The Trade Union Congress in Paris

In the pre-war period, the international congresses of the social democratic and trade union movement were still an event that attracted the attention of proletarians in all countries, despite their highly publicized appearance. For weeks beforehand, passionate debates took place in the workers' organizations about the problems that were the focus of such a conference. The international congresses of the pre-war period still had such a strong connection with the proletarian class struggle because their working programme aroused lively interest among organized proletarians.

Those days are over. Today's world congresses of the old labor movement have no more attraction for the proletarian classes than the international conferences of the capitalists. Indeed, sometimes even less, if one recalls the attention paid by the European working masses to the Locarno Conference, for example.

The fourth congress of the “International Federation of Trade Unions” in Amsterdam, which took place in Paris in the first week of August, also failed to elicit any significant response from organized workers. The preparations for the Paris Congress were outwardly the privilege of the leading bodies of the individual national organizations, which graciously placed a number of articles in the press of the Amsterdam federations in order to inform the 13 million trade unionists. The mass of trade union members, on the other hand, were completely indifferent to the meeting of “their” International; they were simply not affected by the events. This indifference is easy to explain. It has its reason above all in the trade union organization, which today is only a copy of capitalist democracy. Under trade union democracy, for example, it is a matter of course that the officials of the ADGB could send a delegation from their ranks to Paris without first having to obtain the decision of the masses of members on the issues of the Fourth Congress. And just as today in the parliaments of the bourgeoisie real life takes place in the non-public meetings of the special committees, so the Paris trade union congress did its real work in committees. It goes without saying that an organization which, like the Amsterdam trade unions, has adopted the working methods of bourgeois parliamentarism, must from the outset exclude the mass of proletarian members.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that it was not a fundamental difference (namely the Russian question) that caused a storm in the quiet trade union salon in Paris. The noise, which brought something like life into the IFTU Congress with Chairman Purcell's Russia-friendly opening speech and the Brownian bomb of the Oudegeest letter, brightly illuminated the typically bourgeois spirit of rivalry that prevailed among all the Amsterdam leaders. They all, the “left-wing” and “right-wing” Amsterdammers, want “international trade union unity”, i.e. understanding with the Russian trade unions and the other “Profintern” federations. The dispute only rages over and over again about the tactics to be adopted to achieve this goal. The “right-wingers”, Oudegeest, Jouhaux, Graßmann, Leipart, demand from the Russians only the sacrifice that the Comintern leaders have been extolling to the German CP workers for years as a “revolutionary duty”, namely the unconditional recognition of the statutes and congress resolutions of Amsterdam. The “leftists”, led by Purcell, Brown and others, on the other hand, are less narrow-minded on the question of the annexation of the Russian trade unions. They have clearly recognized that, because of the consequences of the Russian NEP economy, there is no longer any difference in principle between Moscow's policy and Amsterdam's reformism. Since their trip to Russia, which coincided with the period of the liquidation of war communism, the British trade union leaders have been so strongly committed to “international trade union unity” above all in order to help open up Russian markets for British capital. Purcell, Brown, Cook et al. only joined the Anglo-Russian Unity Committee out of this “national interest in the capitalist economy of their fatherland”, and the Russian government Bolsheviks acted out of the same national interest in doing business with the British bourgeoisie when they glorified the pro-Russian English Amsterdammers as “leftists”.

Today, after the collapse of the stage in the British-Russian united front theater, even the stupid can see that the “left-wing” British are cut from the same reformist cloth as the “right-wing” leaders of the IFTU. The British delegation's surprising move at the Paris Congress against the stubborn attitude of Oudegeest and his associates on the Russian question was primarily intended to do everything possible, including on the trade union side, to pave the way for the restoration of trade relations between Russia and England. The “left-wing” Purcell and Brown were in fact on the same track as Chamberlain, who, as is well known, had already launched a trial balloon at the Stalin government in order to establish new business relations. Secondly, the British trade union delegation's action served to demonstrate once again its “honest will to unite”, which had fallen sharply in the Moscow Leninist Popes' ranks since the rift in the Anglo-Russian Committee. The fact that the tactical advance of the British was accompanied by an unholy squabble among the bigwigs is explained, according to the confession of 1. Sassenbach (in the “Vorwärts” of August 6), by the fact that each of the three secretaries of the IFTU acts on his own initiative, which is why “literally often the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.”

It is highly characteristic that nothing of significance happens at the Paris Trade Union Congress apart from the frog-mouse war over the Russian question. The “Fourth Congress of the Amsterdam International” stood so far outside the real world of the proletarian class struggle that it no longer had any positive value for the liberation struggle of the international working class, like a “red day” in Klein-Kleckersdorf. The resolutions adopted in Paris are only a veiled declaration of the bankruptcy of reformist politics. The struggle for the old trade union demand for the eight-hour day will in future become even more of a parliamentary plea to the capitalist governments to ratify the famous Washington Agreement, which, as we know, contains a thousand ways of dictating overtime. Amsterdam is increasingly renouncing an independent policy by stamping the Geneva Labor Office of the Capitalist International as the universal weapon of the proletarian class struggle. The “struggle against war and militarism” is, of course, still entrusted by the trade unionist apostles of peace to the “General Staff of the Geneva Breach of Nations”, advising the working classes to sue the imperialist devils to their grandmother. All in all, the Paris Congress has once again confirmed that there is no longer any trace of the spirit of revolutionary class struggle in the IFTU Amsterdam.

However, the Fourth Congress of the Amsterdam Congress could not give a positive answer to the questions of life of the proletarian masses, because this is the very condition of trade union development. Today, the IFTU occupies a position in the capitalist world that chains it to the wagon of the bourgeois order for better or worse. The leading trade unions of the modern industrialized countries in particular are so firmly anchored in the soil of their domestic capitalism through their alliance with bourgeois democracy that their interests are increasingly merging with the interests of their own bourgeoisie. A trade union policy geared solely to social reform requires the existence of a capitalist economy that has as solid a basis as possible in order to function smoothly. After all, only a stabilized capitalism that is little shaken by economic crises is the social basis for a new trade union reformist rise. Hence the interest of the “free” trade unions of each country in the “reconstruction” of domestic capitalism, in the successful competition of their own bourgeoisie on the world market.

This attachment to the existence of the capitalist classes imposes its counter-revolutionary policy on all trade unions; forces them to support the reconstruction of the profit economy with all its consequences (mass-poverishing rationalization, arbitration dictatorship, etc.) and to sacrifice the revolutionary class interests of the proletariat on the altar of capitalist democracy. This reformist community of interests with the national bourgeoisies is also the reason why at the IFTU congresses there are the sharpest differences between the individual national delegations on many questions, which is why Amsterdam cannot pursue a policy of international class struggle against world capitalism.

Such an International, which, like the IFTU, consists only of national auxiliaries of the world bourgeoisie, “is absolutely incapable of real action for the proletariat and must splinter into atoms at the first step,” as August Enderle aptly stated in the “Rote Fahne” of August 5. But because this is so, Moscow's slogan “into the trade unions” is just as great a crime against the proletarian liberation struggle as the workers' betrayal by the Amsterdam Orgesch leaders. And that is why the response of the class-conscious proletarians at the Paris trade union congress can only be: Ruthless struggle to blow up the Amsterdam-Moscow counter-revolutionary united front, to form the working masses in the proletarian class front of the revolutionary workplace organizations!