The Unemployed and the Trade Unions¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the bourgeoisie is deliberately setting the unemployed against organised trade unionists to break working-class discipline, reduce wages, and spread demoralisation. The Communist International and the revolutionary International Union of Trade Unions must therefore mobilise the unemployed for struggle against capitalist society. However, the first and most immediate obstacle—the “most advanced trench” of the capitalist state—is the apparatus and leadership of the major trade unions in the leading capitalist countries. These unions are controlled by agents of the bourgeoisie, and it is impossible to overthrow a bourgeois government while they remain in such hands.
The chapter identifies the source of the trade unions’ resilience as “organisational automatism and conservatism”—an inner equilibrium and self-confidence built up over decades of gradual growth and consolidation, which has instilled corresponding habits in their leaders. But the entire economic situation of civilised mankind has now removed any stability from beneath the unions. The growing number of unemployed and the increase in unemployment are powerful factors undermining the stability of bourgeois society as a whole, and above all the conservative trade unions. Communists must therefore fight, by skilfully leading the unemployed as a section of the proletariat, to smash the rule of the conservative cliques that hold power within the unions.
The chapter insists that the question of unemployment must be placed at the centre of communist parties’ attention. Agitation must be concentrated and unified: the party, its press, its parliamentary fraction, and its trade union cells must all play the same note, awaken the working masses to the fact of unemployment, put forward the same demands, and insist day after day that the trade unions wage a clear-cut campaign against bourgeois society on behalf of the unemployed and the working class as a whole. Such a concentrated international struggle, with common leading slogans, will rally the masses.
The polemical thrust is directed against the conservative trade union leaderships, which are treated not as genuine representatives of workers but as agents of the bourgeoisie holding the front trench of the capitalist state. The chapter also implicitly argues against any strategy that treats the trade unions as neutral or reformable from within without a frontal assault on their existing leadership. The unemployed are presented not as a passive burden but as a revolutionary weapon—the very factor that can break the unions’ conservative equilibrium and open the way to the overthrow of bourgeois government.