Contents
- Introduction
- Official and unofficial trade unionism
- The limits of the trade unions lefts
- The SWP (International Socialists)
- The International Marxist Group
- The Healyite tradition
- Our tasks
Introduction
Marxists in Britain have historically faced two related phenomena. The restriction of revolutionary politics to a small minority of industrial militants and intellectuals, and secondly the great size, longevity and hence prestige of trade unionism in the British working class. This glaring disproportion between the Marxist nucleus and the mass forces of the trade unions has often led revolutionaries into either a sectarian retreat from the problem, into abstract propaganda, or, more usually, an opportunist accommodation to trade unionism and trade union politics.
Several periods of severe crisis for British capitalism from the late 1880s onwards have opened tremendous possibilities to revolutionaries. We have been in such a period since the 1970s. A precondition of building a revolutionary communist party capable of organising in its ranks the recognised vanguard of the British workers is the ability to correctly handle the question of the trade unions. In Britain there is little danger of underestimating their importance. In fact, the greatest danger is accommodation to the status quo, an acceptance of trade union struggle as capable of spontaneously developing a revolutionary dynamic. Economism has time and again reduced would-be revolutionaries to the level of syndicalists in the day to day struggle. This position is not at all inconsistent with abstract propaganda for Socialism or the hysterical pushing of a small sect as ‘The Party’ or ‘The Alternative’. Indeed, this combination of economist politics, designed to be indistinguishable from the views of the average militant, with an apolitical thirst to ‘build the party’ — no matter how disruptive this may be to ongoing struggles, has proved a deadly poison for all rank and file groupings. It is a recipe for breeding cynicism and disillusionment amongst rank and file militants. Democracy alone is an impotent remedy to this. A real alternative lies in a correct understanding of the relationship between a Leninist party and the trade unions. A relationship which involves neither covering up one’s politics nor behind the scenes manipulation.
A revolutionary communist party must be formed on the basis of the disciplined commitment of its members to a programme which is not only based on the principles of Marx and Lenin, the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat etc., but which also follows the method of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme. One that centrally addresses the key struggles of today and links them to the seizure of power by the working class via a series of demands, tactics and organisational means which, step by step, prepare the class for this task. Inextricably bound up with the question of the programme is the question of organising, educating and hardening in struggle a communist cadre. Such a new leadership within the class must, of course, win the existing militants away from the Stalinist, Social Democratic and centrist currents.
Since, in Britain at least, the trade unions are the central arena in the struggle against the misleaders of the class ‘left’ and ‘right’ — revolutionary communists must develop an action programme specifically oriented to the ideological and organisational transformation of these organisations. This action programme is a programme for application in the trade unions, in the shop stewards’ and factory committees, but it is not a trade union programme, i.e. one limited to the existing horizons of trade union struggle, even of militant rank and file struggle.
Such an action programme must apply the overall strategy of the party — the programme — to the particular area of work. As such, it must include all the major elements of the Programme, charting the strategy from present conditions and struggles to the struggle for state power. Its focus, its limits as it were, are those of a coherent strategy to transform the unions into organisations capable of aiding, rather than obstructing, the struggle for socialism. Such a programme must be based upon a clear understanding of the nature and limits of trade unions.
Official and unofficial trade unionism
Trade unions are mass organisations for realising the law of value with regard to wages under capitalism. As such they perform a vital function of defence for the whole working class. However, trade union action, in itself, has definite limits. It cannot indefinitely hold up wages in a period of general depression, nor can it protect the class from the full effects of unemployment. Under capitalism, it cannot embrace the whole of the working class. Furthermore, trade unions are incapable of overthrowing capitalism, or even of continually increasing the workers’ share of total value.
In this lies the domesticating aspect of trade unionism, organisationally and ideologically underpinned by a distinct caste of trade union officials — the trade union bureaucracy — ideologically committed to, and organised for, the negotiation and maintenance of the wage contract. Since the last half of the 19th century, this caste has grown ever larger and been drawn more and more into the actual administrative machinery of the capitalist state.
