Trade unions, mass organisations and the left: From historical necessity to reassessment and renewal

By Rezgar Akrawi

Published 22 May, 2026

In most Middle Eastern and Global South countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, the left suffers from a shared structural problem: the severe and chronic fragmentation afflicting mass organisations, particularly trade unions, professional federations, feminist organisations and student unions.

Authoritarian regimes generate oppressive conditions that push left-wing forces to adopt tightly centralised organisational forms. It also leads them to adopt an approach based on building clandestine and sometimes semi-public trade unions and mass organisations closely bound to political parties, at the expense of their independence and capacity to embrace broader social constituencies. Comparative experiences reveal that when the left turns mass organisations into extensions of its party structure, it may gain internal ideological coherence and influence, yet it risks losing something far more precious: genuine social weight capable of mobilising people at decisive moments.

Objectivity requires acknowledging that the model of the party-affiliated union and mass organisation was not wrong in all circumstances. It played a pivotal role in certain historic phases, particularly periods of left-wing growth and mass ascendancy, when organisational centralisation was needed to maintain cohesion and protect cadres amid repressive realities. Affiliated unions and organisations were able to serve as effective incubators for union and mass work under conditions of extreme hardship.

Yet time has changed fundamentally, and with it the mechanisms of mass thinking and organising. People today, especially the new generations raised on a culture of instant access to information, horizontal organising and direct participation in decision-making, no longer accept being mobilised in the service of a specific party agenda, however sincere its intentions. Real popular power today is not built through organisational decree; it is built through rootedness in people’s daily lives and honest and effective representation of their interests, regardless of intellectual or political affiliations.

This paper seeks to stimulate debate around the need to review the affiliated union and loyalist mass organisation model, and explore an alternative model resting on three complementary pillars: building genuinely independent progressive trade unions, federations and mass organisations grounded in international conventions rather than party programs; active participation of left-wing activists within these organisations as individuals committed to the concerns of their sectors, rather than as party representatives; and building broad coordination and alliance frameworks among the various left forces, which transcend secondary ideological differences and offer a unified project of change.

This paper will examine the Iraqi case as a lived and direct experience, rather than an abstract theoretical model, drawing out lessons and questions relevant to similar contexts in the region and the Global South. 

Left-wing forces in Iraq were compelled throughout most of their history to operate under successive dictatorial regimes —most notably the Baathist regime that ruled the country from 1968 to 2003 — generating an organisational legacy whose shadow still falls on the present day. 

Yet the new conditions that followed the fall of that dictatorship, and the existence of a relative margin of freedoms and public activity despite the authority of religious and nationalist militias, calls for serious thinking about more open and independent organisational models capable of embracing broader social constituencies and representing their interests with greater depth and honesty. 

This reassessment gains added importance when we recall the bitter experience with politically manipulated yellow unions (unions created or controlled by dictatorial regimes to serve their purposes) in Iraq and across the region, where they were transformed into tools of control and subjugation rather than representations of people's interests.

This legacy remains alive in collective memory. Ruling authorities in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Region continue to follow the same pattern with their loyalist official unions, making  an alternative model grounded in genuine independence, collective leadership, internal democracy and intellectual pluralism an urgent need for restoring popular trust and expanding the left’s sphere of influence.

From organic affiliation to independence

After the fall of the Baathist regime in 2003, most left-wing organisations in Iraq were keen to maintain and establish their own unions, federations and organisations. This frequently led to a proliferation of organisations and unions within the same sector. In some cases it resulted in duplicated organisations within a single party, due to internal splits or competition. All this produced a landscape characterised by dispersed energies, multiple names and diminishing effectiveness.

This reality calls for calm and constructive reflection on the price that trade unions and mass organisations have paid as a result of party affiliation. A union tightly bound to a particular organisation finds it genuinely difficult to embrace workers in all their intellectual, national, religious and political diversity. Its sphere of influence narrows and becomes confined to a specific stratum. 

Likewise, feminist organisations organically tied to a particular party find it difficult to attract women from different political and intellectual backgrounds, however sincere the intentions of their leaders. Student unions gradually become arenas for party rivalries, where students lose their independent space and feel they are being recruited politically rather than acting as participants in a movement that represents their interests.

