Strikes Under a Workers an article by leon trotsky
State
In the last issue of INPRECOR (No. 3, new series, 31
March 1977) we published a translation of a speech made by Leon Trotsky at the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist party (March 27-April 2, 1922). The speech dealt mainly with the relationship between economic management and trade-union activity. One of the themes broached both at this Congress and later at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Trade Unions (September 1922), however, was the question of strikes under a workers state. In the same issue of INPRECOR we published a speech on this question by Tomsky, president of the Council of Trade Unions, from the Eleventh Congress of the party. Below is an article by Trotsky dealing with this same question. It was published in French in Bulletin Communiste, No. 15, April 13, 1922. In this article Trotsky refers to the decisions of the Central Committee meeting of December 28, 1921, which discussed the question of the trade unions under the new economic policy. Readers may refer to the presentation by Guy Desolre in the last issue of INPRECOR in order to get an idea of the general context in which Trotsky's article was located. • • Five years ago, during one of its most important congresses, one of the greatest political parties in Russia adopted a resolution in which it was asserted: "The Russian proletariat, acting in one of the most backward countries of Europe, among the masses of a petty-bourgeois population, cannot set itself the goal of immediately achieving socialism. "But it would be the greatest mistake, and in practice a service to the bourgeoisie, to deduce from this the necessity of the working class supporting the bourgeois class or limiting its activity to a context appropriate to the petty bourgeoisie, or to deduce from it the necessity of the proletariat's renouncing the leading role which is incumbent upon it in propaganda and in accomplishing various immediate practical and possible measures which constitute steps toward socialism. "The nationalization of the land is one of these measures. Without immediately going beyond the framework of the bourgeois order, this measure would direcily attack the right of bourgeois property in the means of production and would thus strengthen the influence of the socialist proletariat over the semi-proletarians of the countryside. 30
"The control of the banks by the state, their fusion into a central bank, the control of the insurance companies and the big capitalist trusts, as well as the gradual transition to a more just distribution of taxes on income and property, must be other measures in the same direction. "Economic life is ripe for implementing these measures. They are incontestably possible immediately; they can receive political support from the great peasant masses, who would benefit from them in all respects." Which party adopted this resolution? Ours, the Bolshevik party. In which congress? In its important All-Russian congress in Petrograd, April 24-29, 1917. For the first time, just after the fall of Tsarism, our party came together and worked out its tactics aimed at the social revolution. The text of the motion I have cited was drafted entirely by Lenin. It was adopted by a unanimous vote of 140, with 8 abstentions. Just one year ago it had been said that this document no longer had but historic value. But today it takes on current significance again. With some precise reservations, it may be said that our party is now going back to its positions of April 1917, positions which it had selected at a time when it was possible to define its tactics more calmly than was the case during the years of bitter civil war, out of which war communism arose. Those militants who take the trouble to study this resolution deeply will understand that in many respects our new economic orientation is only a return to the old line as we defined it about five years ago. And the questions being asked about the trade unions today will not appear unexpected to those comrades who read this resolution carefully. The trade-union question, which generated such heated discussions in the party one year ago and provoked the formation of tendencies, has now been resolved unanimously. This is because a year ago the transition to the new — or rather the old - economic policy was only being prepared. The transition period was just beginning on the eve of the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist party. This Tenth Congress met at the most serious moment of the turn, during the Kronstadt events. The party was only beginning to become conscious of the need for great changes, but did not yet clearly grasp what those changes were. The Tenth Congress replaced rationing with taxes in kind. All the rest had to follow from this inevitable decision. At the time, we still did not realize the consequences for the
role of the unions. But if we move to taxes in kind, if we allow a certain return to capitalism, if we grant concessions to companies, and if we encourage private initiative, then it follows automatically that there can no longer be any question of a rapid statization of the unions or the transmission of all leadership of industry to the unions. We see this more clearly now than we did at the Tenth Congress. The recent resolution of the party Central Committee modifies the role of the unions on three essential points:
