n the nineteenth century, the period of capitalism’s greatest prosperity, the working class - often through bitter and bloody struggles - built up permanent trade organisations whose role was to defend its economic interests: the trade unions. These organs played an essential role in the struggle for reforms and for the substantial improvements in the workers’ living conditions which the system could then afford. They also constituted a focus for the regroupment of the class, for the development of its solidarity and consciousness, so that revolutionaries could intervene within them and help make them serve as ‘schools for communism’. Although the existence of these organs was indissolubly linked to the existence of wage labour, and although even in this period they were often substantially bureaucratised, the unions were nevertheless authentic organs of the class to the extent that the abolition of wage labour was not yet on the historical agenda.
As capitalism entered its decadent phase it was no longer able to accord reforms and improvements in living conditions to the working class. Having lost all possibility of fulfilling their initial function of defending working class interests, and confronted with an historic situation in which only the abolition of wage labour and with it, the disappearance of trade unions, was on the agenda, the trade unions became true defenders of capitalism, agencies of the bourgeois state within the working class. This is the only way they could survive in the new period. This evolution was aided by the bureaucratisation of the unions prior to decadence and by the relentless tendency within decadence for the state to absorb all the structures of social life.
