The Trade Union Movement

1.

It has gradually become clear to everyone that imperialism, and in particular its most powerful manifestation, the world war, is completely transforming the socialist movement and creating new conditions for it. We are in the midst of a process of disruption, reorientation and reconstruction. The trade union movement seems less affected by this, but in reality the upheaval of the basic conditions is no less significant.

This was already apparent before the war. The last decade before the war had already brought a crisis to the trade union movement, slowly emerging, but generating more and more unrest and conflict, the causes and consequences of which were not understood.

What were the external manifestations? The rapid and tremendous rise of the German trade unions in the previous decade (1895-1905) came to an end. While prices rose under the effect of prosperity, it was hardly possible to increase the money wage: the real wage fell, the standard of living declined. Every struggle for better wages was met with huge lockouts; every expiry of a collective agreement meant a choice between accepting the employers' conditions and an exhaustive defensive struggle. In the organizations, the power of the leaders grew with centralization, while unrest and discontent arose among the masses. Where these erupted in spontaneous strikes, the officials opposed them and tried to stifle the struggle by means of their leadership power. The discussions about the masses and leaders reflected this inner conflict.

It was often said at the time that both sides were right and that the impetuous urge of the masses was just as necessary as the far-sighted caution of the leaders. Now it is clear in what sense this is true: there were and are two points of view, two world views, two directions that clash here. The bourgeoisie is just as right from its position as the proletariat is from its position. There is nothing more mindless than the saying that the bourgeoisie with its conservatism is just as necessary as the proletariat with its socialism. On the other hand, it is important to realize that in the question of trade union tactics we are not dealing with the question: what is truth? but with the struggle between two tendencies in the workers' movement, with the same opposition that now exists between social patriots and socialists.

From the upswing and prosperity of the 1990s, the method of the trade union struggle developed into a firm doctrine, which took what was then considered practical to the point of becoming an absolutely valid truth. First form large organizations before the struggle is possible, unite as many workers as possible, centralize strongly, form strong coffers through high contributions, lead the members into the struggle as well-drilled battalions or hold them back from the struggle, depending on the higher insight and secret diplomacy of the leaders - that was the ideal and the doctrine of the trade union officials, who found a material basis in the economic situation. Thus the German trade union movement approached the same type that had developed earlier in America and England. It corresponds to the trade union movement under a calm, qualitatively constant, favorable capitalist development. It then forms a necessary part of bourgeois society, which is not intended to undermine capitalism, but to bring about a kind of balance between the interests of employers and workers.

However, while this idea of an organized, well-financed, intelligently managed, non-rebellious trade union movement took root in the minds of the leaders and broad sections of the workers, the feverish development of capitalism into imperialism undermined its very material basis. It increased the unity and fighting power of entrepreneurship, reversed technology, created colossal capital powers in the rule of the banks over industry, against which the trade unions were powerless, and placed huge armies of unskilled and unorganized workers at the service of these enterprises.

All these phenomena, which shifted the field of struggle to the disadvantage of the trade unions, had already emerged before the war. But the war will intensify them a hundredfold in its economic effects. While small capitalist enterprises are in serious decline, the concentration of big business will be greatly increased by the war. And the trade unions, which immediately placed themselves at the service of imperialism at the outbreak of the war, will see their well-filled coffers for managing need dwindle away and will be more powerless than ever before at the end of the war.

But that's not all. The development will also create a much tighter link between the state and industry. Capitalist private industry in Germany has always felt itself to be the foster child of the state: promoting the interests of industry has long been considered to be in the public interest, and private industries felt themselves to be part of a national whole: indeed, they felt themselves to be the core of the nation, the nation par excellence. Damaging private industry therefore meant damaging the fatherland, and defending private industry meant defending the fatherland. The big industrialists saw the promotion of industry as the most important task of the state, and the state, for its part, saw the fulfillment of this task as the strongest lever for the development of its power.

After all, it was precisely large-scale industry that provided the state with the means of power on which the existence and power of the modern class state were based: the equipment of the enormous masses of the army. The most important branches of heavy industry became the armaments industry, using this word in its most comprehensive sense. And the electrical and chemical industries were also essentially in the service of armaments. If industry thus brought the state's most important means of power up to date, it was in turn the state whose needs required this enormous increase in its power. And the more the state grew out of the confines of the nation state and developed into a world state, the greater the areas of friction between the world powers or the coalitions of world powers became, the greater the state's need for power grew; the more it needed the armaments provided by industry, the more it was concerned with protecting industry.

