We Introduce this seventh issue of LAW with another update of the inter-imperialist developments so far. Then, we begin our series of excerpts by the Communist Left, in this issue specifically, the ‘Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands’ (KAPD) composed of Council Communists of the German-Dutch Left. Next, the second part to the Unionism article of issue #6, reviews the position of the proletariat in relation to gig worker unionization, tenant unions, and the boundaries of unionism. We close this issue to again direct you to our “Our Fundamental Political Positions,” “Notes on Proletarian Consciousness, Capitalism, Imperialism, and the Autonomous Struggle,” “Theses on the Revolution in Russia” and finally, the basic texts of Council Communism. In our appendix, endorsed by MS and SS, you can find a series of Anibal’s analyses of the recent Airbus Strike in Spain as critiques of the articles published by Fredo Corvo monitoring the strike. 

Translations: Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese

1. Imperialist War Across the Globe

First, some significant excerpts from bourgeois sources, highlighting certain communist conclusions.

Imperialist capitalism continues its arms race, which is particularly intriguing between its two established blocs. This is an ongoing process, and for this reason they are vying to influence potential supporters while simultaneously devoting enormous sums of capital to military development—a process that directly and indirectly affects the working class. This process unfolds not without various struggles and contradictions, as has been evident at the BRICS summit in New Delhi (India), in the attitudes of its government, as well as in the regional bloc formed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The Mecca Pact is under strain: 

“The coordinated offensive launched this Tuesday by Houthi rebels against southern Saudi Arabia has once again shaken up the Middle East landscape. The massive launch of drones and missiles against four strategic urban centers—Khamis Mushait, Abha, Najran, and Jazan—left at least 73 people injured, including women and children, and struck critical energy infrastructure. The most severe impact was recorded at a Saudi Aramco plant in Jazan, where the fire forced the temporary shutdown of several operations—a scenario posing a direct threat to the Mecca Pact.”

“Beyond the material damage and the psychological blow following months of relative calm, the escalation comes at an extremely sensitive time in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz—a passage monitored by the International Maritime Organization (IMO)—coinciding with the simmering standoff between Washington and Tehran.”

However, its political shockwaves strike directly at the heart of the new regional security doctrine: 

“Barely a month after its signing, the unprecedented “Mecca Agreement on Joint Defense” faces its first real stress test in the face of asymmetric warfare tactics.”

“Political backing came swiftly from Pakistan. Defense Minister Khawaja Asif publicly stated that Islamabad “will fulfill its obligations” under the Mecca Agreement in the event of any aggression against Saudi sovereignty. The statement, however, has been carefully worded to avoid committing to the immediate deployment of expeditionary troops.” 

“The Pakistani Army—the only nuclear power among the three signatories and the alliance’s largest ground force—is focusing its support on technical assistance, the exchange of military intelligence, and the strengthening of air defense batteries and drone interception capabilities.”

“In Turkey, the interpretation of the treaty reflects a strict delineation of responsibilities. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan clarified that, while the agreement enshrines the principle of collective defense, ‘the nature of the assistance that may be provided will depend on the specific circumstances of each crisis and on the express request of the country underattack.’” (atalayar) 

“When the eleven BRICS leaders gather for their summit in New Delhi this Sunday, they will be flanked by a second tier of countries that do not belong to the bloc but can no longer be considered mere guests.

Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Thailand, Belarus, Cuba, and Bolivia fall into the category of ‘partner countries,’ created to bring new governments closer to the bloc without immediately expanding the core group of full members.

Several of them have also arrived in New Delhi with high-level delegations, including Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev; Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim; Ugandan Vice President Jessica Alupo; and Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shettima.

In Central Asia, there are Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam; in Africa, Nigeria and Uganda; and in Latin America and the Caribbean, Bolivia and Cuba. Belarus rounds out a group that extends the bloc’s political presence far beyond its eleven members.

This category was established in 2024, after the BRICS underwent its largest expansion since its creation and grew to eleven members—a growth that increased its international influence but also made it more difficult to adhere to one of its basic rules: decision-making by consensus. Associate members offer a middle ground because they can participate in summits and certain ministerial meetings and join some of the group’s initiatives, but they do not have the same role as members in decision-making.

This status allows the BRICS to bring countries interested in the group closer without committing to immediate further expansion and offers those governments political access to a network that includes China, India, and Russia without requiring them to fully align with the bloc’s positions.

Alongside governments very close to Moscow or Beijing are countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, which maintain important economic and strategic relations with the United States and other Western powers.

The existence of this “second tier” also allows the BRICS to expand their geographic and political reach without further complicating the process of reaching consensus within the core group.” (swissinfo)

“This expansion has given the BRICS a significance that is hard to ignore and has reinforced their claim to speak on behalf of the Global South. But this combined weight remains, to a large extent, more statistical than political, as it has not yet translated into an equivalent capacity to act in a coordinated manner, establish common positions in the face of major crises, or decisively influence international rules.

That contradiction is inherent in the very nature of the BRICS. They are neither a military alliance nor an integrated economic bloc, but rather an informal intergovernmental platform (with no founding treaty or permanent secretariat) that operates through a rotating presidency and makes decisions by consensus. This lack of binding commitments has made it possible to bring together countries with very different political systems, economic models, and alliances, but it also means that each capital projects a different vision of the group’s role onto the group.” 

“The war against Iran has turned these differences into an immediate problem. The rift was laid bare in May, during the meeting of foreign ministers, at which the ministers were unable to agree on a joint statement. Tehran wanted the group to condemn the attacks launched by the United States and Israel against its territory, but the meeting devolved into a bitter confrontation with the United Arab Emirates (which hosts U.S. bases and has been struck by Iranian missiles), which it accused of participating in those operations. Abu Dhabi denied any involvement and rejected the accusation.

That precedent threatened to repeat itself this weekend, but the leaders ultimately approved the New Delhi Declaration unanimously on Saturday, which outlines their positions on major global and regional issues and sets out a roadmap for strengthening cooperation.

The text expresses the BRICS countries’ “deep concern” over the crisis in the Middle East and calls for “exercising maximum restraint” and “avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation,” but avoids mentioning any specific country. This solution preserves consensus without explicitly singling out the United States and Israel for their attacks on Iran, nor Tehran for its offensive against the Gulf states.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine had added another point of contention to the negotiations. The statement avoids assigning specific blame and merely reiterates the members’ general commitment to the peaceful resolution of international disputes “through dialogue, consultation, and diplomacy.” It also expresses concern over the rise in “unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures” that distort trade, in a veiled criticism of Washington.

India, which holds the rotating presidency, wants to present the summit as a diplomatic success and solidify its aspiration to lead the Global South. But it is wary of turning the forum into a coalition against the West. Chietigj Bajpaee, a researcher at Chatham House, a London-based institute for international relations, describes India’s goal as the pursuit of “a non-Western, but not explicitly anti-Western, order.” The deterioration of relations with the Donald Trump administration, exacerbated by trade friction, has led New Delhi to recently regain ground with Beijing and strengthen its historic relationship with Moscow.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Friday, with whom he agreed to expand energy, military, and trade cooperation. Despite U.S. pressure, India continues to purchase large quantities of Russian oil, and both countries aim to increase their trade from the current level of about $70 billion (approximately 60 billion euros) to $100 billion (86 billion euros) by 2030.

For his part, Chinese President Xi Jinping has traveled to India for the first time since 2019, following two years of a cautious thaw in relations between the two Asian powers. The meeting Xi held with Modi during the 2024 summit in Kazan, Russia, paved the way for easing tensions that had built up since the 2020 border clash, which plunged bilateral relations into crisis after soldiers from both countries were killed. Modi visited China in 2025 to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, a Eurasian forum for political, economic, and security dialogue led by Beijing and Moscow.

However, mistrust persists. The territorial dispute and India’s massive trade deficit continue to limit the rapprochement. Furthermore, New Delhi competes with Beijing to position itself as the voice of developing nations, although the latter has a much broader presence in Africa and Latin America. On the other hand, India is also a member of the Quad, a forum for strategic cooperation in the Indo-Pacific with the United States, Japan, and Australia.

The group’s other major geopolitical driver, Russia, takes a more combative stance on the future of the BRICS. Putin wants to transform them into an economic structure capable of protecting its members from Western sanctions through new trade, technology, and financial networks”

“In November 2024, Trump, then president-elect of the United States, threatened to impose “100% tariffs” on BRICS countries if they created a common currency or backed another currency to replace the dollar. According to estimates by the South China Morning Post, about 20% of transactions among members are settled in local currencies.” (elpais)

The U.S. is promoting a militaristic alliance in Latin America, the “operational arm of the U.S. Southern Command”:

“The United States created a joint force with 18 Latin American countries to combat drug cartels. The new structure replaces Operation Southern Spear and comes days before the inauguration of Colombia’s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella. On Tuesday, the United States launched the Western Hemisphere Joint Task Force, a new permanent military structure that replaces Operation Lanza del Sur and coordinates 18 countries in the region in the fight against drug trafficking and transnational organized crime. The announcement was made by U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), headquartered in Doral, Florida, as part of the Coalition Against Cartels in the Americas spearheaded by the Donald Trump administration.” (infobae)

The U.S. continues to conduct military exercises in Asia, with South Korea and Japan (swissinfo) which prompts retaliation from North Korea, not vetoed by China…which, however, does veto U.S. actions against Iran at the UN.

It also welcomes the fact that “the EU has officially joined” its economic campaign against Iran (europapress).  

In other words, we have various alliances that do not constitute imperialist political-military blocs, characterized by their strategies and agreements for united imperialist action against common rivals, often speaking in terms of “mutual security,” but there are indeed coalition groups where capitalist interests—primarily of an economic nature—converge, which does not imply that their participants necessarily align themselves with this or that established imperialist bloc. The BRICS’ policy regarding the U.S. dollar is significant: some states are moving toward a common currency, while others are not, fluctuating depending on the situation and acting opportunistically. 

Such dynamics exist but are still limited: 

“The BRICS countries have, for now, ruled out the creation of a common currency or an immediate replacement for the dollar. During their 18th summit held in New Delhi, they agreed to prioritize trade and investment using local currencies and by connecting national payment systems and digital infrastructure.” (iproup)

However, there is a formative core to these two major imperialist political-military blocs. What is currently being decided are the new additions, and there is still a great deal of maneuvering involving opportunism, cunning, and bourgeois interests. But the core is fundamentally one of military and political cooperation, while also leaving ample room for the interested economic community. But in a globalized economy, contradictions and divergent movements constantly surface; for example, German capital—whose government is trying to erect barriers against competition from Chinese capital—at the same time shows significant investment flows toward China: 

“In the first half of 2026, German companies invested 5.6 billion euros in China, representing a one-third increase over the previous year, according to a study by the German Economic Institute (IW). This figure places China ahead of the United States as a destination for German capital during that period.” (mx.ivesting.com) 

Manufacturing within China reduces costs thanks to subsidies and the yuan’s exchange rate, which helps companies compete with local rivals. This, in turn, leads to a reduction in German investment in the U.S. This does not mean that the German government is joining the imperialist bloc led by China and Russia, but rather that there is room for moves like this to occur without Germany breaking with NATO. EU capitals continue their efforts to achieve the so-called “strategic autonomy”, but they are not dismantling NATO either, and they continue to bet heavily on the war in Ukraine…and to support their bloc, led by the U.S.: 

“Germany transfers its military technology to India to distance it from Russia’s influence” (DW youtube)

Germany Agrees with the U.S. to Intensify Industrial Cooperation in Defense Berlin (EFE). Germany and the United States agreed on Tuesday to intensify industrial cooperation in the defense sector, with a “letter of intent” signed by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and his U.S. counterpart, Pete Hegseth.

As Pistorius explained in statements to the media distributed by the German Ministry of Defense, he and Hegseth expressed their support for “deepening” cooperation in the defense industry, a central point in the document agreed upon by both sides (efe). Germany will increase its defense spending by 28% in 2027, to 105.8 billion (efe). Meanwhile, the EU’s democratic rhetoric—which appears critical of the “excesses” committed by Israeli imperialism—manifests itself in the maintenance of significant financial, commercial, and military ties, as well as exchanges of “defense” technology: 

“Trade between the European Union and Israel stands at around 42,000 to 43,000 million euros annually, cementing the EU’s position as the State of Israel’s leading trading partner, ahead of the United States” (elpais) 

The Israeli army continues its offensives in Gaza, the West Bank, the south, and areas of Syria and Lebanon, with no agreement reached with Hamas—at least for now. Iran and the U.S. remain embroiled in military skirmishes and occasionally engage in negotiations, without having reached general or specific agreements (such as regarding navigation in the Strait of Hormuz). The situation of the working class is deteriorating in Iran, with rising unemployment and shortages. The Axis of Resistance has been weakened but not eliminated, and the Houthi faction in Yemen is currently attacking various states in the region and has expanded its area of control within Yemen itself; Iran occasionally launches drones and missiles, and sometimes its allied Iraqi forces do so as well. We read:

Bessent’s campaign of economic isolation is unlikely to prove decisive without the support of Iran’s most important trading partner. If China continues to do business with Iran, the current Iranian leadership will most likely survive. No threat from the United States to China is credible, since China controls the supply of critical minerals needed by the sectors that drive economic growth in the United States and other major countries. Without critical minerals, there are no chips, and the United States misses out on the investment boom driven by artificial intelligence. 

In June, Iran and the United States agreed to a ceasefire, followed shortly thereafter by a memorandum of understanding. But none of this led to real peace. In practice, Iran still restricts transit through the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States continues to block most Iran-related vessels. Although the memorandum looked good in theory, neither side fully complied with it.

When the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February and Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, some strategic analysts believed that China would push for a quick resolution to the conflict, especially since, until recently, up to 60% of its oil imports passe through the Strait of Hormuz. But this turned out to be a miscalculation. When the conflict began, China had more than 1.2 billion barrels (200 million above its usual reserves), and it still has more than 1.15 billion left. At the same time, the disruption and the resulting rise in oil prices accelerated demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles, which benefits Chinese exporters. Ironically, these are precisely the sectors in which China has massive excess capacity. In that sense, this crisis has postponed its financial losses in these industries.

Overall, China has been one of the countries least affected by the crisis. This is an important consideration that U.S. authorities should take into account in any future calculations, and it rules out instability in the Middle East as a tool for containing China. The main loser in this war is the Middle East as a whole. The global economy is learning to adapt to a level of oil and gas exports from the region that is roughly half of what it was before the war. Of course, the adjustment is relatively costly, but the longer this crisis drags on, the more resilient the global economy may become to disruptions in the Middle East. This may not be good news for the region’s oil-producing countries, which are likely to lose market share in the medium term.

The region (particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar) has also learned that relying on U.S. security guarantees may not be a good idea. Saudi Arabia is trying to lean more heavily on other regional allies, while Qatar and the UAE are engaging in direct dialogue with Iran and using economic incentives to secure a degree of security. These changes support the argument that a solution to the current impasse must include regional economic integration…A stable solution to this crisis requires China’s involvement and increased regional economic integration, as well as a resolution to the Iranian nuclear program that integrates it as civilian technology into a China-led regional supply chain for electricity production.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Washington in late September. Perhaps the conflict between the United States and Iran can be resolved within the framework of broader dialogue with President Donald Trump. Or perhaps China will be content to sit back and wait. (elpais) 

In other regions where there are wars—such as Sudan, the DRC, Myanmar, or the Sahel—these conflicts continue to unfold, in some cases with jihadist attacks on Russian forces and allied government forces, there is sporadic fighting between Pakistan and opposition groups supported by Afghanistan, as well as in the Sistan-Baluchistan region, while in Tigray and its conflict with Ethiopia, there have been new developments regarding what was discussed in the previous issue. In early August, there were military clashes in the Shererina area. Now the conflict is spreading: 

In Ethiopia, seven armed and opposition groups announced this Sunday the formation of a coalition aimed at overthrowing the federal government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and establishing an inclusive transitional government (swissinfo)...Open warfare has returned to Ethiopia…(swissinfo).

“NATO reaffirms its ‘unwavering’ commitment to Article 5 and ‘the transatlantic bond’” (europapress). 

They remain united...they continue to increase military spending...they remain coordinated in the face of the future. The U.S. focuses on China, and the EU on Russia and Belarus, with others complementing the NATO framework. The EU is increasing its spending to achieve greater “strategic autonomy” but it is not breaking with the U.S..

Even Spain’s bourgeois left-wing government, which has conflicts with Trumpism…stands firmly on the side of NATO militarism (it has increased military spending by a factor of 6.5) (elboletin) and is acting accordingly. The Spanish government in response to Trump’s threats: 

“It was to be expected—outrages on the outside and nothing at all on the inside, no criticism whatsoever” (elmundo).

As for nuclear weapons, we read in a prominent bourgeois media outlet, The Economist:

“Today the world faces a new problem: the most powerful countries do not feel sufficient horror at their own nuclear arsenals. The United States, China, and Russia are determined to expand or modernize their nuclear capabilities. As a result, they are reluctant to participate in arms control talks or have allowed agreements reached in the past to lapse”… “The Cold War was an era of cruelty and horrors. However, on rare occasions, the fear of global annihilation led their leaders to rise to the occasion. Today, those who lead the United States, China, and Russia are not immune to fear either. But all too often, their concerns are selfish and short-sighted. Save the world? Let someone else worry about that” (lavanguardia).

