Behind southern governors’ anti-union agenda
May 1, 2024 Gregory E. Williams
It pays to play. Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass gives Texas governor Greg Abott $6 million to get his preferred policies enacted.
Southern politicians who sold their souls to the corporations and banks are a bit rattled right now, and who can blame them? Volkswagen workers won big in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when 73% of plant workers voted to join the United Auto Workers Union.
This is the first time that autoworkers have successfully unionized via election in the South since the 1940s! What if more of us workers here in the South get an idea?
Before the vote even happened, six “anti-woke” southern governors put out a joint letter condemning the union. That should tell us how significant the unionization victory is.
Seriously. The Volkswagen vote is a big deal for all workers in the region. When economists compare workers of the same type, with the only difference being whether they’re union members, unionized workers earn 10-15% more in wages according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. That’s just wages. Unionized workers have better benefits and working conditions, too.
And unlike with “trickle down economics” – the now totally disproven idea that tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy will trickle down to the rest of us – when it comes to the benefits of unions, the high tide really does lift all workers’ boats. The Treasury Department admits that the data is clear on this point. There is a spillover.
For every 1% increase in union membership in the private sector, that results in a 0.3% increase in wages for nonunion workers, and the benefits are greatest for workers without college degrees.
Workers in states that have extreme anti-union laws (misleadingly called “right to work” or RTW laws) make 3.2% less on average than those doing the same job in states with less restrictions on unions. That is to say, full time workers in RTW states like Louisiana or Mississippi make about $1,670 less per year.
The letter written by the governors has a laughable graphic saying “Republican governors stand with American Auto Workers.” It’s signed by Kay Ivey (Alabama), Brian Kemp (Georgia), Tate Reeves (Mississippi), Henry McMaster (South Carolina), Bill Lee (Tennessee), and Greg Abbott (Texas). Every word of the statement is a lie. We should ask who they’re working for, because it ain’t us.
Roster of shame
The governors’ main claim is that all the jobs are going to leave if the workforce unionizes. But there is no correlation between whether a state has RTW laws, and thus low unionization rates, and employment. When you look at whether prime working-age people (ages 25-54) have a job in RTW vs. non-RTW states, there’s no systematic difference. Fluctuations in employment follow the same capitalist boom-and-bust cycles (expansion followed by recession) across states.
Forbes looked at U.S. Census data for 2023 and ranked the states with highest and lowest poverty levels. Mississippi comes in as the poorest state, with 19.1% living below the federal poverty level. So there’s Tate Reeve’s state.
(U.S.-occupied Puerto Rico has a poverty rate of 43%, but the island is not a state, so is usually not included on these lists. It’s being plundered by corporations and banks. U.S. out of Puerto Rico, now! Puerto Rico will be free!)
Louisiana has the second-highest poverty level, but our governor – Jeff Landry – didn’t sign the letter; maybe because auto-manufacturing hasn’t taken off here yet. Alabama is the 7th highest, so Kay Ivy gets an “F.” South Carolina comes in at number 10; Henry McMaster is another loser.
So, three out of six of the signees govern states in the top 10 poorest. And since they’re doing absolutely nothing to alleviate poverty, we can rest assured that they do not care about workers, only about making themselves and their big donors rich. There’s no reason to trust them about unions.
Speaking of big donors, a Mississippi Today investigation in late 2023 found that Tate Reeve’s top campaign contributors brought home a whopping $1.4 billion in state contracts and grants, all from agencies Reeves oversees. It pays to play! Or is it pay to play?
Texas-sized hypocrisy
According to Market Realist, Greg Abbott has a net worth of $14 million. In December 2023, his campaign received $6 million – “the largest single donation in Texas history,” in the campaign’s words – from Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass.
Yass is thought to have $29 billion. He’s the co-founder and managing director of investment firm Susquehanna International Group.
Why would a Pennsylvania capitalist be funding Texas politics? Because he champions the anti-public school voucher movement, tax cuts for billionaires, and all manner of other things that only benefit the rich. He’s making an investment in Texas.
The truth is that there is nothing unusual about these shenanigans, and Democratic politicians are no better. The Washington Post said it: “More than half of those who served in the House and Senate were worth more than $1 million; many had net worths that stretched into the tens of millions.”
We should not be surprised where these capitalist politicians’ allegiances lie. Every time they try to stir us up about unions, trans people, immigrants, or some supposed foreign adversary, we should ask: “What’s in it for you?”
