6. Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions?¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s polemic against the German ‘Lefts’ is a definitive defence of the necessity for communists to work within reactionary trade unions, a position he grounds in the concrete experience of the Bolshevik revolution. The German Lefts, in their sectarian purity, refused such work, but Lenin condemns this as a childish and fundamentally harmful abstention. In Russia, the Party, numbering 611,000 members, exercises the dictatorship of the proletariat through the Soviets, yet it relies directly on the trade unions, which encompass over four million workers. Though formally non-Party, these unions are led by communists and function as a flexible apparatus linking the Party to the class and the broader masses. Lenin insists that the trade unions are an indispensable ‘school of communism’ and a preparatory school for the dictatorship itself. A certain ‘reactionism’ within the unions is inevitable during the transition from capitalism to socialism; to fear or evade it is folly.
The task, therefore, is not to flee these organisations but to work within them to win the backward masses away from the influence of opportunist leaders—the ‘labour aristocracy’ and ‘agents of the bourgeoisie’. Lenin cites Engels’ 1858 letter to Marx, which observed that the English proletariat becomes revolutionary only during industrial booms, turning conservative in periods of depression. This historical insight underscores the necessity of persistent work within the existing workers’ organisations. To abandon the unions is to hand the workers over to reactionary leaders like Gompers, Henderson, Jouhaux, and Legien, whom Lenin equates with the tsarist agent Zubatov, differing only in their European polish and democratic manner. Refusing to work in reactionary unions leaves the masses under the control of these reactionary leaders, which is the greatest possible service to the bourgeoisie. Communists must work wherever the masses are found, using any necessary stratagems, and must not fence themselves off with childish ‘Left’ slogans. The Communist International’s publications are referenced as the source of this position, and Lenin further references the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905 to organise unskilled workers, and the Black Hundreds, ultra-reactionary tsarist terrorist bands, to illustrate the terrain of struggle. The core argument is that revolutionary work inside reactionary unions is necessary to win the masses away from reformist leadership.