The proposal here is not to abandon mass work or withdraw from it, but to elevate it toward more independent and broadly representative models. Building a single, strong, independent, progressive union that encompasses tens of thousands is much more useful than dozens of small, scattered organisations, because a large independent union possesses the weight and credibility to effectively defend the interests of its members and confront violations with a louder voice and deeper impact. 

Left-wing individuals who work within these unions as persons committed to the concerns of their sectors can acquire deeper social and political influence than they would by leading affiliated organisations of limited impact. All of this ultimately serves the left project itself.

A personal experience I lived through in the summer of 1992 reveals the depth and roots of this problem. When we gathered with a number of left-wing comrades and unemployed workers to build a union for the unemployed in the Kurdistan Region, the first disagreement that arose was not about the organisational structure or working mechanisms, but about the founding declaration. 

Some comrades proposed a declaration saturated with left-wing ideological language and words such as imperialism, socialism and the like. I disagreed with them, and held that what we were seeking was to build a union for all the unemployed, from every idea and orientation, not a union for the unemployed of the left alone.

We faced a fundamental choice: do we build a broad mass organisation that expresses the interests of all, or do we build an ideological facade that narrows its own base before it even sets out? That question, raised in the summer of 1992, remains at the heart of the problem we are discussing today.

The impacts of weak coordination and fragmentation

The problem of fragmentation in unions and mass organisations cannot be addressed in isolation from a deeper and more influential phenomenon: weak coordination and joint work among left-wing forces, particularly at pivotal junctures. 

Mass fragmentation among unions and mass organisations reflects, in part, a prior political and organisational fragmentation, manifested in the multiplicity of left-wing organisations with divergent positions on certain issues. This divergence is natural and legitimate in itself; but when it turns into tensions and conflicts that undermine joint work, it casts its heavy shadow over the entire mass work space.

Since the end of the past century, Iraqi left-wing forces have faced the challenge of reaching a minimum level of joint coordination at decisive moments. Differences over political positions, ranging from dealing with the occupation to stances on the political process to evaluations of left-wing experiences, sometimes shifted from a productive intellectual debate that welcomed disagreement into a tension that made field cooperation difficult, despite the many points of convergence. The mass impact of this reality was tangible: internal tensions weakened the left’s ability to present itself in a unified manner before the people who were counting on it as the bearer of a project of change.

This reality directly reflected on unions and mass organisations. When left-wing forces drift apart in their positions, unions and federations do not escape the effects, finding themselves confronting rivalries that disperse energy and divert them from their task of defending members’ rights. Rather than directing efforts toward confronting violations and demanding rights, those efforts are sometimes drained in internal conflicts among left-wing forces, and disputes that do not serve workers’ interests.

The absence of coordination also generated a pattern of competition within the same mass sphere, rather than expansion toward new social sectors that left-wing forces had not yet reached. The result was that the mass work landscape remained limited in scope despite the multiplicity of organisations, as this did not always lead to distributing work and addressing different strata; instead, it led to overlap and repetition in the same areas.

There is a painful paradox worthy of reflection: the left raises the banner of unity among the toiling masses, yet its organisational approach has inadvertently led to the dispersal of struggle and shared efforts and the weakening of unions and mass movements.

In this context, the strategic value of building genuinely independent mass organisations and unions becomes clear: they constitute the space in which left-wing individuals belonging to different organisations can work side-by-side around clear common interests and points of convergence. 

Independent unions and federations impose their own logic, grounded in the defence of rights. This logic transcends ideological differences when it comes to confronting arbitrary dismissal, reclaiming an acquired right, raising wages or demanding equality. 

The experiences of union and mass movements reveal that joint work within independent unions and federations also gradually consolidates a culture of cooperation and builds collective popular power, which in turn has a positive effect on relations among left-wing forces.

