Published in Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 141 February/March 1998
The defeat of the Liverpool dockers and the isolation of the Hillingdon Hospital strikers point to two conclusions. The first is that the trade union leadership is actively preventing any struggle against the Labour government. The second is that the left is powerless to do anything about it. Yet almost all the left believe that unions will play a crucial role in organising working class resistance, and that it is the job of socialists to transform these organisations into ones which can fight for working class interests. They say that the central strategy for socialists is to build ‘rank and file’ movements as a means of organising trade union members against their bureaucratic leaderships and through this process capture the trade unions for working class struggle.
Robert Clough argues that this is a bankrupt strategy. The general experience in Britain has been that mass trade union struggles have only proved possible during periods of full or near-full employment. Furthermore, these have also been the only conditions where oppositional movements within the trade unions have threatened the stultifying grip of the union leadership. But for socialists, trade union struggle is not the same as class struggle. The first is about improving conditions of work – higher wages, shorter hours, more security. The second is about power. The first is by definition only possible in conditions of relative prosperity. The second requires conditions of acute economic and political crisis.
The one time when trade union struggle presented a significant threat to the British ruling class was in the period leading up to the 1926 General Strike. It was also the only period when a widespread trade union struggle took place against a background of high unemployment. Critical to this was the role the newly-formed Communist Party played through the Minority Movement in influencing wide sections of the trade union movement. This article examines why this period was an exception, and how in the end, the working class was defeated. It will look at how the trade union movement evolved, and how that evolution expressed a changing relationship between the ruling class and the labour aristocracy on the one hand, and the labour aristocracy and the working class on the other.
Trade unions prior to the First imperialist War
Following the defeat of Chartism in 1848, British imperialism entered a long period of relative economic prosperity, underpinned by its colonial and industrial monopoly, and its consequent domination of world trade. To ensure political stability, the ruling class made a number of concessions to what became a privileged stratum of skilled workers and craftsmen, including the legalisation of economic trade union activity, and the extension of the vote. This labour aristocracy was able to use its sectional strength in the labour market to obtain better wages and conditions, on average earning twice the level of wages of an unskilled worker.
Only briefly were their sectional interests challenged, when in a period of full employment in 1889-90 an alliance of socialists and unskilled workers created new unions which within a space of a year recruited 300,000 workers, 25 per cent of TUC membership in 1890. But as unemployment rose these unions lost virtually all their membership under a combined attack of the ruling class and its labour aristocratic allies, and began to ape the organisational and political methods of the old craft unions, rejecting recruitment amongst the casual and unskilled labourers in favour of those in stable employment.
However, this was also the period when Britain’s industrial monopoly came under increasing challenge from German and US capitalism. The pressure was most acute in those industries where the labour aristocracy predominated: iron and steel manufacturing, shipbuilding and engineering. A number of major strikes in the 1890s threatened an end to political stability. The ruling class could no longer rely on the sectional strength of skilled workers in their craft unions as an indirect control of the working class. It had to develop more direct means, through the incorporation of the trade union leadership into the state. The first step in this process was the development of a very basic state welfare system from 1906 onwards, with the introduction of labour exchanges, national insurance and old age pensions, and with the unions involved in their administration.
Such incorporation, however, required a more centralised and authoritarian form of trade union organisation, and presented the possibility of opposition from union members when leaders failed to represent their interests. Between 1911 and 1913, conditions of near full employment led to a series of strikes which involved hundreds of thousands of workers, skilled and unskilled. As trade union leaders attempted to restrain the movement, oppositional movements led principally by syndicalists — a tendency which argued that the route to socialism lay through trade union struggle — acquired significant influence. The national character of the disputes, such as those on the rail-ways and docks in 1911, and in the mines in 1912, led to confrontations with the state itself. In 1912, for instance, the government sent warships to the Mersey as a threat to striking Liverpool dockers.
The reactionary role of the trade union leadership was at its clearest during the Dublin Lockout which started in August 1913, based on an alliance between revolutionaries (James Connolly and James Larkin) and the mass of the disenfranchised working class. Requests for TUC support yielded nothing, despite demonstrations of massive support from British workers. When James Larkin appealed over the heads of the leaders for sympathy action, the response was immediate: seamen’s leader Havelock Wilson attacked him viciously. At a special congress of the TUC in December, leaders such as Ben Tillett, once a revolutionary, denounced the strike, condemning Larkin’s ‘unfair’ treatment of British trade union officials, Larkin responded against a growing uproar, condemning the TUC for its betrayal. The Dublin workers were isolated and eventually starved into submission. The threat posed by a revolutionary struggle in Britain’s oldest colony could not be tolerated by a stratum whose privileges depended on the viability of British imperialism, and they acted decisively against it.