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... on-agenda/
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VOLKSWAGEN THE FIRST DOMINO TO FALL AFTER UNION VOTE, SAYS UAW PRESIDENT
Posted by MLToday | May 6, 2024 | Other Featured Posts | 0
BY STEVEN GREENHOUSE
April 22, 2024 The Guardian
After celebrating his union’s historic victory at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, told the Guardian that he was confident of more unionization wins at auto plants across the US, saying: “The workers at VW are the first domino to fall.
“They have shown it is possible,” Fain added in an interview on Sunday evening. “I expect more of the same to come. Workers are fed up.”
The three-day unionization vote at Volkswagen ended last Friday, with the union winning overwhelmingly, 2,628 to 985 – the first time workers at a foreign-owned auto plant in the south have unionized. It was the world’s only non-union VW plant. The vote in Chattanooga was the first union vote in the UAW’s ambitious $40m campaign targeting 13 automakers, including VW, Mercedes, Tesla, BMW, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai, with a total of 35 non-union plants across the US.
The UAW’s next scheduled unionization vote will be at the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, where 5,000 workers will vote 13-17 May. Mercedes has been considerably more outspoken against the union than VW was, with a top Mercedes official telling workers: “I don’t believe the UAW can help us to be better.”
Fain voiced great confidence about winning at Mercedes despite the company’s anti-union efforts. “At the end of the day, I believe that workers at Mercedes definitely want a union,” he said, “and I believe a big majority there will vote in favor.”
At Mercedes, rank-and-file workers, not UAW officials, have taken the lead in organizing the plant. “Workers at Mercedes have literally run this campaign with very little help from us,” Fain said. “They wanted it that way. It’s great to see those workers feeling their power and being able to exercise their power.”
He scoffed at attacks from corporate executives and southern politicians that the UAW is a third party. He said that the union was its members, not an outside group, and that it was the companies that bring in third parties – outside consultants who spread anti-union information.
“The employees aren’t fooled by the companies’ tricks any more,” Fain said. “It’s the same tactics companies use every time. Workers have seen it repeatedly. I believe the workers are ready. They know the companies will continue to use fear and continue to use politicians as their surrogates using fear.”
In the Guardian interview, Fain fired back at the governors of six southern states who had condemned the UAW’s campaign, saying it was “driven by misinformation”. “They’re liars. The people who are doing the misleading are them,” Fain said. “These politicians are showing that they’re just puppets for corporate America, and they don’t give a damn about working-class people. They don’t care about the workers being left behind even though the workers are the ones who elect them.”
Fain was palpably angry that the Republican governors of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas had issued a joint letter denouncing the UAW as “special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs”. Fain said the governors were the ones “wrecking the economy because they don’t care about working people having a decent wage. It’s working-class people who move the economy.” He added that the governors’ “economy is the economy of the billionaire class and corporate class where they take all the profits, and the workers get left behind”.
In a celebratory meeting with the VW workers in Chattanooga late on Friday night and in his interview with the Guardian, Fain said the VW workers now needed to focus on bargaining a first union contract. “I expect good things to happen for the VW workers,” he said. “We want to use the big three contracts as our framework.” He added that VW’s workers would play a big role in formulating “a list of demands” for the contract talks.
Fain acknowledged that unionizing Tesla might prove especially difficult, considering how fiercely anti-union Elon Musk is. “Elon’s extreme hostility to unions tells us about who he is,” Fain said. “He’s a billionaire who’s more concerned about ego and building rockets and flying to the moon than about taking care of the people who enabled him to do that, the people who create Tesla’s profits.”
Fain acknowledged that Musk “will probably be a lot more hostile” to a union drive than other CEOs. “At the end of the day, it’s the workers’ choice. It’s not Elon Musk’s choice,” he said. “As we continue to organize more and more companies, that makes it more and more inevitable that it [unionizing Tesla] is going to happen. We’re going to continue to show up and assist workers who want justice and better treatment on the job.”
Asked what Joe Biden should do to attract union members’ votes, Fain said: “He has to continue doing what he’s been doing, which is supporting workers in their fights.” Fain praised Biden for becoming the first sitting president to walk a union picket line – Biden joined a UAW picket line in Michigan last September when the union was on strike against Detroit’s big three automakers. He also praised Biden for making it easier to unionize EV battery plants.
