Now he tells us!!


On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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. This process is equally characteristic of
> the neutral, the Social-Democratic, the Communist and “anarchist”
> trade unions. This fact alone shows that the tendency towards
> “growing together” is intrinsic not in this or that doctrine as
> such but derives from social conditions common for all unions.
>
> Monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private
> initiative but on centralized command. The capitalist cliques at
> the head of mighty trusts, syndicates, banking consortiums,
> etcetera, view economic life from the very same heights as does
> state power; and they require at every step the collaboration of
> the latter. In their turn the trade unions in the most important
> branches of industry find themselves deprived of the possibility
> of profiting by the competition between the different enterprises.
> They have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary,
> intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the
> trade unions – insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie.,
> on positions of adapting themselves to private property – to adapt
> themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its
> cooperation. In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade union
> movement the chief task lies in “freeing” the state from the
> embrace of capitalism, in weakening its dependence on trusts, in
> pulling it over to their side. This position is in complete
> harmony with the social position of the labor aristocracy and the
> labor bureaucracy, who fight for a crumb in the share of
> superprofits of imperialist capitalism. The labor bureaucrats do
> their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the
> “democratic” state how reliable and indispensable they are in
> peace-time and especially in time of war. By transforming the
> trade unions into organs of the state, fascism invents nothing
> new; it merely draws to their ultimate conclusion the tendencies
> inherent in imperialism.
>
> Full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/tu.htm
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