1. Their participation in economic life was transformed.
2. The obligatory entry of all workers into the unions was lifted in favor of a return to voluntary union membership.
3. The unions again became organs of defense of the workers, considered as selling their labor-power. It is this latter modification that poses the question of the right to strike in a proletarian state, on which point I would like to pause a bit. The unions are far from renouncing any participation in the organization of the economy. This must be underscored, for our recent resolutions have already been deformed by certain comrades who have interpreted them in this way. Comrade V. Yarotsky has written that "the essential task of the unions, the task of economic organization, has been almost entirely eliminated. " This is quite inexact. "Schools of communism in a general fashion, the unions must more particu -larly be, first for the workers and then for all the toilers, schools of socialist administration of production." Thus the resolution of the Central Committee. Our unions must renounce those forms of intervention in economic organization which have been condemned by experience. As the Central Committee resolution says, they must renounce "immediate, improvised, incompetent, and irresponsible intervention in the management of industry, " but at the same time they must assiduously continue their participation in economic work. And the resolution of the Central Committee explains how. But let us go back to the question of strikes. The rebirth of private capital and the emergence of concessionary capital entail the formation of a proletariat which works Mot with the workers state but for capitalists. In itself this is not insignificant. The Moscow provincial economic commission has given us the number of workers employed by private industry in the capital. Here are the figures: Woodworkers 2,000; construction 10,000; chemical industry 1,500; fur and leather 1,300; metallurgy 2,000; textiles 1,000; food services 7,000; clothing 1,000; printing 1,500. We have not been able to check the accuracy of these figures, but taking account of the fact that there are 9,096 rented shops in Moscow and that about 20,000 workers are employed in them, we arrive at a total of 50,000 people employed by private industry, even if the first figures are a bit exaggerated. And this while the Moscow Economic Council has so far conceded private industry only 205 enterprises out of a list of 542 which are slated to be conceded. The provincial economic commission in Petrograd has given us the following figures on wage earners employed by private industry: Factories and Shops 1,880 Workshops 3,877 Small enterprises 528 Total 6,285 But this figure is quite incomplete, because it does not include construction workers, employees in commerce, and several other categories of employees. There are no fewer than 10,000 such employees in private industry in Petrograd. And if we consider the numerical weakness of the proletariat in this city, this figure appears rather large. Moreover, it will grow in the future, especially since concessionary capital has not yet arisen in this area. By all evidence, the trade unions must take up the defense of the workers employed by private industry. The workers concerned do not always want the union to intervene in their affairs at the moment. Under the extremely difficult conditions of the present transitional period, working for a capitalist may sometimes appear to be the best course. But they will soon realize that the protection of the workers state and the union against the exploiter is indispensable to them. To defend these categories of wage earners our unions must reconstitute strike funds and prepare themselves for new struggles. This does not mean that we will always resort to strikes in the concessions and the private enterprises. On the contrary, the unions, acting under the soviet system with the unlimited consent of the state, will often find many other means by which to induce the concessionaire or entrepreneur to satisfy the demands of the workers. • • This much is obvious. What is much more difficult to resolve is the problem of strikes in the state enterprises, in the soviet enterprises. No one is unaware of the fact that there have been such strikes during our four years of struggle. And so long as we are so poor, so long as we suffer the profound poverty caused by the blockade, by the foreign intervention, by the sabotage of some technicians, we will have to expect conflicts in state industry, in the course of which strikes will not always be avoidable. When the first strikes of this kind against the workers state occurred, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries saw them as symptoms of the coming fall of the soviet regime. They did not understand that the strikes we were dealing with had a subjective and objective character radically different from those of the strikes under the old regime and under the Kerensky government. We do not mean that they were all innocent and idyllic. Far from it. It more than once happened that they had a counterrevolutionary tinge. They did inestimable damage to our economic life and to the workers state. But it is no less true that they were not instances of class struggle but rather internecine quarrels
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32 Directeur de publication: Jean-François Godchau Imprimerie Rotographie, Montreuil No. de commission paritaire: 59117
TROTSKY within a class. When the economic situation became somewhat untenable, when the lack of money and the fuel crisis more particularly affected some categories of workers, the latter sometimes expressed their protest through strikes. These strikes were extremely damaging. They settled nothing; they certainly did not improve the economic and financial situation; they did nothing to resolve the fuel crisis. They only indicated the lack of consciousness, organization, and internal fortitude of some elements of workers. They gave the greatest pleasure to counterrevolutionaries of all varieties, prolonged the civil war, and aggravated economic disarray. But in no way did they resemble the class movements that brought down the old regime. They were, as was said in the resolution of our Central Committee, "conflicts between isolated groups of the working class and certain institutions of the workers state. " As such, these conflicts did the greatest damage to the workers state, and on this basis to the working class. But it was impossible to prevent them. Two fundamental causes provoked them:
