One of the primary tasks of a revolutionary is to go among the masses precisely at those times when the masses begin to understand spontaneously that the system is not working for them and are therefore looking for solutions. However, not all workers reach that spontaneous understanding at the same time - there will always be some advanced workers who start looking for solutions much sooner than others.
And it is our responsibility to attract these advanced workers to our communist parties, to train them as revolutionaries in as great a number as possible, so that when as a result of deteriorating living standards and involvement in imperialist wars broader sections of the working class begin to look for solutions, we have a large and well-trained enough organization to be able to meet their needs, both for knowledge and for revolutionary organization.
In imperialist countries, with the wealth they've hijacked from oppressed countries, the ruling class has been able to buy social peace by providing a "middle-class" standard of life to a privileged segment of the working class, and offering certain benefits to the broad masses of the people (though in insufficient quantities and now increasingly being scaled back, but still enough to limit the level of popular discontent such as to prevent too frequent riots).
At the same time workers' unions, heavily linked to the bourgeois "labor" parties, have over the years sometimes been able successfully to fight for slightly better pay or working conditions, which the ruling class has only conceded - albeit reluctantly - because its imperialist interests enable it to do so without bankrupting itself (this is now also changing).
Although the illusions in social democracy are rapidly fading as social democratic parties remold themselves more and more in the image of the neoliberal right in order to reassure the ruling class that capitalism is safe in their hands, nevertheless the illusions in parliamentarism still persist. The unions, which have become very passive at the behest of their class collaborationist bosses, must become more active in organizing working class resistance in the face of the abrupt decline in living standards that has hit the working masses because of the capitalist economic crisis, aggravated by the costs of war.
And the situation is going to get much worse. It's to be expected in these circumstances that workers who previously saw no point in joining a union - leading in the past to massive declines in membership - will now join and take part in the resistance taking place. In so doing these workers become advanced workers, workers actively looking for a solution to the problems faced by their class. In other words, the pool of people who can be expected to be receptive to communist ideas is starting to increase.
It's up to us to bring them to the understanding that trade unionism just isn't enough, and to try to recruit them to become revolutionaries. We will be vehemently opposed in this endeavor by most of the trade union leadership which will devote itself to keeping the movement within the bounds of capitalism.