Fain criticized Donald Trump’s stance on EVs. Trump has warned that Biden’s plans to expand EV sales could be a bloodbath for the US economy and a boon for Chinese manufacturers. Fain told the Guardian that Trump’s plans to shrink America’s EV industry could endanger many auto workers. “There are a lot of workers out there that in the [electric vehicle] industry who stand to lose their jobs,” he said.
At the victory celebration in Chattanooga, Fain urged VW’s workers to help auto workers elsewhere unionize their plants. To inspire the workers, Fain quoted Matthew 17:20: “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”
Fain told the Guardian that faith is important to him. “The foundation of all religion is love – love of your fellow human beings,” he said. “It’s important when we talk as workers and as labor that we talk about these things, that everything we do is about making life better for human beings. When three families have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans, that’s the antithesis of everything that religion teaches. I’ll continue to lean on my faith. I don’t keep that any secret."
https://mltoday.com/volkswagen-the-firs ... president/
RED BAITERS GO BIG TO DISTORT HISTORY AND DISARM WORKERS’ GROWING ANGER
Posted by Ed Grystar | May 6, 2024
By ED GRYSTAR
April 9, 2024
Jacobin magazine has a recent interview with Erik Loomis, “Unions Can’t Be Rebuilt Piecemeal. We Need To Go Big.”
The main focus of the interview is looking back on the CIO in the 1930s and advocating a “Go Big” approach to labor today. One would expect to find historical examples explaining the strategies of the class-struggle organizations which helped to bring about America’s most tumultuous and successful labor upsurge – the formation and struggles of the CIO.
Loomis gives an overview of the particular circumstances leading to the creation of the CIO, notably the depression, FDR, and the particular interests of John L Lewis – but chooses to gloss over the years of on-the-ground organizing by left-wing radicals within the labor movement, particularly communists. Apparently there is nothing to learn, discuss or debate about the strategy and tactics employed by communist and left organizers who built many independent unions and worked in unions affiliated with the moribund AFL.
Despite tremendous attacks and repression, left organizations like the TUEL (Trade Union Educational League) were able to provide leadership and instill a class struggle vision which involved mass labor struggles and a powerful nationwide unemployed movement – the foundation of the largest labor upsurge in the USA and the building of the CIO.
Without the historical context of the type of bottom-up organizing which built the CIO, Loomis has no suggested path or ideas for present day organizers to debate. Why is the credibility of unions on the rise yet the officialdom of labor is both unwilling and incapable of harnessing this energy to build a popular independent movement?
Although Loomis admits, “[rebuilding the labor movement has] to happen through size and power,” He also says, “The reality is that I think it would’ve been very difficult for the CIO to do this at a different time in American history.” In reality, the situation workers face today is not that different than faced in the decades leading up to the creation of the CIO, and there are obvious lessons for. organizers today to learn in the history of the TUEL and TUUL, the communist-led organizations which predated the CIO.
In particular, radicals through the TUEL and TUUL focused on a class struggle approach when working within existing unions, organizing the unemployed, and finally creating their own independent unions which eventually morphed into the CIO.
The Building of the CIO: Role of the TUEL and TUUL
One can’t seriously talk of the CIO’s emergence without understanding the role played by the communists in the period after the 1919 steel strike and the tumultuous years leading up to the CIO.
William Z. Foster, leader of the 1919 Steel Strike, was elected to lead the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) when it was formed in 1920. It worked within existing unions to push for the merging of conservative and ineffective craft unions into industrial organizations, in sharp contrast to the AFL which was not interested in actual mass organizing, but instead focused on cooperative outreach to the business community. And to unite organized labor with the broader working class, the TUEL also focused on organizing the unemployed and independent political action.
The AFL promoted itself as a “respectable” partner to business, expelling thousands of its own members and viciously red-baiting the TUEL. This purge led to the formation of a number of new and independent unions offering a class struggle based union alternative to the craft mentality of the AFL.
The TUEL led mass strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, Passaic, New Jersey and coal miners’ struggles in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama and Ohio which led to the formation of the National Miners Union in Pittsburgh in 1928. Beyond this, the TUEL organized thousands of workers in the needle trades unions of NYC to fight against the corrupt and violent AFL union leadership which policed sell-out contracts.
New leaders took over the furriers union leading to a huge 1926 NYC strike of more than 10,000 led by the TUEL. Thousands were beaten by police, arrested and jailed, but it ended with a five day work week. The AFL expelled the union and got the manufacturers to collaborate with the old
discredited leadership to reinstate the 50 hour work week. Another strike in 1927 was necessary to win back the gains of 1926.
