Leon Trotsky: Guiding Principles on the Trade Union Question

(extract)

[My own translation of the German translation in Die Internationale, Volume 3 (1921), Issue 1, pp. 22-25, Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

Our trade unions are going through a serious crisis. One of the most undeniable causes of this crisis is the weakening and paralysis of the trade unions as a result of the heavy sacrifices they have had to bear throughout the period of the civil war.

The superhuman strain of all the forces which the war demanded of the working class inevitably had a paralysing effect on the self-activity of the workers' organisations, including the trade unions. The methods of workers' democracy (dealing with burning questions in the broad public, criticism, struggle for ideas, electoral principle, etc.) were reduced to a minimum in this period.

The main cause of the trade union crisis lies in the incongruity between the tasks which objectively arise for our trade unions at the given stage of development and those habits of thought and work and methods by which the trade unions – in this respect heirs of the past – are dominated. The disproportion between the trade union as it is and the trade union as it should be has become the strongest contradiction within the workers' state at the present time. Until we have mastered this contradiction, we will not be able to take any serious step forward in the economic field.

[Comrade Trotsky, quoting the programme of the C.P.R., finds that in the last period we have not approached in practice the aim envisaged in the programme, but have moved away from it. If the development were to continue along this road, it would mean a very great danger both for the trade unions and for the economy in general].

In bourgeois society, the trade unions united the working class to fight for the improvement of the condition of the toilers, then for the elimination of the capitalist mode of production through revolutionary action.

In the Kerensky epoch, the trade unions went over to the control of industry; this was one of the forms of the struggle raging between labour and capital.

After the October overthrow, the working class, mainly through the mediation of the trade unions, exuded primitive organs for the domination of the nationalised enterprises. This movement has, without sufficient reason, been given the name of elementary syndicalism. In reality, in this first period of the revolution, the working masses created state soviet bodies, the economic apparatus, armies and other things by the same means of semi-elementary mass creation.

What in bourgeois society constitutes the essence of the trade union has fallen away; in the workers' state the trade union cannot wage an economic class struggle; on the other hand, the participation of the trade unions in economic construction has become more and more limited, systemless and superficial to the extent that the economic organs, which had detached themselves from the trade unions, developed more and more independently, took on the workers they needed and switched their apparatus on and over. It was precisely from this that the deep crisis in our trade union movement arose, and it was precisely this that gave rise to the growth of this crisis.

The trade unions' abandonment of the active and responsible construction work greatly favoured the development of a conservative trade unionist mentality among the leading trade union officials.

During the three years of the Soviet regime, the trade unions were subjected to changes in their structure, their working methods and in the staff of their leading organs to a far lesser extent than all other organisations of the workers' state. Having lost their old basis of existence, which was the economic struggle, the trade unions were, for a number of reasons, unable to draw the necessary forces into their ranks and to work out the necessary methods which would have enabled them to solve the new task which had been set before them by the proletarian revolution and which found its formulation in our programme: to organise production.

In the workers' state there can be no organisationally separate specialists for the organisation of production on the one hand and for the trade union movement on the other. It must be recognised as a universally valid principle that everyone who is needed for socialist production is by that very fact indispensable for the trade union and, conversely, that every valuable trade union worker must participate in the organisation of production anyway.

The concentration of the entire administration of production in the hands of the trade unions, as demanded by our programme, means the planned transformation of the trade unions into apparatuses of the workers' state and the gradual fusion of the trade union organs with the economic organs. It is not a formal proclamation of the trade unions as state organs, but their actual transformation into production organisations which encompass every branch of industry on all sides and are responsible for the interests of both production and producers.

The task, therefore, is not to revise the programmatic presuppositions on the trade union question, but to actually take a new step towards the realisation of the principle recognised by the party and consolidated in its programme.

During the year that has passed since the IX Party Congress, the economic organisations have made a significant step forward. Weighty results have been achieved in individual fields of production. The problem of drawing up a unified economic plan is taking on ever more definite practical forms. However, this is hardly expressed at all within the trade unions. Since the general guideline of development in the sense of a gradual fusion of the trade union organs with the production organs is indisputable for all, it is as clear as daylight that every stage in the field of economic development must at the same time be a new stage on the way to the fusion of the trade unions with the economic organs. As long as this is not achieved, the crisis will continue to worsen.

If the question is posed correctly, it follows with certainty that the organisation of labour in the workers' state can be based solely on production and can only culminate in it. In other words, the organisation of labour and that of production must coincide. Hence also the gradual "fusion" of the trade union and economic apparatuses. This, as we have seen, is the position of the party programme.

The transformation of the trade union associations into production associations – not only in name but in work content – constitutes the gigantic task of the epoch we are entering. The trade unionist must not see himself as an advocate for the satisfaction of the workers' needs, but as an organiser who organises the toilers for production on the basis of an ever more perfecting technique.

In the workers' state, the trade union has meaning and a raison d'être only to the extent that it actually commands production by drawing all producers into its ranks, improving the organisation, the mechanisation of labour, increasing productivity and thus raising the material condition of the workers and their intellectual level.

All the other activities of the trade unions, whether in the field of enlightenment, in military or other fields, are carried out without disturbing their basic character of production organisations of the toilers.

The production organisation must include all the workers indispensable to the given branch of industry, from the unskilled workers to the most qualified engineer.

Re-education based on the criterion of production must, of course, extend above all to the trade union workers (the "officials"), whose ranks must be thoroughly strengthened and occupied by new forces. The leaders of the trade unions in the centre and in the provinces will have to enter the sphere of purely economic questions and will already thereby carry the production criterion into their everyday work in the trade union federations. On the other hand, the leaders of the economic organs are obliged to approach all questions of production, even the purely technical ones, with growing knowledge and solidarity, as questions which concern above all the organisation of the living force. Only the reciprocal fructification of these two points of view will create the necessary psychological basis for the organic fusion of two parallel existing apparatuses into a unified apparatus which will safeguard to the same extent both the general interests of production and immediately the interests of the producers.

[At the end of his guiding principles, comrade Trotsky proposes a series of practical measures].