However, the trade unions remain the basic means by which workers defend and improve their living standards within capitalism. As the bedrock fighting organisations of the working class, they retain a potential against the domesticating bureaucratic apparatus, for the organisation of the mass of the working class for the struggle against the capitalist class: “the trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instrument of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
The dual aspect of trade unionism inevitably means for communists that their strategy in the trade unions must be directed to transforming the trade unions into organs of working class struggle for power, against the conservative bureaucratic apparatus that fetters and strangles the workers’ organisations. The rank and file movement we seek to build is fundamental to that perspective, its politics, its strategy and tactics must serve that purpose.
Just as the class struggle is inevitable under capitalism (the struggle to defend and improve living standards and working conditions) so it follows that, in periods of capitalist decay and instability, the bureaucratic trade union apparatus will be incapable of defending the elementary needs of the working class. It will in fact act to sabotage the struggle of the class to defend conditions, jobs and living standards. It is the inevitable contradiction between the trade union bureaucracy and the fighting needs of the class that gives rise to the unofficial organisations of the class, in the factories, mines and offices. The growth of the shop stewards’ movement before the first imperialist war, the Minority Movement of the 1920s, the massive growth of the shop stewards’ movement in Britain in the late 1960s (Donovan in 1968 recorded 175,000 shop stewards in British industry, the Labour government in 1974 recorded 300,000) testifies to the fact that:
a) the trade unions are not solely the unchallenged property of the bureaucratic apparatus, and;
b) the working class must inevitably look to unofficial workplace organisations in all periods when workers’ living standards and organisations come under attack.
Unofficial workplace based trade unionism may be inevitable, but of itself it is incapable of spontaneously generating a political alternative to the trade union bureaucracy. The reform and amalgamation movements of the early 20th century in Britain and of the 1930s in the USA, the resilience of the British shop stewards’ movement in the late 1960s and its apparent weakness in the mid 1970s, both testify to the mobilising potential of the unofficial movement compared to the trade union bureaucracy and to the inherent political weakness of the unofficial movement without communist leadership.
The limits of the left trade union leaders
Periods of militant rank and file activity and pressure will always create divisions in the ranks of the trade union bureaucracy. Sections of the bureaucracy will be prepared to verbally espouse the militant demands of the class, to even offer to lead struggles for them. The majority of the bureaucrats do this so as to deliberately head off and betray rank and file militancy. A small minority of trade union ‘lefts’ may, to a greater or lesser extent, identify themselves with militant demands and organisation under the pressure of the mass of workers.
But these ‘left’ leaders remain incapable of leading the struggles of the mass of workers to a successful conclusion. Their membership of the distinct caste of trade union officials, committed to the limits of trade union action, ensures that they too will seek to contain the struggles of the class within the framework of trade union struggle. In periods of acute crisis, only struggle led independently of, and against, the bureaucratic caste can maintain and advance the workers’ organisations and living standards. The ‘lefts’ (Scargill in the 70s, Scanlon in the 60s, no less than the ‘lefts’ of the 20s) will not lead this struggle.
The experience of the shop stewards’ movement of the early 1920’s, of the CIO in the 1930’s, tells us that only conscious revolutionary communist leadership can prevent unofficial movements falling prey to these ‘left’ leaders . . . the most potentially dangerous misleaders of the best and most militant sections of the workers in all periods of struggle. Only revolutionary leadership can prepare the advanced militants to march independently of the left-talkers and fakers, to be prepared for their inevitable betrayal. Warning and preparing the class for that betrayal is an indispensable component of communist work in the trade unions.