These were real mass struggles fought by the workers themselves, attacked by police, company stooges and red-baited by the AFL. It’s this type of activity by workers which shaped the landscape of labor in the 1920’s. To not discuss these monumental battles and their significance deprives readers of insight into why and how the CIO was born and practical lessons for today.
TUEL Reorganizes as TUUL
The 1929 founding convention of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) in Cleveland was a major shift in that it moved to openly espouse the organizing of the unorganized into industrial unions and linked the struggle with the fight for unemployment insurance. Unlike the AFL, special recognition of the needs of women, blacks and youth were made and promoted. The TUUL argued that the expulsion of many class conscious militants necessitated the creation of independent unions but stressed this was only if the existing unions were hopelessly corrupt or compromised. Many stayed in the existing unions and worked to change them from the inside.
The TUUL had working affiliates in mining, food, textile, fur / leather / needle, sheet metal, marine, agriculture, and auto. Mass strikes, rallies, and relief efforts were led by the TUUL throughout the country as workers joined and fought street battles with police, company spies, and corrupt AFL unions to better their lives. Readers should investigate these efforts as the parallels today are eerily similar.
Real Impetus For The CIO
William W. Winpisinger, President, IAM AFL-CIO said in The Cold War Against Labor:
It is rather amusing to note how most labor historians choose to ignore what was probably the real impetus to form the CIO and pass much of FDR’s New Deal labor protections. The major impetus was the formation of the unemployed councils in practically every major city in the U.S. during the latter 1920’s and early 1930’s. Spearheading these local drives to organize the unemployed into self-help and mutual support groups, and thence educate them toward egalitarianism and socialism invariably were local Communist Party organizers, inspire by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, who survived the Red Scare and smashing of the socialists in the 1920’s. Many were intellectual activists like John Reed. Others were street smart mule-tough veterans of union organizing drives.
It was they, much more than John L. Lewis or any of the AFL hierarchy before or after, who created the CIO and moved FDR to put a labor agenda at the top of his priorities. In fact, FDR did not put the Wagner Act in his first 100 days of legislation. On the contrary, he argued against that step and opted for General Hugh Johnson’s brand of “official company unionism” modeled after labor relations in vogue in Italy, being aped and improvised upon in Hitler’s Germany and Salazar’s Portugal.
Wherever FDR visited in his 1932 campaign, he was confronted by large crowds of organized unemployed people. And these Unemployed Councils were challenging if not controlling established AFL city central bodies around the country. William Green and his conservative building trades cronies clearly were not in command of the situation. And by 1935, both John L. Lewis and FDR had gotten that message.
Linking the conditions of the unemployed directly to organizing the unorganized was integral to the TUUL. Several even had their own Unemployed Councils. Not only did the AFL ignore organizing the mass production industries, they ridiculed and criticized any fight to enact government benefits for the millions of unemployed. AFL President William Green declared unemployment insurance was a “hindrance to progress,” “a dole” that “degrades the dignity of the working man” and subsidizes “idleness.” Uniting workers on the job and educating the unemployed, preventing them from being herded into scabbing, was critical for success.
Separately, working inside the AFL, Louis Weinstock, a communist in the Painters Union, organized the AFL Trade Union Committee for Unemployment Insurance and Relief in 1932. The AFL attacked the Committee as a “communist inspired” effort to ruin the American economy.
On March 6, 1930 the first nationwide demonstration against unemployment was called by the TUUL. More than one million protested in scores of US cities including over 100,000 in New York City where more than 25,000 police officers attacked the demonstrators. Mass organizing took place in many cities for unemployment relief and jobs, including the Ford Hunger March, National Hunger March, and the Bonus March of Veterans who demanded immediate payment of their WW1 bonus due to hunger. Congress summarily rejected their demands, including when they marched in Washington D.C. on July 28, 1932. President Hoover was pleased to call on General Douglas MacArthur to attack demonstrators with tear gas and bayonets, and burn their tent encampment, killing two infants.
On a quest for justice, this growing power continued to build in the years ahead. This was the essence behind the formation of the CIO. All of the important successes of this period were a result of a bottom-up mass movement which turned American labor from an insular, declining, craft-focused niche into a fighting force for the working-class at large.
