The Founding of the Red Trade Union International: Proceedings and Resolutions of the First Congress, 1921
Mike Taber, Brill, £157

THIS remarkable volume, ably edited ably by historian-archivist Mike Taber, is especially poignant because the founding of the RTUI in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and the grand idea of a global unitary body bringing together revolutionary workers, proved to be very nearly the final note. 

The failure of global labour support would prove decisive to the trajectory of the contemporary left of a century ago. Despite the vital appeal to the people of the Global South, the Russian Revolution could only fall back upon itself. Things might have gone differently, but the drift in the direction of Stalin and Stalinism can be seen as the underlying, tragic saga. 

By 1921, bourgeois law and order had been re-established in Hungary and in the section of Germany where a Red Republic had briefly been proclaimed. Mussolini’s victory lay just ahead. The Seattle General Strike of 1919 was already slipping from memory and the communist factions engaged in fighting each other — a serious matter because the US was not only the new center of the bourgeoisie but also because a left-wing challenge to capitalism in the US had been counted upon by revolutionaries around the globe.

The Russians and their allies who expected so much from the RTUI also miscalculated in the most painful way. 

The day of anarchism had passed nearly everywhere by 1920, but the sense that something else, some revolutionary devolution of power to workers — themselves without a revolutionary party — remained strong in many places. Many pages of this debate-rich volume document the conflict with syndicalism, a prevailing radical workerism in many parts of Europe and the US, philosophically at odds with the centralisation of authority that Bolshevism required. 

In a word, nothing could replace the spirit, the culture and sensibility of the Industrial Workers of the World and the moment that fled would not be regained.

Many other pages capture an alternative dilemma. The Russian Revolution’s effect upon workers in various European locations prompted thousands of newly loyal communists to leave mainstream “bourgeois” union bodies. The new Russian leadership firmly rejected this solution. 

As the great British workers’ leader Tom Mann sought to explain to the puzzled delegates, it had never been the aim of labour revolutionaries in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland to abandon the majority of workers by leaving unions created with so much effort and sacrifice: “It is a serious mistake to build up a lot of smaller organisations, with a view to drawing members from the older ones.”

With this proposition, the Russian leaders more than agreed. But their agreement could not smooth out the many contradictions. In some places, the mainstream union leaders simply expelled unions led by communists.

The presence of a partially recuperated Second International was also troubling to the delegates. It was non-revolutionary, and yet it offered some syndicalist-minded unions a legitimate place to connect with workers of various countries. The Third International, soon to become the Comintern, had no such space available.

Consider Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky (1878-1952), a Bolshevik so critical of Bolshevism that he had been expelled, but who was accepted reluctantly as leader of the Red Labour International because no-one else had the administrative skills and determination. Lozovsky was certainly not alone in his dogmatic insistence that all who disagreed with the Russian line had to be mistaken. 

The Second International had perished in wartime as it deserved to perish. Leftish social democrats formed a new body in hostile response to the Communists, but the International Federation of Trade Unions, sometimes known as the “Amsterdam International,” was a worse than poor substitute for the RTUI, limited almost entirely to Europe. It could not come to an agreement on colonialism, and even left-wing social democrats, for the most part, considered the liberation of the Global South as a step too far.

Anticipating all this, the debaters at the creation of the RTUI struggled in vain. Perhaps the founding of the RTUI, in 1921, had come too late to become successful. As a weapon in the hands of the emerging Russian bureaucracy, it survived for no good reasons, held no consistent positions, and folded formally in 1937.  

Was there ever a real chance for revolution-minded class-conscious workers across the world to co-ordinate their actions? It’s a question that remains open.

Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.

This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in CounterPunch