Our vision of trade unions is that they’ve never been revolutionary. Trade unions are, by their nature, organisms of mediations, to contract the sale conditions of the work force. But it was not until the beginning of the last century that they actually threw in their lot with the capitalist state, sustaining its necessity to keep the social peace and plan the production in a society which is more and more dominated by monopolies. Our opposition is not just theoretical but based on our actual experience in every country where we are present. Whenever the workers begin to move so do the unions - to ensure the movement is defeated.

Over the years we have had a quite a few contacts who have argued we could do more in the unions (and we don’t avoid the unions - we work in the rank and file to win people to real action) but eventually these comrades have concluded from their own practical experience (which has included being expelled from the union by Trotskyist-dominated local committees) that we were, after all, right. Our aim is to build nuclei of workers in the workplace who are ready to fight capitalism (even if they do not accept all our politics) and in Italy we have a couple of these factory groups which are tiny but which are seen as a threat by the unions. As the class struggle develops globally we will be trying to establish more in order to keep a continued political presence in workplaces.

The problem, however, is not whether to intervene or not in union meetings and in actions called by unions. As internationalists, we intervene in meeting and actions called by unions, both federated and base unions, because, when we intervene in situations of struggle, we naturally refer to rank and file union activists, as well as to all workers. Fact is, in all those cases, we radically criticize unions and indicate to self-organize the struggles, to break out of capitalistic limitations as the only way to concretely defend our own class interests.

Instead, other self-styled communist and revolutionary political forces are inside unions and, moreover, they occupy leading roles. But occupying leading roles, in a union which by this time is, in all regards, the chain of transmission of owners’ and state interests in the bosom of the working class, means to line up on the other side of the barricade.

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