Another argument taken up time and again by the leftists in order to justify their ‘critical’ support of, and participation in, the unions, is to present the unions as organisations which left to themselves would be valuable forms of organisations for the workers’ struggle, but which have been led astray from their true path as a result of bureaucratisation and ‘bad leadership’. Thus for the leftists the question is to ‘reconquer' the unions by making them more democratic (demands for faction rights) and by changing the ‘corrupt leadership’ by replacing it with real workers’ leaders at the top.
Instead of seeing that bureaucracy and ‘bad’ leaders are inevitable products of the capitalist nature of the unions, people who hold such illusions present both as the cause of the ‘errors’ and ‘betrayals’ of the unions.
The bureaucratisation of an organisation does not stem from the decision-making power of its central organs. Contrary to what the anarchists think, centralisation is not synonymous with bureaucratisation. On the contrary, in an organisation inspired by the conscious, passionate activity of each of its members, centralisation is the most efficient way of stimulating the participation of each member in the life of the organisation. What characterises bureaucracy is the fact that the life of the organisation is no longer rooted in the activity of its members but is artificially and formalistically carried on in its ‘bureaux’, in its central organs, and nowhere else.
If such a phenomenon is common to all unions under decadent capitalism it is not because of the ‘malevolence’ of the union leaders; nor is bureaucratisation an inexplicable mystery. If bureaucracy has taken hold of the unions it is because the workers no longer support with any life or passion organisations which simply do not belong to them. The indifference the workers show towards trade union life is not, as the leftists think, a proof of the workers’ lack of consciousness. On the contrary it expresses a resigned consciousness within the working class of the unions’ inability to defend its class interests and even a consciousness that the unions belong to the class enemy.
The relationship between the workers and the unions is not that of a class to its own class instrument. It most often takes the form of a relationship between an individual with individual problems and a welfare service (‘which knows how to deal with the bosses’). The unions are bureaucratic because there is not and cannot be any proletarian spirit in them.
The leftists who militate within the unions have assigned themselves the task (among others) of revitalising union life. All they succeed in doing is getting hold of the young trade union militant who begins by believing in the unions, only to become disillusioned and leave, (unless he too becomes a ‘believer’). The only thing the leftists achieve is retarding the awareness of the class of the capitalist nature of these organisations. The Leif-motif spouted by the leftists: “it’s a bad workers’ organisation, but a workers’ organisation all the same” is ultimately the best defence the unions could have in the face of the growing suspicion the workers have about them. The union bureaucrats actually find the ‘fanatics’ committed to ‘constructive criticism’ of the unions their very best allies and touts among those workers who ‘are led astray by anti-unionism’.
As for the tactic of ‘reconquering’ the leadership of the unions in order to turn them into real class organisations, that simply highlights the same myopic point of view, when it is not merely a smoke-screen for crude bureaucratic machinations. The anti-working class actions of the unions are not a matter of good or bad leaders. It’s no accident that for more than fifty years the unions have always had bad leaders.
It is not because of bad leadership that the unions do not take part in the real struggles of the working class; on the contrary, it is because the unions are as organisations, incapable of serving the needs of the class struggle that their leaders always turn out to be bad. As Pannekoek observed: “What Marx and Lenin said over and over again about the state, that despite the existence of formal democracy it cannot be used as an instrument of proletarian revolution, applies also to the unions. Their counter-revolutionary force can neither be negated nor brought under control by a change of leadership, by replacing reactionary leaders with men of the ‘left’ or with ‘revolutionaries’. It is the very form of the organisation itself which reduces the masses to powerlessness and prevents them from using it as an instrument of their own will”, (Pannekoek).
