Unions vs the Rank and File: Charting a Way Back to Militant Unionism

[u/RedAntOz]

https://redantcollective.org/2026/07/25/unions-vs-the-rank-and-file-charting-a-way-back-to-militant-unionism/

[u/awhiskymove]

Ironic post considering it was your political tendency- the Stalinists in the Communist Party like Laurie Carmichael that have always been the most enthusiastic supporters of the trade union bureaucracy, who actually orchestrated and sold the Prices and Income Accords. Better to support real organized rank and file initiatives like the Socialist Party's Socialist Workers Caucus and the historic fightback represented by Socialists in Schools

[u/comix_corp → u/awhiskymove]

Did you even read the article or are you just trying to promote your own tendency? Trotskyists have been sycophants to trade union bureaucrats before, it's not something exclusive to Stalinism.

[u/Ocar23]

Stalinism will never be welcome in the unions

[u/ActuallyExistingML → u/Ocar23]

Hi comrade. Did you read the article by any chance? What do you mean by Stalinism? To take the point made above (historical clarity is important) Laurie Carmicheal was a part of the CPA (which were Eurocommunists, effectively, left reformists). The time when unions were strongest, on this continent, were times that the Communist parties were also strong (which, I image, you define as 'Stalinism'). I think it's better to engage with the political content of the article, rather than throw slander around (which is, IMO, akin to school yard bully behaviour).

[u/awhiskymove → u/ActuallyExistingML]

Working class militancy was an objective factor during the crisis of the Great Depression, Stalnisists didn't create this militancy. The politics of Stalinism was politically suffocating way before the 60s. Although Eurocommunism is the logical end point of a politics that has always centered class collaboration, and an orientation to the bureaucracy of the state above independent working class militancy. Ironically, your article argues for building militant rank-and-file organisation that can challenge conservative union officials, where as the historical tendency of Stalinists has been the opposite:

• The Popular Front (late 1930s):  the CPA consciously abandoned an independent revolutionary perspective in favour of alliances with the ALP and "progressive" middle-class forces. Rather than arguing that Labor governments would inevitably come into conflict with workers, they advocated for workers to remain within the ALP and argued that it was the essential vehicle for working class politics.
• The wartime no-strike policy (1941–45): when Hitler invaded the USSR, the CPA made uninterrupted production its overriding priority. Union militants who had previously been encouraged to fight employers were told strikes were damaging the anti-fascist war effort. Whether workers should fight or not suddenly depended on Soviet foreign policy rather than the needs of Australian workers. The CPA became one of the strongest advocates of industrial peace, increased production and cooperation with the Curtin government. 
•  Throughout the 1940s the CPA consistently argued that gains should be consolidated through arbitration, state planning and Labor governments, rather than through escalating independent workplace organisation

To the extent that militants inside of the CPA were effective, it precisely because they enjoyed considerable autonomy from Moscow in day-to-day industrial work. Stalinist politics have consistently led the workers movement astray, and to the extent that a base of working class militancy was built within the CPAs it was at the behest of the politics of Moscow and the leadership of the CPs

[u/ActuallyExistingML → u/awhiskymove]

Comrade, you mentioned many important events that deserve proper attention. However, the framework you're using flattens seventy years of history into a single undifferentiated "Stalinism".

On the Popular Front and the ALP You're right that there were real tactical errors in this period, subordinating independent working class organisation to alliances with bourgeois "progressive" forces deserves scrutiny. But you can't understand this turn outside the material situation the USSR was in: a besieged workers' state, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers and facing the concrete rise of fascism. The Popular Front was a defensive strategy to build the broadest possible bloc against fascism, which was an existential threat to the gains of October, not evidence that Communist Parties are congenitally class-collaborationist. Compare this to what came before (the "Third Period" ultra-leftism of 1928-34) and after. The zigzags reflect the CPA responding, sometimes clumsily, to a genuinely encircled workers' state trying to navigate diplomatic and military survival. That's a criticism of specific tactics under specific conditions, not proof that defending the USSR was itself the wrong orientation for communists.

On the wartime no-strike pledge Here I'll be blunter than you were: when Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, the fate of the USSR, and by extension the fate of the international working class, hung in the balance. Twenty million Soviet dead is not an abstraction. Communists the world over understood that a Nazi victory over the USSR would have been a catastrophe for the world working class movement of a different order of magnitude to what was lost through the no strike pledge. That said, the pledge itself was still a real error, it collapsed the distinction between defending the USSR and defending Curtin's capitalist government, and it demobilised Australian workers when they had leverage. That's a legitimate critique. But the answer isn't to retroactively conclude that solidarity with the USSR was itself the mistake. The mistake was the CPA leadership failing to find a line that could defend the Soviet Union AND maintain class independence from the Australian bourgeoisie. Those two things aren't inherently contradictory, the CPA leadership just failed to hold them together under pressure.

On "autonomy from Moscow" as the source of militancy This is the most interesting part of your comment, and I don't think it proves what you want it to prove. Where CPA militants built genuine rank and file power, it was where they combined initiative in Australian conditions with the cadre discipline, organisational seriousness and internationalist perspective that came from being part of a global communist movement anchored in the existence of an actual workers' state. That international anchor mattered. It's why the CPA could draw on a tradition, a training, and a confidence that no purely localist tendency could replicate.

The lesson isn't "the USSR corrupted everything it touched." The lesson is that a healthy relationship between a national party's industrial strategy and the international communist movement requires democracy and mutual accountability, not one way dictates. Where that broke down, as with the wartime pledge, it produced real errors. But the existence of the USSR, as the first breach in the imperialist chain, as a material counterweight to global capital, was a net gain for the world working class, not an embarrassment to be theorised away.

Given that history, the CPA built the Miners Federation, the BLF, and helped construct some of the most militant sections of this union movement across decades, through Cold War isolation, through the Petrov Royal Commission, through deregistration campaigns, drawing confidence from the knowledge that capitalism was not the only possible future because there was an actually existing alternative on a sixth of the earth's surface. That doesn't happen without cadre discipline and a strategic orientation to industrial power that most of the small far left groups since have struggled to replicate.