Trade unions during the war
The outbreak of war accelerated the incorporation of the trade union leadership into the state as they rushed to the defence of British imperialism. The TUC proclaimed an industrial truce, and agreed to a ban on all strikes. Its rewards were substantial: participation in all kinds of state committees to oversee production and distribution, and for the Labour Party, the offer of Cabinet positions in the Coalition Government. In return, the labour aristocracy was expected to police the working class, and ensure a minimum of resistance to speed-up, fall-ing wages and the dilution of skilled labour.
However, conditions of full employment fanned working class dis-content, and during the latter part of the war, oppositional movements within the trade unions, most notably the Shop Stewards and Workers’ Committee Movement led a series of strikes particularly in the engineering industry. More generally, trade union membership expanded considerably: from 4 million in 1912 to 6.5 million in 1918. But although the unofficial movements were led by socialists or syndicalists, they were never anti-war. JT Murphy, a syndicalist, who led the very militant Sheffield Workers’ Committee, wrote later that ‘None of the strikes which took place during the course of the war were anti-war strikes. They were frequently led by men like myself who wanted to stop the war, but that was not the real motive. Had the question of stopping the war been put to any strikers’ meeting it would have been overwhelmingly defeated.’
Even in February 1918, after the Russian Revolution, Solidarity, the paper of the shop stewards’ movement, argued against any industrial action to stop the war because there would be no certainty that German workers would follow suit. The irony was that this was the point at which 400,000 German engineers went on strike, precisely with this purpose in mind. The ideological weakness of both British socialism and the mass of the working class had prevented the development of any durable challenge to the domination of the trade union leadership. The struggles never acquired a revolutionary or anti-imperialist character.
The post-war period
The immediate post-war period saw an explosion of working class resistance. In January 1919, servicemen marched on Downing Street protest-ing at the slow rate of demobilisation. Later that month, a near-general strike in Glasgow saw fighting with the police. One of its leaders, William Gallagher, later admitted ‘we were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution’. Meanwhile, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) voted 615,000 to 105,000 to strike for a 30 per cent wage increase, a 6 hour day and the nationalisation of the industry under workers’ control. Only with great difficulty was the leadership able to postpone and then call off the strike on the basis of a substantial wage increase and the promise of a seven hour day. In June, 300,000 cotton operatives struck, to be followed in September by 350,000 railway workers.
The scale of struggle continued into 1920 in conditions of near-full employment. 34 million days were lost in strikes; trade union member-ship grew to 8.3 million, 6.5 million of whom were in unions affiliated to the TUC. Trade union membership was no longer the preserve of a privileged minority: it had become the first step in the organisation of the working class as a whole.
The formation of the Communist Party
As we have seen, the creation of a mass trade union movement during the years of the war, and the growth of oppositional movements within it, did not in themselves lead to a significant political shift within the work-ing class. This became a possibility only with the creation of the Communist International. Even so, establishing a Communist Party in Britain proved a tortuous process, given the political weakness of the existing socialist movement. Two tendencies predominated: an idealist, propagandist trend embodied in the British Socialist Party, and the syndicalist movement centred on the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). The BSP separated socialism from the day-to-day struggles of the working class, whilst the SLP opposed any concept of political leadership. The founding conference was delayed until August 1920, and it took a further two years to create a really unified Communist Party.
The question was how this tiny organisation (no more than 2,000 to 3,000 members) would become a mass communist party with the size and influence of those in Germany and France. For Lenin and the Communist International, working in the trade unions was vital: ‘To refuse to work in reactionary trade unions means leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of the workers under the influence of reactionary leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie, the labour aristocrats … Millions of workers in England, France and Germany are for the first time passing from complete lack of organisation to the elementary, lowest, most simple and …most easily accessible form of organisation, namely the trade unions.’ In this context, communists had no choice but to work within the trade unions: this was the arena in which the struggle against the labour aristocracy for the leadership of the working class would be played out.
