229. Capitalist globalization, while undermining all national reform programs, has brought with it the integration of all major trade union apparatuses globally with their respective capitalist states and corporations. Examining these process, David North explained in 1992:

What has occurred in the former Soviet Union is a manifestation of an international phenomenon. All over the world the working class is confronted with the fact that the trade unions, parties and even states which they created in an earlier period have been transformed into the direct instruments of imperialism.

The days are over when the labor bureaucracies “mediated” the class struggle and played the role of buffer between the classes. Though the bureaucracies generally betrayed the historical interests of the working class, they still, in a limited sense, served its daily practical needs; and, to that extent, “justified” their existence as leaders of working class organizations. That period is over. The bureaucracy cannot play any such independent role in the present period.

This is true not only for the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, but for the American bureaucracy in the trade unions.^[1]

230. The trade union bureaucracies have served as critical auxiliaries in the capitalist offensive against the working class all over the world since the 1980s. Suppressing every mass movement of workers and strike actions in the advanced capitalist countries, they not only fulfilled the same function in Turkey, but also came to the aid of the military regime after the coup on September 12, 1980. All workers’ resistance was suppressed, leftist workers were fired en masse and thrown into prisons, wages were frozen and all the gains that had been achieved through contract fights in the previous period were rolled back, while the trade unions collaborated with the bourgeoisie in every case. DİSK, which falsely bears the adjective “revolutionary” in its name, displayed a complete capitulation to the coup, while Türk-İş, the largest trade union organization of the period, gave its general secretary to the military regime as minister of labor and social security.