Lessons from effective union experiences

Historic and contemporary experiences reveal that effective independent progressive unions have often been a pivotal factor in social and political change, and that their strength did not derive from party affiliation, but from being rooted in their bases:

• The Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), despite certain reservations, played a central role in bringing down the dictatorship in 2011, provided an institutional framework for national dialogue in its aftermath, and succeeded in converting popular protests into organised demands. Its popular weight, rooted in broad sectors of workers and professionals, was precisely what granted it the negotiating capacity that all the political parties combined were unable to match.
• The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) formed a fundamental pillar in the struggle against the Apartheid system, demonstrating that strong independent unions can simultaneously serve as a front for defending labour rights and a platform for the struggle for human dignity, liberation and equality, without being absorbed into any particular political party.
• In Brazil, an independent trade union movement led by automobile workers in São Paulo emerged in the late 1970s in confrontation with the military dictatorship, demonstrating that organised strike action is an eminently political instrument when backed by a progressive union genuinely rooted in its popular base. This union movement subsequently gave rise to the Workers’ Party, which reached power in a rare model of building real political power from grassroots union work.
• In India, miners and textile workers’ unions historically linked daily labour struggles over wages and working conditions to broader social change, demonstrating that a union capable of embracing popular masses in all their religious, ethnic and class diversity can transcend narrow economic demands and transform into a force for deep social change.

Regarding contemporary experiences in Western democracies, the Danish left offers a model worth reflecting on, though it too is not without considerable reservations. In Denmark, left-wing and socialist parties no longer have the option of building their own unions, given that the main trade union confederation is an independent and powerful entity. 

This has made working within independent unions the practical path for advancing radical and progressive orientations from within, through persuasion, practice and struggle across various sectors. This trajectory has produced unions of real popular weight, while left-wing forces within them have acquired deeper social and political influence than they could have gained by merely leading small party-loyalist organisations.

What these experiences reveal is that effective independent unions and mass organisations do not merely defend immediate rights; they are also capable of building, over time, an organisational culture and institutional capacity that makes them a lever for change at decisive moments. This is precisely what the Iraqi left lacked during the October 2019 uprising and beyond — and what should constitute the compass of left-wing mass work in the coming period.

International conventions as a practical foundation

Efforts should be directed toward building genuinely independent trade unions, professional federations and workers’ organisations that ground their work in international human rights, labour rights, and women’s rights conventions, rather than the political programs of left-wing organisations. 

This approach is extra important in Global South countries, as these conventions provide a solid foundation and moral and legal legitimacy that transcends local boundaries, granting union struggles a universal dimension that is difficult to target with accusations of political or ideological bias.

Foremost among these is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees in Article 23 the right to work, free choice of employment, just and favourable work conditions, and to form and join trade unions. Complementing this framework is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ratified by Iraq), which explicitly obliges states to guarantee trade union freedoms and protect workers from violations.

The core conventions of the International Labour Organisation form the most solid practical pillar in this context, particularly Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise, which guarantees workers, without discrimination, the right to establish and join organisations without prior authorisation from authorities; Convention No. 98 on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining, which protects workers from any interference in union affairs; Convention No. 29 on Forced Labour; Convention No. 105 on the Abolition of Forced Labour; and Convention No. 111 on Discrimination in Employment and Occupation, which prohibits all forms of discrimination in the work environment.

On the specific question of women’s rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) represents the most comprehensive and binding reference, recognising women’s full political, economic, social and cultural rights, without reservation. It is complemented by the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, considered to be one of the most comprehensive international documents addressing women’s issues and the requirements for their empowerment.

These conventions correspond in essence to what all left-wing forces advance as demands in the area of labour rights, mass rights and women’s rights, while at the same time deepening them and providing them with an international legal framework. 

Grounding the struggle in these reference points not only provides a strong legal and ethical framework for union, mass and feminist struggle, but also contributes to reducing sensitivities around accusations of party politicisation within unions and mass organisations, as the demands are transformed from general ideological slogans into internationally recognised rights that can be defended before society and authorities alike.

The rentier economy and complexities of union organising

To all this we must add the structural challenge posed by the rentier nature of the economy in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, a feature shared by most oil-producing states that makes independent union organising a matter of considerable complexity requiring rigorous scientific thinking. 

Where a large proportion of the workforce depends on state and public sector salaries, a direct relationship of dependency with authorities is established, which constrains space for independent organising.

Official figures reveal the depth of this dependency: oil revenues accounted for about 89% of Iraq’s total public budget during the first seven months of 2024, while data from the first half of 2025 indicated that oil constituted about 92% of the country’s total revenues. This makes Iraq one of the country’s most economically dependent on a single resource, and narrows the space for any genuine union independence when confronting a state that holds both tools of punishment and reward.