1. Our poverty, the ruin wreaked among us by imperialism.
2. The serious deficiencies of certain institutions of the workers siste tainted by "bureaucratic deformation." It is impossible to tell which of these two factors was most important in each specific case. In any event, the task of our unions is to prevent, through intelligent interventions, deepen the poverty of the country. A difficult task. To accomplish it we need militants who live among the masses, with the masses, who experience the life of the masses and are able to understand them, to appreciate, without excessive idealization, their degree of consciousness and the power of old prejudices among them, who are able to win their confidence and affection. During the period of war communism the leaders of our unions had but one response to strikers: "You do not have the right to stop working, nor to demand that the union defend your interests as sellers of labor-power. The soviet state is a workers state. In a workers state there is no need for special organs to defend the interests of the workers. " At bottom this response was correct, and it remains so. But it soon becomes a deplorable official formula if the unions are not closely involved in the lives of the workers and if they are unable to effectively combat the "bureaucratic deformation" of some of the state organs, if they are not able to prove to the most backward worker that everything possible has been done in his interest. There is a difficult limit to grasp in this matter, but we must be able not to overstep it. If the unions do not live in the very life of the toiling masses, if they do not do everything possible to ceaselessly improve their conditions, then the theoretical solution of the question of the right to strike in the workers state is no longer but a nefarious formula producing diametrically opposite effects on the workers from those intended.
We all know how limited our material resources are and how difficult it is for us to increase the real wages of the workers employed by state industry at this time. But have we done everything possible? About the hygienic working conditions in our industry, for example? Have we done all our present poverty permits, even if only for the workers of the most important state industries? No, a thousand times no. "One of the best and most unfailing means of appreciating the justice and effectiveness of the work of the unions is provided by the results of trade-union policy in avoiding collective conflicts in state enterprises, in being concerned with the interests of the workers on all matters, and in eliminating the causes of conflict in time." This is what is said, with a great deal of correctness, by the resolution of the Central Committee. If one can say that in a bourgeois state the best union, the most militant union, is precisely the one that supports the most struggles, then it must be said that in the factories of the workers state the truth is exactly the opposite. But to eliminate strikes, a policy of foresight, of "concern to safeguard the interests of the workers in all matters, "must be substituted for all the other means sometimes employed during the difficult days of the civil war. A workers state going through a period of transition like ours cannot prohibit strikes in industrial enterprises by law, although it is obvious to all conscious workers that such strikes are damaging, absurd, and sometimes counterrevolutionary. But nor can the workers state proclaim the right to strike in its factories, as the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks would like, to the greatest advantage of the bourgeoisie. And this is not a tactical contradiction. It is a contradiction in life itself, in the hard reality of the transition period. The stronger the Soviet state becomes, the more we improve our economic life, the more rapidly we heal the wounds we suffered during the war and the counterrevolution, the better we will eliminate from our social life the Menshevism and "revolutionary socialism" of those who supported reaction for years, the better the unions will succeed in peacefully resolving conflicts - and the more conscious the working class will become, the less will be the bureaucratic deformation of our state organs, and the quicker this contradiction will disappear. The new tasks of the unions attribute many rights to their members. But we also expect much from their work. The campaign whose plan is sketched out in the resolution of the Central Committee of our party will take months. In fact, this resolution does not concern solely the trade-union movement. It includes the situation of the working class as a whole in the present period in Soviet Russia. Our unions must transform themselves. They must be rebom. Let the party be ready from its side. An immense task must be accomplished. And the unions must at all costs be up to the great new necessities.