2. Some Economic Consequences: The Economy Continues to be Geared Toward War

“Since Friday, September 11, 2026, Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline has been officially shut down following recent attacks, putting 4 million barrels of daily oil exports at risk. Meanwhile, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is now at risk of being closed, threatening up to 9 million barrels of daily oil supply. All of this comes as the Strait of Hormuz is operating at approximately 20% of its pre-war capacity with Iran, representing a reduction of 15 million barrels in daily oil flows. Taken together, this represents nearly 30 MILLION barrels per day of oil flows that are disrupted or at risk. Even taking into account some overlap between these routes, the scale of the potential disruption is enormous relative to the global oil market, which stands at around 100 million barrels per day. This is one of the most serious energy supply crises in modern history” (kobeissiletter facebook)

This triggered a new period of rising oil prices, surpassing $107 per barrel:

“Brent rose 3.34% to settle at $108 per barrel as tensions in the Middle East escalated. West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the U.S. benchmark, also rose 3.17% to $103.22 per barrel.

According to the latest data provided by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the decline has been 7.2 million barrels per day (mbd), which represents a decrease from the 10 mbd projected for 2025. In addition, according to the latest estimate from the International Energy Agency (IEA), global crude oil demand will fall by 2.5 mbd this year due to the failure of crude oil flows to normalize. Global supply will decline by 5.7 mbd due to disruptions in the Middle East, which is widening the deficit and putting upward pressure on prices. Meanwhile, the TTF natural gas price also posted a sharp rise on Monday, up 5.17% to 83.55 euros per megawatt-hour after briefly surpassing 84 euros during the trading session.

Furthermore, higher oil prices point to rising inflation, which adds pressure on central banks to raise interest rates—in a week in which the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) will announce its monetary policy decision on Wednesday; the Bank of England (BoE) on Thursday; and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) on Friday.” (elperiodicodelaenergia).

High hydrocarbon prices are accelerating the upward trend in inflation, and this not only impacts the living conditions of the working class but also spark protests, such as the current ones in Syria and other places, following those in Kenya, Bolivia, Peru, Libya, Tunisia…(almonitor) (euronews).

As for the war economy, it continues to follow the bourgeois model of action: 

“The president of the monetary authority, Christine Lagarde, is calling on European governments to cut public spending in order to redirect resources to the military-industrial complex and the technology sector… The ECB president lamented that some 300,000 million euros in investments leave Europe each year for other parts of the world, mainly the U.S., and called for a “fluid, liquid, deep, and efficient capital market” that would help retain that investment.”(diariosocialista).

The reduction in such state welfare programs is creating pressure, fostering conditions conducive to the emergence of protests, which continue to rise. However, other conditions are also necessary, in this case regarding the balance of power between the classes.

3. Global Economy: Capital continues to Capture Profits

Some examples:

“The U.S. economy is experiencing a historic divergence in the distribution of national wealth, characterized by corporate profits at unprecedented highs while the labor force’s share of income has fallen to levels not seen in decades. According to the latest official data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) for the second quarter of 2026, pre-tax corporate profits reached a record $4.8 trillion on an annualized basis. This figure represents 18% of total national income, the highest proportion recorded since the post-World War II era. At the same time, the share of national income going to employees in the form of wages and benefits fell to 60%, reaching its lowest point since the 1950s, while corporate profit margins rose to 19.4%, a level not seen since the 1940s” (diariosocialista).

“Nvidia Earns $59,688 Million in the Second Quarter of Its Fiscal Year, Up 126%” (efe).

“Chinese chipmaker CXMT boosts revenue by more than 870% through its ‘aggressive expansion’” (eleconomista).

South Korea, “In the second quarter, Samsung posts record profits of 43,000 million euros from AI. Profits rise 1,813.8%.” (swissinfo). 

4. Labor Unrest and Labor Movements in the Face of Capitalist Pressures

There is little news of protest movements; some significant examples include union calls for action, such as in the UK or the Netherlands, and other union strikes where tensions are higher than usual, such as the one already analyzed involving Airbus in Spain. See: (inter-rev).

And the appendix in this issue, with extensive discussion of the issues it raises. There are other calls from the workforce itself, showing some signs of proletarian self-organization—though not without various problems and conflicts—in sectors such as platform delivery workers in Brazil and Vietnam. See: (inter-rev).

In Ceuta, amid Spanish nationalist pogroms and squabbles among bourgeois parties, as well as inter-imperialist bickering between Spain and Morocco…migrants are indeed good for working cheaply and without legal protections (lavanguardia).

5. More Climate Chaos Caused by Capitalism and Numerous Catastrophic Consequences

August was the hottest month on record worldwide. August 2026 tied with July 2023 as the warmest month in the entire record. The global average temperature was 16.96 °C, approximately 1.65 °C above pre-industrial levels. The oceans also reached extraordinarily high temperatures. (copernicus) 

Disaster in Nepal and Tibet…(reuters). Numerous forest fires around the world, particularly in the EU…(jointresearchcentre). See more: (inter-rev).

It is our intention to publish a series of articles on the Communist Left, particularly on the German-Dutch branch and the Italian branch.

We do not intend to offer a detailed history of these branches of the Communist Left—a task that exceeds the scope of this publication—but rather to highlight their main strengths and weaknesses, their positive contributions that remain unchanged, as well as their shortcomings, errors, and inadequacies.

Many decades have passed since their emergence, and numerous vicissitudes have occurred. The conditions under which they arose and carried out their activities have, on the one hand, undergone significant changes, but, on the other hand, the fundamental constants of capitalist exploitation and domination remain.

1) The German-Dutch Communist Left: Council Communism

“Council communism, in a broad sense, is a political tendency that originated in the ‘Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands’ (KAPD). At its founding in 1920, the KAPD had more members than the KPD. More important than its numbers, the KAPD continued to fight for the revolution with ‘new tactics’ of mass organization—tactics envisioned by Pannekoek in 1914 as suitably adapted to the era of imperialism. These ‘new tactics’ took the form of the workers’ councils that emerged in the Russian, German, and Hungarian revolutions. These councils were adopted by Lenin to destroy the bourgeois state, and in doing so, they gained worldwide popularity. However, once in power, the Bolsheviks adopted a state-capitalist program, subordinating the councils to the state. The RCP, with its revolutionary prestige, used the Communist International to serve the interests of Russian foreign policy. Lenin, in his pamphlet on left-wing communism, condemned the KAPD, the Italian communists led by Bordiga, and the left-wing communists in Great Britain (Sylvia Pankhurst) who criticized the counterrevolutionary course of the Communist International.”
(Fredo Corvo, June 17, 2023) (councilist) (inter-rev) 

Let’s look at a series of important characteristics of this communist left, which would shape the early council communism, and we’ll do so directly through quotes from its leading figures.

1.1 The KAPD

• “The historically necessary goal of the workers’ revolution is, ultimately, a new organization of production. But the tasks of the working class in the revolution are, above all, political tasks. For only the secure possession of political power enables the working class to redesign production and lead society toward communism.” (Part 3 of the Program of the “Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands” KAPD, 1923, adopted by the party’s sixth congress (September 9–11, 1923)  (inter-rev)

• “The productive forces with which the proletariat will enter the historical era of its power will be enormously developed. But the technical apparatus will be so damaged by the self-destructive crisis of capital and by civil war—the class struggle in its final, highest phase—that the working class will need a transitional period to transform the possibilities offered by modern methods of production into productive realities. Only after this transitional period will society have at its disposal the wealth of products that will enable the transformation toward an economy based on solidarity to meet society’s needs.” (id)

• “The self-preservation of the proletarian dictatorship can be based only on the organization of revolutionary workers in revolutionary councils. The KAPD has a duty to use all its intellectual and organizational forces in the struggle for the creation of the councils and for their purely revolutionary character.​
  The means of political power to be deployed for the self-preservation of a proletarian dictatorship are derived from the sum total of experience to date. The political organizations of the bourgeoisie, as well as those of the bourgeoisie’s lackeys within the working class—parliaments and their parties, trade unions, the bourgeois press, the courts, and the administrative apparatus—must be destroyed, to the extent that they have not already been destroyed in the course of the struggle. The councils must create a new administrative apparatus on their own. In place of the old bourgeois class law, a proletarian class law must be applied, the enforcement of which must be in the hands of revolutionary courts. Control over all inhabitants must continue, utilizing all the technical expertise of the bourgeois police, but eliminating the old staff of officials. The complete disarmament of the bourgeoisie and the arming of the revolutionary workers are self-evident. The organization of armed workers must take place primarily on a company-by-company basis. The large, leading revolutionary enterprises must remain—and will remain—the core of the Red Army, even as armed units. But political power means nothing if it is not based on control of the main economic bases. “…” The workers’ councils are the organs of the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship.” (id)

• “The working-class revolution is, in its overall course, a continuous political-economic process in which the political element can never be completely separated from the economic element. To set aside one of the two always means straying for a time from the straight path of the revolution.
  Considered as a whole, political action will ultimately be a means in the service of the economic end, a means destined to become superfluous. In detail, however, political means—that is, the means of power—must inevitably have many effects in the economic sphere, in a sense that at first glance seems to contradict economic needs, as the *Communist Manifesto* states:
  ‘The proletariat will use its political dominance to wrest from the bourgeoisie, step by step, all capital, to centralize all the instruments of production in the hands of the state—that is, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class—and to multiply the mass of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
  This, of course, can initially be done only through despotic intervention in property rights and bourgeois relations of production—that is, through measures that seem economically inappropriate and unsustainable, but which, in the course of the movement, rise above themselves and, as a means of revolutionizing the entire mode of production, are inevitable.’”

• “For the proletariat as a class to have the means of production at its disposal, it is not enough to issue decrees, nor is it enough to institute every conceivable control against the violation of those decrees; rather, it is necessary for the working class as such (not merely its political leaders and predecessors) to take control of production into its own hands. Only if it succeeds in doing so will it be able to subject what has been conquered to central regulation without itself being subjected to a new bureaucratic dictatorship and exploitation.
  The conquest of the means of production is, therefore, a process that must be carried out in every enterprise, factory by factory, by the workers themselves. Only when the working class has become aware of this in the course of the struggle, has understood the special significance and necessity of the proletarian revolution, only then is it truly capable of waging its struggle in a revolutionary manner”…” But it can be expected with certainty that political victory will be achieved more quickly than the complete control of all the means of production” (id)

• KAPD: Theses on the Role of the Party in the Proletarian Revolution

1. The historic task of the proletarian revolution is to place the earth’s wealth in the hands of the working masses and to abolish ownership of the means of production, which makes it impossible for a possessing, exploiting, and dominant class based on private property to exist. The goal is to free the social economy from all the shackles of political power on a global scale.

2. The effective abolition of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation of all production and its distribution away from the propertied classes, the elimination of class antagonisms, the dismantling of political institutions, and the construction of a communist society constitute a historical process whose specific stages can be predicted with precision. Regarding the role of political violence in this process, a few clarifications can be made.

3. The proletarian revolution is both an economic and a political process. Neither as an economic process nor as a political process can it be concluded within a national framework; on the contrary, the establishment of a global community is its vital and necessary objective. It follows that, until the definitive defeat of the power of capital on a global scale, the future victorious factions of the proletariat will also need political violence to preserve themselves and, if possible, to counter the political violence of the counterrevolution.

4. In addition to the foreign policy reasons that make it necessary for the victorious factions of the proletariat to persist in political violence (even within their own sphere of domination), there are reasons related to internal development. Viewed as a political process, the revolution presents a decisive moment: the seizure of political power. Viewed as an economic process, it does not present such a decisive moment, since the concrete takeover of the economy by the proletariat and the transformation of the profit-driven economy into a consumer economy require long-term work. Needless to say, throughout this process, the bourgeoisie will leave no stone unturned to defend profit and, to this end, regain political power for itself. To this end, in countries with a developed democratic ideology—long-established industrialized nations—it will attempt to use the slogans of democratic deception to mislead the proletariat. For this reason, strong and ruthless political violence on the part of revolutionary workers is the bare minimum required until the proletariat takes full control of the economy, thereby depriving the bourgeoisie of any economic basis for its existence. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

5. The necessity of violence for the political domination of the revolutionary proletariat—even after the political victory of the revolution—is at the same time the basis for the necessity of the political organization of the revolutionary proletariat both before and after the seizure of political power.

6. Workers’ political councils (soviets) represent the broadest historical form of organization for proletarian rule and administration; they arise whenever the class struggle radicalizes and becomes a struggle for total power.

7. The appropriate historical form for bringing together the most conscious, most enlightened, and best-prepared proletarian fighters is the party. Since the goal of the proletarian revolution is communism, the party can exist only as a party with a communist program and spirit. The party must be a programmatically coherent whole, united in a single will, organized and disciplined from the bottom up. It must be the vanguard and the weapon of the revolution.

8. The primary task of the Communist Party, both before and after the seizure of power, is—amid the confusion and vacillations of the proletarian revolution—to hold fast, clearly and unequivocally, to the only sure compass: communism. The Communist Party must, in all situations, tirelessly and without hesitation, show the proletarian masses the goal and the path, not only with words but with deeds. In all issues of the political struggle, both be nd after the seizure of power, it must drive home with the greatest clarity the distinction between reformism and revolution. It must denounce any reformist solution as a stopgap, as a prolongation of the old system of exploitation, as a betrayal of the revolution, and as a betrayal of the interests of the working class as a whole. Just as there can be no common ground whatsoever between exploiters and the exploited, neither can there be the slightest political link between revolution and reformism; social-democratic reformism, whatever mask it may hide behind, is today the greatest obstacle to the revolution and the last hope of the bourgeoisie.

9. Consequently, the Communist Party must, first and foremost, keep itself absolutely aloof from all reformism and opportunism; the same applies to its program, its tactics, its press, its specific slogans, and its actions. In particular, it must never increase the number of its members more rapidly than the solid communist core can absorb them.

10. In the course of the revolution, the working-class masses will undergo inevitable fluctuations. The revolution is a dialectical process not only as a whole but also in its individual phases. The Communist Party, as an organization of conscious elements, must therefore strive not to succumb to these fluctuations and to overcome them; it must help the masses—through the clarity and purity of its slogans, the harmony between its slogans and its actions, its position at the head of the struggle, and the accuracy of its forecasts—to quickly and thoroughly overcome such fluctuations. The Communist Party must, therefore, through its entire conduct, develop the class consciousness of the proletariat, even at the cost of an apparent external contradiction with the broad masses. Only in this way can the Communist Party win the trust of the masses in the course of the revolutionary struggle and carry out educational work on a large scale.

11. The Communist Party must not, of course, separate itself from the masses: that is to say, apart from the obvious work of tireless propaganda, it must link itself to the movements of the working masses generated by economic hardship and partial demands; it must seek to spiritually enlighten such movements to propel them toward effective struggles, expand them, and accelerate their momentum by appealing to active solidarity, so that they take on revolutionary and, if possible, political forms. But the task of the Communist Party cannot be to make itself more foolish than it already is; in other words, its task cannot be to reinforce the spirit of opportunism by developing, under the Party’s leadership, partial reformist demands.

12. But the most important practical work of communists in support of the workers’ economic struggle lies in organizing the weapon of struggle which, in revolutionary times in highly developed countries, is the only weapon usable for such struggles; that is to say, communists must ensure that revolutionary workers (not only members of the Communist Party) organize within the workplaces and that these workplace organizations form Unions to create the instrument suited to the working class’s takeover of production.

13. Revolutionary workplace organizations (the Unions) constitute the fertile ground from which, in the course of the struggle, action committees will emerge—the frameworks for partial economic demands and, ultimately, for the workers’ own production in struggle—as well as the preparation and infrastructure capable of underpinning the revolutionary workers’ councils. 

14. By thus creating the vast class organization of the revolutionary proletariat, the communists—in addition to preserving, as a party, the strength of a compact, programmatically unified body, and to emphasizing, within the Workers’ Union as everywhere else, communist thought as the supreme law—ensure the victory of the proletarian revolution and the ultimate victory of communist society.

15. The role of the party following the political victory of the revolution depends on international relations and the development of the workers’ class consciousness. As long as the dictatorship of the proletariat (the political violence of the victorious working class) is necessary, the Communist Party must do everything possible to safeguard development in a communist direction. To this end, it is essential that, in all developed industrial countries, the revolutionary proletarians themselves, under the spiritual leadership of the communists, participate as broadly as possible in the takeover and reorganization of production. Organization in workplaces and unions, learning through ongoing partial conflicts, and the creation of action committees constitute the preparation that the vanguard of the workers themselves will undertake in the course of the revolutionary struggle.

16. To the extent that the union, as a class organization of the proletariat, strengthens itself following the victory of the revolution and becomes capable of consolidating the economic foundations of the dictatorship in the form of the council system, it will gain in importance relative to the party. To the extent that, in a later phase, the dictatorship of the proletariat is secured through its anchoring in the consciousness of the broad masses, the party will lose its importance in favor of the workers’ councils. Finally, to the extent that the consolidation of the revolution through political violence becomes superfluous—as the dictatorship transforms into communist society—the party disappears.” 

(KAPD. Proletarier, July 1921, No. 7) (inter-rev) (raetekommunismus)

• “The KAPD will triumph alongside the proletariat in struggle… or perish alongside it.”
  (The Revolutionary Party. “Kommunistische Arbeiter-Zeitung,” Organ of the KAPD, 7th year, July 1926, No. 35.)