However, since its own development was only dictated by the development of large-scale industry and the large-scale capital of the banks associated with it, industry felt the need for a global state power in the first place. The needs of the state and of industry interpenetrated, affected, increased and promoted each other. And now, under the effect of war industry and the financial situation created by the war, this interpenetration goes even further; one hardly knows where the private economy ends and the state economy begins: state socialism is the open avowal of bourgeois state scientists.

Thus we see a powerful coalition maturing: The combination of capital power and state power.

The last great trade union struggles, above all the miners' movement, clearly showed the role the state has to play on those occasions when the undisturbed continuation of industrial production was threatened. There were no more strikes, and there will be none in the future, that are not political. These circumstances were bound to plunge the old trade union movement into a deep crisis, all the more so as the development of the capitalist state was in a lively state of flux and was able to adapt itself easily and flexibly to the institutions and phenomena of society, while the trade union movement remained doctrinaire in its conception of its organization and its methods of struggle, unaware, or at least not admitting, that this very doctrine favoured the development of capital.

2.

How will the working class be able to resist this all-sided pressure from the state and capital power, the organ of state-organized, unified giant capital, which has merged into a solid unity? This is the great problem that the future of the working class, its conditions of existence, its external forms and its inner essence harbors.

Let us turn our gaze to America, the other country of highly developed industry and highly concentrated capital. Millions of unskilled workers are exploited there in giant enterprises. A developed state power, whose real tendency to maintain and promote the power of capital is concealed from the eyes of the unenlightened workers by the mists of a sham democracy, stands unscrupulously in the service of the powerful in trust, ruthlessly suppressing every independent movement of the workers by all means of the most ruthless ruthlessness, while the corruption of the organs of this state power shoots luxuriantly and lustily into the stalks. One says nothing new when one says these world-famous things: but one makes oneself complicit when one conceals or suppresses them.

So how did the workers' struggles develop in this country of highly developed industry and finance? The workers repeatedly stood up against exploitation. But these struggles took very peculiar forms. They usually began as spontaneous revolts in the form of strikes. They were carried out with the greatest tenacity, with admirable discipline and a willingness to make sacrifices, with unbending solidarity. In many cases, they began without rules and only gained form and organization as they progressed. Repeatedly these struggles brought success, often they collapsed. But the American workers saw them as the form of struggle that best corresponded to the developed state-capitalist conditions. And so it was natural that at the same time the conservative trade unions continued to decline.

In our trade press it was repeatedly pointed out with regret that these actions were again without result, as the organization born of the struggle often disintegrated again after some time. But apart from the fact that American conditions cannot serve as a schematic model for the conditions in other countries, and that the forms of struggle of the American workers' battalions cannot simply be transferred to the struggles of European workers, for example, one should be careful not to measure the phenomena of a new period with the yardstick of a past era. Actions such as those of the American workers are not the prelude to and preparation for trade union action in the traditional format: rather, they form a new type of workers' struggle that will develop wherever the same or similar conditions exist.

It is not a question of whether this is a good thing or whether it would not be better if the great masses were to unite in fixed formations which prepared the struggle according to plan. Rather, it is a question of the fact that under the prevailing conditions in America this method of spontaneous outbreaks is natural, and that only in very special cases is the form of firm organization and long-prepared struggle possible.

In Germany, we know, the conditions are not literally the same as in the United States; but we also know that in our country large masses of workers, broad strata, are unorganized and not very capable of organization. The fact that the workers of heavy industry and state enterprises in particular have so little organizational strength is not simply backwardness, but also the vague feeling that the previous trade union method is no match for these huge enterprises, whose immense power they are getting to know at close quarters, and that the money they are supposed to bring into the coffers is largely thrown away, but would be too good for the mere maintenance of a bureaucracy, which ultimately only acts as an organ of entrepreneurial and state power. Their situation corresponds to a different, more modern form of struggle, which has not yet been able to develop in Germany. On the other hand, it has long been apparent in the large associations that the old method is outdated and that insisting on it weakens rather than strengthens the working class.

