Outside & against the unions

“Outside and Against the Unions” was written by the UK communist group Wildcat in 1992. Much of the article is about the sabotage of the Miners strike in the UK in 1984-5 by the National Union of Mineworkers and thus might seem irrelevant in Australia nearly twenty years later. However as well as much that is specific to the Miners strike there is an excellent exposition of the standard communist critique of the unions first developed by the council communists some eighty years ago. The council communists criticised the unions due to their experiences in the failed German revolution of 1918-23 where the unions and the Social Democratic Party used the Freikorps (proto-Nazi formations of ex-soldiers) to slaughter the insurgent proletariat. Wildcat have a website at www.webcom.com/~wildcat.