These ‘lefts’ ought to be supported critically where they represent the pressure of the rank and file for increased democracy in the union and a more militant struggle with the employers and the government. To convert the communist programme of class struggle into a demand that workers first abandon these left leaders is a recipe for sectarian isolation and impotence. But critical support is a tactic to be applied concretely in circumstances where united struggle is possible and necessary — not a permanent strategy whereby the ‘lefts’ must be installed at the head of the unions as an ‘alternative leadership’. The ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party/Workers’ Socialist League see this as the last stage in the ‘exposure’ of reformism prior to the assumption of leadership by the revolutionaries. The former position is opportunism, naked and unashamed. The latter is a barren sectarian schema concealing an opportunist accommodation to workers with illusions in the ‘lefts’.
In Britain in the present period, the major agencies for ensuring the subordination of the shop floor and trade union branch leadership to left, and not so left, talking bureaucrats are the ‘broad left’ machines in the unions, and episodically, the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions.
Programmatically and organisationally gagged by the Communist Party as a stage army to be used to pressure the trade union bureaucrats, the Liason Committee for the Defence of the Trade Unions must not be confused with programmatically inadequate but genuine rank and file formations — it is a Stalinist orchestrated support mechanism for sections of the trade union bureaucracy. However, during the mobilisations against the Tory Industrial Relations Act, the freeing of the Pentonville dockers and the miners’ struggles, the conferences called by the LCDTU opened up an arena within which a principled revolutionary intervention could have stood as a pole of attraction to militants previously under the influence of the Stalinists. The task of revolutionaries in those conferences was to open up a road to struggle alongside the better sections of militants, to demonstrate in action the bankruptcy of the Stalinist programme, to intervene among, not stand outside, these particular gatherings of militants.
The crisis of leadership and direction in the shop steward stratum of the British workers in the early and mid-seventies underlines the fallacy of believing that organisations thrown up by, and built for, the economic struggle, can by and of themselves pose a direct and consistent communist challenge to the projects of the bureaucracy.
Not only can such a challenge not be expected to simply grow ‘from below’ out of the shop stewards milieu, but the employers themselves have set out to systematically draw in and incorporate sections of this once ‘unofficial’ leadership of the trade unions, viz. The Ryder proposals at Leyland.
The task of communists is to struggle for political leadership in the unofficial movement, a leadership committed to the wholesale transformation of the purpose and therefore the structure of the mass trade unions — their conversion into revolutionary trade unions. We aim to win the leadership and transform the mass trade union organisations of the class — not to split them. Such a transformation must be based on the class energy, the mobilising potential, of the unofficial movement, that is the purpose of the rank and file movement.
Communists today must learn the significance of the Minority Movement. It was not simply an extension of pre-existing unofficial movements. It transcended them fundamentally. Under the hammer blows of the Russian Revolution, as a direct result of the conscious intervention of a communist party guided by the arsenal of revolutionary strategy and tactics established by the Communist International, an unofficial movement was built, initially committed to the transformation of the unions into a means for organising the working class for the struggle for power.
The militant unofficial minorities in the major unions were welded into a potential alternative revolutionary leadership under the programme of the Communist Party. In this way, the Minority Movement was distinct from the previous syndicalist shop stewards’ movement, and it is this vital distinction that lies at the heart of our orientation to the building of a rank and file movement in the period ahead. The operative principle of the communists in the revolutionary period of the Minority Movement was later summed up by Leon Trotsky in the Transitional Programme: “Trade Unions are not ends in themselves, they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution.”
The class struggles of the 60s and 70s have again created an unofficial movement in the British trades unions. In every major industry and union there exists a distinct militant minority. The capitalist offensive and the class collaboration of the trade union bureaucrats pose sharp political questions before this minority of militants. The nature of unofficial organisation and the circumstances in which it exists are different from those prior to the building of the Minority Movement. Nevertheless, the tasks of communists remain the same, to win the unofficial movement away from its confused, at best centrist, politics and to a revolutionary communist strategy. Whereas this was done relatively rapidly in the Twenties, in today’s conditions it is likely to be the result of a long and protracted political struggle within the unofficial movement.
The central tactic in this struggle will be that of the united front. Within the trades unions, the form of the united front, in present conditions, will be a rank and file movement. By this we mean that revolutionary communists must fight alongside reformist and centrist workers in all their struggles to defend or extend the interests of the class, placing no conditions on their involvement. However, to the methods, slogans and goals of the reformist and centrist leaders we counterpose those of the Action Programme for Trade Unions. The correct implementation of the united front tactic places revolutionaries in constant and open conflict with the false leaders of the class, whilst allowing the maximum unity in action. In this way, communists can prove, in practice, the superiority of their strategy. We recognise that, under present conditions, revolutionaries will inevitably be involved in limited and partial struggles. We do not turn our backs on such struggles, but constantly seek to extend them beyond their self-imposed limitations by raising the demands and methods of our programme.
In the fight to build a rank and file movement there is always a temptation for revolutionaries to try to reach a bigger audience, to build a ‘broader movement’ by watering down the demands of the communist programme, to present the demands in a sense and form more palatable to non-communists. This method — of so-called revolutionaries constructing halfway house programmes for joint struggle with reformists, is in fact a travesty of the united front tactic.
Just as revolutionaries do not make their support for a strike for trade union rights conditional upon acceptance of the communist programme by the strike leadership, we do not make our involvement in the rank and file organisation (mobilising advanced sections of the working class) conditional upon their prior agreement to our programme. But the task of communists is not to offer imagined compromise programmes of agreement with reformists — it is to fight alongside those workers while maintaining full independence of programme, seeking to prove the correctness of our programme and strategy in struggle. That must be the position of revolutionary communists in the struggle to build a rank and file movement. Any other method would be an abdication of our duty to raise the demands that are necessary for the class, with the result of preventing the constant exposure of the weakness of the reformists’ policies in comparison with those of the revolutionaries. Such a ‘halfway house’ approach to the question of the united front must be opposed at all times — there are no shortcuts.
The Socialist Workers Party (International Socialists)
In formal terms, the creation of a Rank and File Movement has been most central to the politics of the SWP. The theoreticians of the IS declared the postwar Labour government (1945–51) to have been the last great period of reforms ‘enacted from above’. The decline of individual Labour Party membership in the 1950’s, the growth of shop stewards’ organisation in the workplace, signified, for them, a turn on the part of the best militants towards the shopfloor where real gains could be made. The International Socialists (IS) dubbed this a new tradition of ‘do-it-yourself reformism’.
From this analysis, in the mid-sixties IS, deeply imbued with the spontaneism and anti-Leninist politics of Cliff’s ‘Luxemburgism’ (viz T. Cliff ‘Rosa Luxemburg’, 1st edition) argued that “the principal tasks of socialists are to do what we can to unify the working class and to encourage the movement from below.” This “movement from below” was equated with the steady expansion of shop steward organisation across industry:“it is the general nature of the threat facing stewards that allows the opportunity for developing them into a widely based movement.” To IS at the time, the shop stewards’ movement was set to become the labour movement. This was posed most sharply in the Liverpool Socialist Worker pamphlet, In Defence of Strikes, the Anti-Castle Report: “To all intents and purposes, the old Labour movement, the Trade Unions and the Labour Party, are dead or dying. . . . The shop stewards movement is the only real Labour movement that exists at the moment.” The IS gave no political content to their call for the shop stewards’ movement, it was simply expected to fight the Incomes Policy, to link the factories together, to put more bite into ‘do-it-yourself’ reformism.
By 1970, IS had to admit that its expected shop stewards’ movement had not come into existence. The Employers Offensive of 1970 admitted that the scenario of 1966 had been faulty. In the wake of “discovering Leninism” as a form of organisation for the IS, Cliff placed stress on the reasons for the non-emergence of the shop stewards’ movement lying with “the lack of a strong militant socialist party to unify the class.”
