Unions and Councils - Antonio Gramsci

  1. Bilan
    Bilan
    I just finished reading this, and though the article makes some accurate critiques of unions - in favour of councils - I'm curious to know what Left Communists here think of it.

    The main point of the article relates around this point:

    "The Council is the negation of industrial legality: it strives at all times to destroy it, to lead the working class to the conquest of industrial power and make it the source of industrial power. The union represents legality, and must aim to make its members respect that legality. The trade union is answerable to the industrialists, but only in so far as it is answerable to its own members: it guarantees to the worker and his family a continuous supply of work and wages, i.e. food and a roof over their heads. By virtue of its revolutionary spontaneity, the Factory Council tends to spark off the class war at any moment; while the trade union, by virtue of its bureaucratic form, tends to prevent class war from ever breaking out. The relations between the two institutions should be such that a capricious impulse on the part of the Councils could not result in a set-back or defeat for the working class; in other words. the Council should accept and assimilate the discipline of the union. They should also be such that the revolutionary character of the Council exercises an influence over the trade union, and functions as a reagent dissolving the union's bureaucracy and bureaucratism.
    The Council strives at all times to break with industrial legality. The Council consists of the exploited and tyrannized masses who are obliged to perform servile labour: as such, it strives to universalize every rebellion and give a resolutive scope and value to each of its acts of power. The union, as an organization that is jointly responsible for legality, strives to universalize and perpetuate this legality.The relations between union and Council should create the conditions in which the break with legality, the working-class offensive, occurs at the most opportune moment for the working class. when it possesses that minimum of preparation that is deemed indispensable to a lasting victory."


    Primarily, this is what I want to hear thoughts on:

    by forming themselves into permanently organized groups within the trade unions and factories, the communists need to import into these bodies the ideas, theses and tactics of the IIIrd International; they need to exert an influence over union discipline and determine its aims; they need to influence the decisions of the Factory Councils, and transform the rebellious impulses sparked off by the conditions that capitalism has created for the working class into a revolutionary consciousness and creativity. Since they bear the heaviest historical responsibility, the communists in the Party have the greatest interest in evoking, through their ceaseless activity, relations of interpenetration and natural interdependence between the various working-class institutions. It is these relations that leaven discipline and organization with a revolutionary spirit.

    Ignoring the reference to the IIIrd international, obviously. Tactically, though, how does this fit in with Left Communists here?
  2. Devrim
    Devrim
    Sorry, it has taken you so long to receive a reply to this. I didn't see it. I think that the vast majority of left communists today would reject work within the unions. However, the IBRP does advocate 'internationalist factory groups' and still has some of them in Italy. I am not sure what you are actually asking though. Could you explain the question more clearly, please.

    Devrim
  3. Bilan
    Bilan
    Mainly the last paragraph in italics. I was wondering how Left Communists on here approach this - do they support it, against it, and why?
  4. Alf
    Alf
    For the ICC, we would certainly be in favour of communists in a particular workplace organising themselves along with other militant workers to fight for class demands, proletarian methods of organisation like assemblies. We would not be in favour of these groups being part of the unions or trying to win rank and file union posts.

    We don't see such groups as adjuncts of the 'party' or revolutionary political group, or as being restricted to those who adhere to the communist programme, but as less formal and more open structures advocating basic class methods of struggle. As far as the revolutionary organisation is concerned, we are not in favour of forming 'factory cells' but think that the basic unit of a revolutionary organisation has to be the local section, based on 'territory' rather than workplace. Bordiga took the same view when the Third International tried to impose the factory cell model in the phase of 'Bolshevisation'.
  5. Bilan
    Bilan
    Cool, thanks.
  6. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit