For an Organized Working Class! – Remarks on the prospects of trade unions in Uganda

Trade unions are no new form of organization in Uganda. The National Organization of Trade Unions (NOTU) is the largest trade union organization within Uganda and exists already for more than 50 years. But they are insufficient. They might have over 900.000 working people organized among their ranks, but only very few industrial workers. It is good that over 100.000 transport workers are organized in their ranks, over 160.000 teachers about 130.000 agricultural workers and more than 50.000 workers in the tourism sector, but overall not even 30.000 workers in the industrial sector were organized under the umbrella of the NOTU in 2018¹. They are therefore very underrepresented. This shows that industrial workers in Uganda are barely organized in trade unions. We need to change that! A positive aspect is that agricultural workers are more unionized at least.

The goal we have

Engels said:

“The emancipation of the working class can be the work only of the working class itself. It is self-evident that the working class cannot leave its emancipation either to the capitalists and big landowners, its opponents and exploiters, or to the petty bourgeois and small peasants, who, being stifled by competition on the part of the big exploiters, have no choice but to join either their ranks or those of the workers.”²

The working class is defined by wage labor, not just by being part of the industrial proletariat. But still, the industrial proletariat plays the most vital part among the working class together with the working peasantry. They are the ones that create the wealth of the nation. We shall keep that in mind, that industry and agriculture is the primary.

To the quote itself must be said: We cannot rely on the mercy of the bourgeoisie and big landlords. They will never give up voluntarily. Why should they? They benefit from exploiting us. The petty bourgeoisie cannot save us, even when they are friendly towards us. They cannot compete with the big capital.

We can only break our own chains, united. For that we must fight against the capitalist system as a whole and that needs organization in the form of trade unions, besides the Communist Party.

The myth of the “neutrality of trade unions”

Trade unions de jure are “neutral” in most capitalist countries. De facto they are bound to political parties, in most cases towards social-democratic ones, sometimes there are sham trade unions orchestrated by conservative parties (for example the self-proclaimed “Christian trade unions” in Germany). Dimitrov pointed out that fact over a century ago. He even said:

“Either with labour – against capital; or with capital against labour! Either on the side of the revolution, or in tile camp of the counter-revolution!”³

This is what makes the difference between a red and a yellow trade union in the end. When the trade union leaders call for a “balance” between labor and capital, they are yellow trade unions, therefore servants of the bourgeoisie; when the trade union leaders recklessly fight for the interests of the workers, they are red trade unions. There is no “middle ground”. Social achievements under capitalism can surely improve the acute living situation of the workers, but they cannot solve the fundamental contradictions of capitalism overall. Whoever loses that out of sight will in the short or long run turns yellow.

Our tasks

It would be of course a case of madness to simply ignore the existing trade unions. They are insufficient in many ways: Not only that their leadership has no socialist vision, their organizational focus is obviously in the service sector. We can join their organizations, but we shall at no time forget about our mission to build up socialist-oriented trade unions in the long run.

Liu Shaoqi mentioned in 1932 that the policy of the Communist Party of China regarding yellow trade unions was the following:

“The Red trade unions should get their own members to join yellow unions which have a mass following (but not those which do not). They should establish a revolutionary opposition within such unions and win over their mass following.”⁴

What does that mean for us? It means the following:

We should join the NOTU trade unions, even though their leadership is not our friend. It is not the leadership we want to ally but the workers on the basis. Therefore we should join the NOTU to get into contact and parallelly build up an opposition organization. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was purged from the social-democratic trade unions in the 1920s and therefore had to build up its own trade union organization, which also still had some members among the social-democratic trade unions: The Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO).

Our strategy and tactics in Uganda should be similar: Building up a Red Trade Union Organization and winning over organized workers from the yellow trade unions. The latter shall not be the main focus since only 900.000 working people are organized in the NOTU trade unions. The most workers are not unionized, it is our task to get them organized in trade unions to fight for the common goal of better livelihood and work conditions.

Also every trade union activist must understand the Marxist teaching that there can never be a “just wage” under capitalism, that the capitalist wage labor needs to be overcome⁵. For that the work “Value, Price and Profit” by Karl Marx should be taught in reading circles among workers and as a summarized version through the daily work.

It might be that Uganda’s working class is proportionally much weaker compared to its large amount of peasants, but that does neither decrease the importance of trade unions nor does this mean that the working class could not take the lead. The working class is the most important class because it shows the path to the future. The peasantry might still be the dominant class in Uganda, but it will not be forever. The small private ownership in which the peasantry mainly roots in is not economically stable. The very obvious proof for that is that many sons and daughters of peasants leave the impoverished villages to look for a job in the urban centers. The working peasantry can only survive as a class when it starts organizing in cooperatives, parallelly to the formation of trade unions by the working class. Only together the agricultural sector of Uganda can be modernized with industrial means; only together the agricultural sector can produce enough food surplus for a growing urban working class. But that is a topic for another occasion.

The workers must take the lead in the workers-and-peasants-alliance to show the path into an industrialized Uganda!