The new work did not even mention the need to build a rank and file movement arguing in its 1½ page conclusion entitled ‘Politics’ that, “we need a revolutionary socialist movement.” The IS perspective outlined in Incomes Policy had not proved correct because of “the lack of a strong militant socialist party to unify the class” and therefore the bringing into existence of a rank and file movement. The party was designated a necessary, but purely organisational, role in uniting the rank and file movement.
The rank and file movement was designated a limited trade union role as a halfway house between the party and the class. The IS Executive Committee’s pre-conference discussion documents of April 1975 made this clear. The rank and file movement was seen as “playing a vital role of organising a bridge between the party and the class,” within a division of labour where the party consisted of those “ready to overthrow capitalism” and the rank and file movement organised those “who are ready to fight”.
This has been most recently summarised by Steve Jeffreys in the International Discussion Bulletin of the SWP (no. 7/8). He advances a programme of militant trade union reformism: “in the present world crisis of the capitalist system this often means being the most consistent (and most democratic) reformists within the unions which are rapidly abandoning (in the most bureaucratic ways) the reformism of yesterday.” Explicitly and honestly he goes on to argue that what he terms “orthodox Trotskyism” has always failed to understand the significance of the party as being, not its political, programmatic essence, but its organisational role: “they ignore or play down the central contribution of Lenin, namely that the issue of party and class is fundamentally an organisational question. Both of mass organisations of the revolutionary party and of intervention by the party in even greater mass organisations of the class.”
The IS schema envisaged a rank and file movement as no more than a militant shop steward based movement. Its development was guaranteed because of the collapse and decay of the official movement. The job of revolutionaries was simply to assist in organising this current. While IS underlined the need for independence from, and opposition to, the trade union bureaucracy, this task was seen in purely organisational terms. In his work, “The Challenge of the Rank and File,” Steve Jefferys outlined the four major lessons that needed to be learnt from the history of the national Minority Movement and the Shop Stewards Movement:
That organisation at the workplace level was the key question;
That the aim of the rank and file movement must be to connect existing sectors with each other;
That the rank and file movement must work within unions to challenge reformist leaders over their control of the unions;
That the rank and file movement must have a national organisational structure, a structure that could only result from the conscious activity of committed militants, i.e. the party.
In fact, IS learnt none of the central lessons of the Minority Movement. They did not understand that such a movement could only be organised around a political challenge to class collaboration and the class collaborating bureaucracy — a programme for workers’ power and the transformation of the trade union movement. This explains the history and failure of the IS attempt to build a rank and file movement. The rank and file movement was posed as an alternative to the bureaucratic LCDTU in a period of generalised militancy. The IS leadership turned their backs on intervention in the LCDTU conferences, considering they could win militants directly to the ‘rank and file movement’ and build a sufficient pole of attraction outside the LCDTU to break its hold over militant sections of the class.
In the face of the LCDTU’s failure to organise democratically and independently of the trade union bureaucracy, the IS leadership decided to declare their own ‘rank and file movement’ based on militant groupings in a series of industries. Two hundred and seventy trade union bodies were represented at the first conference (1974), 313 at the second in 1975. Most were militants schooled in the upsurge of militancy against the Heath government, against anti union legislation, against productivity dealing and speedup. The programme of the ‘movement’ never rose above the level of militant trade unionism, IS opposed all forces who attempted to change this with characteristic undemocratic and bureaucratic zeal. The first conference declared itself for the defence of trade union rights, against incomes policies, for militant policies and for trade union democracy. The national campaigns of the formation centred on issues of ‘trade union principle’ giving the ‘rank and file movement’ a hearing among better sections of the class but laying no basis for a coherent communist opposition to the bureaucratic leaders. Schools were organised on ‘safety at work’; leaflets and campaigns were organised on Shrewsbury and the adoption of Chilean trade union prisoners; but the ‘movement’ never materialised. In 1976 and 1977, it was replaced by the Right to Work campaign and marches. The 1977 conference of the IS dominated Rank and File Movement was the smallest and least representative, incapable of organising sustained solidarity action with the firemen’s struggle.
