DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

The trade unions are the basic organisational vehicles for the workers' day-to-day defence of their economic interests against the capitalist class. Through trade-union organisation, workers seek to suppress competition between themselves as sellers of labour power, and so secure a higher price for this commodity.

The formation of trade unions reflects an elementary form of working-class consciousness — the recognition that the economic well-being of each wage-earner depends on collective action and solidarity. But in itself, this elementary form of class consciousness and organisation implies neither consciousness of the historic interests of the working class nor understanding of the need for independent political action to realise these historic interests.

A century and a half of experience has conclusively demonstrated that the unions alone, being mass organisations uniting workers with diverse levels of political consciousness, are incapable of preparing and organising the working class for revolutionary action. This task requires the building of a revolutionary socialist party.

Nevertheless, the organisation of workers into trade unions is a necessary stage on the working class's road to the socialist transformation of society. Trade unions are necessary for the day-to-day defence of the workers' interests against those of capital.

In the absence of strong trade unions, the employers win the vast majority of their daily battles over wages and working conditions, and this leads to a loss of self-confidence in the working class, undermining the foundations of consciousness and preparedness for struggle that are necessary for more radical anti-capitalist action.

Moreover, in the era of monopoly capitalism, trade-union activity cannot defend workers' economic interests by confining itself to the fight for better wages and reduction of the working day. Workers are faced with national economic problems affecting their living standard: inflation, taxation, cuts in social spending, permanent unemployment, as well as all the other social and political issues of the day, which include the destruction of the environment, attacks on democratic rights, etc.

The trade unions are driven inevitably to take positions on all these issues, and as a result they are potentially a school for the education of the working class on a range of important political questions relating to the division of national income and questions of investment at the level of the national economy. Because of these and other factors, it is important that socialists conduct systematic work in the trade unions.

The party's activity in the unions is designed to maximise their effectiveness as instruments of struggle for the defence of the immediate interests of the workers, and in the course of such struggles to win the workers to a socialist perspective. The main obstacle to this aim is the domination of the unions by a thin layer of officials who place defence of their relatively privileged positions ahead of the interests, both immediate and longer-term, of the mass of workers.

The union bureaucracy, which enjoys social privileges not available to ordinary workers, shares the socio-political outlook of the petty bourgeoisie. It values, above all, social peace and class collaboration. It objectively weakens the unions, transforming them from organisations for the defence of their members' interests into secondary instruments of the capitalist state, charged mainly with the task of subduing and disciplining the workers. One result of this is greater susceptibility to anti-union propaganda among the less politically conscious workers.

The party seeks to strengthen the unions by promoting trade-union democracy, labour unity and class independence.

Trade-union democracy is essential to the mobilisation of the full power of the workers against the employers. At the very least, trade-union democracy involves the right of the union ranks to freely determine the union's goals and policy, and to elect and recall the union's leaders. The essential foundation of such democracy must be day-to-day involvement of the entire membership in the union's activities, particularly at workplace level.

The demand for trade-union democracy conflicts with the interests of the union bureaucracy. In its pursuit of social peace and conciliation with the employers, the bureaucracy inevitably rides roughshod over the concerns and interests of the unions' ranks. The party's propaganda and agitation concerning questions of union democracy should therefore be closely linked to the fight against the class-collaborationism of the union bureaucracy, which is the basic source of its anti-democratic methods.

Recognition of the elementary need for working-class unity is the bedrock of trade-union organisation. The party supports a number of steps to strengthen trade-union unity. These include:

• Campaigning for unionisation of unorganised workers.
• Extending solidarity to all workers in struggle.
• Breaking down narrow craft divisions and promoting democratic amalgamation into unions that embrace all workers in a given branch of industry.
• Promoting full participation in the life of the unions by specially oppressed groups of workers, such as women, migrants, the young and the unemployed. The party supports the right of these specially oppressed workers to organise their own caucuses inside the unions and to develop their specific demands. At the same time, the party opposes attempts by the union bureaucracy to isolate specially oppressed groups in powerless token organisations cut off from the regular union bodies.

While the party stands for the greatest possible degree of trade-union unity, it also recognises that the trade-union bureaucracy attempts to enforce unity around reactionary projects in the service of its class-collaborationist perspectives. Such cynical, demagogic appeals to unity must be resolutely opposed.