The most classic example of this state of affairs is the last shipyard workers' strike in 1913. The spontaneous initiation of the strike showed the instinctive desire of the workers to choose the form of struggle that they considered most appropriate to the new conditions. The resistance of the bureaucracy clearly revealed the leaders' desire not to let the strike endanger the organizations and the organizations' inability to adapt to the new conditions. No strike has shaken the trade union organizations, or even the party organizations, as much as this shipyard workers' movement. The confidence of the shipyard workers in their leaders dwindled. That was one of the main results. The mass resignation from the organizations, the calling out of the trade union and party press, that was the immediate consequence. The rise of the Yellows was a necessary consequence. All coaxing, all reminders of discipline and organizational duties were of no avail, as the failure of the organizations was in plain sight.

No matter how well-intentioned the sermons, the workers are not guided by them; they draw their knowledge from the hard facts of their own bitter experiences and determine their actions accordingly. Even radical party leaders - the “Bremer Bürger-Zeitung” under Henke's leadership bowed its knee to the power of the bureaucracy - saw the independent action of the shipyard workers as a relapse into the old method of so-called wildcat strikes. They were unable to recognize that this action was the beginning of a new era of workers' struggles. The shipyard workers were enlightened and, as workers in the most modern industrial companies, far-sighted enough to prevent themselves from being caught up in the radical demagogic phrases of these leaders.

The path to the new struggles and the new successes goes, in a spiritual sense of course, over the corpses of the previous leaders, regardless of whether they are reformist or old-radical, i.e. centrist. Being a leader now means making sacrifices, renouncing well-paid offices and a quiet life from the outset. The previous leaders are fundamentally incapable of this leadership. The new leaders will only emerge from the new movement and from the working masses themselves. They will be on the same social level as the masses themselves; for the new movement will not set up new institutions for those in need of rest. They will have no prospect of lifelong office; their leadership will always be short-lived. And a continual expansion of the field of struggle: that will be the result of every struggle. And in this, too, the new forms will come into sharpest conflict with the old organizations; for from the point of view of the coffers, the altars of the old movement, every extension of the field of struggle is evil, since it exhausts and disrupts the finances. But in reality this is the only means of forcing the coalition of giant capital to make concessions. To defeat this capital with the help of the coffers now, in the age of the rule of finance capital, is a utopia bordering on the comical. In the modern struggles of the working class, the coffers will be exhausted very quickly. But only in future struggles will the workers be able to win a world.

3.

As I said, the example of the American workers' struggles cannot simply serve as a model for the future labor movement in general. It stems from the particular American conditions: Huge masses of workers, thrown together from all countries, some of them from the most primitive peasantry, unorganized, in the service of a huge big business, alongside an ossified labour aristocracy. The example only shows how such masses have a powerful weapon in mass trade union action against a seemingly all-powerful business community.

In Europe, the future conflict between capital and labour will probably - to the extent that anything can be predicted at all - be more closely linked to the existing organizations. This must be the case because the trade union organizations here do not comprise a small aristocracy, but much broader masses. As a result, the principle of organization has become much more second nature to the masses. The old-style trade union struggles will not disappear completely, but will at best fill the time between the major struggles as a constant skirmish to cover the ground gained as far as possible. They will then lead over to the big ones each time.

The question of whether and to what extent the existing associations can become organs of these mass struggles will depend above all on whether and to what extent the mass of workers will know how to enforce this tactic, even against the will of the bureaucracy, and as a precondition for this, whether and to what extent broad layers of workers grasp the necessity and conditions of this tactic with a clear consciousness. The calculation will not work out completely: the living conditions of an association as such, like those of the party, point to toleration on the part of the state, to adaptation to the existing, to renunciation of revolutionary struggles against the existing. Its form is based on this, and it cannot escape this constraint. Mass actions cannot therefore arise as actions planned in advance. But in any case, as soon as the old associations prove to be obstacles to the struggle, as in the last shipyard strike of 1913, they will lose one degree of their firmness after another; for in every case the workers will demand that they stand behind the strugglers and not, as hitherto, seek their goal in ending the struggle as quickly as possible. Their own future will primarily depend on their attitude in such cases: whether they will become purely bourgeois, conservative-reactionary formations, mere means of power in the hands of the leaders, mere obstacles to development, to which the fighting workers will turn their backs, or organizations in which the needs of the masses of members will be decisive and which will therefore play a certain role in the liberation struggle of the proletariat.