The formation of the Communist Party coincided with the threat of a renewed British intervention against the Russian Revolution, following the victory of the Red Army over a Polish invasion in April 1920. As the Red Army advanced to the Polish frontier, Prime Minister Lloyd George threatened retaliation should it cross the border. Already, London dockers had boycotted munitions bound for Poland being loaded onto the SS Jolly George. Now Councils of Action — nearly 300 in all — sprang up across the country under the slogan of ‘Hands off Russia’; Lenin was to describe them as soviets. Huge demonstrations took place on 8 August. Under pressure, the TUC and Labour Party held a conference the next day which threatened a general strike against any intervention. The government retreated rapidly. Imperialism and its opportunist allies had been checked, though not defeated.
The Communist Party and the trade unions
Lenin’s stricture that communists must work in the trade unions was directed in part against the left wing of the CPGB, in particular former syndicalists who wanted no part of the old trade union movement. Within months of the formation of the CPGB, the immediate post-war boom had turned into slump. Unemployment grew from 250,000 to 2 million, and by the end of 1921, 6 million workers had suffered wage cuts averaging 6 shillings a week, while trade union membership had fallen by 2 million.
The sharpest crisis was in the coal industry, where falling prices precipitated a conflict between the government and mine owners on the one hand, and the miners on the other. On 15 February 1921, the government announced it would terminate war-time controls over the industry at the end of March. At the same time, mine owners issued a demand for heavy wage cuts. The MFGB appealed for support from their partners in the Triple Alliance, the railway and transport workers. The government authorised a state of emergency under the Emergency Powers Act. A strike was called for Tuesday 12 April; on Thursday, the MFGB leader Hodges made an unauthorised offer for a temporary settlement to a group of MPs. He was promptly disowned by the MFGB executive, but JH Thomas, leader of the NUR, seized on this as an excuse to abandon the miners, and on Black Friday, 15 April, the remaining leaders of the Triple Alliance followed suit. The miners were left to struggle alone for three months before being forced back to work.
By the end of 1921, the unions had paid out nearly £15 million in unemployment benefit to their members. TE Naylor, a Labour MP and secretary of the London Society of Compositors, told the House of Commons: want the government to realise, if they can, what would have happened in this country, supposing that there had been no trade unions to stand between the working class of this country and the revolution which would have undoubtedly broken out.’ He did the government an injustice: Churchill in Cabinet two years earlier had argued that ‘the trade union organisation was very imperfect, and the more moderate its officials, the less representative it was, but it was the only organisation with which the government could deal. The curse of trade unionism was that there was not enough of it, and it was not highly enough developed to make its branch secretaries fall in line.’
The collapse of 1921 dealt a significant blow to the Shop Stewards Movement which had just declared its allegiance to the CPGB. The party faced a position where the trade union movement was very fragmented — there were over 1,000 unions, many of which remained organised on the narrowest of craft basis, although there had been significant amalgamation for instance of the engineers and the transport workers in the immediate post-war period. Its slogans of one union for one industry and for more centralised powers for the TUC betrayed a narrow organisational approach to the problems it had in fighting the labour aristocracy.
Despite the crisis of 1921, the work of the party started to develop. At the end of 1921, it led the formation of the National Unemployed Workers Committee Movement, whose ranks were swelled by many of the engineering shop stewards who were sacked in this period. At the same time, it formed a British Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions affiliated to the Communist International, whose aim was ‘not to organise independent revolutionary trade unions, or to split revolutionary elements away from existing organisations of the TUC …but to convert the revolutionary minority within each industry into a revolutionary majority’. The Bureau held a conference in September 1922 which attracted over 300 delegates representing 176,000 workers. This was the germ of the Minority Movement.
By 1923, the CPGB newspaper Workers’ Weekly was selling 50,000 copies even though party member-ship was only about 5,000. A partial economic recovery in 1923-24 staunched the exodus of trade union members. The defeat of 1921, even though limited, had allowed the labour aristocracy partially to consolidate its position in relation to the mass of the working class. Trade union amalgamation had been one step; the creation of the TUC General Council had been another. Mean-while, the tentacles of the Labour Party spread throughout the movement: the 146 Trades Councils and Labour Parties affiliated before the war grew to 389 in 1918-19, whilst by 1920 the number of divisional and local Labour Party organisations had topped 2,000.
Thus the labour aristocracy was transforming itself into a centralised force controlling a myriad of organisations which embraced a substantial proportion of the working class. Yet it could not as yet defeat its opponents: the 1923 Labour Party conference overturned a decision of the previous year to discourage trade unions sending Communist Party members as delegates. Oppositional movements grew in a number of unions, in particular the MFGB, where the embryonic Minority Movement secured its first major success in getting AJ Cook elected as General Secretary to replace the traitor Hodges who had become Civil Lord of the Admiralty in the first Labour government.