But the class struggle always continues. In the years ahead, the forces of reaction among business, politicians and inside labor regrouped after the WWII strike wave and ushered in the era of McCarthyism. Left unions in labor were attacked, resulting in their expulsion from the CIO and deadening the lifeblood of struggle from labor. Many of the labor leaders who fought and participated in past struggles were jailed during the hysteria of Red Baiting. Instead of calling out this purge as one of labor’s greatest setbacks – Loomis treats it as a necessity – to him, it was somehow the role of organized labor to join with McCarthyism and destroy their own organizations.
Go Big or Go Nowhere
A snapshot of today’s predicament for the working class is eerily familiar to that of the late 1920’s. As material conditions gradually deteriorate for American workers, anger grows but remains primarily untapped and disorganized. This need for leadership is juxtaposed alongside polls showing growing public support for unions. Weak and ineffective business unions seeking partnerships with corporations cannot deliver the necessary popular program because their ideology ties them to corporate interests. This is our dilemma.
We can break free by understanding our power is not the inside political game or partnering with corporations but one which educates and mobilizes workers on and off the job – independent political action which inspires workers to battle the corporate monster controlling every aspect of life in the US.
This is the foundation of the movement we need to nurture and grow. A look back at the CIO period can help guide the way forward.
https://mltoday.com/red-baiters-go-big- ... ing-anger/
LABOR POLITICS: THE STRUGGLE FOR REFORM VS. REFORMISM
Posted by MLToday | May 6, 2024
By Sam Hammond
April 15, 2024 People’s Voice (Canada)
“Reforms for the improvement of people’s situation, which here and now and at every instant are always sensible because politics is conducted in the interest of people now living, cannot be the aim of a communist party, rather only an aspect of its continuing struggle. For it is not a question of managing better in this capitalist society; and it would be an illusion to believe that internal capitalist contradictions can be removed by reforms, since they are structural contradictions of the system of the production relations. It is much more a question – on the route via reforms – of changing the social system.”
The above quote by German Communist philosopher Hans Heinz Holz concisely and articulately states the position of revolution and reform from the revolution side. It quite correctly identifies reforms as sensible while explaining why they cannot be the strategic aim of a communist party.
If reforms are necessary and sensible but cannot be the aim of the party, then what exactly are they in regard to the aim of destroying the exploiting class and initiating a classless society? In short, they are “quantities” in the struggle to bring about a qualitative change. As such, they must not be viewed only as building blocks of developing contradiction, but as part of the dynamic that can, depending on the historical and social environment, plod along or explode.
The difference between communists and social democrats is not defined by whether or not they struggle for reforms – indeed, most reforms favouring the working-class quality of life were initiated by communists – but whether or not they view them as a “quantity” on the road to social transformation or an end in themselves, a bandage to save capitalism and help it maintain hegemony as a kinder capitalism with a human face.
To struggle for reforms is not necessarily reformism. To see them as a treadmill item in a permanent capitalism is. That is the essential difference between reformism and class struggle.
Communists see reforms as quantities in the class struggle to alleviate human suffering, interfere in the rate of exploitation, develop class consciousness, unite the working class and develop the most conscious in the strategy and tactics of resistance and revolution. Social democrats see the campaign for reforms as a rather vapid cap-in-hand series of campaigns, legal briefs and parliamentary trade-offs in the process of shaping the imaginary pluralistic society into an enlightened utopia of kind and caring capitalism. Something closely akin to training a wolverine into a loving house pet, and just as achievable.
The struggle for reforms must be won by mass action that raises class consciousness to the level of ideology and program, involving the most advanced sections of the population and developing the demand for more reforms. This is antithetical to the vision of negotiated reforms on behalf of the people as a bartering tool for class peace, a social contract of collaboration on the part of an aristocracy of the working class.
If reforms are not the aim but rather an instrument or a “quantity” in the class struggle, then the struggle for the kind of reforms to be sought, and the kind of mobilization of forces to achieve them, must radically differ from the tepid campaigns of social democracy for a kinder capitalism, decent work and more crumbs from the table.
The demand for a Charter of Labour Rights – long championed by the Communist Party of Canada– which would require the mobilization of significant forces and secure the immunity of the labour unions from legislative attack, is ignored by the social democratic labour leadership because they are very well aware that massive mobilization would require changes in leadership and program that would expose collaboration and complicity in the global neoliberal agenda.
