1.

In trying to separate the valuable from the trash accumulated within the Fourth International, we need to have a sense of a few of the main points that demarcate Nanobureaucratic territory as separate from Marxist theory. One of these main points is the Cult of Trotsky, which rests on the theory of the Cult of Jefferson and the Cult of Lincoln, something we could call “Progressive Bonapartism” i.e., Stalinism, elaborated in the reaction to the 1619 Project and the emergence of historical documents in general that prove the reactionary nature of bourgeois politics as a whole. (Some other points include: (a) a rejection of progressive nationalism and as a result a rejection of the breaking up of imperialist power, (b) a rejection of the theory of spontaneous consciousness and as a result a rejection of mass movements that turn to the revolution for guidance, (c) a rejection of Marx’s theory of Capital and the resulting capitulation to capital in real life in the form of Progressive Bonapartism, and (d) a rejection of Lenin’s theory of imperialism with the result that they defend capitalism in Russia in particular and from there capitalism in general as salvageable. Other points might include (e) a rejection of factional democracy and the program of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, (f) a rejection of due process for members, (g) a rejection of security measures and the turn to the bourgeois judicial system and (h) against the illegal “underground” movement as supported by Leninism.) So, when we read Trotsky, we should not assume that Trotsky is always correct. When a typo is passed on without a correction in a quote, this shows either carelessness with regard to editing or more likely a fear to correct anything Trotsky. Trotsky himself would disavow such fawning. Healy may have enjoyed it coming from North, but we must rise above such tactics. We have different reasons for supporting the revolution.

“Itself born of the contradictions between his [sic] world productive forces and capitalist forms of property, the October revolution produced in its turn a contradiction between low national productive forces and socialist forms of property.” [sic added]

https://icfi1953.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-trade-unions-and-icfis-mistakes.html

How to use “[sic]”: “https://grammarist.com/usage/sic/“

2.

“In response to this change, and to preserve and advance on the gains (socialist forms of property) on which the Stalinist bureaucracy parasitically based itself, Trotsky came to propose a program not of reform, but a program of political revolution, of violent rebellion against and overthrow of the bureaucratic caste.”

https://icfi1953.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-trade-unions-and-icfis-mistakes.html

Trotsky’s evolution on these questions deserves more attention. At first, Trotsky voted to block Stalin’s resignation on at least one occasion. He also silenced the Workers’ Opposition and other left groups, while replacing elected trade union officials with appointments by the party bureaucracy. He ignored calls by Sylvia Pankhurst to build the Fourth International beginning in 1921. This was not because Sylvia Pankhurst was small and unimportant. She was featured in Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism and participated in the Second Congress of the Comintern, arriving secretly as a stowaway.

Trotsky, aware of Lenin’s work and fearing to criticize it, realized he had to accept like Lenin had the counter-revolution, and turn on his comrades to treat them as rivals, turning them in to imperialist police for execution. This began with Lenin’s decision at Brest-Litovsk, opposed by both Trotsky and Luxemburg, to abandon the German Revolution at the most important moment, immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution and before the end of World War I. As a result of Lenin’s decision, German troops could return to Berlin to execute Luxemburg. (Brest-Litovsk, March 3, 1918; Armistice, November 11, 1918; Soviet-led conference for the foundation of the Communist Party of Germany, December 31, 1918; Summary Execution of Luxemburg by Freicorps: January 15, 1919) We should note that while the Soviet government supported a separate peace with German imperialism, it also waited until after the armistice to support a Putsch in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht ended up dead. This happened because, during the conference to found the new Communist Party of Germany, Luxemburg criticized the Soviet government’s secret police and destruction of Soviet democracy.

At the same time, Brest-Litovsk allowed Russian troops consisting mostly of the peasantry to return to St. Petersburg and Moscow to crush the ascendant proletariat. However, it was conveniently timed so that Lenin, a Marxist advocate for the proletariat, would have the power while the new revolutionary democracy of the October Revolution was crushed by imperialist force. This brought Trotsky into the leadership but dependent as well on the mostly peasant army for his power. In the end this peasant base could not uphold socialist political forms, since the peasantry bases itself on the cultivation of privately held plots of land and the sale of their privately owned agricultural products. A revolutionary government could have stayed in power, but only on the basis of military support for the German Revolution and for world revolution to overthrow the Allied Powers.