For many, particularly ex-IS members, this record of stagnation and decline is explained simply by the bureaucratic and stifling organisational practices of the IS leadership. The movement failed, it is argued, because IS refused to recognise the organisational independence of the rank and file movement. The current leadership of the SWP’s counsel to their members to drop the ‘front’ aspect of the ‘rank and file movement’ suggests that certain of the SWP’s leaders understand their failures in these terms, too.
Our position is that the IS sponsored and dominated ‘rank and file’ initiative failed because of its politics. Conceived of as a militant halfway house between the party and the class, IS were only prepared to fight for policies that were ‘militant’ and not being carried out by the trade union bureaucracy — for what IS quite openly called ‘do-it-yourself reformism’. Policies of militant shop floor economic reformism could lay the basis for individual stunts but they could not lay the basis for a political challenge to transform the unions in order to struggle for power. The SWP dominated rank and file has been left calling for militant trade unionism, modelled on the shop floor strength of the 1960s at a time when it is precisely such traditional shop floor militancy which is incapable of answering the central questions facing the workers’ movement.
The International Marxist Group
The IMG, and its newspaper, Socialist Challenge, also claim a commitment to building a new Minority Movement. Although they make much of their disagreements with the SWP’s conception of the ‘rank and file movement’, in reality both groups operate on the same ‘halfway house’ methodology. The IMG advance two major criticisms of the SWP position. Firstly, they argue, the SWP operates with a purely sociological notion of the difference between the bureaucracy and the rank and file of the unions. Secondly, they attack the SWP for strangling and suffocating democracy and the necessary debate within the rank and file formations. What is the alternative argued for by the IMG?
The IMG, quite rightly, point to the need to challenge the politics of the union bureaucracy — to fight for a political alternative to their class collaboration. However, the politics they advance are simply the politics that can draw together all those elements in the trade unions who will support, at least verbally, the need for ‘class struggle’ policies. For the IMG this means gaining support both from the rank and file and from within the bureaucracy itself. And it follows that the programme and tactics of the broad alliances must be tailored so as not to alienate the potential allies — the class struggle ‘lefts’ in the trade union bureaucracy. Likewise, criticism of these projected allies must be played down by the ‘revolutionaries’ of the IMG in order to smooth the way for their recruitment into the class struggle alliances. Loose federations, on a loose programme of ‘class struggle’ demands, is the projection of the IMG for the new Minority Movement. In this way the IMG, like the SWP, seeks to build a ‘halfway house’ on a non-communist, ‘class struggle’ programme. They are seeking to engineer broad alliances on a programme suitable only for holding the alliances together. Here is what the IMG say about the tendency it is trying to build: “what is urgently required is the development of cross-sectoral and cross-union alliances involving shop stewards and shop floor militants and capable of challenging the political authority of the trade union bureaucrats . . . the alliances we seek to build would aim at creating a unionwide network of militants, cemented together by a broad agreement on the tasks that lie ahead. Our model would be a modified form of the National Minority Movement of the 1920s.”
Modified out of all recognition, we might add. Where the Minority Movement was based on the quite clear understanding that the only genuine and effective programme for class struggle was that of the Communists, the IMG want only “a broad agreement on the tasks that lie ahead”. Now, the Minority Movement was cemented together by the sharpest agreement on the need to transform the unions into organs for the struggle for power, the need to build a new leadership that would struggle to wrest control of the unions away from the bureaucrats — but all this the IMG wish to ‘modify’ into a “broad agreement on the tasks that lie ahead”. The IMG’s strategy of reaching ‘broad agreement’, of developing and offering programmes to reach that agreement, stands in stark contrast to the actual tasks of communists in the building of a new Minority Movement — the fight to prove the superiority of the revolutionary programme and to arm and prepare militants for the inevitable betrayal of the trade union bureaucracy.