The formation of the Minority Movement
Following a number of preparatory conferences, the Minority Movement was officially launched in August 1924. 270 delegates representing a claimed 200,000 workers resolved that its aim was ‘the emancipation of the workers from oppressors and exploiters, and the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth’. Yet the Movement was faced with how to connect this ambition with the reality that trade unionists were concerned with more immediate issues. Hence it argued that ‘While aiming ultimately at the complete overthrow of the capitalism, the attention of the movement must necessarily be concentrated on the immediate struggles of the workers against their exploiters.’ Put more simply: ‘Bread and butter problems first, high politics later, is the method to adopt.’ The conference agreed a number of policies, including:
■ a wage increase of £1 per week with a minimum wage of £4 per week;
■ a 44 hour week and no overtime;
■ the formation of workshop and factory committees and industry-based unions;
■ workers’ control over industry;
■ a stronger TUC General Council, with control over the Labour Party;
■ the affiliation of both the Unemployed Workers’ Movement and the Trades Councils to the TUC;
■ the repudiation of the Dawes plan, which had rescheduled German repayment of post-war reparations to the victorious imperialist powers.
Yet mainly organisational solutions to the problems facing the British working class ignored the political dimension of the struggle against opportunism. Speaking from the chair at the CPGB’s 1924 conference, William Gallagher argued that ‘The Communist Party does not attack the Labour Party. The Communist Party strives all the time to make the Labour Party a useful organ of the workers in the struggle against capitalism, but we do attack the leadership of the Labour Party and will go on attacking it until the Labour Movement has forced it either to prosecute a work-ing class policy or to make way for a leadership that will do so.’ In other words, the problem of the Labour Party lay in its leadership, rather than what it represented — opportunism.
With its frequent references to ‘reformism’ and ‘bureaucracy’ the Communist Party had lost sight of the split in the working class, of the existence of the labour aristocracy and its connection to imperialism. The centralisation of the trade union apparatus, the formation of the General Council, were steps which marked a tightening of Labour’s stranglehold over the trade unions and thereby the whole working class. To call for a further strengthening of this centralised power showed a basic misunderstanding of the underlying process.
The left has often attributed the political weaknesses of the Communist Party in 1924-26 to the reactionary influence of a ‘Stalinised’ Comintern. This is not the case; the International was constantly instructing the CPGB to strengthen its anti-imperialist work, complaining that it had done ‘as good as nothing’ in the colonies and that its documents contained not ‘a single word by which the English Party declares itself unequivocally for the separation of the colonies from the British Empire’. The overriding political failure of the CPGB lay in its inability to adopt a consistent anti-imperialist stance, and to connect that to the struggle against opportunism — the historic failure of British socialism.
The Minority Movement and Red Friday
The defeat of the Labour government at the end of 1924 brought in the Tories determined to restore British imperialism’s position in the world economy through a return to the Gold Standard, a move which took place in April 1925. This was a move that had long been demanded by banking and finance capital, which fully recognised that the consequence would be strongly deflationary, involving wage cuts for the mass of the working class. Prime Minster Baldwin spelled it out in June: all the workers in this country have got to take reduction in wages to help put industry on its feet’.
The key to defeating the working class lay in smashing the miners: one million in number, they made up one sixth of the male work force and nearly one in five trade unionists. On 30 June, the coal owners gave a month’s notice terminating all existing agreements, with drastic wage reductions, abolition of a minimum wage and reversion from national to local agreements. The Minority Movement may have been politically limited, but it had an organisational strength which prevented the trade union leadership from backing down at this point. On Thursday 30 July, the TUC called for an embargo on the movement of all coal, a move which would have precipitated a general strike. Unprepared for this resistance, the government backed down the following day — Red Friday. It offered a nine month subsidy to buy time and appointed a commission of enquiry into the industry under Sir Herbert Samuel.
From this point on it was quite clear that once the subsidy expired, there would be either a capitulation by the TUC, or a general strike. As it turned out, it was to be both. Whilst the government made all due preparation, dividing up the country into separate administrative areas, establishing the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS), preparing for the movement of troops and warships to troubled areas, the TUC did absolutely nothing. At its second conference in August 1925, the Minority Movement found impressive support from over 400 organisations representing up to 800,000 workers. There were delegates from 200 miners’ groups, 126 engineers’ and 76 transport workers’ organisations. But the political level had not advanced: the conference repeated the call for more powers to be given to the TUC General Council although it did agree to set up local Councils of Action to co-ordinate future action.
