Trade unionism
Trade unionism (derived from the term "trade union", German " union ") referred to in the Marxist literature, particularly in Lenin , a trade union movement which alone is pursuing a reform oriented representation of workers' interests. Even workers' parties that limit themselves to trade union reform policies are described by Lenin as trade unionist .
Emergence
Trade unionism arose in England , where the capitalist mode of production first developed. From there, with increasing industrialization and proletarianization, it spread across large parts of the continent to other industrialized societies outside of Europe, but could rarely take on a similarly strong form there as in the United Kingdom. The English trade unions were viewed and valued by Marx and Engels as anti-capitalist organizations, and Marx cooperated with them in the International Workers' Association (founded in London in 1864). It was only later that Marx and Engels became disaffected with them because they assumed the character of trade unionism , which Lenin had scourged . Engels already saw in them organizations of the upper working class, the labor aristocracy .
The British Labor Party was, at least in its first decades, the political representation of the trade unions in parliament and, for Lenin, an example of trade unionism , since it did not have an explicitly socialist profile and primarily focused on the representation of trade union issues in parliament. The party emerged as an amalgamation of trade unions and small political parties and initially had no individual membership. This was in contrast to many socialist parties on the continent that had no trade union tradition. The SPD , for example, developed at the same time as the German trade unions, while some British unions or their predecessors were founded almost 100 years before the Labor Party.
reception
The term was used disparagingly by Lenin in his work " What to do? " To denote a direction within the RSDLP that limited political disputes to trade union struggle. For Lenin, trade unionism was an ideology that placed workers under the political influence of the bourgeoisie rather than that of social democracy. Lenin formulated this in his Critique of Spontaneism and took up the situation of the labor movement in the United Kingdom, which when "What to do?" was still linked to liberalism :
But the spontaneous development of the labor movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, it runs according to the program of the Creed, because spontaneous labor movement is trade unionism, is only trade unionism, but trade unionism means just ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. That is why it is our task, the task of social democracy, in the struggle against spontaneity, it is to dissuade the labor movement from the spontaneous striving of trade unionism to put itself under the wing of the bourgeoisie and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary social democracy bring.
Two years later, Rosa Luxemburg took up Lenin's dispute with Rabochaya Mysl . She went into a peculiarity of the British labor movement, whose class consciousness was based on purely economic premises, so that bourgeois socialists, as they dominated the party executive on the continent, had less respect for proletarian, often anti-socialist trade union functionaries:
Above all, it must be noted that in the strong emphasis on the innate abilities of the proletarians for social democratic organization and in the suspicion of the “academic” elements of the social democratic movement there is nothing “Marxist-revolutionary” per se, but rather the relationship with opportunist views can just as easily be demonstrated. The antagonism between the purely proletarian element and the non-proletarian socialist intelligentsia - that is the common ideological shield under which the French semi-anarchist trade unionists with their old cry: Méfiez-vous de politiciens !, the mistrust of English trade unionism against the socialist ones “Fantastic” and finally - if we are correctly oriented - also the pure “economism” of the former Petersburg Rabotschaya Mysl (workers' idea) with their transfer of trade-unionist narrow-mindedness to absolutist Russia.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Friedrich Engels: Foreword to the English edition of the "Situation of the Working Class" . In: Marx-Engels-Werke, Volume 22, p. 274.
- ↑ Vladimir I. Lenin, What to do? , Chapter 2b
- ^ Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy , RLGW Vol. 1.2, p. 436
literature
- Sidney and Beatrice Webb The History of Trade Unionism , London 1894.
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Что делать? , Stuttgart 1902.