World TUC – Their Masters’ Voice¶
Core Argument¶
World TUC – Their Masters’ Voice
This article, published in Socialist Appeal in 1945, dissects the World Trade Union Conference held in London as the definitive proof of the trade union bureaucracy’s complete subordination to imperialist state power. Drawing on Trotsky’s 1940 observation that modern unions, remaining on reformist positions, inevitably adapt themselves to the capitalist state, the author argues that the war years accelerated this integration to its logical conclusion: open treason against the international working class.
The core indictment is that the Conference, far from representing workers’ interests, functioned as a transmission belt for the policies agreed at Yalta by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. The Economist is cited approvingly to demonstrate that even bourgeois observers noted the “faithful echo” of government policy in the labour leaders’ speeches. The 250 delegates, drawn exclusively from Allied countries (Germany, Italy, Greece excluded; Swiss and Swedes admitted only as observers), devoted themselves to “furtherance of the Allied war effort,” pledging increased production and vowing to make Germany and Japan “repent” and “atone.”
The article reserves its most venomous polemic for Sir Walter Citrine, whose speech is characterised as “the most rabidly jingoistic ever heard in any labour assembly.” Citrine’s proposals are quoted at length: the complete destruction of German industry, the transformation of Germany into an agricultural economy, the forced transfer of German workers abroad, and the maintenance of German living standards at a “fixed level” through rationing and price controls to maximise reparations. The author notes that Citrine explicitly acknowledges the danger of German workers “sinking to the level of slave labour,” yet proposes only “trade union control” – meaning bureaucratic supervision by Allied union officials under the ILO – as a remedy.
The Russian delegates receive equally harsh treatment. Their speeches are deemed “indistinguishable from those of the Citrines and other Labour renegades,” proving that Stalinist policy of “peaceful collaboration” with Western imperialism had stripped the Soviet unions of any revolutionary content. The post-war demands resolution – forty-hour week, paid holidays, anti-discrimination measures – is dismissed as “verbiage,” since the Conference proposed no means of implementation beyond appealing to the very governments preparing to cut working-class living standards in the struggle for markets and profits.
Only the colonial delegates, forced by the “overwhelming urge” of their peoples for freedom, raised the demand for self-determination – and the Conference refused even this elementary democratic principle. The article concludes that the new World Federation of Trade Unions, whatever its nominal membership, will remain a “servile tool of capitalism” so long as reformist and Stalinist leadership persists. The only solution is the replacement of the bureaucracy through the struggle for trade union democracy and unconditional independence from the capitalist state.