Conference: Labour and Trade Union Movement in Russia:
From the Past to the Future, KTR, Moscow, April 18-19, 2015

Comrades,

I have been asked to speak about the Russian labour movement in the international context and I want to clarify what I mean by international context: I mean the world labour movement, although of course everything that is happening around us, the economy, the politics of States and many other things also impact on our movement. But the immediate and most relevant international context is our fellow-workers in the rest of the world.

Then, we need to remember that the labour movement in the historical acceptance of the term is not just the trade union movement, it also has a political dimension, the socialist movement in all its complexity and the anarchist and syndicalist movements.

Having said this, we must now turn to what is absolutely unique about the Russian labour movement, both in its political and trade union dimension: it is, together with that of the other countries which made up the USSR, the only labour movement in the world that has been isolated from the labour movement of the rest of the world for about seventy years.

That is a tremendous break.

The political movement (the Mensheviks and the Georgian Mensheviks, the SRs, the Bund, later the Trotskyists and other communist dissidents, some of the anarchists) were able to maintain a significant international presence until World War 2.
In the post-war situation, the Mensheviks and SRs faded into oblivion, the Bund was destroyed by the NKVD which killed its leaders and by the Nazi Holocaust which exterminated its members, the Trotskyists irreparably damaged their credibility by endless splits, even though some continued to exercise a significant influence, to this day, in the labour movement of some countries outside Russia.

As for the trade union movement, it was pushed down two blind alleys: first the Red Trade Union International, also known as the Profintern, then, after World War 2, when an independent trade union movement had ceased to exist in the USSR, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).

We heard a moment ago from our comrade Rainer Tosstorff about the Profintern. He is the author of what will probably be the definitive history of that organization. I want to take this opportunity to stress the importance of history.

One cannot overstate the importance of history. History is what creates identity and is therefore not about the past but about the future. Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, said that he who controls the past controls the future. Others have observed that those who have no past do not have a future, or, in other words, if you have no roots you cannot grow.

This is why our enemies always falsify our history, to steal our past, to erase the identity of working people as a class, trying to assert the power of other identities, the identities of religion, of nationality, of ethnicity, against the fundamental reality which is our identity as a class, with an overarching common interest, across borders all over the world.

In a country where the past has become as unpredictable as the future, history has become a political battleground.

Discovering and preserving the historical truth is an act of resistance. If you are repressed, study history. If you are silenced, study and write history. Eventually truth will prevail, pravda viteži, like our Czech comrades used to say, and with truth, freedom.

The Profintern was a sectarian and divisive operation, its main effect had been to prevent the unity of social-democratic and communist trade unions at a crucial time, when Nazism was on the rise in Germany, thereby ensuring the defeat of the Left.

The second blind alley was the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), originally an artificial construct intended to reflect at international trade union level the war-time alliance of the Western powers with the USSR. At its founding it included social-democratic and other non-communist unions, as well as the State-controlled trade union structures of the USSR and other unions under communist leadership.

The WFTU proved to be too frail a vessel to carry this political load. It was unable to bridge the deep gulf which had opened up since 1921 between the communist movement, meanwhile thoroughly Stalinized, and all other tendencies in the labour movement. Also, the wartime alliance had begun to fray and the external political clamp which had held the organization together came off with the first skirmishes of the Cold War.

In 1949 the social-democratic unions and others pulled out of the WFTU and founded the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), leaving the WFTU to the labour structures of the Soviet bloc and to the communist-led unions elsewhere.

Today the WFTU survives as a relatively small organization dominated by hard-line Stalinist politics. Its latest affiliation is the so-called trade union organization set up by the authorities of the so-called Luhansk Popular Republic.

In the 1940s , however, the Russian workers were no longer isolated from the world of labour by external barriers, but by the very organizations that were supposed to represent them.

The so-called Soviet trade unions had become State administrations dispensing social services but at the same time keeping workers under control, with the aid of other appropriate State administrations, such as the NKVD.

Far from facilitating contacts and knowledge of the outside world these organizations were screening their members from such knowledge. The steady stream of thousands of foreign trade unionists visiting the organizations rarely had a chance to meet any workers, and usually under tightly controlled circumstances.