The inaction of the TUC was an obvious attempt either to prevent the general strike from taking place, or to ensure its defeat, and the Minority Movement was not strong enough to do much about it. The September 1925 TUC Congress sounded extremely left-wing: it declared that the aim of trade unions must be to struggle for the overthrow of capitalism; it called for the withdrawal of troops from China, and ‘to support the right of all peoples in the British Empire to self determination, including the right to choose complete separation from the Empire.’ Yet it would not decide on any preparatory steps to meet the coming confrontation; it even ruled a resolution re-affiliating Trades Councils out of order. Meanwhile, two leading right-wingers, JR Clynes and JH Thomas were re-elected to the General Council.
Two weeks later, the real strengths of the opposing forces were revealed at the Labour Party conference. The right-wing made all the running, whilst left-wingers on whom the Minority Movement and the CPGB had pinned great hopes — Purcell, Hicks and Swales, leaders of three of the smaller unions — remained silent. With the bourgeois press led by The Times egging on the Labour Party to ban the Communists, the conference agreed that no known member of the Communist Party could remain a member of the Labour Party, and that trade unions should urge their members not to appoint known Communists as Labour Party delegates. The signal had been given: two weeks later, 12 Communist Party leaders were arrested for sedition, and sentenced to between 6 and 12 months.
Thus the labour aristocracy made its own preparations for the general strike: inactive where its position was still under some threat (in the TUC), using its strength to exclude and isolate any progressive and revolutionary force where it was stronger — in the Labour Party. Whilst right-wingers such as Thomas, MacDonald and Clynes led the witch hunts, it was the left social democrats, people whom Gallagher had described as ‘good proletarians’ for their role in Red Friday, whose silence sold the revolutionaries down the river.
The arrest of its leadership did nothing to stop the CPGB and the Minority Movement from attempting to organise an opposition. In March 1926 it organised a special conference in preparation for the forthcoming confrontation. This time nearly 550 organisations were represented, including 52 Trades Councils which were to serve as the nuclei of Councils of Action. The 900 delegates represented 957,000 workers; it was a force which alarmed the ruling class as well as its allies in the labour movement. But with its iron grip on the General Council, the labour aristocracy was now determined to isolate and crush the challenge it faced.
The General Strike
The Samuel Commission reported on 10 March, a few days before the special conference of the Minority Movement, recommending, as expected, a cut in wages and longer hours. Although welcomed by Mac-Donald, it was initially rejected by the TUC. But in negotiations with the coal owners and the government which excluded the leadership of the MFGB, the General Council started to back down. JH Thomas was in constant contact with Prime Minister Baldwin; even AJ Cook took to back-door negotiations with the Fabian Cabinet Secretary Tom Jones. On 16 April the coalowners announced a total lockout from 1 May. In growing desperation, the TUC tried to force the miners to accept the 10 per cent wage cut the Commission proposed, to no avail. On 30 April, a Special Conference of the executives of TUC-affiliates was forced to issue a call for a general strike, starting on 3 May. The vote (3.6 million to 50,000) disguised the fact that both JH Thomas and JR Clynes had fought unsuccessfully to prevent their unions (the NUR and NUGMWU) from supporting the call, They were to play leading roles in the subsequent betrayal.
Even before the strike had started, the TUC were back in Downing Street negotiating with Baldwin behind the back of the miners, and agreeing on 2 May that they would ‘urge the miners to authorise us to enter upon a discussion with the understanding that they and we accept the [Samuel] report as a basis of settlement and we approach it in the knowledge that it may involve some reduction in wages.’ But the government was not satisfied, and when on 2 May members of NATSOPA, the printers’ union, refused to typeset an inflammatory editorial in the Daily Mail because its owners refused a right of reply, Baldwin stopped the negotiations. In a statement to the TUC, he wrote that not only had the TUC asked ‘their members in several of the most vital industries and services of the nation to carry out a General Strike on Tuesday next, but that overt acts have already taken place, including gross interference with the freedom of the press. Such action involved a challenge to the Constitutional rights and freedom of the nation.’
The TUC was thrown into panic: the government had now posed the strike in terms of state power, some-thing they had never dreamed of doing. Clynes and his colleagues sought audience with Baldwin `to plead, almost on our knees, for a less cruel arbitration’ saying later that ‘we the leaders, had never sought the strike; our men to some extent ran away with us.’ Baldwin dismissed them out of hand.