How foolish or German-chauvinistic do you have to be to believe that the Russian Revolution succeeded with the help of the German army but the same help should not be afforded to the German proletariat. They could succeed supposedly without the help of the Russian army! The Paris Commune of 1871 could only succeed with the help of the German army, which occupied France at the time. We cannot attribute this obvious lack of rationality on the part of Lenin in 1917 and 1918 to a stroke, but we can assume it had something to do with German assistance in the October Revolution. Lenin takes the power with German help, Lenin signs a treaty with German imperialism against the protests of Trotsky and Luxemburg. Luxemburg ends up dead, and Lenin holds on to the power. Only a change of leadership replacing Lenin with a Brest-Litovsk oppositionist, a Left Oppositionist in 1918, could have kept Russia involved militarily in the German Revolution.

This Russian military involvement in the German Revolution could have saved the lives of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, many German workers and revolutionaries, and many of the leading Bolsheviks and workers and peasants who perished under Stalin. It could have saved Lenin’s life, although it would have ended his political reign over the world revolution by denouncing him as a fratricidal usurper within the revolution of the European working class. As John Locke explained, a revolution differentiates itself from both tyrants and usurpers by an act of the entire people. In other words, the spirit of each dying for the other cannot remain an anecdote about the lower class. It has to infuse the work and lives of the new revolutionary leadership. A unity between the leadership and the masses.

It would have required a conscious policy of the elevation of the proletariat to the higher ranks of the Red Army, eliminating from the higher ranks the Tsarist officials that simply switched sides when confronted by gunfire. It would have meant a split within the Bolshevik Party to address the concerns of leading Communists internationally who opposed the Bolshevik police-state. This new party or faction would have upheld the rule of the proletariat, basing itself on the socialist property rather than on the peasants’ farms. Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed cannot confess to this error, and he must argue that parasitism arose from socialist property forms. Quite the opposite, the peasant mass organized into an army asserted its interests by introducing capitalist reforms, secret police to eliminate proletarian leaders, and open alliance with imperialist powers against the revolutionary leaders of foreign countries. Everything to keep the Russian government in place. Socialist property would provide free services to the poor, removing barriers to participation, and allowing for more inspections, reports, and accountability of the type that cures society of parasitism. Lenin admits it openly in 1918:

Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution as long as we march with the peasants as a whole. This has been as clear as clear can be to us; we have said it hundreds and thousands of times since 1905, and we have never attempted to skip this necessary stage of the historical process or abolish it by decrees.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/subservience.htm

Stalin hinted at this error when he claimed that Trotsky underestimated the peasantry. In fact, he meant Trotsky very well understood the interests of the peasantry as leader of the peasant army and depended on the peasants’ property rather than socialist property for his power. For this reason, Trotsky advocated a long, slow road to collectivization, which eventually had to turn into its opposite, forced collectivization. That is, the form of Trotsky’s policy proposals arose from the content of his leadership of the peasant-dominated Red Army. He mesmerized the people with his speeches and forced them into battle effectively, showing his peasant credentials. He who loses the farm is forced to work on the other’s farm. A leader basing himself on socialist property would encourage radical audience participation and rather than a charge into a battle, a charge into the workplace to earn together their share of society’s benefits.

Socialist property dominating manufacturing in the cities, a result of the actual efforts of the proletariat, required for its expansion more socialized forms of property in the country. The proletarian policy, they both knew, meant immediate, voluntary collectivization. This meant offering favorable financial conditions for collectivized farms and their workers, something which contradicted the interests of the peasant landowners who sought to profit by means of bourgeois private ownership rather than proletarian work. It would hurt the army as well, which Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin needed to quell rebellions against their secret police tactics against proletarian leaders. In order to hold on to the army, Trotsky needed to rely on the peasantry, which meant private ownership of the means of production in the very backward agricultural industry. Sylvia Pankhurst analyzed this as the capitalist-socialist dialectical nature of the October Revolution that even the great minds organized by the Bolsheviks could not overcome subjectively.

3.