• “The Current Context
  The global economic crisis, born of the world war with its monstrous social and economic effects—which create the overwhelming impression of a field of ruins of colossal proportions—can only mean one thing: the Twilight of the Gods of the capitalist-bourgeois world order is near. This is not, today, a matter of the periodic economic crises that were once part of the capitalist mode of production; it is the crisis of capitalism itself; we are witnessing the convulsive spasms of the entire social organism, the formidable outbursts of class antagonisms of an unprecedented magnitude, and widespread misery for vast segments of the population: all of this is a fatal warning to bourgeois society. It is becoming increasingly clear that the ever-growing antagonism between exploiters and the exploited—the contradiction between capital and labor, awareness of which is spreading even among those previously apathetic layers of the proletariat—cannot be resolved. Capitalism is experiencing its definitive failure; it has plunged into the abyss of an imperialist war of plunder; it has created a chaos whose unbearable prolongation confronts the proletariat with a historic alternative: a relapse into barbarism or the construction of a socialist world.” (KAPD Program, May 1920) (left-dis.nl) 

• “II. Although trade unionism is theoretically grounded in the class struggle, from the perspective of its utopian and petty-bourgeois worldview, it is completely incapable of understanding the conditions of the class struggle and its historical necessities. It understands the madness and historical unsustainability of the capitalist system, but, in accordance with its ahistorical mode of thought, it also denies the harsh necessities of the proletarian-revolutionary struggle aimed at the elimination of capitalism. It has imagined a cultural ideal of the future socialist social order, where wolves graze peacefully alongside lambs, and believes that the means by which one must fight for this ideal must also be peaceful in nature. The brutalities of the bourgeois class state lead it to the conclusion that the very idea of the state in general—including the proletarian state—is one of those things that must be eradicated. Trade unionism, like us, strives for a classless society and concludes—since it views world events from an ethical rather than a historical perspective—that the proletarian state is just as much an obstacle to the development of a classless society as the bourgeois-capitalist organization of power. Therefore, it denies the necessity of the proletarian dictatorship, because it sees the state itself as the root of all evil, without realizing that the character of the state changes fundamentally with the change in the relations of production, and without realizing that the relations of production can only be changed in a communist direction under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Trade unionism expresses genuine petty-bourgeois moral outrage at the abominations of the proletarian state, but without showing the path that leads to communism without the means of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The idea that the dictatorship of the working class could also be directed against individual (counterrevolutionary!) sectors of the working class is so terrifying to the pious trade unionist that he fails to realize that the capitalist counterrevolution will always recruit its armies from among proletarian elements and that these elements, as part of the counterrevolution, must be fought with all available means.
  Consequently, the rejection of the state system of coercion as such also determines the methods of struggle. The rejection of the state in general means renouncing the conquest of political power. With this refusal to seize political power, syndicalism now considers itself—who knows how radical—and fails to realize how the bourgeoisie mocks it. The idea of conquering or maintaining positions of economic power without holding political power is, in reality, too naive to make this obvious nonsense particularly clear. The history of the factory occupations that took place in Italy last year under syndicalist leadership has likely demonstrated to every sensible proletarian that the possession of economic power—of the sites of production—is an illusion as long as the ruling capitalist class is capable, through its state apparatus, of halting the production process. However, to make the production process possible, it is not enough to take possession of the most important factories; it is also necessary to wrest from the bourgeoisie the power to control its entire state and administrative apparatus, since, otherwise, it could resort to the idea of recapturing the factories with the help of its armed white guards.”...” Syndicalism, which fundamentally rejects armed insurrection, thus denies the necessities of the proletarian revolution and ends up mired in the quagmire of pure and simple bourgeois pacifism, as is unambiguously demonstrated by the literary collaboration of Helene Stoecker and Armin T. Wegener in *Syndicalist*.”
  (We and German Syndicalism. Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union or General Workers’ Union, AAUD journal Der Kampfruf, 1921, Nos. 2 and 3.) (libcom.org)

• “The Trade Unions. Even more clearly than the parties, the trade unions became organizations of a perfectly capitalist nature. Born in an epoch of small-scale war against employers who were not yet powerfully organized in cartels, they were originally the adequate form for proletarian combat against capitalism’s tendencies towards pauperization.
  ‘It was by combating capital, combating its tendencies to absolute impoverishment, setting limits to the latter and thus making the existence of the working class possible, that the trade union movement fulfilled its role in capitalism, and this made it a limb of capitalist society itself’...‘Just as parliamentary activity incarnates the leaders’ psychological hold over the working masses, so the trade union movement incarnates their material authority. . . . In developed capitalism, and even more in the epoch of imperialism, the trade unions have become enormous confederations which manifest the same developmental tendencies as the bourgeois state in an earlier period. There has grown up within them a class of officials, a bureaucracy, which controls all the organization’s resources—funds, press, the appointment of officials; often they have even more far-reaching powers, so that they have changed from being the servants of the collectivity to being its masters, and have identified themselves with the organization. And the trade unions also resemble the state and its bureaucracy in that, democratic forms notwithstanding, the will of the members is unable to prevail against the bureaucracy. . . . [T]he workers do not control their trade union, but . . . it stands over them as an external force against which they can rebel, although they themselves are the source of its strength—once again like the state itself’ (Pannekoek).” (the December 1920 Guidelines of the General Workers' Union of Germany) (libcom.org)

• “b) Theses on the Trade Union Question, on Works Councils, and the Control of Production.
  1. The trade unions created by the working class during the period of peaceful development of capitalism were workers’ organizations dedicated to the struggle for higher wages in the labor market and for the improvement of their working conditions. Revolutionary Marxists strove to link them with the political party of the proletariat, social democracy, for the joint struggle for socialism.
  2. The subsequent development of the trade unions—just like that of international social democracy—took place in accordance with the dialectical law of the development of contradictions: during the era of the boom and the height of capitalist prosperity, the form, methods, and content of the labor movement could adapt to the essence of capitalism and contribute, within the capitalist economy, to improve the living conditions of the working class. But when, around the beginning of the 20th century, a turning point in the development of capitalism occurred, when the decisive crisis of the capitalist era was looming and, with it, the contradiction of interests between capitalism and the working class intensified, the hour of decision also arrived for the trade unions. International reformism —partly masked by revolutionary rhetoric—prevailed, both in political parties and in the labor unions. This organization, which had exclusive control over all media outlets, all material and organizational resources, and was supported by the democratic ideology poisoned by capitalist society among the better-paid workers paid workers and even the broad masses—opted, compelled by its entire tradition, to uphold the dominance of capital, against the objectively revolutionary interests of the working class; it stifled May Day celebrations and sabotaged the mass strikes.
  Once the trade unions, at the onset of the full dialectical development of class contradictions, had sided with capital—indeed, once it had been clearly demonstrated that the existence of the trade unions depended on the perpetuation of capital’s rule—the subsequent development was entirely logical and inevitable.
  3. For the same reasons that international social democracy, with few exceptions, did not prove to be an instrument of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism, but rather an organization that, in the interest of the bourgeoisie, alienates the proletariat from the revolution, the unions proved themselves during the war, in most cases, as part of the bourgeoisie’s war apparatus and helped the bourgeoisie to squeeze the working class to the utmost, in order to wage a war as vigorous as possible in defense of capitalist profit interests.
  4. Due to their programmatic and personal ties to the leaders and the bureaucratic apparatus of the parties of the Second International and the “Half-International,” the trade unions have become the most solid pillars of the counterrevolutionary democratic policy of those parties. The more that, in all the countries that had participated in the war, overcoming the economic crisis that followed the imperialist war came to the forefront among the tasks of the capitalist state, the more the trade unions—by expanding and modifying their original tasks—have decisively shaped the policies of the social-patriotic and centrist parties, thereby becoming a political factor of the first order.
  In this same context, a second development is taking place: through long-term collective bargaining agreements with employers’ associations, mandatory arbitration tribunals, participation in the state regulation (read “sabotage”) of the right to strike, and the system of works councils, as well as in the state-organized demobilization and labor market; in short, through a coherent system as a whole, the unions are increasingly becoming, under the legal protection of the power of capital, parts of that capitalist state apparatus through which, under the guise of economic democracy, the working masses are muzzled in every sense and left at the mercy of capital. These two processes—the politicization and nationalization of the unions—advance in the various highly capitalist countries in direct proportion to the degree of maturity of the social revolution; therefore, in Germany, where the acute struggles of the social revolution are already being waged, they have already been completed.
  The international character of this development is manifested in the founding of the International Labor Office in Geneva—that treacherous alliance, masked as democracy, between the Yellow Trade Union International of Amsterdam and the League of Nations, masked as democracy, of the imperialist governments of capital throughout the world. Just as the parties of the Second International and the “half-International” have become the last and strongest pillars of democratic state power, so too are the old trade unions, the last and most solid pillars of the dictatorship of capital in the form of legalized economic democracy.
  5. The economic consequences of the war, the total disorganization of the world economy, runaway inflation, the widespread use of women and youth labor, and the deterioration of housing conditions—all of this is driving the broadest masses of the proletariat onto the path of struggle against capitalism.
  6. The capitalist class, for its part, is striving in every country to overcome the crisis caused by the imperialist war and to re-consolidate the power of capital, which has been shaken. To achieve this goal, it must fight by all means to lower the standard of living of the working class far below the current level and to greatly intensify exploitation. To this end, the capitalist class turns to the old trade unions in every country; it does so in various ways: where the crisis is most advanced, such as in Germany, the employers, together with the trade unions, muzzle the proletariat with the ropes of an apparent economic democracy; whereas, where capitalism is still stronger—as in England, for example—the employers wage, together with the unions, sham struggles and, in this way, keep the workers believing that, in the current crisis, it is still possible to achieve, within the capitalist economy, a lasting improvement in the living conditions of the proletariat.
  Just as capitalist state power is an instrument for the repression of open class struggle in general and in the economic sphere in particular, so too have the unions, for years now, in the service of the capitalist class, become an instrument that represses open revolutionary class struggle. Just as the highest and ultimate manifestation of capitalist state power is bourgeois and parliamentary democracy in the political sphere, so too is the highest and ultimate form of organization of capitalist power economic democracy, sustained by the trade unions. To succeed in the economic struggle, the broadest masses, driven by reformist illusions, turn first to the trade unions wherever the first wave of the revolutionary struggle begins to rise.
  Trade unions take advantage everywhere of this first wave of struggle to, through a semblance of leadership and covert sabotage of the struggle, draw as many of the masses as possible to their side and imbue them with reformist ideas. But as soon as the scope and frequency of the strikes and the magnitude of the demands that workers, out of necessity, put forward threaten to seriously undermine the foundations of the and, at the same time, endanger the organizational apparatus and the funds of the unions—and, with them, the very basis of the unions’ existence—the capitalists and the unions join forces to make the continuation of such struggles impossible.
  7. In the current era of capitalist decline, the working class must wage the struggle for the preservation of its existence in every country—until it seizes power—conceiving this struggle, depending on the situation, as a defensive struggle against the impoverishing tendencies of capital or as an offensive struggle against the economic power of capital. The unions are no longer capable of leading this struggle due to their structure, their methods of struggle, and their tradition. The old organizational structure of the unions divides workers into separate occupational groups, even though the process of capitalist exploitation unites them as the exploited within the workplace, within the country, and internationally. The methods of struggle of the old unions are—and increasingly—geared toward compliance with the legal forms established by the capitalists in collaboration with the union bureaucracy. The tradition of the old unions is oriented toward the perpetuation of the capitalist economy, not toward its elimination. The form of organization, the methods of struggle, and the ideological tradition of the old unions constitute an organic whole that has been forged throughout history. Pushing workers, in their economic struggles, toward these unions means steering them away from communist ideology, hindering the full development of the struggle of the masses, and entrenching them in the belief in the unshakability of capitalism; it means preventing them from applying revolutionary and effective methods of struggle, and pushing them into the shackles of bourgeois legality; it means, quite simply, preventing them from uniting as the exploited and continuing to hand them over, fragmented by profession, to intellectual capital.
  8. Given that this evolution of the unions in different countries—depending on the age of the unions, the historically entrenched ideology of the working masses, and the severity of the economic crisis—exhibits varying degrees of intensity and has reached different levels of maturity, Communists are compelled to choose their tactics in each country after carefully observing all these details. However, despite all tactical differences, communists are obliged to participate as intensely as possible in the economic struggles of the Masses.
  They must direct this participation toward a unified line. This line is as follows:
  
  a) to unite the workers, as an exploited class, in active and unconditional solidarity, overcoming all artificial divisions by profession and industry;
  b) to always openly proclaim as their objective the overthrow of capitalist power;
  c) prepare for the working class to take control of the economy and for communist construction through the councils, and carry out the economic struggle for partial objectives and partial successes using revolutionary means,
  d) in general, systematically educate the working masses to disobey oppressive capitalist laws and contracts,
  e) undermine the capitalist economy through action and by all means, thereby contributing to its total collapse.
  
  9. Wherever it has already been necessary, in order to fulfill these principles, to create new organizations to fight against the old unions, or where class-conscious workers have already created such organizations (unions), Communists must support these unions with all their might—ideologically, in terms of propaganda, and organizationally—wage the most vigorous struggle against the old unions in their entirety, and strive to dismantle them by all means. They must strive to ensure that these unions, in terms of organizational form, methods of struggle, and ideology, become organically unified structures with a proletarian-revolutionary class-struggle character, just as the old unions are organically unified structures of a counterrevolutionary character. Furthermore, communists must rigorously ensure that the unions do not isolate themselves from the rest of the working class, but rather, in the workplaces, at public meetings, and in the struggle, always demonstrate the most vigorous effectiveness outwardly, among the broad masses of the working class. Furthermore, Communists are obliged to help such unions free themselves from syndicalist and pacifist prejudices and to take a stand on the side of communism, the only force that can serve as a reliable compass amid the confusion of the economic struggle.
  10. In the era of capitalism’s disintegration, the proletariat’s economic struggle transforms into a political struggle much more rapidly than was possible during the era of capital’s peaceful development. Any major economic conflict can immediately raise the question of revolution for the workers. Therefore, it is the duty of communists to point out to the workers, at every stage of the economic struggle, that this struggle can only succeed if the working class, in an open struggle, defeats the capitalist class and undertakes, through the dictatorship, the task of construction. On this basis, communists must strive to infuse the working class’s economic organizations as fully as possible with the communist spirit, demonstrating, through the clarity of their slogans and forecasts and through practical sacrifices, that they are indeed the vanguard of the workers’ revolution and, in this way, to win the trust and effective support of the broadest working-class masses and their economic organizations.
  II.
  1. The intensification of the class struggle has led the capitalist class to improve its means of fighting the working class everywhere, especially where it can draw on the experience of a strong and deeply rooted social democracy and labor movement. The capitalist class is carefully and methodically engaged in gathering all significant partial demands put forward by revolutionary workers, falsifying them, legalizing them, and turning them into weapons of struggle against the proletariat. This strategy has so far been applied in the economic sphere to two such partial demands: works councils and control over production.
  2. Works councils and production control in an extra-legal form can persist for a certain time as an expression of a fluctuating balance of power between the classes. As soon as the bourgeoisie succeeds in legalizing works councils or production control, in whatever form, both will become institutions of capital against the proletariat, components of the economic-democratic deception, and will serve to shift responsibility for the collapse of the economy from the capitalists to the workers, conceal from the broad masses the unaltered persistence of their wage servitude, and divide the workers and set them against one another.
  3. From these experiences, communists must learn two things: first, they must never harbor the illusion that anything can be achieved for the workers through such partial slogans. Therefore, they must leave propaganda in favor of such partial objectives in the hands of those who do not have a completely clear communist vision; for it can never be the task of communists to pretend to be more foolish than they are. When the working-class masses launch themselves into the struggle over issues such as works councils, control of production, and the like, communists must, of course, support these struggles in every possible way, but always in such a way as to propagate the seizure of total power by the councils. Second, where the bourgeoisie has succeeded in legalizing partial revolutionary gains and, in doing so, transforming them into counterrevolutionary positions, communists must immediately wage the most vigorous struggle against such positions. Any so-called “exploitation” of such positions amounts to a strengthening of the ideological and effective power of the counterrevolution. Communists can never do too much to educate the working class in the boycott of all laws and legal institutions of capitalist power, for the task is not to revolutionize the institutions, but to revolutionize the working class.”
  (KAPD .Proletarier. Nº 7. Juli 1921) (raetekommunismus) 

For further reading:

Selected KAPD Works 

Trabajos Seleccionados del KAPD 

KAZ Berlin Works 

KAPD 1919-1932 Português 

The Communist Left in Germany 1918-1921 Gilles Dauve and Denis Authier 

Historia del Partido Comunista Obrero Alemán (KAPD) (Bernhard Reichenbach - 1928) 

KAPD Partido Obrero Comunista de Alemania – Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands (KAPD Compilación de textos 1920-1932 

KAPD Textos Seleccionados 

Introduction

In the previous issue, we provided a general introduction to: the basic configurations of unions; how workers’ labor, grievances, disputes, and strikes are policed by the union; and, finally the general question of self-organization. 

In part two, we turn to the 21st century response of unionism to the newer ‘gig economy’ and how the historical struggle of service workers reflect the conditions and the unionism of today’s gig workers. Though we begin with a review of the definition of the proletarian classification to better evaluate the terms discussed in this article. After gig unionism, we then provide a brief introduction of tenant unionism and its general role in policing the proletariat. Then, we sketch the broader social implication of unionism’s role regarding class society’s domination outside the shopfloor: from the informal laborers and the reserve army of labor, and from the domestic home to multi-national and global dynamics, especially with the ongoing inter-imperialist activities. Then, we pick up where part one concluded, proletarian self-organization itself. We conclude with considering the significance of communist intervention in such circumstances and reiterating the nature of independent and internationalist self-organization of the proletariat. There is also some recommended reading provided as examples of historical analysis of unionism and its consequences, including other questions relevant to part two.

Issue #8 will provide a deeper consideration of the inter-imperialist stakes that unionism is implicated in and of anti-unionism as a fundamental necessity for proletarian self-organization, historically and currently.

The Proletarian Class

We repeat here the simplified criteria of the Proletarian class: 

Those who lack the means of ownership of the means of production who actively or whose only option to survive is to be hired, that is the sale of their labor-power, which include a wide variety of tasks, for wages or remuneration (1).