The trade unions cannot effectively defend their members' interests unless they are independent of the employers, capitalist parties and the capitalist state. Genuine independence of the trade unions requires:

• Opposition to all attempts to integrate the unions into the management structures of capitalist firms under the cover of projects bearing names such as ``worker participation'' or ``industrial democracy.'' In a capitalist economy, such projects inevitably result in workers being forced to take responsibility for the profitability of the company, while holding no real power in management. Such projects divert the unions from their basic task of defending workers' jobs, wages and working conditions. They are used to divide and confuse the workers and to weaken their class organisation in the face of the employers' attacks.
• Opposition to the affiliation of unions to the liberal-capitalist Labor Party. The unions' ability to defend their members' interests is seriously weakened by these organisational links, which are used by the union bureaucracy to promote the view that the ALP is the political arm of the labour movement. This false view is in turn used to justify the subordination of workers' struggles to the pro-capitalist policies of the ALP.
• Opposition to control of the unions by institutions of the capitalist state. The Australian union movement has long been subordinated to the capitalist state through the system of compulsory arbitration and industrial courts. This subordination has been actively supported by the reformist trade-union officialdom, which peddles the liberal illusion that these capitalist institutions are socially neutral and can be used by the workers to advance their interests. The struggle to free the unions from the control of the capitalist state is thus inseparable from the struggle against the class-collaborationism of the union bureaucracy.

While fighting for trade-union independence from the capitalist state and all capitalist parties, socialists reject the view that the unions can effectively defend the workers' objective interests while maintaining an attitude of indifference towards politics and the question of which class holds state power.

The capitalist class has always sought to convince workers that they should concern themselves with economic questions only, and should not involve themselves in politics. The capitalists are well aware that no serious danger will threaten their rule while they manage to confine the working class within the narrow limits of economistic trade unionism. Indifference to politics really means passive acceptance of capitalist politics. This is why the capitalist class encourages such indifference among workers.

The employers' use of state power to weaken and defeat the unions' industrial struggles eventually impels the workers to recognise the need for political action. To prevent this impulse developing in a socialist political direction, the capitalist class promotes the view that political action should be restricted to seeking legislative reforms. This idea is readily accepted by the reformist union bureaucracy, which limits industrial action to day-to-day economic questions and confines the political struggle to parliamentary channels.

However, the unions cannot effectively defend the interests of the workers if they restrict their activities to seeking better terms for the sale of labour power to capital. They must take up all questions affecting the lives of working people. They must become active in the struggle for fundamental social change.

The return of the unions to their rightful function necessarily entails the replacement of union bureaucrats with union officials who base their activity on an anti-capitalist outlook. This task cannot be achieved without the development of class consciousness and combativity in the union ranks.

The bureaucracy's hold over the unions is based on reformist illusions fostered within the working class during the long postwar capitalist economic boom. These illusions can be overcome only in the course of developing political action. Through their own struggle, the broadest layers of the working class must reach the understanding that it is objectively impossible to achieve genuinely human conditions of life under the capitalist system.

In the course of these experiences, the party's members in the unions seek not only to introduce socialist ideas to workers participating in struggles for immediate demands, but to be the most effective leaders of these struggles. This is the only way to rid the trade unions of their bureaucratic misleaders, the only way socialists can win influence in the trade-union movement and make it an instrument in the struggle against capitalism. It is the only way they can roll back the bureaucracy's domination of the unions, replacing it with an apparatus of workplace representatives and leaving only the most essential central functions to the unions' full-time officials.

The number of party members holding official positions in the trade unions is a measure of the party's influence, but it is by no means the most important. Far more significant is the percentage of rank-and-file party activists in relation to the whole union membership, the extent of circulation of the party's press, and the number of working men and women who respond to the party's appeals for action.

Without a firm base of support among the unions' ranks, and a strong involvement of party activists in the unions, party members who hold official union positions face the danger of becoming either captives of the union bureaucracy or degenerating into mere officeholders.

Active unionists, especially those who hold official positions, are beset by innumerable pressures to turn aside from the road of class struggle. They can resist these pressures only by maintaining the closest contact with the party and by consistently seeking to extend the party's influence among the working masses, winning them to the party's policies and socialist goals.