The first day of the strike, involving transport, printing, industrial, building and power workers was solid. By the third day of the strike, the problem for the unions was to keep those workers scheduled _for a second wave of action — shipyard, textile and light industry workers —back at work. Meanwhile, local Councils of Action were taking over the arrangement of supplies. Mass pickets ‘arrested’ those suspected of breaking the strike or moving goods illicitly, impounding their vans and lorries. Road and rail transport ground to a halt; on Tyneside, the OMS had to negotiate with the strike committee to unload food supplies, agreeing completely to their conditions.
As control of the strike gradually slipped from their grasp, the TUC accelerated their moves to end it regardless of terms. Excluded by the government, they turned to Sir Herbert Samuel, entering into discussions on 8 May, once more behind the back of the miners. On 11 May, the TUC accepted a rehash of the Samuel Report, and JH Thomas in pressing it on the MFGB told Cook that ‘You may not trust my word, but will you not accept the word of a British gentleman who had been Governor of Palestine?’. The MFGB rejected the terms, but gave the space to the General Council to call off the strike. The next day, a deputation from the General Council went cap in hand to Downing Street to announce that the ‘General Strike is to be terminated forthwith in order that negotiations may proceed.’ Baldwin himself gave absolutely no commitment, and having received the surrender, dismissed them curtly with the words ‘we have both of us a great deal to do… and I think that the sooner you get to your work and the sooner I get to mine the better.’
The surrender was received with consternation; meetings up and down the country protested at the decision, to no avail. Throughout, the strike had been solid: there were more workers out on strike on the last day than there were on the first. The Communist Party and its allies had played a leading role in the Councils of Action and the mass pickets: of some 2,500 arrests, over 1,000 were of Communist Party members, singled out by the police for special attention. As in 1921, however, the miners had been abandoned; they were to continue their struggle for a further six months before they were finally forced back to work, defeated.
The aftermath — ‘Never again’
Before the strike, the Communist Party had considered the possibility of a betrayal, but concluded ‘the TUC simply dare not do this thing’. Its reaction afterwards was one of astonishment at the role of the left on the General Council: ‘this treachery, unexpected and fatal, was greater than the expected treason of Thomas’.
The defeat of the General Strike was a victory for the labour aristocracy; it was the necessary condition for it to isolate and destroy the opposition of the Minority Movement. Under the slogan ‘Never again’ the TUC forced Trades Councils to sign a form declaring that ‘this trades council is not affiliated to the National Minority Movement… and that, as a body, it is not associated in any way with the National Minority Movement.’ Starting with the General and Municipal Workers, a number of trade unions banned members of the CPGB or the Minority Movement from any official position. Labour Conference after Labour Conference tightened the rules over Communist membership, expelling dozens of local parties which refused to co-operate in the witch hunt. No discussion was allowed of the role of the General Council during the strike, although a former left-winger, Bromley, wrote a lengthy criticism of the MFGB which was widely published. Class struggle was ruled out. By 1929, the Minority Movement was all but defunct.
Conclusion
The failure of the Communist Party lay in its inability to understand the connection between imperialism, the labour aristocracy and opportunism. In the period under discussion, the struggle against imperialism was at best an afterthought. The party was therefore in no position to see how opportunism was evolving in line with the changing strategy of the ruling class. What it saw one-sidedly as progressive — the growth of institutions which organised the working class — had also its reactionary facet — the development of means through which the state could more effectively control the working class. The leaders were not the only problem: the institutions were as well.
As we have argued, this political weakness was not the imposition of a ‘Stalinist’ Comintern: it was and always has been entirely home-grown. It is the weakness of the left today, with its support for the re-election of a viciously anti-working class Labour government. It cannot build independent trade union ‘rank and file’ movements since it has no understanding of the labour aristocracy. The fact is now that the labour aristocracy’s position has been unchallenged for decades, Trade unions, even where they have low-paid members such as in Unison, represent the interests of the better off. They are unions which stamp out even the tiniest sign of working class activity, whether it is that of the Hillingdon strikers or the Liverpool dockers, The left is incapable of dealing with this, and will inevitably capitulate to the backwardness of trade unionism.
It is of course possible the currently unorganised sections of the working class will turn to the trade unions as a first step in advancing their class interests, but there is no sign that this is happening at the moment. More and more it is evident that the unions will only respond if a movement is built outside of their ranks. The conclusion is that communists today do not neglect the need to intervene in trade unions, or to support struggles when they take place. They cannot, however, make them the focus for building a new movement.
Robert Clough – Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 141 February/March 1998