Control for the proletariat is reduced to the consent and agreement (formal or informal) to the terms of the sale of their labor and the implicated tasks. This leaves the proletariat with distinct options of how to subsist and remain a legal subject, though these options are entirely on the sole basis of the sale of their labor-power. The control for every other facet of society becomes the plurality of precedents and decisions by the bourgeoisie and its lesser sections, the deeper violent state and class history that guarantees the markets’ and monetary regimes’ existence where the proletariat complies in its class activity defined by such control and history, even off the shift, during leisure in housing and comfort and entertainment, the means of acquiring material subsistence, that is transactions, and their subjectivity as a citizen in civil and political regimes are such domains they may occupy but don’t control. Though, this is not to say that a ‘proletarian’ control over these regimes would be feasible nor would some control over such by persons who ‘represent’ a proletarian ‘interest’ would be significant beyond altering class society, the only proletarian control is that which emerges from an internationalist and independent power.

The Bourgeoisie

Profit is one facet of how capital operates, other additional financial operations due to central bank and large-bank innovations, even multinational institutions and associations, are available to and designed by the bourgeoisie to surpass profit in terms of the accounting practices for revenues and beyond the moment of productive labor and sale of commodities. Companies can surpass profits by generating greater market capitalization, which is the increase of the price of their company stock, relative to the stock of other companies, for investors to buy and own part of the company(2). Such a class has the power and capital to generate this growth since they have the access to gather coalitions of their peers, including the security of the monetary system and the markets assured by the central banks, treasuries, and international institutions, even in failure (3). Ultimately, the wealth of the nation generated by the activity of the bourgeois class enables these larger operations of a government and economy to their power. The difference in sizes between capitals and capitalist nations put them in both mutual repulsion and alliance. Given that capitalism is not just a national class regime but a multinational class regime, socialized in its monetary and financial institutions, the difference of power in the geopolitical realm is the differences of the control these multiple sections of the bourgeoisie have.

Proletarians in the Gig Economy

‘Gig worker’ refers to a form of wage contract and tax classification which often flattens the class relationships involved in ‘gig work.’ Workers in the gig economy are often referred to as ‘self employed contractors’, something which confuses whether gig-workers are proletarians or not. Clearly, the proletariat can clearly be engaged in ‘gigs’ as part of the selling of their labor power. It may or may not be the primary source of income or supplemental with or between one or more jobs. What differs from the more typical ‘independent contractor’, is that the gig-worker relies on a digital app or website platform to broker, that is, to distribute their services to clients given the worker complies with the terms set by the platform. Although the worker can set their schedules but within the constraint that they typically seek the peak demands of order frequency and price rates. A large portion of this gig labor is for local on-demand tasks of transporting riders to a location and the delivery of restaurant food, or grocery items from vendors to a customer. The platforms set the price-rate according to algorithms and add to the precarity of gig workers making their wages unpredictably at the discretion of an algorithm. Even major retail companies, various chain restaurants, and lesser vendors have integrated these platforms into daily transactions with customers.

These gig platform companies, like many companies, typically grow on the basis of their stock value growth, that is investors who perceive a projected growth and buy the company’s stock or shares of a stock. There is a large diversity of financial operations that can explain the significance of this for bourgeois power but are beyond the scope of this article. Although market capitalization is not counted as a revenue of profits, it is still a competitive advantage for market power which allows a section of the bourgeoisie to control more of the market with more capital to fund its operations that defend their class power, including worker exploitation. The platform companies’ revenues are also collected from charging additional fees to consumers and vendors and then distributing what is left to the worker according to the wage-rate that is determined often by the platforms’ algorithm. Given the algorithmic overdetermining how gig workers relate to the app interface for earning income, this usually drives many proletarians who engage in this type of gig work experience a precarity since the platforms perform, without transparency, arbitrary operations that restrict task assignment and by extension their wages, rendering the ‘flexibility’ of choosing one’s shifts an exaggeration.

Independent Contractor? Self-Employed? Freelancer? Service Labor? Petty-Bourgeoise?

‘Self-employed contractors’ or the ‘freelancers’ can be business owners of their ‘one-person’ enterprise. When this is the case, they can better control a broader set of the terms of their contract for more direct compensation, especially pricing. Independent contractors can engage with specialized features of these platforms or even separate special platforms but ultimately have a direct say on the terms in which they sell their service. They also find clients from their networks and can own personal copyrighted intellectual property of their branding. Ultimately, these qualify as petty-bourgeois.

This is also not to be generalized that service workers or service laborers nor as unproductive labor since their same tasks can be performed for an enterprise or employer who seek to exploit a surplus-value, the service becomes a commodity performed bought on the market as such. 

Gig Worker Unionism

Given the legal classification that the platform companies have set for the people who work through the app, gig work has evaded the jurisdiction of many labor laws relevant to unionization. But this has been the subject of recent reforms, and also the grounds for new unions. But as part one had demonstrated, unionism remains a significant disciplinary power of proletarian autonomy. Whether reform reclassifies them as employees by default or reclassification requires the discretion of the worker herself, the working class lends over their activity once again to intermediaries that will police and discipline their self-organization into compliance with management, law, and enterprise control. 

Despite the ingenuity of strike action for gig workers involving a concerted refusal of tasks, that is by changing the profile status on the app to off-duty during peak demand hours, and the assembling of gig workers, that is using digital networking to hold meetings for distantly dispersed labor of delivery travel and also personally contacting them where they coalesce at high-demand vendors, these actions become controlled for unionization and legalism. As we elaborated in the previous part of this article, we can observe the regular policing and boundaries that unionism locks an organizing proletariat. 

Tenant Unions

Despite being outside the workplace, tenant unions remain a key component to the traditional labor movement and have found another resurgence in the past decade. Tenants, in the building associations they’ve formed, make demands for lowered, capped, or stabilized rent and to have the property managers address living condition issues. This organizing includes strike action, in this case the rent strike of withholding rent payments to force the property management and owners to bargain with the tenants. These associations join into their regional form of the tenant union, members being the tenant representatives of the local building associations, while pooling and allocating resources for coordinating litigious and legal strategies to support strikes or, more primarily, to address tenant grievances prompting regulatory laws and courts to make property management comply or the unions prompt management directly to settle issues before prompting the law.

Just as the workplace contains ‘employees’, not all of whom are proletarians, the same goes for residential ‘tenants’. Workplaces and residential properties have employees and tenants that differ in size, class, and social position (ethnicity/race, gender, citizen status, etc.) They differ in their relation to the dynamics of power given the historical results of said dynamics in currently enabling these individuals’ own cooperation within each and among the classes. Historically and currently, there tends to be a distinction, a residential segregation, between residential areas, often boundaried by ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic origin’, as immigrants or born-citizens, including a class distinction like ‘working-class’ neighborhoods or ‘wealthy’ neighborhoods. Though, most attention may be given to the poorer tenants, wealthy or luxury residential tenants also form tenant unions. This is significant for the unions in the representation of tenants regarding legal battles and grievance conciliation with landlords and the property management companies. The reforms and lobbying, the litigation activity, reflect the class character of the appellants and the wider control that wealth affords them, though not solely by income but assets, so they can impose their vision of reform while the poorer tenants affiliate in collaboration together as tenant federations that are beyond single-building associations.

Housing and the Proletariat

The real estate economy is massive and rent is not a simple category as it applies to various relations that enable the bourgeoisie, as commercial, office, or industrial tenants, to operate their class powers. Despite the power of the rent strike, the historical rent strike movements still developed incoherently. The tenant associations would organize the mass rent strikes and when they encountered the integration by the state and property management, the associations became tenant unions. In cases where tenant unions were already present, then unions would plan the rent strike movement as a legalist integration. Thus, tenant unions have this role of incorporating tenant organizing into the broader domains of bourgeois control of real estate markets and state sanctions where both mobilize the police for evictions and to threaten penalties of breaking rental contracts. When rent strikes organized by these single-building tenant associations occur, its demands can be tolerated by property management and addressed on a case-by-case basis, fracturing efforts of joining cross-building action whose activity only occurred from these separate incidents. The proprietors maintain their general control of their sum properties. Legal and litigious strategies are prioritized by tenant unions to evoke governmental institutions because these can prompt longer term and wider reform which property management cannot settle easily like with single buildings. This tends to correspond to the domination of the organization by non-proletarian tenants who are better positioned to commit to such strategies but at the expense of proletarian tenants. Thus the demands the proletarian tenants make, are the result of the petty bourgeois tenants policing and dominating the unions and the wider movement of tenant unionism.

The global distribution of residential renting indicates a contrast of monetary and financial regimes that the sectors of the bourgeoisie in their respective nations have historically reconciled in consensus or opposition with their political elites and the monetary-financial arms of the state’s central banks and national mints. Between tenants of privately-owned properties, tenants of social housing, and personal home ownership, different countries express different proportions of how their populations reside in their homes, often a mixture that constitutes large sectors of the population to these three housing forms. Their laws may include broader social housing or may be developing them with the collaboration of tenant unions. Overall, the proletarian housing conditions for tenants of private real estate are significantly defined by either market volatile rent that severely burdens their income, which becomes a barrier to home ownership, but rent caps or rent stabilization allow renting to maintain affordability for proletarian tenants. Though this still applies for more expensive rental properties, making it of interest to petty bourgeois tenants who we’ve described as organizationally disciplinary of their proletarian tenant members during legalistic and political mobilization. 

Even so, most renting under private proprietors, especially who own entire buildings, can commonly decide to discontinue renewing the rental leases which periodically expire, thus any tenants can be evicted without cause, albeit it’s not discriminatory, or in some cases, it requires a ‘just cause’ of a tenant’s continued payment tardiness and other factors like significant property damage, public disturbance, renovations, demolition, etc. Additionally, these companies have a broad control of the markets for residential, commercial, and office renting, permitting a complex market control to increase prices in certain regional markets. Though, this depends if this private model constitutes a major portion of the real estate market, but if it's where social housing is stronger and broader, that market control is unable to occur to the same extent. This often corresponds to the history of geo-social transformations, comparatively and respectively, across urban, suburban, and rural relations with labor and capital mobility, migration and gentrification, and industrial and commercial trends. Proletarians remain at the behest of all this being the control of bourgeois activity. The settling of tenant grievances can be performed by tenant unions, government agencies, or by property management, the relation remains about bargaining, even as so, bargaining prompted a collection of classes, who collaborate or not, with the residential property ownership, it does not center proletarian control. 

Proletarians and Home Ownership

There are specialized legal structures of ownership that were established by various sectors of the classes, including the proletariat, in order to assure housing in the face of the volatility of the real estate market. These housing ownership structures (Collaborative housing, limited common property regimes, ownership cooperatives, Community Land Trusts, and Limited-equity Trusts) typically have multiple members who, as a legal entity, collectively own the property. Such properties are with many residential units. The ownership model often involves collective decisions of maintaining and arranging amenities, funds, expenses, and legal rights. Though these ownership structures have varied developments and results, especially regarding inheritance, the sale of their lease, or transfer of property to another cohort, children or different families and owner-tenants, often decided in some collective form practiced by the active owners. Those factors tend to determine whether any proletarians involved transform into petty-bourgeoisie, similar to worker cooperatives, that essentially make a collective petty-bourgeoisie. To arrive at such an ownership is a long process of funding the means and growing the coalition but all within the boundaries of reform. Housing reform movements have often included in their demands these ownership cooperatives as a social program for the state to establish. Such movements who adopt such strategies involve tenant unions and endorsed politicians to collaborate in designing these programs and legislation. The state and law are the authoritative sites for defense, but when the state withdraws, combined with these real estate bourgeoisie who lobby legislation, it leads to an erosion of this housing model. 

These housing models are in contrast to the widespread individually mortgaged home loans that commercial banks generate so individuals may buy a permanent ownership lease after paying off the loan with interest. There is a complex interrelation with markets, mortgage-backed, securities, bonds, central bank controlled interest rates, supply chains, and multinational capital which is another deep history of bourgeois expropriation but this article is limited from examining it sufficiently (4). Thus we limit our consideration to the proletarian condition with this housing model of mortgage home loans. Given these loans are based on credit history and financial position, a proletarian condition risks their ability to maintain a mortgage. During the volatilities of the labor market and the broader market for staple expenses of energy and food, they can barely manage or perhaps fail and the banks are forced to cancel the mortgage and terminate the lease. Additionally, the more common case of properties these proletarians mortgage and the market for that class of residential properties, the property often never valuates in a manner that capital gains are made, thus hardly ever sold or priced more than what it was bought at. Affording this housing is often only possible after a multigenerational pooling of funds meanwhile the household income depends on that proletarian wage-relation. This strain caused by mortgages is similar to proletarians in state-leased home ownership models. Here, state-owned properties are leased for a finite long-term period which is bought and financed through down payments and with heavy interests. The property returns to the state after the lease ends. The affordability for proletarians also tends to rely on multi-generational fund pooling. 

In some cases, some working-class homeowners end up becoming real estate investors by renting out parts of those properties—either renting out their primary residence or, wherever they can, such as converting them to tourist apartments. They turn one apartment into two, and one part becomes a “tourist apartment.” In this case, the proletarian homeowner’s own struggle for wage-increases, which would counterbalance the relationship between necessary labor and surplus labor, is offset by their new bourgeois activities. Proletarians or petty-bourgeois may rent out their apartments at high prices and then move into lower-standard rental apartments. This tourist renting, now digitalized on platforms like AirBnB, becomes a market tension. Competitive success in such a market is the difference of control that defines the upward social mobility to emerge as petty bourgeois or above. The inflation of housing markets can bring volatilities that make any occurrence of ‘social mobility’ precarious, returning many true home owners to the proletarian condition, linked to a growing precarity of the minor professionals of semi-proletarian condition whose labor that capital increasingly standardizes. The barriers to home ownership and generational wealth are antagonistic to proletarians; and are barriers that are defended by the petty bourgeoisie, meanwhile the larger real estate bourgeoisie sustain a broad control that defines the market. Tenant unions can only politically contend and concede to this wider reality that the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie owners of real estate are better able to politically dominate. The state favors legislations that benefit this class of real estate ownership, though with heavier bias to the higher priced market activity of the bourgeoisie.

The boundaries of Unionism

Is the question of unionism still to reform it beyond its current limits? To innovate unionism? To develop grassroot unionism or ‘autonomy’ movements based on the unions? The communist assertion is no, no and no. Unions may organize and mobilize workers into a one of many collectives, but the survival of proletarians is an activity that definitively does not occur on the basis of an independently organized class, rather it’s on the basis that determines their class position, the class regime of the bourgeoisie. 

Proletarian defense requires independence due to the depth of class rule today and its international or global coordination due to the multinational collaboration, competition, and form of the contemporary bourgeoisie. This defense had never meant exclusively the tax-coded ‘productive’ employee but that of the entire class.

The Informal, Underemployed, and the Unemployed Proletariat

Informal Proletariat are individuals of proletarian condition who are hired without the official labor contracts, thus the compensation is typically with cash and the terms are set by a manager who decides based on their own personal discretion. The absence of legal recognition means the informal proletariat are unqualifiable for many employment benefits and labor rights, often resulting in much lower and unreliable wages. This is in relation to a wider informal economy, which are petty bourgeoisie, perhaps personally exerting labor, informal ‘workers’, but often with some form of ownership engaged in informal commerce without the official licenses, official tax filing, and official inter-commercial contracts, like small vendors, farmers or producers. Depending on the figures, Informal workers make up a massive portion of workers, a global majority above 50%, and in many nations, particularly the ‘lesser developed’, constitute nearly the entire workforce of their populations. (ourworldindata).

Underemployed proletarians are the sector of the class engaged in part-time employment or temporary employment, and often with several part-time shifts in different jobs simultaneously, overlapping, or intermittently. Though, this type of condition can be of formal or informal employment, thus applying to many informal proletarians. They are a minority of the entire ‘workforce’ and can hover at rates below 10% or in historical crises and worst modern cases, rise to above 20%, meaning the best and worst cases corresponding to the more developed and lesser developed countries respectively. (worldbank).

Unemployed proletarians are those of the proletarian condition but not actively employed. Perhaps defined as job-seeking by certain government censuses to assess if someone qualifies for unemployment benefits, but this is not a necessary additional criteria for our analysis. Often without work for long periods of time, subsisting on their savings, or just as often, living with a partner or family who cover daily costs of food and bills, permitting the unemployed to avoid renting, meanwhile they are engaged in domestic labor. They also tend to make up a minority of the larger ‘workforce’ of proletarians, assuming the methods used by the official figures, unemployment rates can range between sub 10% or above 30% in different cases of countries globally, the range corresponds to countries in similar fashion as the underemployment figures. (worldbank).

Control Over the Informal, Underemployed, and the Unemployed Proletariat

These sectors are typically excluded from the union, but tend to be accommodated with an individual membership model that many unions include and provide some portion of a relief fund. Despite this, they are generally largely unaccounted for or even excluded by unions. These sectors of the proletariat make up large numbers of the global proletariat and the union-form is mostly unable to make a legal defense for them if there is no formal status of employment. Unions often develop and bind themselves to their particular industry, and the corresponding legislation that was prompted by the particular grievances of that enterprise and labor relation, where the law is technical and specific about how and who can be defended.

The underemployed tend to be unable to find a union that can accommodate them as their job insecurity may demand cross-regional mobility or seasonality, though, legislation and internal union by-law may permit them to become a member of more than one union, but this is very uncommon and often heavily restricted, leaving them outside the boundaries of unionism. Meanwhile, the unemployed proletariat is exterior to unions. Unless initially a member of a union and was fired, the union can only bargain that they are rehired but the union often aligns with management policy defending major lay-offs which unions cannot ultimately challenge legally. Otherwise, the unemployed proletarian is not protected under labor union rights and laws.

