Labour Struggle and Revolutionary Leadership

As originally published, our Montreal May Day leaflet included a misleading formulation on the relationship between the fight for a class-struggle union leadership and the cohering of a revolutionary workers party. After affirming that such a labour leadership would “arm the workers to wage hard-fought battles against the capitalist exploiters,” the leaflet stated: “It is on this basis that a revolutionary workers party can be forged to struggle for a socialist revolution, putting an end to austerity and capitalism once and for all” (emphasis added).

This formulation begs the question: who will forge the class-struggle oppositions needed to replace the current pro-capitalist union bureaucracy? Moreover, it states that the revolutionary party will issue out of class struggles led by such a new union leadership. There is certainly a relationship between the development of a revolutionary party and its influence in the unions, but as written this conception puts the cart before the horse, bending in a semi-syndicalist direction.

As Lenin explained in What Is to Be Done? (1902), labour struggle does not spontaneously lead to revolutionary socialist consciousness—i.e., the understanding that capitalism must be overthrown through workers revolution to establish a proletarian dictatorship as the first step in the transition to communism. A revolutionary party is needed to win workers, including class-conscious workers, to this understanding. In contrast, a labour reformist can advocate militant union struggle while still accepting the framework of capitalist rule. An example in Quebec is the late Michel Chartrand, leader of the Montreal CSN from the late 1960s to the late ’70s, who advocated and led militant struggles while simultaneously tying the workers to the bourgeois order through a mixture of nationalism and social democracy.

As the leaflet makes clear elsewhere, the program and areas of political intervention of a revolutionary party are broader than the union sphere, which only covers a minority of workers. It is necessary to act as a “tribune of the people” among diverse sections of the populace, including non-proletarian layers. In addition, history shows that the forging of a revolutionary party will in all likelihood mainly take place through a series of splits and fusions involving left-wing political organizations, not the direct linear recruitment of union militants. For example, the German Communists became a mass party by fusing with the left wing of the Independent Socialists (USPD) in 1920. Of course, such fusions will generally also increase party influence in the unions.

On a different topic, the leaflet originally stated that “it is the workers who produce all the material wealth of capitalist society.” However, wealth and the surplus value extracted from the workers through capitalist exploitation are not identical. For a more detailed exposition, we refer our readers to Karl Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, some excerpts from which are printed on page 2.