Similarly, the ICFI proposes a rebellion by rank and file union members against the degenerate, nationalist trade union bureaucracies. We agree with this. However, Trotsky never failed to defend the Soviet Union, nor to recognize the significance of its extension and the ‘bureaucratic impulse’ this could provide.

https://icfi1953.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-trade-unions-and-icfis-mistakes.html

Trade unions have an indisputable effect of raising wages. The average unionized worker makes more than 50% more than non-unionized workers doing the same work. The Nanobureaucracy of the ICFI is not ignorant of this fact. They themselves rely on the “bureaucratic impulse” of the unions, finding a niche industry for themselves in criticizing the unions from the left. They can live off this criticism, and benefit in that way from the union bureaucracy. The problem with this perspective, however, is not that it ignores the significance of the unions, it is that it believes they have outsmarted the workers, arriving at these conclusions before they have. This does not qualify them for leadership of the working class, just like Stalin’s theorists did not qualify to lead the socialist economy created by the October Revolution. Only the working class itself deserves the power it takes when it transfers power from the capitalist state to a new socialist state. In the same way, only the workers themselves deserve the power in the committees they create to take the struggle against the capitalists out of the hands of the union bureaucracy. That perspective needs to be defended against the corrupted Leninism that states that a wise intellectual who has studied the class conflict should have dictatorial powers over the committee. That this defense is necessary may seem obvious to a moral observer, but to someone tempted like Christ by their mafia connections, the committee is prime territory to be conquered and tyrannized by absurdly anti-democratic methods.

As Trotsky noted: ‘A revolutionary party which failed to notice this impulse in time and refused to utilize it would be fit for nothing but the ash can.‘”

We should use this impulse from the bureaucracy to warn the workers that their greatest friend is really their worst enemy. They are, in fact, a stranger they only thought they knew well. The same is true of political leadership. This contradiction comes from the objective necessity for revolution coming up against the objective conservatism of the historically powerful state. Like a war works on the bodies of soldiers, politics works on the relationships of human beings. It makes men superhuman only to kill them the next moment. It makes men look like hopeless fools then raises them to the very top. The task of revolutionaries is to lead the workers as they enter into inevitable conflict with every force, one after another, which stands in the way of their class liberation from material want. This would free the greatest portion of humanity in history and begin a new era without hunger or war.

Engels wrote in a letter to Kautsky: “The Commune [1789-1795] with its extreme course became superfluous. Its propagation of revolution became a hindrance to Robespierre as well as to Danton both of whom, but each in his own way, wanted peace. From this conflict… Robespierre emerged victorious, but now terror became in his hands a means of self-preservation and thus absurd… On July 27 Robespierre fell and the bourgeois orgy began.

“‘Well-being for all on the basis of labour’ still expresses much too definitely the aspirations of the plebeian fraternité of that time. No one could tell what they wanted until long after the fall of the Commune Babeuf gave the thing definite shape. Whereas the Commune with its aspirations for fraternity came too early, Babeuf in his turn came too late.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1889/letters/89_02_20.htm

As you can see from this quote, the 1789 Revolution produced the commune, which first brought to power constitutional royalists, then later Robespierre who made concessions to the working class. He could only stay in power using terror because he could not pass the power on to Babeuf. His replacement by the Directorate would mean a permanent step back from socialist laws to protect labor. Babeuf arrived late, once the Directorate had the power, and began to distribute his newspapers and organize meetings and protests. The Directorate allowed Babeuf to organize for a time, using his influence to threaten the royalists planning to forcibly remove the Directorate and completing the counter-revolution themselves. Instead, the Directorate attacked Babeuf once they felt saved from the royalists’ threatened return to power. Afterwards, it was Napoleon that returned to restore the monarchy and old state, but under a different family. He could then send French revolutionaries into wars abroad to be massacred by foreign armies, quelling the revolution in a classic style.

