Comrades,
What we are looking at in this session is the international trade union organisations. Who are they? Yesterday Dave gave us an overview of the ITUC, the WFTU, the Global Union Federations and the ETUC. There are also other international, regional and sub-regional organizations lurking in the underbrush, but for now let us mention just one very important development:

Recent efforts to organize informal workers have created new international organizations, principally StreetNet, representing street and market vendors, and the International Domestic Workers’ Network (IDWN). Both work with GUFs: StreetNet with UNI and the IDWN with the IUF. Home based workers have organized at regional level in South-East Europe and in Asia.

From this quick overview, the political challenge becomes obvious. We are dealing with a highly fragmented movement.

What all these organisations have in common, is that they are workers’ organisations. You would expect that they would have largely common policies, reflecting a common class interest. Why is this not the case?

This may be the most important question we have to face because the onslaught of capital is world-wide and unified, and that requires a much greater practical unity in action than we have today.

I believe that our main problem is not so much the fragmentation among different organizations than the fragmentation of our political perception, of our understanding of society, of our interpretation of what is happening in society and therefore of what needs to be done. The organizational fragmentation is a consequence of the loss of a common understanding, not a cause.

The reason is two-fold: one, and this is a paradox, is a consequence of our movement’s own success. The international trade union movement is now truly world-wide and spans a far greater range of societies and cultures than at any previous time in its history, and consequently it is also exposed to and affected by a much greater diversity of cultures.

The second reason is that at the same time, its leading organisations, mainly in the industrialised countries, have become largely de-politicised. This has been the outcome of a long process starting at the end of World War II, when a weakened trade union movement in Europe became increasingly dependent on the State and, in the context of capitalist reconstruction and the Cold War, retreated to what it believed to be its core business (collective bargaining), abandoning the goal of a socialist transformation of society and leaving society to the State.

In that context, the merger between the ICFTU and the WCL in 2006 was acquired by erasing the last vestiges of social-democratic politics that had survived in the ICFTU. Not much has remained of what were at one time progressive elements of WCL ideology either, basically liberation theology. This was a merger based on the lowest political denominator, with the result that the ITUC today is adrift with no recognizable politics at all.

This has deprived the workers of the world of a universal and common narrative about society: what it is, and how to change it – like for example the democratic socialist narrative which still existed in the pre-World War II movement, and which today survives only in some Global Union Federations, and of course in many unions at national level.

The loss of a universal narrative that we share in common is a critical problem: it weakens international class consciousness and abandons political consciousness to widely different perceptions of society, shaped by local or regional realities.

For example, the ETUC, which is politically and financially dependent on the European Union, is deliberately and sometimes aggressively eurocentric, and, even more than the ITUC, subscribes to an ideology of “social partnership” which has long since been discarded by the presumed “social partners”.
The Latin American unions, acutely sensitive to the dangers of American imperialism, have been far less aware or concerned about what happened to the workers for seventy years in the USSR and for forty years of Stalinism in the Eastern European countries under its domination.

Much the same applies to the South African unions, with politics shaped by the anti-apartheid struggle. Their physical, intellectual and emotional remoteness from really existing Stalinism has enabled the WFTU to gain some undeserved credibility. “Socialism”, by its Stalinist definition, seems an attractive option – at a safe distance in time and place.

The unions in the former Soviet bloc, emerging from the wreckage of a society where all forms of independent labour organisation were suppressed for decades, have for the most part no ideology at all. Their main problem has been to repudiate the so-called “socialism” which, by its Stalinist definition, was the ideology of their rulers, the ideology of a police State. Some unions have embraced the neo-liberal ideology of their natural enemies. Some more radical elements have been attracted to revolutionary syndicalism, because its class struggle politics are less tainted with the vocabulary of their enemies.

Not having experienced apartheid, they would be totally unable to understand how the political hegemony of the SACP over the South African labour movement came about – and what would make the WFTU appear as an attractive option to some South African trade unionists.

Polish Solidarity, a movement of 10 million members at its peak in 1981, with a strong left-wing component, has since been hijacked by Catholic conservatives, endorsed neo-liberal policies, invited Margaret Thatcher to its congress and is down to less than 1m members.

China, the largest nation on earth, has a trade union structure inherited from the Soviet model, The government has embraced capitalism, but has maintained a trade union structure designed to control the working class rather than represent it. While the ITUC and others are cosying up to it, workers throughout China are daily revolting against it, and against the system. Which side are we on?
I could go on like this with many more examples.

The present labour movement resembles far too much the blind men in the parable trying to find out what an elephant is like and coming up with incompatible answers.

So our challenge is to reconstitute the full view of the elephant.

How do we do this?
The trade union movement, such as it is, is what we have, and that has to be our point of departure. Our task is to recover the politics which are naturally ours, the politics of our class, and reconstitute our identity as a movement of our class.

We must recover a common understanding, recover our common narrative about our history and about society.

All of us need to rise above and reach out beyond our own experience, which is of necessity only one part of reality, open up to the experience of others, always critically, but always with patience and respect, rebuilding the movement from below, always remembering that we are part of one world working class. We must become internationalists.

Socialism remains our goal but, instructed by experience, we know that the meaning of socialism must be radical democracy: real power, democratically exercised, by real people, at every level, not by any substitutes, no vanguard parties, no so-called “progressive” authoritarians. We cannot delegate the fight for the emancipation of labour to anyone else.

Finally, we must always keep in mind that we are part of society, and that our goals are no different from the general interest of society. We are not a “special interest group” as our enemies would have it, we are at one with society.

Therefore we need to remain aware that there are many social movements not directly linked to labour, but sharing many of our objectives, who are or should be, our allies. Many have filled the void left by the labour movement when it retreated to business unionism and the administration of post-war capitalism, then known as the “social market economy”. We need them as allies to build a the broad world-wide political coalition that will eventually liberate mankind from capitalism.

I am thinking of organisations like the Clean Clothes Campaign, which has done more to support garment workers around the world than their own International ever could, or WIEGO, which has been instrumental in helping informal women workers getting organized, other women’s movements, movements to defend the environment, human rights organisations, even political parties of the Left where they still support us.

Comrades:
This Summer School has a lot to do with meeting our political challenge. We have created a free space for discussion and action, and that free space is expanding – use it, and keep using it. We are creating an invisible International. We have no bureaucratic structures, we do not aspire to any sort of bureaucratic hegemony. We are a free network of autonomous and self-determined trade union activists, working together, and with others, with a common purpose: help rebuild the international movement that the workers of the world need and deserve.

GLI International Summer School 2013