The informal proletarians are not protected by labor regulation or union rights and rely on non-labor civil law and rights for settling their grievances. This tends to be due to the nature of their necessities determined by the job market and the social or financial barriers of qualifications where being informally recognized as a compliant and able laborer is all that remains. Where informal proletariat represent a majority of a nation’s workforce, unions have a nearly absent presence, particularly because of labor laws and the abusive practices of employers. Though, informal proletariat do organize regardless, making associations, perhaps nominally unions, and still engage in struggle for wages, bargaining, strikes in their particular case of a workshop, and in a similar but basic fashion as a union would; the difference being the present or absent rights for organizing and labor. Here these informal petty bourgeoisie can still control the bargaining, since labor rights do not apply, they can personally appoint the negotiators or even have the collaboration of police or local authorities to terminate the bargaining or simply through strategic turnover. 

The informality is significantly dependent on the nature of these informal economies regarding its scale and the extent to which they are embedded with familial or inter-familial kinship networks. Thus, those economies correspond to a matrix of implicit social or cultural status including a proximity or link to official authority. This all may interrelate in a manner to enable these informal petty bourgeoisie, and in their coalitions, to invoke that difference in status across familial members and to invoke the cultural conventions of shame, etc. to be the rationale of how hirable an informal proletarian and to even discipline them. Especially since it's based on this personal discretion, and thus perception of the proletarian’s history is significant where gossip can bring stigma or leave one ambiguously a non-stigma. In the case of these proletarians organizing, this context makes it a risk for them to organize, or once having organized, converts the proletarian as a risk. Where the informal proletarian is a stranger to localized kinship, the less these ‘conventions’ are personalized, but can still play into prejudice and the lack of regulation permits these owners to abuse proletarian strangers even further. Even so, this dynamic of ‘conventions’ that enables that class control also occurs when acquiring housing, qualifications, etc. Even within ‘formal’ economies where the evaluation of a proletarian is possible through legally accessible data, legalized surveillance, and official procedures of hiring though all within the parameters of civil rights and general regulation. Politics, electoral campaigns, social movements, litigation, civic procedures etc. even in the unions, feature this dynamic. Though of course, the effectiveness of using conventions is how that use belongs to a particular ability of bourgeois control, benefiting the more powerful. 

In certain cases, unions can have an active role in the control of evaluating proletarians within the conditions of hiring, where official or implicit agreements between the employer and union of a shop require the employer to only hire active union members for a workshop, this practice makes the shop a closed shop. These were historically prevalent in Europe and the US, but prohibition of closed shops became widely adopted by those countries including legislating employer rights who cannot be forced to agree to a closed shop and including individual employee rights that make being a union member optional when a shop is unionized. Despite this, there are other countries who legally incorporate them. If not, the employment laws may have a gap in regulating closed shops or are unable to comprehensively enforce regulation. There are equivalents to closed shops where new hires are required to join the respective labor union. And of course, with state-owned enterprises, and thus the unions directly controlled by the state, joining that union is legally obligatory in the hiring process. In general, the unions find this incentive to become this ‘monopoly’ so they may defend the active employment of their own members, even exclude membership if it means the survival of the union in the face of layoffs or pressure from management, the control of the bourgeoisie. In such cases, the non-members and unemployed are excluded by the unions. 

Self-organization of the class done by these sectors does not necessarily occur in a strictly distinctive manner, but instead collaboratively since it is normal that they either live with their ‘formal’ counterparts or even these proletarians themselves oscillate between these sectors and being a formal proletariat, perhaps even some combination of these conditions (5). Unemployed, underemployed, and informal proletarians self-organizing often make demands to be employed, to have the state create formal employment opportunities, some form of social welfare by the state or company, and wages when applicable. Proletarians amongst these varying conditions, formal or informal, are materially divided as an activity of the proletarian class. The character, span, and scale of this division is the consequence of bourgeois control, and how the proletariat contended amongst themselves to relate, still encounters these boundaries set by active and past bourgeois control, even older class regimes.

Class Rule of Social Life

Combining legal, financial, and social processes, with capital, the accumulation reasserted by the domination of the bourgeois class and its various sectors enables their own activities to continue. This activity results from differences and also transforms into differences of competition and scale. The processes transform according to the interaction of this class with its own and with the other classes. Class domination remains across these developments, what the dynastic or generational transfers of wealth have recalibrated for is the control over an industrial, state, and financial power into associative structures or institutions, national and international. Those institutions enabled collaboration with the lesser bourgeois sectors so they may better mobilize the global proletariat for production, capital, military, or simply the broadening transactional consumption of social life. 

The family or kinship unit is relevant to the activity engaged by the proletariat, often the basis of their survival when underemployed or financially precarious across all ages. Though, there is certainly a large representation of an adult youth without work. The family or kin unit is not necessarily of blood relation but tends to widely operate on subjective terms. Anyhow, this family unit is simultaneously an experience where rational decision and moral obligation are attached, but we must avoid a reductionist psychologicalism. The bourgeoisie have broad capacities to reward its family unit. The reproduction of generational wealth of the bourgeoisie reward is synonymous with a class activity that dominates, families groom and train, rationale accompanies the moral expressions when politically articulated. Navigating the popularized political or intellectual expressions of that class power, the proletariat is demanded to engage in a self-policing, a daily weighing of options against the directives of productivity, contracts, and the necessity of earning a wage: face discipline, lose one’s job, rearrange budgets, migrate in search of work and safer conditions. Their own families may help shelter them temporarily from burdens in a limited manner but their household remains the site where children are prepared for the wage-relation, every member simultaneously a source of aid and vigilance, constrained to survival, the case of which is already that of divided, unorganized class dependent on bourgeois control. Unions simply collect a share of what results from the proletarian families, the compliant proletarian or the troubled proletarian. The union is there to monitor and police the difference of docility. Meanwhile, union bosses and union management ideologically defend their structural role and their personal advantage in it so they can support their families too. The union will appeal to this ‘family’ ideology and a whole scope of ideological apologies for the union’s role for bourgeois control.

Additionally, regardless of the housing model and the past or active solutions to issues of housing markets, whether the rent accounts a major strain or not, these tend to compare in what permits the productivity of the labor-power. If workers are more productive with affordable housing policy or with significant financial strain from overpriced rent, or are housed by state-controlled, cooperative entities, or market-driven private entities, this remains a benefit for bourgeois control on either side of the ‘work-life balance’ model. Proletarians, their families, their peers, encounter this doctrine of productivity, whether actively employed or not, the necessity to sell one's labor-power remains. Again, unionism can only defend and bargain contracts of bourgeois control, they insist on this pricing of labor to occur, but it's an occurrence that belongs to the entire scope of bourgeois control, thus unions do not defend proletarian control. Bourgeois control is multinational, though competitive, it still operates in coalitions, alliances, and in various differences in control, and the extent of that control corresponds to what portion these particular class sections control of the financial, industrial, supply chain, state, political, legal, banking, monetary, etc. regimes in its interrelating local and global scales.

Monetary and Financial Regimes

Returning to precarity of the debt the proletariat experiences the simultaneous necessities of the class regime interdependence of its monetary and financial regimes to operate itself so it may engage its control of financial and monetary regimes. These particular coalitions of the bourgeoisie plan their particular control in the market in establishing the general price of a commodity or tradable capital, and the encounter of differences in this control is the history of markets, and by extension, this control does not only center a dominion over the price but extends to extra-market struggles and to wars. This history of monies, bonds, capital, banks, states, production, etc. is wide and profound. We must restrict ourselves to unionism but the understanding is vital to comprehending bourgeois power and where unionism simply cannot approach it. The proletariat has had to agree to the given that their labor-power is priced, the labor market is where unions have placed themselves to fend against price volatility with negotiating contracts but the dominant feature of this market is that the employer. The bourgeoisie or the state capitalist has the control to close factories or stores and open new ones when unions become intolerable to then cause them to lose their rank-and-file now out of work, without employment and shopfloor to bargain over. Even more so, the bourgeois control constituted by these financial markets and central bank relations is something unions have no part in. Unions can only opinionate, inform, or defend through their affiliations and endorsements with political campaigns or regimes and with the respective sections of bourgeois control whose shopfloors these unions belong to. A clear demonstration is the developments from the international currency loans that have arranged debtor countries’ capital accumulation for globalized bourgeois control; and to more recent innovations of state welfare and central banks designing currency exchanges, monetary systems and monetary programs that can better integrate their informal economies and its informal proletariat, formal too, into national and global bourgeois control. As this happens, the competition of the bourgeoisie for generating and expropriating the means for global advantage requires militarization strategies and the political recalibration of state machinery, thus developing inter-imperialist advantage as war.

What is Proletarian self organization today?

We have referenced the councils in our last issue, but now we consider the contemporary activity today. 

The near full majority of self organization tends to be pre-unionization or pre-integration to the typical civil channels of politics and the workplace with the state and management. Here, what still occurs are the fundamentals of assembly and coordination in the shopfloor or locally to grow and engage in concerted actions like the necessary logistics, funds, and strikes while extending to other shops or proletarian associations outside the workplace. Though, this isn’t to say that self-organization can’t occur post-unionization or post-institutionalization, rather, it’s done without the purview of the union or the civic authority. The proletarian associations, consisting of only proletarians, may involve minor mutual aid networks but they tend to operate very dependent on a very limited minority of organizers of the class. Though, this activity today remains dispersed and localized, unable to even gesture for a wider approach toward the class. They may manage to make limited and temporary defense of their survival but this survival own basis is either controlled by the bourgeoisie or, if this survival resists it, is surrounded and isolated by it where they eventually must resort to its control. This occurs for most wildcat or legal strikes, squatting or occupations, and limited cases of collective expropriations of means of production, even as a revolt or revolution that is typically composed of other mobilizations that are under and are collaborating with a continuing, contesting, emerging sectors of bourgeois control. These sectors also span from local to multinational scales, already dividing their respectively mobilized proletariat. 

Proletarian self-organization has not arrived at such lengths to challenge such ‘regular’ activity or during the mass mobilization or immobilization of ‘social crises’, though they would need to approach their own class without recourse to the shifting sections of the bourgeois class. Rather, they must grasp the capacities that are generated when they can organize across the class internationally. Defending themselves against the divisions already placed before them, expecting failures and setbacks, but planning what can allow them to return to their assembly and coordination. This redefines their expropriations, occupations, and strikes as a class-wide revolutionary activity. Whether by gig proletarians, proletarian tenants, informal, or under/unemployed, the boundaries and obstacles for localist and legalist organization can emphasize the need for class-independent internationalism and what its contours are.

Additionally, revolutionary activity of this character is not identical to the petty-bourgeois, maximalist dogmatism. The struggle for higher wages remains the need that hinges the proletariat’s struggle, and if the non-rentier petty bourgeoisie—which finds itself screwed over by rising prices and the collapse of the real estate market—wants to benefit off this struggle, that’s their problem. Let its most discontented elements join the proletarian movement, but many still engage in attempting to create and dominate movements to gain advantages from the state-capitalist and legalistic-institutional system. Any bargaining with states or management must remain prompted by organizations that are controlled by proletarians. Though, however small it may occur, it is an organization distinctively polar in its relation to the other classes, and any broadening of that organization would be a process exterior to that polarized inter-class negotiation, or exterior to the class collaborationist organization of inter-class negotiations. This is an independence that allows the proletarian organizations to make demands to the wider proletariat and to only organize across the international proletariat. This process has occurred before but from and along contexts that were dominated by the ‘differently-scaled’ of bourgeois control and thus collectively contested their command and manner over proletarian mobilization. The proletarian organizing was unable to distinguish its organization from this class collaborationism and its strategies (6). The emphasis for communists to clarify is that proletarians must defend themselves against such should they ever provide themselves with the revolutionary means of an internationalist and independent manner for communism.

Communist Intervention?

Communists have historically been a minority, and a minority of the proletariat, who have recognized the significance of independently-controlled proletarian revolution of class abolition. 

Though, of course, communists have nominally been associated subject to a long historical practice that has substantially generated or become incorporated as part of the larger control of the bourgeois class and its historical or emerging peers both lesser and shared in power. This results in parties, movements, cells, and sects that have adopted, affiliated with, or directly supported activities that simply extended the contest of those classes, either mobilizing masses or smaller groups for class collaborations while the general proletariat remains proletarian. The priority of such activity is justified by a variety of schemas or models of what history or society is, its classes, and its powers. This generally tends to result in expropriating the capacities of activity from the proletariat and bourgeoisie so these ‘communists’ may collaborate with bourgeois control and to acquire a share of it themselves, nationally or globally. Communism is not an expropriation of bourgeois control, rather it is its abolition, as the process in which an international proletariat becomes international and independent, to defensive and to offensive capacities.

LAW sets out to clarify this ambiguity of the activity of communists. In regards to unionism, those nominal communists, even left communists, have subscribed to these schemas that include the union. Unionism is not a defense of proletarian self organization, anti-unionism has been a major expression of the council movements and the dissonance within unionization and unionism demonstrates the proletariat’s initial recognition of their own self-organization. Communists must gather to better assess the depth of this anti-unionism, internationalism, and the broader self-organization today. Of course, with full consideration of the limits of and the past efforts by such historical council communist organizations and the revolutionary proletarian organizations they belonged to. Here, communists can begin to evaluate how to stay linked with the class, given they create moments of self-organization, and to offer an active role in that self-organization. Communist will gather and better organize as this self-organization of the class permits them and informs them, functionally simultaneous and identical, communists are part of it and can militantly organize within it. Meanwhile, they can gather as minorities, digitally and personally, to prepare the clarity for such a process, critically informed by historical proletarian self-organization but  also  of its  consequences, and the current consequences of what is done and what is not done, and how they relate to capital’s capacity for economic control and general political and social control, and therefore, also military and cultural control.

Recommended reading:

• Aníbal “Sobre las Causas y Condiciones de la Crisis Capitalista” (2025)

• Aníbal “Movimiento del capital: Acumulación y Crisis” (2021)

• Aníbal and Materia “Teorías del Derrumbe del Capitalismo” (2020)

• Anton Pannekoek "The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism" (1934)

• Paul Mattick Sr. “What can the Unemployed Do?” (1938)

• Paul Mattick Sr. “Organizations of the Unemployed” (1938)

• “Chapter 6: Unemployed Councils” in The Second Revolution: The Council Movement in Berlin

Footnotes

(1) The labor-power is a commodity sold as a unit-duration of time or a unit-rate of productivity, in exchange for a wage as money, that is liquid assets (bank account deposits or cash). This is exchanged according to agreed terms (equal or free say in determining said terms is not required) to complete particular tasks and within a duration of time, a contract. The proletarian is employed so the capitalist, in Marx’s terms, can derive a use-value, this may be the ‘productive’ labor of creating surplus value (the physically-produced sold commodity or the task-performed sold commodities that a certain quantity is expected to be bought of with money and arrive to the enterprise owners as revenue—profit, i.e. surplus value). Or ‘unproductive’ labor in which an employee is paid by an employer for a labor-power that performs particular tasks. But these tasks are not performed to be sold to buyers on the market. These are like some retail workers (paid to only do clerk or cashier work—a transfer of ownership of commodities), a civil servant (performs tasks where operational expenses and salaries are funded by taxes, though consumers may be charged a fee, making it part of the revenue generated by the civil sector—a government is also capable of operating an enterprise that sells commodities on the market), and corporate administrative staff who are directly hired by and complete tasks for the same company. 

Propertyless, that is, without property. Property being, land, capital, and productive means meant for surplus-value. This is not to mean property that is considered to be purchases of commodities or services that are for personal-use where the means to convert them into capital are beyond one’s access and means and beyond even the nature of the purchased item of single-use or liquid assets which depreciate. Debt accompanies the necessities to compensate for outside of subsistence alongside taxes and bills, a burden on generating wealth in the manner the bourgeois are able to with their own debt and tax write-offs. This is in relation to a deeper continuing history of proletarianization that primarily involved becoming deprived of the self-subsistence of various ecological means and labor becoming increasingly standardized within a larger and broadening division of labor. This is combined with the transformation of prior relations of debt and the changing monetary forms established by state-building and central banks that brought forth the wider necessity of engaging in one's material life as monetary transactions as commercial banks normalized the credit money they generate. Though credit money in many countries is less normalized since these nations are without the financial and legal institutions to support a more widely accessible credit system, credit is more exclusive to wealthier individuals unlike certain developed nations who have widely accessible credit systems where many still become debt-prone and burdened. 

(2) Stock, ‘shares’ being the units of a single stock, whose increase in price is indicated as an accumulated equity and can be monetized (liquid cash) by investors through ‘broker-dealers’ on the public exchange. These dealers sell their shares and buy other shares on these investors' behalf, or for themselves to make a future sale and purchase of greater price for greater accumulation. Owners of shares can receive loans from a bank who receive the shares as collateral who later become owners of the shares when the initial owner defaults (doesn’t pay their debt in cash), though investment banks can directly buy stock anyhow. Shares of the stock can also be sold by the company for cash to generate revenue for company funds. Companies can also issue corporate bonds to generate revenue by selling them to investors who themselves can acquire cash or other assets by selling the bonds to dealers who buy and sell too on corporate bond markets. 

(3) Failure of a single enterprise in this means they did not survive the difference in power (market of prices) held by other coalitions. This risk is always present and failure is encountered when unable to extend the time horizon of that risk. This failure is even adopted by different investors as a financial operation to capitalize (bet) on, i.e. short selling and derivative trading. If the market of a type of option collapses in such a way the option-prices in other markets drop, making the risk of selling or buying too great according to their fiscal position, the government treasury and central bank can derisk dealing and become a dealer-of-last-resort through a variety of methods. 

