Hi,
The discussion on council communism touched on an interesting question: the nature of the trade unions today. According to the Libcom article on Council Communism,
It’s sometimes been thought that council communists have maintained an ‘outside and against’ position on bureaucratic reformist trade unions, seeing them as a break on workers’ militancy and believing that the leadership, who’s role is seen as little more than ‘cops with flat caps’, will always eventually sell out the membership. It is true that, historically at least, council communists have been anti-trade union. However, this has largely been due to the context in which council communists were writing. For instance, German council communists of the 1920s were fully aware of the German trade unions’ role in betraying the attempted workers’ revolution in 1918. However, in modern times, though keeping a very critical view of trade unions and their undemocratic nature, council communists generally believe that having a union is better for workers than not having one.
We would argue that 'in modern times' nothing has changed: the capitalist mode of production is still decadent and therefore the unions - whether reformist or radical, bureaucratic or democratic - are still against the working class.
In the the 1800s capitalism was still progressive, expanding, and thus capable of granting real reforms and making concessions. The form the workers' organisations took corresponded to these conditions: permanent organisations (co-ops, unions) and mass parties (social-democracy). However, the First World War was an expression of the fact that capitalism had exhausted the non-capitalist areas of the planet and nations could only expand at the expense of other nations. Capitalist socialist relations - the nation state - had become a fetter upon the further development of the productive forces - a global economy.
The conditions in which the working class struggled had fundamentally changed: the unions became integrated into the state-capitalist war machine and likewise the social-democratic parties became integrated into the political apparatus of the ruling class - where they remain today. This explains why in the Russian revolutions of 1905/1917 and Germany 1918 the working class began to adopt new forms of struggle: non-permanent organs (soviets/councils) and smaller, more centralised proletarian political organisations (Bolsheviks, KAPD).
The distinction between Revolutionary-syndicalism (IWW/British Syndicalism) and Anarcho-syndicalism (CGT/CNT) is largely due to the former's acceptance that the conditions under which the proletariat was fighting were beginning to change, whereas the later remained wedded to the conceptions of the 19th century.
So the question remains: today, is it better for workers to have a union than not?
Fraternally,
World Revolution.
PS. Our pamphlet Unions Against the Working Class is now available free online, as are a collection of articles on the question What is Syndicalism?
So I take it you won't join a union then?