The Russian working class had undergone terrible historical experiences: several waves of Stalinist terror in the 1930s, the war in the 1940s. In the totalitarian society that had developed, the working class had become alienated, atomized and passive, so much so that it was unable to oppose any resistance to the massive theft of public wealth that happened after the collapse of the regime and to the transformation of its bureaucratic ruling class into a not much different ruling class of gangster capitalism.

At this point, we need to remember that even under these very difficult and depressing circumstances there were these incredibly brave and clear-sighted individuals who, against all odds, tried to establish independent and free trade union organizations: among others, Vladimir Klebanov, a Ukrainian miner, who created the Free Trade Union Association in Donetsk in 1977, Vladimir Borisov and Victor Fajnberg, who set up the Free Interprofessional Association of Workers (SMOT) in 1978, together with Valeriya Novodvorskaya, Albina Yakoreva, Lev Volokhonsky, and others. These attempts were destroyed when their leaders were sent into psychiatric prisons or labour camps, or were forced into exile.

Short-lived as they were, and easily suppressed, they did attract the attention of some trade union activists in Western Europe and North America. Solidarity committees were formed, mostly by militants of the radical, independent Left – we had one in Geneva, which we foolishly dissolved in 1991, believing the problem was over. Little did we know.

There were too few of us. The mainstream unions continued to ignore the dissidents and engage with the official State-controlled unions until the last moment.

Later, starting in the late 1980s and formally founded in May 1990, there was of course KAS-KOR, and we have the great pleasure of having some of its founders with us today.

We have now reached the early 1990s in our story, and we need to have a look at how the world appeared at that time, particularly our world, the labour world.

Two facts stand out:

In the first place, no one expected the Stalinist system to collapse as quickly and as quietly as it did. I am not talking about those who never questioned its legitimacy and expected it to last many more decades: even those of us who regarded it as fundamentally unstable and unable to survive gave it at least another twenty years and, although we were politically prepared for its collapse we were in practice surprised when it happened and unprepared to deal with it.

In the second place, social-democracy, as a historical force based on the organized working class and with the perspective, however distant and vague, of a socialist society, was already in the midst of a terminal decline. Having accepted capitalism in the 1950s, social-democracy accepted neoliberalism in the 1990s. It had become “de-socialdemocratized” and, despite its internationalist traditions, found itself unable to respond to globalization.

In short, at the very historical moment where its rival and enemy, Stalinism, was leaving the scene of world politics, social-democracy, as an independent social and political project, did the same, and therefore could not provide a model for a transition to a different society.

The labour organizations emerging from Stalinism and trying to turn themselves into genuine unions, or new unions arising from the political opposition, in Russia but also everywhere else in what had been the Soviet block, had nowhere to look for a progressive alternative and accepted what they were told: “there is no alternative”, Margaret Thatchers’ slogan. Margaret Thatcher, our worst enemy, was the guest of honour at the 20th anniversary celebration of Solidarność, in Gdansk, in 2000.

Nor was the trade union movement more helpful. In the early 1990s both non-communist Internationals, the ICFTU and the formerly Christian World Confederation of Labour (WCL) had no perspective of social transformation, neither in the capitalist world where they had been operating nor for the millions of workers about to join it. They united to form the ITUC un 2006, without a vestige of any ideology either of them may at one time have had.

This is how, through a catastrophic combination of circumstances, the collapse of Stalinism as a system was not followed in Russia and in the Soviet bloc by progressive regimes, socially, culturally and economically advanced regimes, some form of social-democracy—that’s what we hoped —instead it was followed by a lawless and violent form of capitalism with an ideology akin to fascism. If the Whites had won the civil war it couldn’t have been worse, in fact it would have been better because millions who died needlessly would have lived.

What now? What is to be done?

There is no doubt that we have to rebuild international solidarity and to do that we have to rediscover a culture of solidarity. We have to learn to reason in terms of the class interest, not only the immediate interests of our members, narrowly defined, nor even the collective interest of the workers of our country, even as large a country as Russia, but we must ask ourselves: is what we do, and what others do, consistent with the common class interest of the workers of the world?