Babeuf’s late arrival matches exactly the behavior of Trotsky, who insisted on participation with the Third International run by Stalin even after his own exile, even through the destruction of Soviet democracy, and even after the famines and forced labor. He continued to support the Third International through Hitler’s rise to power with the help of German Stalinists, through assassinations, the betrayal of the Spanish revolution leading to General Franco’s rise to power, and into the first year of the Great Purges. Only in 1938 did the Left Opposition finally give up on the Third International. By then the working class had no democratic rights in Russia, Germany, Spain, and Italy. World War II was only one year away. Like Napoleon forced the revolutionary French soldiers abroad into endless war as far as Russia, the new fascists governments could massacre by the tens of millions Europe’s revolutionary people, radicalized by the great depression and the success of socialist property in Russia.

This late arrival in both cases did not occur by some accident. The timing fell apart because both Babeuf and Trotsky depended on a deal with the government to legally distribute their literature. They held back participation until given the explicit, legal right. It had to benefit the government itself. Lenin reversed this bad timing by using it in his favor. Bad timing meant disapproval from the government, and that meant an illegal party was necessary and actually the only path to power under the circumstances. Lenin published and distributed literature illegally, risking members of the party who could end up in prison simply for possession of the writing of the illegal party.

Sylvia Pankhurst, for example, in the UK, where human rights supposedly get respect, landed in prison where the judge and prison authorities forbade her the right to writing materials. She had to write with chalk and on secretly smuggled scraps to preserve her work. Lenin too, recounts memories of burning materials in a hurry to hide them from authorities and using milk as ink to write secretly in margins of books. These efforts by the authority to suppress communist writing only led to greater interest into the content of that writing. Illegal copies spread everywhere as a result, adding to their fame.

These writers continued to work because they believed the proletariat alone could accomplish the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the right to vote, all depended on the establishment of a proletarian government and the end of the class oppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. It could not be that every proletarian needed a bourgeois owner upon which to depend and from whom they must take orders. The revolution must be real and the present state, merely a nightmare.

Lenin writes in Chapter 3 of State and Revolution:

It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavorable auguries. Marx did not persist in the pedantic attitude of condemning an “untimely” movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from marxism, [sic] Plekhanov, who in November 1905 wrote encouragingly about the workers’ and peasants’ struggle, but after December 1905 cried, liberal fashion: “They should not have taken up arms.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm

The working class needed to hear from Marx an attempt to put off the conflict, since the reaction against the workers would shock them with its brutality. Plekhanov, on the other hand, encouraged the violent struggle of the working class until after the reaction. Then, he switched sides like the #Nanobureaucracy does now with regard to the trade union struggle. With every new strike anywhere in the country, the Nanobureaucracy calls for workers’ councils and a general strike leading to immediate revolution, like Plekhanov took every act of violence against authority as the last step before the seizure of the palace.

This has to do with the Nanobureaucracy’s anti-Marxist lack of involvement in the actual trade union struggle for the organization of unions, the raising of wages through contract negotiations, and the organization of strikes without the “pedantic attitude” of a renegade who wants to smash to pieces what he does not understand. The commodities, the products of capitalism, may legally belong to the capitalist but the workers’ labor created them. When the workers take up arms or participate in trade union activity, they attempt to take back from the capitalist what the capitalist stole with the approval of bourgeois law. At that point, they change perspective from one of the individual interacting with the protective, judicial state to the perspective of class conflict, when the real forces dictating in that conflict become unmasked.

Engels writes very clearly on the issue of the bourgeois intelligentsia attempting to take over the party:

If these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc. But in a workers’ party they are an adulterating element. If reasons exist for tolerating them there for the moment, it is also a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in the Party leadership and to remain aware that a break with them is only a matter of time. The time, moreover, seems to have come. How the Party can tolerate the authors of this article in its midst any longer is to us incomprehensible. But if the leadership of the Party should fall more or less into the hands of such people then the Party will simply be castrated and proletarian energy will be at an end. [emphasis added]

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/letters/79_09_15.htm

If the Social-Democratic Party, the party of revolution, had to fight the class struggle against the bourgeoisie to eliminate them from the leadership of the party within the party, what does that tell us about the trade unions and the state? The bourgeoisie, as a class, numbers in the millions, and they naturally use their money to secure leadership positions in any organization they join. This should not lead us to the conclusion that the capitalists and their corporations then must lead the revolutionary party, the conclusion of the Nanobureaucracy. The workers must use the same class analysis of the trade unions and the state, and they must apply that to the struggle to defend a proletarian leadership from the incursions of the bourgeoisie. The Democratic Power Faction has always supported a clear class policy, a net worth cap for the leadership of the organization. This maximum net-worth limit would immediately remove the greatest threats to “proletarian energy.” Afterwards, their agents would come next. This rational class policy would provide for the participation of individual bourgeois volunteers outside the leadership of the party. We should not be under any illusion that the official leadership of the party is not the real leadership of the party.