In productive economies, workers move toward union organising because their negotiating power with private employers requires organised collective action. In rentier economies, a different logic prevails: the relationship is one between a citizen and a state that distributes rent, transforming labour demands from a struggle over clear contractual rights into endeavours surrounded by concerns about job security and livelihood stability.

The most telling example of this is perhaps what occurred during the October 2019 uprising in Iraq. Thought that vast popular uprising shook the entire political order, unions were unable to convert the momentum of the streets into organised labour strikes that could halt the production process and compel the government to respond. 

This was because the majority of protesting workers were government employees directly tied to state salaries, who found themselves facing a painful equation: either protest and bear its professional consequences, or remain silent and preserve their only source of income.

In the Kurdistan Region, this pattern manifests itself with even greater intensity. We have witnessed repeated waves of protests over delayed salary payments, yet these protests remained spontaneous, intermittent and unable to transform into an organised and sustainable union movement. 

The fundamental reason is that the Kurdish worker who demands their rights simultaneously knows they are wholly dependent on the very government they are protesting against, making independent union organising a personal risk that the individual finds difficult to bear alone.

This reality has revealed an urgent need to gradually build awareness that the right to a union is not a rebellion against the state, but rather a guarantee of worker’s dignity in the face of any authority, thereby presenting collective protection as an alternative to individual fragility. 

Such an approach demands that the left develop distinct union policies that take into account the specificity of the rentier environment, rather than replicating models born in different economic contexts. It requires focusing on gradually building social awareness that union and mass rights are not a concession granted and withdrawn by authority; they are an inherent right guaranteed by international conventions and required by full citizenship. 

Is also necessitates broadening the concept of organising to include demanding transparency in the distribution of rentier wealth and accountability for those who manage it — demands that concern everyone and can transcend political barriers to build broader social solidarity.

International donor organisations and the question of independence

No reading of the landscape of union and mass fragmentation is complete without reference to the role of international donor organisations. Objectivity requires acknowledging that international funding and global expertise have contributed to supporting genuine union, human rights and mass work activity in various phases, and that many organisations have benefited from this support in building their capacities and expanding their presence.

Yet there is another side to this picture that warrants frank, critical reflection. This is particularly true regarding organisations tied to Western capitalist governments that ultimately reflect their countries’ policies and strategic interests in the region — interests that do not necessarily align with those of the working classes and popular masses these organisations claim to support.

Many of these organisations have directed their funding in ways that promote a particular model of “civil society,” which focuses on reform within the existing class system and avoids challenging core economic structures, while marginalising unions and federations with a clear class orientation and radical labour and mass demands. 

Such organisations are designed to serve the requirements of reports and projects more than the needs of their popular bases, and end when their funding cycle does, leaving behind no solid institutional structure.

At a deeper level, this funding pattern has contributed to redrawing the map of struggle priorities, with resources and human energies that could have been directed toward building a strong independent union and mass movement being channelled instead toward temporary activities and projects. 

This has sometimes been accompanied by the reinforcement of the phenomenon of personalisation in unions and organisations, where relationships exist between the funder and specific individuals, and not the organisation as a collective institution. This weakened participatory structures and turned the leadership of some organisations into personal privileges linked to accessing external funding networks, rather than an expression of the trust of the popular base.

This is not a call for absolute hostility toward all international cooperation. There is genuine international solidarity with labour, union, mass and feminist movements, embodied by independent international labour and human rights organisations, such as the International Trade Union Confederation and various human rights and feminist organisations. 

It is a call for critical class awareness in dealing with Western government funding and for holding firm to the principle that the priorities of the union and mass movement must emerge from the needs of workers and the people, not funders’ conditions. Decision-making independence is a non-negotiable condition regardless of the value of the funding on offer.

Towards a unified popular left

The absence of strong and independent unions, federations and organisations has weakened the left beyond what is visible on the surface. 

When decisive moments have arrived in the history of popular protests and uprisings, the left has found itself in a painful organisational vacuum: no unions capable of converting demonstrations into organised strikes that could compel the ruling authorities in Baghdad and Erbil to respond; no unified student movement with genuine institutional power; and no influential feminist organisations capable of translating popular anger into sustainable demands. 

Instead, what existed was dozens of small competing organisations with limited coordination and recurring organisational conflicts.

The past decades have witnessed fundamental transformations in the way people think and organise, which no serious political force can ignore. 

