THE TRADE UNIONS IN THE PAST
The trade unions sprang up during the early stage of capitalism as an organization aimed at improving the economic conditions of the workers within the framework of the existing capitalist system. At first they considered it as their task to fight only the individual capitalists in defence of the immediate professional workers' interests, without affecting the foundations of capitalist exploitation and without going beyond the pale of the capitalist industrial social organization.
The abolition of competition among workers of a given trade, the restricted access of new workers to it and the resorting in extreme cases to strikes - those were the usual methods used by the old trade unions in order to obtain higher wages, shorter working hours and better working conditions.
Failing to see the direct tie-up which exists between the condition of the workers in production and the political and state organization of capitalist society, those trade unions, a classical example of which we find in the former British trade unions, shut themselves up in their narrow professional shell, assiduously avoiding all participation in political battles and in the nation's politics in general, and confining themselves to questions pertaining to their trade. This, of course subsequently did not prevent them from being quite frequently used, directly or indirect for the political ends of the bourgeoisie.
In spite of this innocuous character of the first trade unions the bourgeoisie and its state opposed them vehemently and tried by violence, repression and legalized bans to destroy them, sensing instinctively that they might develop into dangerous class organizations, into organs of the class struggle of the proletariat for the abolition of the capitalist system.
The rabid acts of violence, repressions and bans against the trade unions, however, far from failed to produce the result expected by the bourgeoisie. A product of the very development of capitalism, having emerged in the struggle between capital and labour and having become a vital necessity for the workers in their defence against capitalist exploitation, the trade unions could not possibly be eradicated. The persecutions against them only intensified the existing class contradictions in capitalist society and revealed them more clearly to the masses of workers. Without the intervention of the trade unions, the strikes were more frequent, spontaneous and turbulent, inflicting immeasurable damage on production, threatening often even the personal safety and property of individual capitalists.
It was precisely this that finally compelled the bourgeoisie to get reconciled to the existence of trade unions, while attempting to tame them and to turn them into organizations which would regulate relations between workers and capitalists and maintain a lasting peace in industry.
The British bourgeoisie, which for long was complete master on the international market and owned the largest and richest colonies in the world, had ample possibilities, for the attainment of this goal, to mete out certain material benefits to the trade unions which comprised mainly skilled workers, the so-called labour aristocracy.
This marked the beginning of the era of collective contracts, concluded between the trade unions and the capitalist organizations and by fixing by mutual consent the conditions and rates of wages and working time, thereby removing for a long time the danger of strikes at the enterprises and in the branches of industry affected by these collective contracts. The well-known wage scales were established, according to which wage rates were determined in accordance with the average price of prime necessities over a given period, the calculation, however, being usually so made as to keep wages at the lowest possible level. And in order to involve the workers and their trade unions more deeply in capitalist production, to harness them to it and make them eager collaborators of the capitalists in expending and stabilizing it so as to increase capitalist profit to the utmost, many enterprises resorted to profit-sharing schemes in the form of certain percentages and bonuses granted to the workers. Thus, the capitalists secured a maximum labour efficiency on the part of the workers, safeguarded themselves against their strikes, pocketed fat profits, while all that the workers got was the illusion of participating in the profits of the enterprises and, if what they cot was inadequate, of attributing it not to capitalist exploitation, not to the greed of the capitalists, not to the capitalist system of production itself and the way the goods produced were distributed, but to their own inadequacy in work, to their failure to put in the necessary efforts for the success of production.
Adopting this industrial policy towards the workers, the capitalists strove to make them believe that an improvement of their condition could be achieved not through strikes, not through a struggle against capitalist exploitation, but solely through an increase of capital, through an expansion of production, through constantly growing capitalist profits.
And the majority of trade unions in Great Britain and in several other countries, from bodies for the defence of the workers' interests and for fighting capitalism, were turned into Vehicles for the establishment of equilibrium and peace in capitalist production and into an instrument of the nation's capitalists whereby to keep the workers' masses in a state of subordination and bondage, to divert them from the road of the class proletarian struggle and ever to oppose them to the emancipatory workers' revolution.
And when in the middle of the last century, after the founding of the First Socialist International 1) and the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, the proletariat began rapidly to organize itself as a class of its own and the trade union movement increasingly adopted Marx's view to the effect that trade unions should not confine themselves to a partisan war against individual capitalists and to the Sisyphean task of lopping off the branches without touching the trunk of capitalist exploitation but should become schools of socialism and strive to abolish capitalism itself by playing a prime role in the civil war for its downfall, the bourgeoisie adopted a long-term and systematic policy of bribing and corrupting the trade union leaders and the numerous trade union bureaucracy, in order to keep the trade union movement under its influence.
In its press it flattered the trade union leaders as being intelligent and talented workers' representatives, enticed them to come to its sumptuous banquets, courted them in various ways, granted them all sorts of benefits, helped them to enter parliament and kept them firmly in its hands.
It must be admitted that in this way the bourgeoisie quite often succeeded in attaining its goal and in keeping many of the trade unions under its direct or indirect control, of which circumstance it made the widest possible use, in particular during the World War.