(4) This private bank home loan housing model, after reforms for anti-discrimination rights, has a long history of discriminatory practices on the basis of credit history, the history of their ability to pay loans back with interest, often credit card debt. The bank assesses the housing and broader market with the individual’s credit history (or both of the married couple in their joint mortgage) and what this individual can pay out of pocket according to their income to determine if they’ll grant the loan, how large of a loan, and the interest rate. The US is unique in having 30-year fixed rate mortgages, monthly payments, but once decided, are fixed for the term of the mortgage while also having government-sponsored entities buy these mortgages as mortgage-backed securities from those private banks which allows them to offer larger loans and fixed rates, meaning these entities take the risk of any defaults. Other countries practice this lending without such government entities and the bank has to take the risk itself, making shorter term rates that switch to long-term adjustable rates set by a central bank while longer term mortgages tend to have much higher interest rates than those in the US. These differences tend to reflect the housing policies that are adopted by their states and economies.

(5) We can refer to the unemployed councils of the 1919 German revolution, though these would lose the radical fervor and begin prioritizing legalist aspects of their demands which would result in the councils dissolving as with the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, corresponding to the decline of the revolutionary movement.

(6) During the mass strike movements, popularizing anti-war sentiments, and the political organization of inter-class combination established by the vanguardist electoralist labor parties of the German and Russian revolutions, that exterior process still occured. Though the ability of the proletariat to distinguish itself from class collaborationist strategies was limited, especially in their political experience where the state remained a center to organize with. This character of that exterior process, emerging entirely within the short-span of the revolution, was those revolutionary council systems erected by the Russian and German proletariat, a process that defined the decline trajectory of those councils. Unionism—whether in the German case as an established movement linked to the labor parties, or in the Russian case, established after the Bolshevik’s expropriation of the state following the tsarist prohibition of unions—played a role in disciplining and dissolving the councils. The process and consequences of those strategies—dominated by workerist petite-bourgeois organizers, politicians, and radicalist—meant the decision to invite those labor parties into the councils resulting in the subsequent policing and elimination of the revolutionary council systems. The revolutionary proletariat encountered the boundary of the nation-state, an antagonistic boundary that operated as an extension of bourgeois control, and a bourgeois control that could extend multi-nationally; a control which those labor parties a share in and even generated into state capitalist designs.

(I)

From the strike at Airbus Spain to other problems, mistakes, and shortcomings cited by Fredo Corvo referring to the strike at Airbus Spain, FC writes:

“If true, this reinforces two conclusions. First, the improved offer was not simply the normal result of collective bargaining: the sustained pressure of the strike forced Airbus to go beyond the limits that management had previously set for itself. Second, Airbus and the government were simultaneously attempting to channel that concession through a controlled institutional process involving selected unions, rather than through the strike committee as a whole.” https://leftdis.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/ultimas-noticias-sobre-la-huelga-de-airbus-7-de-septiembre-de-2026/comment-page-1/#comment-1709 

In light of this:

1) It is clear that the company has somewhat improved its initial proposal and that without mobilization by the workforce it would not have done so. This once again demonstrates that we must act based on our needs, that we must fight. The question is: for what purpose and how, with what content and in what ways?

2) FC separates the substance from the forms that the movement takes, and from what he writes it appears that it is the strike committee that should negotiate, as it still has the legitimacy of having been elected by the assemblies. But that legal strike committee, in the first phase, consisted of all the legal unions on the Works Council, which later, due to tactical differences, split over whether to negotiate by calling off the legal strike or not. And in the second phase, the union strike committee was made up of the UGT, CGT, and UTIL. Those who decided to call off the strike and negotiate were treated with kid gloves by the management of Airbus Spain and the Spanish government; they were praised by the establishment parties, the bourgeois press, and other media outlets. The UGT then joined the negotiating table… leaving, conveniently and opportunistically, one foot in and the other out. And so, at that table, the union representatives account for 88% of the legal representation… Therefore, to say that what matters is for workers to control who negotiates—that is, for the strike committee to do so—- not a new radical committee that puts forward better and more class-based demands (for employed and unemployed workers within capitalist society and the economy on the scale of its overall functioning, and not just that of the parent company) and, consequently, the expansion of the struggle beyond the framework of the company in Spain, beyond the sector…and beyond the trade unionism that scrapes for crumbs and accepts, in fact and in law, an increase in productivity and labor discipline—but rather the legally established one chosen previously, WHICH IS THE ONLY ONE THAT ACTUALLY EXISTS.

That is to say, let the unions—in this second phase, the three unions mentioned—be the ones to negotiate… and then let the rank-and-file of the workforce at the various Airbus factories in Spain decide through a democratic assembly. What a load of crap!! The unions have their list of demands, which involves accepting the company’s strategic plans—both civilian and military—now and looking ahead to some good years; therefore, they agree to ensure calm and increase the pace—we’ve got to boost productivity, guys!....Fredo Corvo usually keeps an eye on AI… well, he could take a look at this: “Airbus’s future plan in Spain focuses on strengthening the industrial competitiveness and operational flexibility of its plants to absorb the sharp global increase in production rates. After intense negotiations marked by days of strikes, company management and the major unions reached a preliminary agreement brokered by the Ministry of Industry and Tourism, focused on ensuring the labor peace essential for increasing production rates.” 

[1] linkedin [2] larazon [3] infobae [4] empresaexterior [5] abc [6] merca2 

Likewise, regarding the Airbus Strategic Plan through 2029 and its profit forecasts, we can read:

“The European aerospace consortium has presented an ambitious financial roadmap aimed at consolidating its market leadership. The strategy, which includes a share buyback program, is projected to have a direct and significant impact on the industrial landscape of Spain, a founding partner of the group. 

Airbus, the aircraft manufacturer, unveiled a new strategic plan on Tuesday with which it aims to nearly double its operating profits by 2029. The announcement, made during an investor day, was accompanied by the launch of a share buyback program—a clear sign of confidence in the company’s financial strength and its medium-term growth prospects. The measure seeks to reward shareholders and optimize the company’s capital structure at a pivotal moment for the sector.

Direct Impact on the Spanish Industry

Airbus’s new roadmap has direct implications for the Spanish economy, given the country’s strategic role as one of the consortium’s four founding partners. The expected increase in production rates to meet financial targets will translate into greater activity for Spanish plants, which are centers of excellence in the manufacture of critical components. Factories such as those in Getafe (Madrid), Illescas (Toledo), and the Andalusian plants in Seville and Cádiz—which specialize in the production of tail stabilizers, fuselage sections, and the final assembly of military aircraft such as the A400M—will see an increase in their workload.

This momentum is not limited to Airbus’s own facilities but extends to the entire ecosystem of the aerospace supply industry in Spain. A large group of first- and second-tier suppliers—providing everything from complex aerostructures to smaller components and engineering services—will benefit from the consortium’s need to secure its supply chain. For Spanish companies, this represents an opportunity to secure contracts, invest in innovation, and consolidate highly skilled jobs, thereby strengthening Spain’s position as a major player in the European aerospace sector.

Global Competitive Landscape

“Airbus’s announcement comes amid intense competition with its main rival, the U.S.-based Boeing.” (empresaexterior). 

Let’s continue with what Fredo Corvo said.

The company, like the government, prefers “selected unions,” and this is criticized by Fredo Corvo, who prefers that it be the strike committee—which was initially composed of those selected unions (CCOO, ATP, SIPA) plus the UGT, the CGT, and UTIL (which together now make up the legal union strike committee). What a load of crap squared! 

Fredo Corvo goes on to assert:

“A referendum may grant each worker an individual vote, but it can also sever the final decision from the collective process through which workers have debated their demands and fought together. General assemblies at the workplace serve a different purpose: workers can collectively compare positions, question negotiators, amend proposals, and grant mandates to delegates. If representatives are sent to supplier sites or other Airbus workplaces, those delegates may be bound by a mandate from the assembly and replaced if they deviate from it.

Current information does not yet make it sufficiently clear whether all meetings described as “assemblies” are genuinely open to all workers at the workplace” (id)

Of course, at the assemblies in each factory, those who make up the workforce and choose to attend are present. And of course, the unions also have their own schedule of meetings and assemblies.

Fredo Corvo then speculates in a vacuum about a conflict on a European scale…But his hopes are not reality, nor are they on their way to becoming so; rather, the opposite is unfolding…division and isolation within the Airbus manufacturing facilities in Spain… and a union approach tailored to the legal frameworks for negotiation and compromise with the companies. Airbus management is in a position to hand out crumbs, and the workforce and the unions knew and know this…Likewise, the Government and its relevant minister, Jordi Hereu (Minister of Industry ).

Fredo Corvo and his AI reason by setting conditions for a hypothetical advancement of the process and for a connection between what is happening—between its stages of development—which are fallacious and mere wishful assumptions outside the realm of what is actually possible, which we verify are nonexistent, given that they lie outside the determinants that condition the possibilities in this specific correlation of forces between the proletariat and capital—conditions and connections that Fredo Corvo presents in a formal and voluntaristic manner, in a biased and short-sighted way…something out of place if one wishes to approach the matter critically and with a perceptive communist and internationalist perspective.

This is where subjectivist voluntarism, short-sightedness, and the “democretino” councilism that focuses on mythologized forms, which detaches itself from the actual, truly operating relationships and contradictions, and is content to repeat that what matters is that workers control the negotiations…

In the (mostly unionized) Samsung workforce movement in South Korea, they had already screwed up and refuse to accept it; instead, they lash out at those of us who have criticized them, as if we were communists of limited capacity and little insight into what is happening and brewing, mere sectarians, dogmatists, and mechanists… and, in my case, a little man who devotes himself to insulting and insulting (in reference to my critical assessments), and who wants to lead a political sect (in reference to LAW) with which he has had—and continues to have—disagreements and agreements.

Unions End the Airbus Strike. The strike committee decides that workers will return to work this Wednesday despite the “yes to the strike” vote winning by 67 votes See: (inter-rev). 

Summary edited by Fredo Corvo, with a critical response to Aníbal (leftdis).

(II)

1. Unions and Resistance. 2. The Possibility...Which One?

Fredo Corvo, in: Workers, Rearmament, Militarization in Spain since the Beginning of 2026, claims that the unions are organizing the workers’ resistance!!!... even if they later channel it. The lack of rigor is growing.

He adds:

“This difference took on particular importance at Airbus. See our articles ‘Airbus Spain: A Major Strike Reaches a Critical Point’ and ‘Lessons from the 2026 Airbus Spain Strike.’ There was a possibility that workers in Madrid, Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha, suppliers, and, ultimately, Airbus facilities in France, Germany, and Great Britain would confront the multinational production chain as a class issue. These developments are still in their early stages. But they indicate where independent class power might begin.”

THIS POSSIBILITY IS NOT REAL, MATERIALLY FACTUAL, AND CONCRETE, BUT RATHER HYPOTHETICAL AND SUBJECTIVELY EXAGGERATED AND DISTORTED!

Fredo Corvo is currently using a lot of AI. Let’s ask that AI what the difference is between the two types of possibility… and draw conclusions:

“The fundamental difference between real possibility and hypothetical possibility lies in the existence of the necessary conditions for something to occur in the physical or factual world. While real possibility is based on natural laws and existing conditions, hypothetical possibility is constructed from imaginary or theoretical assumptions.”

Resistance is effective opposition, but the unions do not oppose capitalism!! Statements of this kind run counter to the ABCs of council communism, and the subsequent clarifications intended to put it in perspective—aside from being centrist and ambiguous—do not remedy the absurdity, the inappropriateness, and fallaciousness of that statement.

Unions can, at most, resist certain measures or actions by employers, but only within the framework of capitalist wage relations. Earning a higher wage is not opposing capitalism, but rather attempting to alleviate the workers’ dire situation within it. Trade unionism IS NOT a school of revolutionary communism, nor is it a tendency halfway between the capitalists and the communists.

“The Potential Power” of the Working Class

FC publishes an article that discusses the “potential power” of the proletariat as follows: 

“For the moment, this power manifests itself primarily in a fragmented way: a five-day strike on the railroads, a national demonstration, an action at a factory, a conflict in the education sector, or a work stoppage in transportation and public services. The advance toward an autonomous class struggle begins when the workers themselves link these separate struggles together, create their own organs of struggle, do not leave the power to decide on the expansion and conclusion of actions in the hands of the permanent apparatuses, and establish contacts with workers beyond the company, the sector, the linguistic region, and national borders.” (leftdis).

In other words, the forms and content of TRADE UNION ORGANIZATION CAN BE TRANSFORMED... when workers connect them and all that... but then why don’t they do it? Because to try to achieve those goals through the union route, that isn’t necessary; there’s no need to create workers’ self-organization against capital and its states. A form of democratic channeling of discontent stemming from capital’s mistreatment—what FC calls “reproductive struggles”—is not and cannot be an autonomous struggle, nor can it serve as its preliminary platform.

The autonomous anticapitalist struggle against capitalist relations and their states either emerges directly—without adapting to trade unionism and bourgeois legality—or arises in a BREAK with trade union movements and perpetuates its differentiation. Therefore, it must assume political functions not aimed at reforming the system—or at its democratization in cases where there is capitalist political rule through open or covert dictatorships (without full freedom of political parties)—but rather functions of revolutionary confrontation. And such an autonomous movement may take steps backward and allow itself to become entangled in the networks of trade unionism and the political movements for political and social reform within capitalism.

When the unions organize a day of action across various sectors and companies, when they sometimes hold mass demonstrations and call for legal general strikes, setting the date and format based on the rules of capitalism and its legal labor regulations—which are drafted and administered by the bourgeois state (the government, ministerial labor agencies, and the unions, as well as business organizations)— this is not a precursor to an independent movement of the proletariat, but rather a union- and state-led co-optation of the unrest, channeled toward unionism, with its framework of negotiations, meetings, lists of demands, scheduling of legal mobilizations, etc. This has NEVER been the basis for an effective, unbridled, autonomous, anti-capitalist dynamic. And where the unions are not legal, what they do is try to become so in order to exercise that function legally, but objectively, in fact, they already exercise it. 

What FC publishes is what many currents of the New Left, Trotskyism, etc., say. Source of all this: (inter-rev). 

(III)

Below we present various comments and articles published by Aníbal on Inter-rev.

The conflict at Airbus Spain and Fredo Corvo’s interpretation

Fredo Corvo, as M.O. and partly as FC, is focusing on the issue of the Airbus strike: (leftdis). 

At no point has he cited Inter-rev—neither news articles nor comments, in my case. He takes AI and Spanish press reports and crafts a narrative that contains not only inaccuracies but also harmful positions, as well as various biases and ramblings. We’re starting (and continuing)...off to a very bad start. 

The strike, says FC, is an expression of the proletarian struggle. In reality, the strike expresses unease and discontent among workers, technical staff, and employees, since a significant wage gap has accumulated; the company is doing exceptionally well and reports a notable increase in profits, it has restructured its workforce by reducing it through voluntary buyouts, and it’s denying a sector of technical staff the opportunity to work remotely.....Well, roughly speaking, this is the situation, and in it, it is a VERIFIED fact that the workers did not call the strike on their own; it is not a “wildcat” strike, “wildcat” strike, but rather a union-called, democratic, and legally formalized strike, carried out through the normal legal channels of democratic unionism.

If it is argued that union strikes and mobilizations are a manifestation of the “struggle of the proletariat”....this general ambiguity hides the fact that it is not a self-convened and self-organized struggle, but rather another democratic union struggle, in this case within a context of unrest and discontent among workers, employees, and technical staff, who know that AIRBUS needs them because it has a vast order book, both in the civil aviation sector and in the military sector, which is clearly on the rise. 

Therefore, either this is made clear and we proceed from that premise, or it is mystified and misleading. If democratic union calls—which are legalized and protected by bourgeois state law—are considered the “struggle of the proletariat”... that expresses and generates confusion. The proletariat’s struggle against capital cannot be equated with the democratic union struggle. The legal trade union struggle is, on the one hand, a manifestation of the reformist and merely palliative mindset that exists among the proletariat and, on the other hand, a form of trade union framing, steering, and instrumentalization of proletarian discontent in order to maintain and reproduce the relations, structures, and networks of interests and control of capital.

Fredo Corvo is dedicated to obfuscating, and this opportunistic tactic and attitude is highly suspect and very pernicious.

Fredo Corvo elaborates on the Airbus conflict, but in his conclusions he says:

“For the time being, however, the workers have retained the tool that gives them their bargaining power, precisely at a time when Airbus is attempting to increase its production”...“Whether this structural dependence can be transformed into broader power for the working class depends on an additional step that has not yet been taken: expansion and coordination beyond individual Airbus factories and, ultimately, beyond Airbus itself, across the increasingly integrated European aerospace and military-industrial production system.” (leftdis). 

-No, the workers (laborers, office workers, and technicians) do not have their own direct representative body created during this conflict; rather, the Inter-Company Committee elected in democratic union elections remains in place. Those who have the right to negotiate and to call for a strike or a legal demonstration are the union representatives on the Inter-Company Committee (CCOO, ATP, SIPA, CGT, ÚTiL, and UGT). This should not be confused—and Fredo Corvo does confuse it. For a consistent council communist, a legal works council is not an “instrument that confers bargaining power” on workers.

-Airbus has a European Works Council (SE Works Council) that represents workers at the transnational level. (europa).

With regard to expansion and coordination at the European level, union leaders have an instrument in this European Works Council, whose utility complements the autonomy of each national committee…They’ve got it all figured out; they’re not idiots. What happens is that there is competition at various levels among the different national companies, and that spills over into the democratic labor union scene. Those who lack such coordination are the workers themselves, who have shown no signs of taking action in this regard, because a) they vote divided along individual preferences for one union or another; b) no such proposal has been raised at any assembly; c) they still place their trust in the union movement, even though there are tensions between some sectors of workers and certain unions. This is true, but we must not exaggerate it.