In these struggles, however, the trade unions will also openly reveal their political character. It is a serious self-deception to believe that the trade unions are apolitical even today. The close connection between the large industrial enterprises and the state makes any purely trade union struggle illusory from the outset. Every influence of the trade unions on the working conditions of the workers affects the interests of the state. And if the free trade unions are now to be recognized by law as having equal rights, this is not because they are apolitical, but because they have proven themselves to be reliable pillars of bourgeois-imperialist politics.

That is why the trade unions have been allowed to participate not only in the areas of social policy, worker protection, worker insurance, child and women's protection, as well as housing, health and nutrition, but also, with special emphasis, in taxes and customs. We have learned to appreciate the politics of the trade unions and that is why they are given such a broad field of highly political activity. If they continue to prove themselves one day, it is hard to see why they should not then be allowed to exert political influence on constitutional issues and foreign policy. These areas could already be entrusted to them now; they will not do anything in them that could run counter to the interests of imperialism. The trade union leaders are already enthusiastic about colonialism and are forward-looking supporters of the Reich; they are just as convinced of the necessity of armaments as they are of securing the borders, and they will accept any electoral reform proposal as progressive, just as they have accepted the amendment to the Association Act. The fate of the Reich is safe in their hands. Nevertheless, it is wise not to give them the whole thing yet and to hint at the entitlement to the rest in a concealed manner for the time being.

Never have the free trade unions been so unanimously praised for their patriotic stance as in this war, the most powerful political activity of the European bourgeoisie. Never has the strong political activity of the trade unions been more favorably appreciated by the bourgeoisie. And it is also remarkable that the trade union leaders are all politicians, that a large proportion of the Social Democratic members of the Reichstag are trade union officials and that the policy of the Reichstag parliamentary group is made in the General Commission of the trade unions.

There is no political event of importance on which the trade union press does not comment, and there is no Social Democratic meeting in which the trade union officials do not express their political will and try to enforce it. No Social Democratic party conference has ever passed without the political and tactical position of the trade union bureaucracy, which is always represented in large numbers, having a very significant, if not decisive, influence.

The trade unions have always been political through and through. The vast majority of the masses of unionized workers were also politically organized, and trade union issues were increasingly treated and judged from a political point of view. In the party press, however, especially during the war, there was the interesting spectacle of the leader of the trade union section being able to polemicize politically to the full extent against the leadership of the political section when one represented the majority and the other the minority point of view, and vice versa.

The war has so far had the effect in the political field of making the most extreme tendencies recognize their own nature and aims more clearly than before. The right of the social-imperialists wants a firm connection to the bourgeois world, wants to become a member of bourgeois society in order to consistently place the workers' organizations at the service of imperialism. Using new tactical methods, the left-wing radicals want to bring the proletariat to self-confidence and independence and thus restore the old socialist principle of class antagonisms and class struggles to its rightful place in theory and practice.

Something similar can be seen in the trade union field. Even before the war, left-wing radicals emphasized the importance of mass action in the trade union movement. The consequences of social imperialism for the trade union movement can be seen in Winnig's efforts to unite the free trade unions with the Christian and Hirsch-Duncker unions to form a single union. In fact, only a label separates him from this. When Legien, who prefers to leave everything in the trade union movement as it is, takes this opportunity to speak of a difference in “world view” that separates the workers of the free trade unions from those of the Christian and liberal unions, this can only be understood to mean that for the workers, as he wants them to be, the “socialist world view” is a label, a cherished dogma. For the real world view of Legien and Winnig is exactly the same bourgeois-capitalist one as that of Stegerwald and Lebius: both want to serve imperialism.

But while Winnig wants to appear to be what he is, Legien rightly recognizes the value of the old traditional ideologies; for what must the workers who built up the organizations for the struggle think when they are now told that the Christians and the liberals want the same thing as they do! And perhaps Legien will be more right than he himself would like if the members of the free trade unions one day take their socialist ideology seriously.

It will be the task of the socialist workers to fight within the trade union organization against the narrow-mindedness of trade union dogmatism and to create and spread clarity about the new conditions of struggle.