Re: Labour aristocracy -- wrapping up

["Tom O'Lincoln" <suarsos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to Ben and everyone else for a stimulating exchange on the "labour
aristocracy". I think the thread is exhausted (certainly I'm starting to
repeat myself). What I would like to do is present below a short summary of
Luxemburg and Gramsci on the related topic of trade unions and union
officials. I wrote this long ago as part of a pamphlet that was never
published. Maybe I should say at this point that it's not intended as a
"Luxemburgist" or "Gramscian" alternative to "Leninism". I think a party of
the Bolshevik type remains the indispensable means of overcoming reformism.



***

In The Mass Strike,
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1906/mass-str/ch08.htm)
Luxemburg isolates some of the factors which led to the bureaucratisation
of the German movement and its integration into capitalism. Like Lenin she
had been impressed by the spontaneous struggles of the Russian revolution
of 1905, and she could not miss the dramatic contrast they provided to the
plodding style of German trade unionism. She was spurred to write a
critique of the latter. She argued that the very successes of the German
unions contained the roots of the problem:

"The rapid growth of the trade union movement in Germany in the course of
the last fifteen years, especially in the period of great economic
prosperity from 1895 to 1900 has brought with it a great independence of
the trade unions, a specialising of their methods of struggle, and finally
the introduction of a regular trade-union officialdom. All these phenomena
are quite understandable ... They are ... without doubt a historically
necessary evil. But ... these necessary means of promoting trade union
growth become, on the contrary, obstacles to its further development ...

"The specialisation of professional activity as trade-union leaders, as
well as the naturally restricted horizon which is bound up with
disconnected economic struggles in a peaceful period, leads only too
easily, amongst trade-union officials, to bureaucratism and a certain
narrowness of outlook. Both, however, express themselves in a whole series
of tendencies which may be fateful in the highest degree for the future of
the trade-union movement. There is first of all the overvaluation of the
organisation, which from a means has gradually been changed into an end in
itself, a precious thing, to which the interests of the struggles should be
subordinated. From this also comes that openly admitted need for peace
which shrinks from great risks and presumed dangers to the stability of the
trade-unions, and further, the overvaluation of the trade-union method of
struggle itself, its prospects and its successes."

Here Luxemburg provides something which  is missing in Lenin. She analyses
the trade union bureaucracy, not merely an ill-defined "aristocracy", and
shows how this bureaucracy's social position leads to its politics. These
politics are characterised, she writes, not only by "hostility to every
theoretical criticism" but also by the search for "a new theory which would
open up an illimitable vista of economic progress to the trade union
struggle within the capitalist system" That is, the social position of the
bureaucracy gives rise to its political stance as a protagonist of
reformist activity within the system.

Antonio Gramsci, writing in the newspaper Ordine Nuovo in 1919-20,
developed an analysis along similar lines. (The quotes are from Soviets in
Italy, Nottingham, n.d., p. 9-11 and 17.) He advanced a ruthless critique
of the trade union structures of his time:

"The workers feel that the complex of 'their' organisation, the trade
union, has become such an enormous apparatus that it now obeys laws
internal to its structure and its complicated functions, but foreign to the
masses who have acquired a consciousness of their historical mission ...
They feel that even in their own home, in the house they have built
tenaciously, with patient effort, cementing it with their blood and tears,
the machine crushes man and bureaucracy sterilises the creative spirit."

This passage is strikingly reminiscent of Marx's own description of the
alienation of capitalist society. "As in religion, man is governed by the
products of his own brain, so in capitalist production he is governed by
the products of his own hand." (Capital vol I, Moscow `1965 p. 621). Nor is
the resemblance accidental, for Gramsci like Lenin and Luxemburg proceeds
from the understanding that unions are institutions trapped within the
logic of capitalism:

"[Under capitalism], when individuals are only valued as owners of
commodities, which they trade as property, the workers too are forced to
obey the iron laws of general necessity; they become traders in their sole
property -- their labour power and professional skills. More exposed to the
risks of competition, the workers have accumulated their property in ever
broader and more comprehensive 'firms', they have created these enormous
apparatuses for the concentration of work energy, they have imposed prices
and hours and disciplined the market. They have hired from outside or
produced from inside a trusted administrative staff expert in this kind of
speculation, able to dominate market conditions, to lay down contracts, to
evaluate commercial risks and to initiate profitable economic operations."

The union reproduces the structures of the basic capitalist unit, the firm.
Its officer, the union bureaucracy, quite logically emerge as protagonists
of capitalist politics and defenders of the capitalist system:

"...the union bureaucrats conceives industrial legality as a permanent
state of affairs. He too often defends it from the same point of view as
the proprietor. He sees only chaos and wilfulness in everything that
emerges from the working masses. He does not understand the worker's act of
rebellion against capitalist discipline; he perceives only the physical
act, which may in itself and for itself be trivial ... in these conditions
union discipline can only be a service to capital."



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