The working class constitutes
the majority of the Danish
population. Today it is more
complex than ever before – both
economically, in terms of
education, socially and culturally.
But there is one common feature
of all working class people: They
are part of the class that create
social values; they are part of the
class with an objective interest in
revolutionary change and in
building socialism.
Bourgeois ideology and the
social roots of opportunism
The working class is the main
force of the class struggle.
This is the objective side. The
subjective side is how the working
class and its party acts, struggles
and develops; If it pursues the line
of class struggle or a line of class
collaboration; If it moves towards
the revolution or away from it.
It is the struggle for the minds
and the hearts of the working class
and to provide the necessary
theory to win the struggle for
socialism.
Every day we are exposed to a
flood of bourgeois propaganda,
designed to make us think of
anything other than to change the
world. When we as a communist
party speak about opportunism
within the working class, we are
talking about political currents
pretending to have working-class,
left or even revolutionary policies,
but in fact are not – like reformism,
revisionism or Trotskyism. They
may sound quite convincing, but
their phrases and illusions about
improving capitalism dissolve into
hot air when they are put to the test
of practice.
These opportunist currents
are not the result of ignorance or
naivety. Their purpose is to split the
working class and prevent the
unification of the revolutionary
forces. They do not disappear and
leave the stage, even though they
are proven wrong all the time. On
the contrary, the building of the
Feb, March - 2019
communist party, the unification of
the revolutionary forces and orga-
nising on a mass scale on the basis
of the line of class struggle can only
make progress by defeating the
opportunist voices of defeat.
Opportunism has objective
roots and stems from objective
interests, bearing the chara-
cteristics of social strata outside the
working class. The most important
social bases of opportunism are
twofold – a special social stratum
at the top of the working class, the
so-called labour aristocracy, and
the intelligentsia, primarily petty
bourgeois intellectuals.
In Denmark the labour
aristocracy ranges from the heads
of the reformist trade union and
party bureaucracy and the mana-
gements of trade union related
companies to ordinary trade union
and
party
fun-ctionaries,
technocrats and privileged shop
stewards, including also some
privileged workers.
More than one hundred years
of social democratic reformism has
made the labour aristocracy an
institution, among others of the
cooperative companies that
originated from the labour
movement, and gradually were
transformed into the streamlined
companies of today operating
entirely on market premises.
The main Danish labour
organisation – the social
democratic trade union federation
LO – has its own system of
education for class collaboration,
partly financed by contributions
from the employers’ unions.
During the last few decades
we have seen a number of new so-
called trade unions. They offer
membership at a much lower price
than the ordinary trade unions.
They are the so-called ‘yellow’,
splittist organisations such as the
Christian Trade Union with 700
functionaries. These organisations
do not sign any labour contracts
with the employers and they have
abandoned the right to strike. Their
members work as scabs at times
of conflict between the real trade
unions and the employers and their
organisations. The yellow organi-
sations count for four percent of
the workers and employees, while
the conventional reformist trade
unions organise around 67
percent. This makes them among
the highest ranking in the EU,
although the level of organisation
has actually decreased for a
number of years.
The lives of the labour
aristocrats are quite different from
the lives of the trade union
members who pay their salaries.
Their lucrative wages, pensions
and jobs differ sharply from the
much lower paid labour of the trade
union members, marked by
attrition, job uncertainty and
insecurity, terms of employment
and work hours. They are not
subjected to a constant pressure
to raise productivity, or two percent
yearly cutbacks as in the Danish
public sector, or rationalisations,
nor do they see their workplace
outsourced, privatised or moved
abroad.
You are not automatically
transformed into a labour aristocrat
by becoming a shop steward or
having another position of trust
from your co-workers. But the
danger is obvious in the back-
patting reformist trade union
hierarchy. The process of
corruption is an objective mecha-
nism, characterised by material
cash advantages or certain
privileges enjoyed by the
corrupted. Subjectively a trade
union leader may at one moment
be a labour aristocrat of the classic
type and the next a person of class
struggle – but unfortunately also
the other way around, which is the
tendency when a strong communist
party does not exist. The higher the
rank in the labour aristocracy, the
more one is bourgeoisified.
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