The digital revolution has redrawn the map of power and influence, enabling horizontal networks and independent initiatives to achieve a wide presence in record time. 

Protest movements, from the squares of Iraq to social justice movements across the world, have demonstrated that flexible horizontal organising is capable of generating enormous mobilising energy that excessively centralised structures cannot match.

To this must be added a deep shift in the value systems of new generations toward intellectual pluralism, transparency and rejection of excessive centralisation. Young people today have grown up in a culture of instant access to multiple sources of information, possess high critical and comparative capacity, and place transparency in decision-making and accountability in the use of resources as basic conditions for trusting any organisation.

We have also witnessed a clear rise in models of collective participatory leadership. Successful experiences in contemporary social movements demonstrate that distributed leadership emerging from within groups is more sustainable than individual pivotal leadership.

In light of all these transformations, people, especially youth in protest squares, no longer trust unions and organisations affiliated with parties. They prefer horizontal forms of organising and independent initiatives that respect their intellectual independence, allow genuine participation in decision-making, and engage with diversity as a benefit rather than a burden.

There are growing segments, particularly among young people, displaying rising discomfort with traditional party work. This phenomenon deserves serious reflection and study to understand its roots, rather than meeting it with rejection and condemnation. This imposes the need to develop more democratic, collective and flexible forms of organisation.

This new logic may provide the left with a genuine opportunity for intellectual and organisational renewal and to broaden its social base. The choice is no longer between building a loyalist facade or abandoning mass work; it is between continued fragmentation or transitioning toward building strong independent progressive unions and federations, in which left-wing individuals of all orientations work together.

The path to genuine unity passes through two complementary tracks, neither of which can stand without the other:

• First track: union and mass work. Collective participation in building strong independent progressive trade unions, federations and mass organisations, which bring everyone together, regardless of their intellectual, national or religious affiliations, around common interests and vital demands. Within these independent organisations, left-wing individuals can contribute the best of what they have: the values of social justice, solidarity and struggle for human dignity and equality.
• Second track: political and organisational work. Coordination and joint work at the party and political level through diverse alliance frameworks, at the country or provincial level or around specific demands. This can serve as the basis for building a broad, unified, multi-platform progressive left framework that encompasses all left-wing and progressive forces, alongside unions, labour organisations and mass movements, around points of convergence. Changing the situation in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region requires mobilising all those energies in a single coherent project.

This paper does not claim to offer a ready-made roadmap or a complete organisational prescription. The practical steps, the mechanisms for getting started, and the implementation details for different contexts are, at their core, matters that require an open collective dialogue among left forces, the trade union movement, and mass organisations. 

Its primary purpose is to stimulate this dialogue and nourish it with serious questions, in the hope that it leads to an intellectual and practical debate that contributes to developing such a vision and building shared answers.

Genuine mass work in our era means serving workers of hand and mind, building and uniting their power, participating in changing their lives for the better, and embodying the values of the left in daily practice rather than in political discourse alone. 

The left’s real strength lies not only in its intellectual propositions and political positions, but in its capacity to build independent, far-reaching, progressive institutions, rooted in people’s daily lives, capable of defending their interests and rights, and converting their social energies into a genuine force for change that opens the path toward the socialist alternative.

Rezgar Akrawi is a Danish writer of Kurdish origin from Iraq. He is a left-wing political analyst focusing on the Kurdish question, social justice and digital capitalism.

References

Trade union experiences

Tunisia: The Role of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) in the 2011 Revolution and the Democratic Transition https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article5575

South Africa: The Formation of COSATU and its Role in the Struggle Against Apartheid https://sahistory.org.za/article/congress-south-african-trade-unions-cosatu

Brazil: The Independent Trade Union Movement and the Formation of the Workers' Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Party_%28Brazil%29

India: History of the Labour Movement and its Connection to the National Liberation Movement https://thelaw.institute/introduction-to-law/india-labour-movement-historical-overview/

Denmark: The Danish Trade Union Confederation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Trade_Union_Confederation

Iraq’s rentier economy

International Monetary Fund, Article IV Consultation on Iraq 2025 https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2025/07/08/pr-25243-iraq-imf-executive-board-concludes-2025-article-iv-consultation

International Monetary Fund, Iraq Report 2024 https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2025/05/15/mcs-iraq-concluding-statement-of-the-2025-imf-article-iv-mission