In determining what that is, we are pretty much on our own. There are no guides, no supreme authorities. The ITUC, the largest international labour organization that has ever existed, has no consistent principles or policies, is erratic and unreliable. The WFTU is a sectarian Stalinist backwater, the Socialist International is a travel club for increasingly irrelevant politicians.

But do we need them? I don’t think so. Let me explain.
In the first place, there is an outstanding reality that determines everything else: the very real ongoing struggles of workers everywhere in the world, large and small, thousands of struggles every day, because workers have no alternative, no other place to go. Even in a country like China, formerly a stronghold of totalitarianism, a police-State apparatus at the service of capitalist corporations has been unable to prevent thousands of strikes and workers’ demonstrations, more every year. We are talking about thousands of workers in a struggle every day, at some point on the globe. It does not take a genius to figure out what these struggles have in common, the direction they are taking, what causes them and what form of society would meet their demands, even though they are uncoordinated and mostly as yet not even aware of each other.

In the second place, not all international structures of the labour movement are useless. We have the international trade union federations, ten of them, independent organizations, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Very few of them have explicit political perspectives, they mostly fight defensive struggles, but to the extent that any perspective of struggle exists in the institutional international labour movement, that is where it is, and some have proven records of militancy and creativity, like the IUF which two years ago helped create an entirely new movement, which is growing, that of the international domestic workers.

In the third place, we already are a new International. We are the Invisible International. This term was created by the Russian revolutionary and author Victor Serge, in 1940, when he was in France struggling to survive and escape Stalinist and Nazi repression, and succeeded thanks to an informal network of revolutionaries, many of them themselves persecuted and struggling to survive, but supporting each other, organizing escape routes, resistance networks, new organizations and struggles.

Our situation is not nearly as dramatic as what Victor Serge had to face in 1940 but, like him, we have to rely on a network of survivors. There are many of us, and we are everywhere, and we need to connect. We are individuals, groups, organizations.

Thanks to current communication technology —and summer schools —we can connect, at little expense. Do we need a new vanguard party? Absolutely not. The last thing we need is another vanguard party. What we need to do is to build a network, and the network is the vanguard.

Do we need political conformity? Yes, within a very broad framework. We need to be radical democrats, radically committed to democracy, not only as a goal but as a method, as a process, especially within our own organizations and how we handle our relations with each other. Our political backgrounds can be very different, we can be socialists of different traditions, syndicalists, communist dissidents, anarchists – as long as we all are radical democrats. The corollary is: we are uncompromising enemies of all authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies and political structures.

For those of us who are trade unionists, the union has to come first. The union cannot be the playground of sectarian power plays, it is too valuable and vulnerable for these games. Everyone is welcome in the union, but please leave your organization at the wardrobe, we can then democratically discuss the policy of the union. The union will then itself defend that policy, as if it were a political party.

Do we want to change the world? Of course we do. If not us, who? Capitalism in its present form is shamelessly obvious: a system where a tiny powerful and immensely rich minority is waging class war against the vast majority of the world’s population, a terrifyingly destructive system that threatens even the survival of human life on earth. Fighting that system is an act of human self-defence and the trade union movement is the social force in the best position to take that fight. Who else?

Let me summarize:

Who are we?

We are trade unionists because we want to defend our interests and our dignity and that of our fellow-workers at work and in society. In doing so, we civilise society.

The interest of our members coincides with the general interest of society. We fight to preserve the Common Wealth for everyone.

What is our ideology?

We are radical democrats, and by means of democratic struggles we aim at establishing a society responsive to basic human needs, based on freedom and justice. We come from different political traditions, including some that fought each other in earlier times. We are now united in resisting all forms of oppression and will support each other.

Do we have a common strategy?

To achieve these objectives, we seek to build a common strategy with like-minded unions and social movements everywhere. This is work in progress.

Where are we going?

We do not expect the rich and the powerful to voluntarily concede freedom and justice for all. We must therefore organize so as to be able to win any confrontation, preferably the Chinese way, by building overwhelming force that makes violence unnecessary (Sun Tzu). This may take years, but there are no short cuts. Short cuts, as history has shown, lead somewhere else where we don’t want to go.

How do we organize resistance?

Through building networks of solidarity and mutual support, by building the Invisible International.

I thank you for your attention.