EXCERPT:
Eighty-two years ago, Leon Trotsky, the great revolutionary Marxist and leader of the Fourth International, noted (in an essay, “Trade unions in the epoch of imperialist decay”) that “there is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.”
Writing shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Trotsky explained, “Democratic unions in the old sense of the terms, bodies where in the framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist.”
Trotsky was writing shortly after the eruption of the semi-insurrectionary struggles, including the seizure of factories in sit-down strikes, that led to the formation of the mass industrial unions in the US. However, his analysis of the tendency toward the “growing together” of the unions, the state and the corporations was extraordinarily prescient. This process continued throughout the post-World War II period, including through the purging of the socialists and militant workers from the unions prior to and after the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955.
Commenting on the transformations that have taken place since Trotsky’s analysis, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North noted that “the process of global economic integration and transnational production deprived the trade unions of a national framework within which they could apply pressure for limited social reforms. No room was left for even the most moderate resort to the methods of class struggle to achieve minimal gains. The unions, rather than extracting concessions from the corporations, were transformed into adjuncts of the state and corporations that serve to extract concessions from the workers.”
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