(IV)

In a new article (leftdis), FC points out that:

“The August 31 vote drew its strength from the fact that workers retained control over the strike”...“workers retain the weapon of the strike.”

No, the assemblies have ratified union control over negotiations and the calling of demonstrations ( CGT has filed a legal request for a strike in Madrid in one month, for example),then CCOO (which holds the majority on the committee) and two other smaller unions (ATP and SIPA) reached an agreement with management, and the assemblies became angry and rejected it, subsequently granting the three unions that make up the legal strike committee the authority to negotiate. That is when the management of Airbus Spain told them that there would be no negotiations unless they called off the legal strike; the Interconfederal Service for Mediation and Arbitration (SIMA) stated that a mediation ruling was required, and this was ratified by the Government, with the Ministry of the Armed Forces approving it; and once again, management reopened the negotiating table but only with CCOO and the other two unions ( ATP and SIPA), a move that is legally rejected by UGT, CGT, and UTIL. UGT tells management that this is a mistake and urges them to reopen negotiations with them—UGT, CGT, and UTIL—without excluding CCOO, ATP, and SIPA. 

“The weapon of the strike” and “control over the strike” are ambiguous phrases that do not capture what is happening: a legal strike cannot be a weapon of anti-capitalist workers’ struggle, but rather an instrument used by unionists—whether they are workers or official union representatives— to try to exploit the discontent and unease among workers, employees, and technical staff in favor of union-led solutions, collective bargaining agreements, and deals with management that do not involve the future development of workers’ self-organization to fight against capital. On the other hand, control of the strike is not truly such if union leaders are allowed to take the lead, to pursue the conflict through legal channels, and everything that this necessarily entails.

Fredo Corvo already went off the rails with the conflict at Samsung in South Korea… and it ended as it did—and not by chance. And now he continues to go off the rails, trying to present himself as a skilled communist expert on advice, on the conditions, content, and forms of “workers’ struggles,” portraying himself as a militant who knows how to get things done, in contrast to those of us who make radical declarations but don’t know how to put them into practice, “translating the content of communist theory into practical guidelines for the class struggles.” Ahem!!

As for the end of the strike, there are divisions, an offer from management, and pressure from the government. FC’s methodology isn’t working.

The Airbus strike in Seville remains up in the air: Tablada has suspended the walkouts, and San Pablo will decide this Tuesday. 

The conflict at Airbus Spain and Fredo Corvo interpretation. 

The Tablada workforce has agreed to a truce pending a referendum, while workers at San Pablo are continuing their strikes and will vote this Tuesday on whether to continue the protests. (cadenaser) 

Internal sources have told this newspaper that Cádiz (94.3%), Illescas (59.7%), and Tablada(60.2%) have voted in favor of suspending the strike. In Getafe, however, the “no” vote prevailed by a narrow margin: 46.2% rejected the proposal, compared to 45.4% who voted in favor.

In San Pablo, the vote could not be completed due to technical issues, and the referendum will be held again tomorrow. Albacete, meanwhile, had already voted on Friday to suspend the strike and has decided not to continue with the pressure tactics. (economiadigital) 

A) This highlights several important issues:

- the reasons why the assemblies decide to take one position or another are not identical. It is important to understand that not all AIRBUS-Spain factories operate the same way, and not all face the same kind of labor future. At the plants in San Pablo (Seville) and Getafe (Madrid), military production is more significant, and the workers have capitalized on the rise of militarism and are aware of their importance as a labor force in its development. In the others, workers must secure jobs in the civil aviation sector, which is subject to greater uncertainty. This helps explain the attitudes and situates the conflict within the current phase of imperialist capitalism—its military and civil development. That is why the government has exerted pressure and management has acted this way.

- Despite the combative stances we have seen, we have not moved beyond the framework of trade unionism, with the democratic version being predominant.

-Therefore, there is now a division, but both sides share a way of acting that is channeled within the trade union framework, with various organizational platforms and union tactics, as can be seen. There is no possibility that they will radicalize the content and form of their conflict with management; there is no possible expansion—they do not even consider it. The public exposure of their movement comes through the bourgeois press and the demonstration legally organized by the CGT.

B) FC / Airbus -Spain. FC’s methodology is ineffective.

-with a general, formalistic framework that does not give these issues the attention they deserve or downplays their importance...

-with a framework applied in the style of AI, and markedly mechanistic... FC has repeatedly botched things, producing biased analyses and numerous failed predictions...And the worst thing is to remain silent, as FC has done, and resort to alter egos and AI to try to fix things... Then the result is a disaster.

Now the beginning of the final act is unfolding... and it is unable to react appropriately and critically.

Unions End the Airbus Strike The strike committee decides that workers will return to work this Wednesday despite the “yes to the strike” vote winning by 67 votes. See: (inter-rev). 

(V)

1. Differences: Their Causes and Manifestations. 2. Referendum.

1. Differences, their causes, and manifestations.

Fredo Corvo has published an article in which he acknowledges that some of the criticisms made by Aníbal were valid: (leftdis). 

Well, the facts speak for themselves in this regard.

The point is that there are differences between us on various issues, and in this regard, there are two analytical frameworks that do not align; this is something we need to explore further.

As edited by FC:

- It exaggerates potentialities—especially immediate ones—and places them within a framework that is applied in a formalistic, notably mechanical manner, though with certain comments that temper this mechanistic approach

-It seeks, within movements and conflicts, those expressions of potential that the rest of us supposedly fail to grasp and understand.

-What is essential for FC is to provide instructions—within that doctrinal framework—pedagogically and in detail: “one should and could” carry out a series of activities conducive to independent and anti-capitalist development within workers’ struggles. It overlooks many conditions that make this impossible or limit it, and fails to thoroughly assess, with precision and critical rigor, the state of the balance of power between the two fundamental classes.

-Thus, by exaggerating its potential, trade unionism is underestimated, as is how deeply rooted it still is among the proletariat, alongside legalism and “democretinism.” But in practice, it is becoming clear that these exaggerations distort reality and facilitate it, encouraging belief in immediate prospects that neither exist nor materialize. Therefore, this significantly undermines the positive contributions of FC.

-FC fails to understand working-class adaptive opportunism; it does not exist. FC exaggerates and distorts the tendencies to oppose capital under these capitalist conditions (militarism, war economy, pressures, imperialism, etc.)…Yet in the movements of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, there are two overlapping traits: competition and such adaptive opportunism.

2. Referendum

In a new article that attempts to hold its ground, signed by M.O. and edited by Fredo Corvo (leftdis) regarding the referendum, he reiterates:

“Workplace assemblies can and should insist, however, that the full text and the consequences be made known before any binding decision is made. These assemblies should also discuss how workers can give weight to this insistence.”

No, the assemblies can do that hypothetically , but they are not doing so in actual practice. The management’s attitude naturally generates mistrust among the workforce, but there is no clear, united, and combative worker response, because they have lost a lot of money during so many days of legal strikes (more than 30 as of today) and because, at its core, what we’re seeing is a democratic union approach to making demands. Some media outlets report that at the Airbus factory in San Pablo (Seville), a portion of the workforce is still on a legal strike. If that is the case, the division is clear. In any event, management is letting a few days pass so that the limited energy remaining runs out or so that the strike is limited to a small number of workers. The unions involved in the preliminary agreement endorse this directly, and the UGT, CGT, and UTIL let it slide, arguing that they leave the decision to strike or return to work up to the individual workers…

Furthermore, at stake is not only this type of voting—first on a general framework for the preliminary agreement and then on the specific details to be worked out by the unions that accept it and company management—but also the acceptance of the Airbus-Spain Strategic Plan, with its rising production levels and corresponding labor peace. (empresaexterior) 

Among the workforce, this is seen as normal, since it’s part of that “quid pro quo”… except that management is cunning (logically, capitalist executives aren’t fools) and can finalize the preliminary agreement with terms more favorable to them, withdrawing more of the crumbs they’ve conceded… or keeping them and making them contingent on accepting the aforementioned Strategic Plan. The legal labor agreement is negotiated over two years, and the Plan is set for up to another year…Without knowing all this—which is common in large companies—the narrative published by Fredo Corvo remains a catechism of prescriptions based on “one must” and “one can,” consisting of well-meaning, idealistic intentions outside the framework of actual possibility.

(VI)

Recent events: demonstrations, referendums, etc. Airbus-Spain.

FC says, amid various ambiguities, outright nonsense, and very telling silences:

“Airbus has gained a significant tactical advantage by resuming production, but it has not yet completely defeated the movement. Yesterday’s demonstration in Madrid is proof of that.”

“Some of the striking workers feel frustrated because the strike was suspended in favor of a referendum, with uncertainty surrounding the results. The demonstration was organized by three unions to redirect this frustration among the workers toward…once again, the referendum. The unions are not interested in resuming the strike. Only an initiative by the workers themselves to return to the strike could tip the balance of power back in the workers’ favor. There are no signs that this will happen. However, this does not prevent us, as council communists, from raising this possibility, if only as a lesson for the future.” (leftdis). 

In other words, the demonstration that, according to FC, proves the movement has not yet been defeated, turns out to have “been organized by three unions to divert this frustration among workers toward… once again, the referendum.” How does that make sense?

That part of the workforce frustrated by the way things are going, seeing that the management’s proposal hides some dirty tricks... is going to the demonstration organized by those who have decided not to continue with the strike despite having won the vote count....That part of the workforce is entrenched in unionism and its various bullshit and opportunism. The union-driven frustration that plays out within the union sphere can’t give anyone with half a brain any illusions—especially those who don’t entertain absurd hopes. If the referendum takes place—and it will—there is a possibility… 

A: that a majority will vote in favor of accepting the company’s proposal, in which case, legally speaking, goodbye strike—a strike it has already said goodbye to in advance. 

And possibility B: that the supporters of negotiating with UGT-CGT-UTIL win, in which case management can accept, refuse and remain silent, or refuse and ask the government for a binding ruling. 

(1) And if that happens, what will these people who support these three unions do? 

What usually happens is that they go back to work until the next collective bargaining agreement offers them something better amid the electoral circus… while the company has achieved its goals… and the labor movement has defused the discontent and efficiently redirected it toward renewing the union vote…FC admits that the unions (all of them) aren’t interested in resuming the strike, and in fact these three that organized the Madrid demonstration said they were no longer maintaining the legal union strike, and the rest have long since shown themselves to be in favor of signing the company’s proposal. And he admits that they are diverting the discontent toward the referendum... but even so, he continues to harbor illusions about what to do within the democratic union circus of the referendum. 

FC remains baffled and writes:

“The most fundamental question is whether the workers themselves begin to debate the proposal and the future of the struggle through general assemblies at the workplaces open to all workers, regardless of their union affiliation. Such assemblies can and must demand full consensus before any binding decision is made. They could also decide what should happen if the proposal is rejected: whether strikes should resume immediately, whether new demands should be formulated, and whether direct delegations should be sent to workers at other Airbus plants, suppliers, and related workplaces.

That would transform the question from: ‘How should each employee vote?’ into: ‘What will the workers do collectively after the vote?’ The second question concerns the workers’ actual power.”. (id)

Workers hold general assemblies in which any member of the workforce who wishes to attend may participate. As for the rest, they either vote on the union’s proposals or let the unions decide.

FC is out of touch with reality and keeps telling readers that what the movement does not demonstrate is possible, while remaining silent about the sharp decline of this union movement. Instead of showing what is happening and telling workers that either they break with the unions or this—and worse things—will happen, FC devotes itself to speculating with its fantasies and dreams that workers will still opt for possibilities that even the most dissident segment of the movement itself shows are unnecessary...and that the majority of the workforce supports the three unions— —which hold a majority on the Works Council and are in favor of the preliminary agreement, without being challenged by their rank-and-file members in a practical and autonomous manner.

(1) We read:

“A somewhat more drastic possibility—but one that some labor organizations are beginning to fear—is that if the company does not take another step forward by presenting a reasonable proposal that could be accepted by employees in a referendum, the government may decide to resort to a binding arbitration award.” (industrytalks) 

More:

UGT is taking a “neutral” stance and does not support this demonstration. CGT and UTIL support it. The referendum will be binding (europapress). 

All of this was published in: (inter-rev).

Finally, here is some information and commentary that we consider significant, among the various pieces published by Aníbal on Inter-rev: (inter-rev). 

“‘Airbus, Employees, and Unions: An Assessment of the Labor Dispute Ahead of the Referendum’

“Employees will vote this week on whether to accept the company’s proposal, which ties wages to the CPI but does not restore lost purchasing power. Workers acknowledge progress, though they remain skeptical. Employees have managed to break a historic red line and, according to some accounts, see some of their economic demands as resolved. In terms of reconciliation, the proposal also calls for a return to the status quo prior to the cuts introduced during the conflict, but it does not provide the retroactive economic adjustment they had been demanding from the outset. EADS Airbus will cut 5,800 jobs in its defense and space divisions in Spain and three other European countries

According to the works council, the cumulative loss between 2020 and 2025 amounts to 46.3% of the 2025 salary—approximately 26,030 euros gross per typical worker—compared to the 2,000-euro lump-sum payment offered by the company in previous proposals. The current formula prevents the gap with the cost of living from continuing to widen from now on, but it does not make up for everything that has already been lost.

Workers have shared with this newspaper their assessment of the agreement reached and the impact it has had on the workforce: 

“What quite a few of us think is that we’ve achieved a lot, but have we made up for what we lost? No, and that—along with the way things were handled—is what has taken the biggest toll on the workforce.”

Regarding the negotiations, those same workers have pointed out that the July agreement, signed by CCOO, SIPA, and ATP, “almost succeeded.” Their assessment is that, had that proposal been slightly improved and properly presented to the unions, “people would have returned to work.”

Beyond the numbers, the strategy chosen to explain the proposal has raised doubts among employees. Airbus has organized informational sessions open to the public to explain the details of the offer. Those presenting the sessions are not Human Resources representatives or members of management, but rather groups of four volunteer managers who rotate from one session to the next and answer questions during an open Q&A.

The proposal, which has not yet been signed, and the absence of Human Resources and management during its presentation are creating even more uncertainty among workers. In the long term, it also remains to be seen whether these same demands will be raised again when the current collective bargaining agreement expires in 2027.

Divided Unions

The division reflected in the results of the employee votes also extends to the unions. The front that, at the start of the conflict, acted almost in unison, is now fragmented into two blocs: CCOO, SIPA, and ATP, which support the preliminary agreement, and UGT, CGT, and ÚTIL, which are calling for its rejection in the referendum. Both sides have exchanged accusations.

Airbus Spain employees have insisted that the strike was a mobilization by the workers themselves and that the unions “are responding to their demands.” SIPA was the first to call a strike, which began on July 1.

The call for the strike had the full backing of the unions, although the position of CCOO—the largest union at Airbus, representing 35.7% of the workforce—remained unclear for much of the conflict. Initially, the organization refused to join the strike, though it later announced its support.

Despite this, both protesters and other labor unions noted that the majority union did not participate in the assemblies or on the picket lines. CCOO initially signed a preliminary agreement with management, which was rejected at first. Later, SIPA and ATP joined the strike, a decision that caused unease among the assemblies, which ultimately rejected the preliminary agreement in a referendum with 49.15% of the votes. Faced with a loss of confidence among the workforce, SIPA decided to call off the strike, a decision that also sparked internal turmoil within the union. From that point on, CGT, UGT, and ÚTIL took the lead in the new strike, which achieved significant participation despite the fact that these three organizations collectively account for just over 25% of union representation.

At Airbus Spain, Comisiones Obreras is the union with the largest representation, with around 35.7% of the delegates, and holds significant influence in the shop floor division. It is followed by SIPA, with 22%, and ATP, with 17.6%. For their part, UGT and CGT each have slightly more than 10%, while ÚTIL accounts for approximately 4.4%. Thus, CCOO, SIPA, and ATP together hold the majority of union representation.” (economiadigital). 

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Where and for what purpose is the labor movement heading?

This makes it clear that the legal strike prompted management to offer crumbs—but these do not restore the purchasing power lost by wages. From there, the two democratic union blocs are divided over the timing and content of the agreement. CCOO, SIPA, and ATP want to consider the preliminary agreement valid and ratified; UGT agrees with its content but not with the process, which has caused discontent among sectors of the workforce, and they have reacted through the channels of democratic unionism, supporting the trio formed by UGT, CGT, and UTIL—which, as we can see, account for about 25% of union representation on the Works Council but control the legal strike committee. Whether or not the preliminary agreement goes through, what it shows is that the labor movement not only operates within the bounds of legality and bourgeois relations, but also that its limits in terms of demands are glaringly obvious… and they remain silent about the fact that the company’s strategic plan entails increased productivity and labor peace…

If the preliminary agreement is ratified by a democratic majority in the referendum to be held this week, what will those who reject it do? Will they request another legal strike through the unions that support it? That is the most likely outcome, which means that, aside from the tension caused by the strike and the unrest among the workforce, everything is headed toward a dead end of failure and marginalization. These are the various consequences of operating within the legal framework of the labor movement in a capitalist democratic society. Workers have lost a great deal of money, and their capabilities have been eroded… and they are unable to recover what they have already lost… with the Strategic Plan through 2029 hanging like the Sword of Damocles over their heads.

Corporate management constantly acts to safeguard its capitalist interests and enjoys state and financial support. Workers, on the other hand, are forced to operate under circumstances where the means and regulations at their disposal prevent them from defending themselves adequately and forcefully. The business community is organized and enjoys state support—both on a permanent basis. The proletarian class is not; it is fragmented and lacks national and international support from its own class... THE CONCLUSIONS ARE OBVIOUS AND MAKE IT CLEAR WHO SYSTEMATICALLY WINS AND WHO LOSES.

