Defending Labor Against Capitalist Assault

Workers Vanguard No. 1021	5 April 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

Defending Labor Against Capitalist Assault

(Quote of the Week)

In early 1947, the Political Committee of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party passed the resolution excerpted below on its tasks regarding the trade unions. On the heels of the largest strike wave in U.S. history, the government had embarked on an anti-labor offensive that led to the June 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which banned militant union tactics and sought to purge reds from organized labor. Today as then, the fight to defend the unions requires struggling against the class collaborationism of the labor bureaucracy, which subordinates the unions to bourgeois politicians and the capitalist state.

The trade union bureaucracy has always been the most dangerous agency of the capitalist ruling class inside the ranks of labor. In their habits of life, in their social ideas and political outlook these capitalist-minded officials are very little different from the members of the National Association of Manufacturers. Within the unions the bureaucrats willingly undertake the assignment of disciplining the workers for the bosses, curbing their militancy, and restricting the functions of the unions within the narrowest economic limits. This role of the bureaucracy was driven home to many workers during the war when the union officialdom served as policemen for the government inside the trade unions, enforcing their no-strike pledge and shielding the employers against the just grievances of the workers.

Today the bureaucrats are cowering before the monopolist assault upon the rights of labor. In fact, a section of the union bureaucracy secretly welcomes some parts of the legislation before Congress which they themselves could use as weapons against the militancy of the rank and file....

The rest of the trade union leadership proposes to confine its fight against the congressional punitive legislation to the lobbying methods and dependence upon friendly capitalist politicians which have proved so costly to the unions and led them into their present blind alley.

That is why the militants must snap out of their lethargy, prod the unions into action and take the initiative to unite the labor movement for an all-out fight against the anti-labor drive.

—Socialist Workers Party Political Committee, “The Tasks of the Party in the Fight to Defend the Trade Unions” (21 January 1947)