The concept of reforms carried through on a provider-and-client basis, as found in the models of “business trade unionism,” or the sectarian proprietorship expressed by social democracy in the concept “we will look after your needs, just vote for us,” was at the heart of the major split orchestrated by the “pink paper unions” that destroyed the united fightback against the Mike Harris Tories in Ontario years ago.
When the concept of sectarian paternalism and control won out, it set the stage for the long sleep of the Ontario Federation of Labour (in the same bed as the Canadian Labour Congress), helped isolate the CAW union and allowed Buzz Hargrove to move it to the right. The main labour leadership was quite happy to farm out political campaigning to the NDP’s sectarian parliamentarianism. The aim was to eliminate democratic member-driven mass struggle and isolate or control labour’s social justice partners.
Most workers in Canada do not come face-to-face with capitalists in their workplace, as workers did in the earlier stages of capitalism, when capitalists self-managed their enterprises and the workforce. However, they do come face-to-face with the professional-representative strata who manage enterprises and financial institutions, services and the state itself on behalf of the ruling class. Along with this are the increasingly complex and diversified forms of social production, the escalating alienation of workers from the products of their labour, and the complete subservience of the mainstream to the corporate agenda.
It is apparent how the buffer zone of deception can hide the class brutality of exploitation and create a breeding ground of reformism not oriented against the capitalist class directly but against the representatives of that class.
Wealth – as viewed directly in exorbitant salaries, bonuses and stock options for the managers of capital – can obscure the fundamental relationship between exploiters and exploited and promote the concept of fair distribution as a solution. For the working class to seize and hold as much as possible of the wealth they produce is a necessary battle, but only as a quantity in the struggle for emancipation and not as a payment for class peace.
Entire ownership of the means of production and 100 percent social expropriation is the only alternative.
The self-awareness and self-identification of working people as an exploited class must emerge from a worldview that has components about the past, present and future. Development of social consciousness – first of all as an awareness of, or bewilderment with injustice, grievances and defencelessness – can and does arise in individual people, but it is impotent rage and only takes on a socio-political character when it is nurtured and developed in social groupings.
There is also an accelerating factor in group action that can provide the equivalent of years of experience from moments of activity. One strike, no matter how small or isolated, brings the reality of class power, the need for organization and the need for class unity to the forefront. The strike of necessity precedes the realization that the workers must own and control their own bodies and the product of their labour, and that the withdrawal of their labour power is the economic lever of reforms and of reprisal, and is strengthened by mass unity.
Social consciousness is developed in social formations, and among the working class the trade unions are by far the most advanced and organized social formations. This situates them in the class struggle and defines them as an essential ingredient, not just one grouping among others. Trade union struggles historically are the first stage in the developing of social consciousness – of class consciousness.
The initial stages of struggle are naturally economic, part of workers’ struggle for subsistence, and tend to shape the organization and structures of labour unions and their goals.
Labour unions exist in the terrain of capitalist society, and their social concepts and demands reflect the reality of their environment. They are reformist and economist initially because they deal with the immediate needs of living people. As Holz writes, “The development of total alternative conceptions for society is not their [labour unions] task. Socialist concepts certainly arise and continue within trade unions, but they are not the content of trade union struggles nor of trade union conceptions of organization.”
The revolutionary ideology of Marxism-Leninism did not arise from trade union struggles, but nevertheless the fertile ground of awakening class consciousness and the historical phenomenon of permanent workers’ institutions within the exploiting state creates a natural and essential merging of theory and practice. This phenomenon is at the root of much recent class history – including the need for the ruling class to inject into the trade unions the self-destructive ideology of counter-revolutionary anti-communist crusading in the form of McCarthyism and the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Social democracy was the willing accomplice in these campaigns in Canada.
The isolation, defeat and even physical expulsion from the ranks of the labour unions of members of the Communist Party was and is a project of the capitalist class and will continue as long as there is a class struggle. Conversely, their offensives, no matter how damaging, have never been complete because there were and will always be advanced members of the working class, including left social democrats, who refuse to abandon communist workers precisely because communists have been the advance guard in the struggle for reforms that have shaped their lives.
There is no blanket or pot lid in this world opaque enough to hide this history completely.
No matter how the tides rise and fall, communists never give up on their presence amongst the most organized sections of the working class and never deny these workers the weaponry of revolutionary ideology that they need, which will propel the struggle for reforms into the struggle for socialism.
https://mltoday.com/labor-politics-the- ... reformism/