist legality. The fact that the trade unions, as a result of their role as state-recognized arbitration partners, are only allowed to follow the dead letter of an arbitration award was clearly demonstrated by the Hamburg dockers' strike.

Answering the question of “legality and mass action” in a revolutionary sense therefore also means making a clear class distinction in the field of state conciliation policy. In other words: capitalist legality and proletarian mass action are as hostile to each other as fire and water — but the mass action of the working class can only have a revolutionary character if it is also consciously directed against the trade union guardians of bourgeois legality. From this logically arises the necessity of the political and organizational break with trade union tactics, the necessity of proletarian class unity in the revolutionary factory organizations of the General Workers' Union [AAU]. Only where the workers radically break with the law-abiding trade unions and go over to the organization of the revolutionary class struggle will the way be clear for proletarian mass actions against capitalism and its reformist guardians of the law.

• 1Organ of the KPD
• 2Acronym for the German Metal Workers' Union, a former industrial union for metalworkers. Dissolved in 1933 after the Nazi ascension to power