The following paragraph reads:

As for ourselves, in view of our whole past there is only one path open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and in particular the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is therefore impossible for us to co-operate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who say that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois. [emphasis added]

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/letters/79_09_15.htm

We can take the above argument one step further. We can see that to allow the bourgeoisie and its agents to remain influential within the party leadership means to eliminate the other pole from the party. The bourgeois leadership attempts to “expunge this class struggle from the movement.” The working class itself, emancipating itself, must declare an end to the emergency powers taken by the SEP’s Nanobureaucratic leadership in the 1980s. In order to bring to life the movement and resurrect the castrated manhood of the party, this argument must be clear: to neglect to eliminate the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie from the revolutionary party leadership is to eliminate from the party the living movement of the proletariat for its own emancipation. The class struggle must make steady gains in this direction until the inevitable break from the oppressing class.

Similarly, Lenin did not excuse the bourgeoisie even when they contributed greatly to the study of Marxism. He wrote:

The publicists’ alliance that we see today among the lenders [sic] of Narodism (Chernov, Rakitnikov and Sukhanov) and various Social-Democratic intellectualist factions that are either openly opposed to the “underground”, i. e., the workers’ party (the liquidators^[2] Dan, Martov and Cherevanin) or else help these liquidationist workerless groups (Trotsky and Sher, Bazarov, Lunacharsky and Plekhanov), is in fact nothing more nor less than an alliance of bourgeois intellectuals directed against the workers.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/jun/x01.htm

And later in the same article: “[Plekhanov, Trotsky, and others’ alliance] is a most unprincipled alliance of bourgeois intellectuals against the workers.” So, when we think of Trotsky and Plekhanov as leaders within the Marxist movement, we should also keep in mind Lenin’s reminder that these were “bourgeois intellectuals” allied against the workers. As we saw with Lenin’s own break with Marxism at Brest-Litovsk, this precise portrayal of the bourgeois intellectual could also apply to Lenin himself. Since the Bolsheviks ignored the policies of Marx and Engels with regard to bourgeois intellectuals and allowed them into the leadership, a period of partial capitalist restoration immediately followed the October Revolution. A bourgeois leader of a proletarian party could only act as a usurper and a tyrant, eliminating the proletariat systematically from all powerful positions in the state and even within the trade unions. Marx and Engels recused themselves from all executive positions in the First International while writing pamphlets, delivering speeches, and otherwise contributing to the intellectual life of the real First International leadership. We will need to struggle hard for this policy within the Fourth International as an essential element of the class struggle in society as a whole. For this reason, Democratic Power proposes for all executive positions including local branch positions a net worth cap of $1,000,000 for the SEP US, (to exclude the top 5%) with adjustments of this amount for PPP (or the 95^th percentile) in other countries.

4.

ICFI (1953) Supporters writes:

However, it is precisely within the unions, where they are most needed to defend the remaining gains preserved within the unions against the nationalist bureaucracy, that the necessary point of building rank-and-file committees is most sharply posed. This is precisely the point at which the ICFI tells us to abandon ship – vote no to unionization attempts, do not join unions, and abstain from any efforts to unionize and build new unions!

https://icfi1953.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-trade-unions-and-icfis-mistakes.html

We do not pose a point, and this mistake leads to the lack of clarity, a sign of a lack of thought. A question is posed, with a sense of artificiality; a point is proven, with finality. Rank-and-file committees, or as we should call them, workplace equality committees, do not stand before us as a question posed. We see them as the inevitable outcome of the process of class struggle against the union bureaucracy and the liberal state.