What is included in the preliminary agreement is not a victory for the workforce; they are crumbs that fail to compensate for the accumulated losses from the past, while labor laws and the labor movement were doing their “job”…And as for the rest, it amounts to economically linking wage increases to the CPI—which does not even guarantee the maintenance of the purchasing power of workers’ wages, since the actual prices of the goods and services workers consume are higher than that CPI. The rest are mere crumbs that capital exploits to its advantage and that mean very little to it, but “in exchange” for which the signatory unions will say that one must behave in a lawful manner and work harder and in social peace. Those who did not sign will devote themselves to repeating the same approach and union strategy that has led to these results. Do the math and carry on… the capitalist process of value accumulation continues…

We can read:

“Real wages in Spain have grown by only 2.76% over the past three decades, according to the latest data analyzed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for the period between 1994 and 2024. Workers’ purchasing power has risen from an average of 32,157 euros per year in 1994—expressed in 2024 monetary terms—to 33,044 euros at the end of last fiscal year.

This trend places Spain in fourth-worst position among the 38 countries that make up the organization, falling short of the OECD’s average growth—which reached 30.8% over the same period—by a factor of eleven. Only Mexico, Japan, and Italy have recorded lower growth rates, with declines of 7.2% and 0.9% in the first two cases, and a slight increase of 0.5% in the latter.”
“A recent report by the BBVA Foundation contradicts this narrative by confirming that labor productivity in Spain has grown by 17% since 2000.” (inter-rev). 

(VII)

1. The Airbus Strike Committee Has Improved Its Proposal, While the Date for the Referendum Remains Undetermined. 2. UGT, CGT, and ÚTIL Are Pushing For A 4% CPI Increase In 2026 And 2027—Half The Timeframe Offered by the Company. 3. Share Buyback to Distribute...

“The labor dispute at Airbus Spain continues. A week after “pausing” the strikes, the Strike Committee has presented a new offer with demands that expand upon the proposal they had already submitted on August 27 to the Interconfederal Mediation and Arbitration Service (SIMA).

The new document comes on the heels of Saturday’s successful march to the Ministry of Industry, backed by more than 5,000 employees, and ten days after the company submitted its own offer to the Ministry of Industry and Tourism in an attempt to end the protests. The proposal was scheduled to be put to a vote this week, but as of today, the date remains unknown—a situation that has heightened mistrust among employees.

Sources close to the process have told this online publication that the company may have delayed the vote after meetings with the workforce last week—intended to explain the offer and address concerns—failed. According to these same sources, no executives or human resources officials participated in these meetings; only managers were present.

Airbus has indicated that the referendum will be held “sometime in September” to give workers time to understand the full contents of the agreement. 

The New Proposal from UGT, CGT, and ÚTIL

The document presented by the Strike Committee—composed of UGT, CGT, and ÚTIL—raises the bar compared to the proposal Airbus put on the table on September 4. The main differences center on issues such as wages, remote work, the cafeteria, vacation time, flexible hours, and compensation for strike days. Regarding wages, the committee is demanding a raise equivalent to the CPI plus 4% in both 2026 and 2027—over two years—without any cap clause, in addition to a one-time payment of 4,000 euros. The company’s proposal calls for a 7.95% restoration of purchasing power spread over four years and a one-time payment of 2,000 euros. There are also significant differences regarding remote work. The Strike Committee demands that 40% of the workday be spent working remotely, applied universally and mandatorily to the entire workforce, leaving the decision to return to in-person work up to the employee. In contrast, Airbus is committed to maintaining the current policy and honoring the individual agreements already in place.

The cafeteria is another point of contention. CGT, UGT, and ÚTIL are demanding that the service be free and available to the entire workforce, while the company proposes reducing the price from 5 to 3.5 euros for those employees who do not currently receive this benefit free of charge. As for vacation time, the committee wants to maintain the current model, based on two fixed weeks and two flexible weeks. Management proposes modifying this scheme to reduce the mandatory weeks to two and increase the number of weeks that can be chosen freely to two, which must be agreed upon between the employee and their supervisor. Flexible work hours are another issue that keeps the two sides at odds. While the Strike Committee wants to extend this to the entire workforce, including workshop staff, the company excludes production-related positions from this option.

Similar Stances on the Workload at the Cádiz Plant

On other issues—such as job security in the event of potential contract transfers, the workload at the Cádiz plant, and the definition of positions related to aircraft maintenance and ground handling licenses—the positions are somewhat closer. However, the committee is demanding specific commitments and timelines, while Airbus proposes addressing many of these demands through working committees that should be established by November 1.

The new proposal comes amid a scenario marked by union division. CCOO, SIPA, and ATP have endorsed the preliminary agreement reached with the company and the government, while the Strike Committee considers the proposal insufficient and has opted to ramp up pressure with a document that reinforces several of the demands raised since the start of the conflict.

The Uncertainty Surrounding the Airbus Referendum

Although the proposed agreement signed by Airbus, CCOO, SIPA, and ATP—with government mediation—stipulates that it must be voted on by the entire Airbus Spain workforce in a binding referendum, the exact date of the vote is still unknown. This lack of a date has generated mistrust among workers and the unions that have not signed the agreement. They believe that delaying the vote may serve to buy time and weaken the position of the employees who are continuing the protest.

The referendum will follow the same procedure as the one for the preliminary agreement in July, which was rejected by a very narrow margin and ultimately deepened the rift among the unions. Until the date is officially announced, the dispute remains at a standstill. The indefinite strikes have been put on hold, but the workers have not yet given their approval to the proposal, which, if ultimately approved, would put an end to the labor dispute that has plagued the company since July.” (economiadigital) 

..............................................

“Airbus Launches a Share Buyback of Up to 4.1 Million Shares for Its Employees

The program will end no later than November 6, 2026.

Airbus has announced the launch of a share buyback of up to 4.1 million shares to support future activities under employee stock ownership plans and equity-linked compensation plans.

Airbus: €195,500. 0.25%

The program will be executed on the open market during a period that began on September 11 and will end no later than November 6, 2026.

Airbus has engaged an investment firm to manage the execution of the program. The investment firm will make its trading decisions regarding the timing of purchases independently of Airbus.

‘The program will be carried out based on market conditions and in accordance with applicable rules and regulations, including Regulation (EU) No. 596/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of April 16, 2014, on market abuse (the EU Market Abuse Regulation), and Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1052 (the Delegated Regulation),” it explained to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV).

The program is being carried out under the authorization granted by the shareholders to the Airbus Board of Directors at the Annual General Meeting held on April 14, 2026, to repurchase up to a maximum of 10% of the company’s issued share capital. The program aims to support the implementation of future employee stock ownership plans and equity-based compensation programs, while preventing dilution for existing shareholders.’” (bolsamania). 

-----------------

“The other major point of contention lies in the way the negotiations have unfolded. The CGT maintains that the strike committee did not participate on an equal footing in the process that culminated in the proposal presented on September 4 following the intervention of the Ministry of Industry.

Torres believes that the upcoming Airbus referendum should not simply become a formality to validate a document that has already been finalized. Despite his criticisms, the union representative acknowledges as a step forward that the discussions have made it possible to reinstate the CPI reference after several collective bargaining agreements without an equivalent guarantee.

ÚTIL also has reservations about the Bromo Project, related to the reorganization of space-related activities, as well as certain wage conditions. The proposed text stipulates that affected workers will initially retain the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, their seniority, and access to internal employment within the group.

In the case of Cádiz—another issue raised during the dispute—the proposal calls for the creation of a specific committee to address future workload and investment needs.” (elboletin) 

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“Strategies and tactics of the parties. Methods for defending the company.

The three unions on the strike committee (UGT, CGT, and UTIL) are raising the bar slightly on their demands, while the rest— company management, the Spanish government, CCOO, SIPA, and ATP, are stalling to delay the referendum, with the aim of further wearing down the rebellious segment of the workforce. Postponing the start of voting works in their favor, given that the strike has, in fact, fizzled out, and the divisions remain in place. The “Strike Committee  Without a Strike” is trying to strengthen its position after mobiizing 5,000 workers for the legal demonstration a few days ago. But this froth on the milkshake disperses and disappears—as is often the case in this type of conflict, where what is at stake is how to integrate the workforce into the implementation of corporate and state plans, giving them a few crumbs of the spoils, while maintaining jobs and positioning the company in the market to implement the Strategic Plan. The Committee wishes to emphasize that, with them, more can be achieved than with the rest of the unions that accept the Preliminary Agreement—in order to capitalize on it in terms of votes in the upcoming union elections, collective bargaining (next year), and- a seat at the negotiating table with Airbus management...which is beating around the bush regarding the rank of the person it sends to that table...buying time...and in contact with the government.

Airbus workers will vote in a referendum on September 24 and 25. The proposed agreement that employees will vote on is the one signed by Airbus, CCOO, SIPA, and ATP, with government mediation. 

Airbus workers will vote in a binding referendum on the company’s latest proposal on September 24 and 25, according to internal sources consulted by this newspaper. The referendum will follow the same procedure as the one for the preliminary agreement in July, which was rejected by a very narrow margin and ultimately deepened the rift between the unions.

The new proposal comes amid a climate marked by union division. CCOO, SIPA, and ATP have chosen to support the preliminary agreement reached with the company and the government, while the strike committee has opted to ramp up pressure with a document that escalates several of the demands raised since the start of the conflict. In fact, the lack of a date for the referendum had sparked mistrust among the workers and the unions that had not signed the agreement, and it was believed that the delay in the vote was intended to weaken the position of the employees continuing the protest. If they approve the protest, the workers would put an end to the labor dispute the company has been facing since the summer.

Division Among Airbus Workers

The proposal the company submitted to the Ministry of Industry in an attempt to end the protests has failed to convince the strike committee, which presented a new offer with demands that go beyond the proposal they had already submitted on August 27 to the Interconfederal Mediation and Arbitration Service (SIMA).” (economiadigital). 

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“CCOO Calls on Airbus to Hold the Referendum Before the End of September.” (economiadigital).  

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“A date has been set, and external oversight has been announced, for the vote among Airbus employees in Spain on the agreement reached with the involvement of the Ministry of Industry.

On September 24 and 25, Airbus employees in Spain are once again called to the polls to ratify or reject the preliminary agreement between company management and the unions regarding the new collective bargaining agreement. This agreement was reached through the intervention of the Ministry of Industry and Tourism after workers had rejected several previous draft agreements, which also caused divisions among the unions represented on the works council regarding support for the indefinite strike called as a means of pressuring Airbus Spain.

Furthermore, a couple of days ago, the unions presented a new offer while awaiting Airbus’s announcement of the date for this vote. Airbus has explained that these two days will give all workers the opportunity to vote, and that there will be “observers from all unions that wish to participate, with the involvement of the external consulting firm PwC to ensure maximum transparency and integrity of the process.”
Regarding the proposal to be voted on, they also noted that: “The proposed agreement outlines a balanced solution to the conflict that improves working conditions while ensuring that Airbus in Spain maintains a strong and competitive position. It is a collective opportunity that allows us to protect the company’s stability, the well-being and safety of all employees, and the future of our industrial operations in Spain.” (fly-news). 

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“Airbus has announced that this is its final offer. If the workers reject it, the terms will not apply; the previous regulatory framework will be reinstated, and management has stated that it will not engage in further negotiations.” (actualidadaeroespacial). 

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The Curtain is Falling...

Company management, CCOO, ATP, SIPA, and the government are making their intentions very clear...and it’s no coincidence that they’re doing so at a time when the workforce is on the job, having lost more than 30 days’ pay, the mobilization was scaled back to the company level in accordance with legal regulations, and there is noticeable reluctance and fatigue amid glaring union divisions...and the chances that the dissenting factions will resume the legal union strike have vanished. The gestures of the legal union strike committee, attempting to get the three unions accepted at the negotiating table with a new “improved” proposal… have failed; the “achievements " of the legal protest march are being ignored by company management, CCOO, ATP, SIPA, and the government… It happens all the time; you’d have to be a fool to believe that this is how you build labor power… When, in fact, the unrest is dispersed and neutralized, time is wasted (which benefits the company and its cronies), and the measures that build strength are replaced by others that are disjointed and ineffective…To manage this “wet gunpowder,” there are the union apparatuses and democracy.

The company’s management, moreover, claims that this is the final offer, and if it is rejected, they will revert to the “previous regulatory framework,” thereby effectively conditioning the logic of voting “YES” because it is the lesser of two evils. This leads one to believe that legal union mobilizations serve to strengthen the workers’ position vis-à-vis the company, the government, and the union faction that colludes with management—in this case, led, as so often, by CCOO.

-----------------------

“Getafe. Podemos brings the Airbus conflict to the Getafe City Council and calls for greater public control over the company”

“...Alba Leo’s party calls for support for the workforce’s demands and proposes increasing the state’s stake in Airbus to gain greater decision-making power.”

“...Currently, the state holds a stake in Airbus through the State Industrial Holdings Company (SEPI), which owns 4.12% of the group. SEPI” (noticiasparamunicipios).

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“The National Court provisionally suspends the Airbus referendum on the indefinite strike. A judge grants the CGT’s emergency injunctions and halts the vote until a new hearing is held.” (eleconomista). 

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“The legal action stems from a lawsuit filed by the CGT about ten days ago regarding a labor dispute. The union maintains that the fundamental right to strike was violated during negotiations and accuses the company of acting in bad faith during the negotiation process. Initially, the CGT had requested that the referendum’s results be declared null and void. Subsequently, it expanded its request and demanded the immediate suspension of the referendum through emergency injunctive relief.

The National Court has granted this latest request and ordered a provisional halt to the referendum until the hearing on the injunctive relief measures takes place. That hearing is tentatively scheduled for September 24, coinciding with the date on which the employee vote was supposed to begin.” (elcorreo). 

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“Sources consulted by this newspaper have explained that Airbus would have to postpone the referendum until Friday if the hearing is ultimately held on Thursday, or move it to the following week. CCOO, one of the unions that signed the agreement, had asked the company to hold the vote before the end of September in order to meet the established deadlines. At this time, the indefinite strike is on hold. This means that the dispute remains unresolved and the strikes could resume if an agreement favorable to the workers is not reached. The process now hinges on the hearing, during which Airbus will be able to present its arguments in response to the CGT’s lawsuit. Until then, the referendum on the preliminary wage agreement remains suspended. The company has not yet commented on the court’s decision.” (economiadigital). 

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“The National Court has provisionally suspended the referendum called by Airbus for September 24 and 25, after granting the CGT’s request for preliminary injunctive relief. The decision temporarily halts the employee vote until the court rules at a hearing scheduled for September 24. On that day, it will be determined whether the process can proceed or must be halted.

CGT, one of the unions that, along with ÚTIL and UGT, has been organizing an indefinite strike at Airbus since late August, has filed a lawsuit against the aircraft manufacturer for an alleged violation of the right to strike. The union questions the parallel channels and other actions taken outside of negotiations with the committee managing the labor dispute. As part of that lawsuit, it also requested specific injunctive relief to prevent the referendum from being held among the workforce.

The immediate court ruling does not yet resolve the substance of the dispute. On September 24, the National Court is scheduled to rule on the injunctions and decide whether the referendum can be held under these circumstances. If the ban is not upheld, union sources suggest that Airbus could set another date to put the proposal to a vote. The main trial regarding the alleged violation of the right to strike is scheduled for November 4.” (hosteltur). 

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Now, with this high-level court decision, the company can either wait for the hearing and present its arguments, or a binding ruling is issued by the state mediation body, or the call for the referendum is postponed by agreement of the negotiating committee, and nothing changes until then, or the company’s management makes room for the CGT, UTIL, and UGT at the negotiating table....

In any case, the workforce is working and there are currently neither union strikes nor grassroots protests, only competitive maneuvers between unions, the company, the state, and its judicial branch. CCOO specializes in these cases: either it promotes and endorses the state mediation ruling, or it conducts a consultation prior to the referendum; they’ve done this many times, and it has generally worked well for them. The company feels quite confident because the workers have lost more than a month’s pay and are not in a position to mount even a defiant union front. The CGT presents this as a legal victory and calls for the negotiations to incorporate improvements into the list of demands. It may gain supporters.

Airbus: The National Court suspends the referendum on the preliminary agreement following a lawsuit filed by the CGT alleging a violation of the right to strike. Article from “La Izquierda Diario” (a Trotskyist-affiliated publication).

Significant excerpts:

....
“An economic analysis report prepared by the strike committee itself and circulated among the workforce in recent days debunks the narrative that the September 4 proposal represents a real improvement. According to that analysis, the company’s offer differs little from the July referendum—which the workforce had already rejected—and fails to restore the purchasing power lost since 2020: at best, it halts a decline that has been underway for years. Several days ago, Izquierda Diario reported that the workforce has suffered an 8.59% loss in purchasing power since 2020, while Airbus reported 2,243 million euros in profits in just six months of this year—47% more than in the same period last year.”

....

“The company has publicly committed to doubling its operating profit, from 1,700 million euros in 2020 to between 12,100 and 12,500 million in 2029: the difference between these two figures—which would result from implementing the pay raise demanded by the workforce—is minimal compared to the total size of the business. Meanwhile, the compensation for its board of directors has nearly doubled between 2020 and 2025. And between share buybacks and dividends projected for 2026–2028 alone, the company will distribute among major shareholders and executives an amount that is eleven times the total cost of the pay raise and one-time bonus demanded by the strike committee.”

…

“There is a silence that pervades the entire preliminary agreement: not a word about subcontractors. The document negotiated by CCOO, ATP, and SIPA applies only to Airbus’s direct workforce, leaving out thousands of workers who, with red union cards instead of blue ones, build the same airplanes with their own hands, earning less and working under worse conditions. At the Getafe plant, subcontractors account for more than half of the actual workforce.” (izquierdadiario).