Should union members abandon the trade union struggle in favor of the workplace equality committees? That would be to impose by decree a historical process, a fateful mistake. The revolutionary party must intervene and present its program throughout the entire process. A higher wage rate and better working conditions than those proposed by the union bureaucracy. Deeper cuts into the profits of the capitalists through price caps for life’s bare necessities: housing, food, medicine, and education, as well as communication and transportation. These demands do not require workers’ committees in order for the party to intervene in the active struggle of the working class. The trade unions must take up these issues with their membership, and the revolutionary party must propose its own contracts so as to win positions within the trade union for the right to negotiate. Revolutionaries have a right to participate in the trade unions and even win local elections to represent workers in specific factories. Why exclude this possibility? Does doing so really impose a new situation on top of the old one? Or does it simply raise an irrational optimism with regard to revolutionary opportunities approached with the wrong mindset? These questions must be posed.

The workplace equality committees do not prove any point either. To use the committees simply to prove a point against one or another revolutionary group, as the Nanobureaucracy does, only serves to exclude the workers from the leadership of their own organizations. This is a form of liquidationism for the committees as a way of proving a point or stroking the ego of a petty bourgeois leadership. To state it clearly, the Nanobureaucracy wants control of the committees and all money raised by them, or it wants to shut them down. Such a top-down approach to politics only serves the interests of the bourgeoisie rather than the self-emancipation of the proletariat. The role of Democratic Power is not to allow the bourgeoisie to prove their point about the imagined incompatibility of socialism and democracy within the revolutionary committees.

They will form and give rise to an inclusive movement that welcomes all parties and shades of opinion to freely express themselves about the important topics they were formed to discuss. The bourgeoisie will, as always, seek to suppress them as a “mobocracy.” Their hypocrisy will not go unnoticed, as they rule over the workers’ democracy not with reasoned argument but with mobster threats; extortion over publicity, electoral strategy, and public office; and any political violence they can summon up, even through alliances with fascism, against the proletarian leadership. The workplace equality committees reserve the right to defend with force the democratic rights and security of their membership and for the working class in general. This is not to prove any point for the proletariat, although we do value the search for truth. It is to participate in the political emancipation of the oppressed class. We cannot, as long as we are politically conscious, allow the bourgeoisie to dictate policy either through their state or through their leadership of our revolutionary parties.

Democratic Power must defend inclusivity and the right to debate within the workplace equality committees and demand proportional representation for all parties and factions, aside from the Republicans and Democrats, interested in leading those committees. Nanobureaucratic suppression, far from imposing historical progress on the class struggle, can only lead to the destruction of valuable connections between politicized workers. These connections serve to mobilize the working class for a confrontation with the capitalist class in every sphere of political activity, in mass demonstrations, in trade union activity, in electoral politics, and in the internal politics of revolutionary parties.

5.

In any case the fight, as ever, remains to turn the workers and their organizations in a revolutionary and political direction and to fight whenever necessary for new organizations opposed to and against the compromises of all nationalist, reformist etc. bureaucracy. 

https://icfi1953.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-trade-unions-and-icfis-mistakes.html

The organizations of the working class do not need to turn into revolutionary organizations. On the contrary, they must serve the purpose they were created to serve. Trade unions do not represent revolutionary conflict with the state. History has proven that against the misconceptions of the anti-political IWW. Trade unions do represent the workers in their negotiations over contracts with the employers. For this reason, they play a reactionary role in demonstrations and electoral politics. Nevertheless, the working class is the revolutionary class, and the revolutionary party must participate in the economic struggle on the side of the workers to enlighten them about the political side of their struggle. The revolutionary party can win elections in union locals to represent the workers where they live. They can use these offices not to turn the trade union revolutionary but to address the working-class audience with revolutionary ideas during their discussions about trade union activity.

To confront a union official over a compromise as an online marketing rep for a private corporation is much different from confronting the same union official using a union rep or local official, one who is also a party member with a working-class base of political support. The abandonment by the Nanobureaucracy of the revolutionary strategy will actually provide opportunities for the Democratic Power Faction to gain influence during important battles. As these battles intensify, the bourgeois leadership of the revolutionary movement will betray one another, forcing a break between the proletarian and bourgeois factions. The Democratic Power Faction will stand by the proletarian side and support their campaigns with a greater proletarian energy, inspiring the final emancipation of the proletariat by the proletariat. Proletariat, get fired up!