In comparison with the SWP, the IMG can sometimes seem more ‘political’ in its understanding of the problem of the trade union bureaucracy. Where the SWP employs crude rhetoric about the salaries and lifestyles of the bureaucrats, the IMG talks of a political challenge to them. In reality, however, the IMG’s perspective of bringing together unionwide networks of militants is based on a refusal to follow in the footsteps of revolutionary communists in the unions. In order for their ‘class struggle tendencies’ to become anything more than reformist ginger groups, they would have to base themselves on the need to organise the rank and file for struggle independent of the bureaucracy where this proves necessary. They would have to fight openly for control of the unions by the rank and file against the bureaucrats. They must warn the workers that all bureaucratic leaders, whether they are of the ‘right’ or the ‘left’, are potential traitors, the only test being whether they will submit to the discipline of their own rank and file and the demands for the democratisation of the unions.
The IMG has never based its industrial work on these positions. At the April 1977 ‘Leyland TUC’, its representative failed to attack the trade union officials of ‘left’ and ‘right’ who had connived at wage controls, they refused to attack the AUEW ‘lefts’ who, while organising the conference, were refusing to support the struggle of the toolroom workers.
In the 31 March supplement to Socialist Challenge, the Broad Left in the CPSA is held up as a model of the organisation IMG want to build: “the Broad Left, at its last conference, adopted fighting policies and an open democratic structure. All tendencies are free to operate inside it and put forward their own positions. Minority positions are represented on the leading bodies and in its journal.” It is significant that no mention was made of what these “fighting policies” were, only the open structure seems worthy of comment from the IMG. The real nature of this grouping can be seen from the CPSA conference of 1978. The Broad Left did tremendously well in the executive elections. The candidates of the Broad Left secured an overwhelming majority on the new executive. At the same conference, proposals on pay and democratising the union, supposedly central to the Broad Left, were equally overwhelmingly defeated. The real fight for policies amongst the membership was never undertaken whilst the tactic of the ‘broad agreement’ succeeded only in ensuring victory for a leadership committed to nothing except vague ‘left’ rhetoric.
At the founding conference of the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance, Workers Power proposed a resolution calling for the formation of an organisation prepared, if necessary, to fight independently of the bureaucracy, prepared to challenge the bureaucracy for control of the union. The resolution was opposed by the IMG as being “divisive,” presumably threatening the unity of the new organisation with ‘left’ bureaucrats prepared to campaign under the banner of the STA.
In the Working Women’s Charter Campaign, the IMG consistently fought against amending the outdated and reformist programme of the campaign on the basis that the alternative put forward was “too advanced” — too advanced that is for the Communist Party and left trade union bureaucrats that the IMG hoped to woo to the campaign. For the same reasons, the IMG virtually boycotted the efforts to build Charter caucuses in the trade unions, committed to struggle for the implementation of the policy of the Charter, fearing that such caucuses would alienate sections of the trade union officialdom that could be won to nominal support for the Charter campaigns.
The IMG are committed to building ‘militant’ caucuses in the unions in political alliance with sections of the ‘Left’ bureaucrats. They quite falsely counterpose the division between ‘lefts’ and ‘rights’ at all levels of the unions and a programme designed to unite the ‘lefts’, to a communist understanding of the distinct division of the interest between the bureaucracy of the Labour movement and the rank and file, and a communist programme designed to unite the rank and file in struggle. Indeed, while attacking the SWP for trying to “leap over” the bureaucracy, they suggest that not only is such a movement impossible to launch at the present, but that it will never be necessary: “This leap, however, cannot even be begun, leave alone completed today. It will only happen when an important segment of the mass base of the trade union bureaucrats is dented by important upheavals, and then it will not be so much a leap as a breach.”
In other words, the IMG expect upheavals in the class struggle itself to make a breach in the trade union bureaucracy for us; a breach that they expect will send the ‘lefts’ to the side of the ‘class struggle’ and the ‘rights’ into the arms of the class enemy. Because future candidates for the ‘left’ side of this breach cannot be won today to a programme based on breaking the bureaucratic stranglehold over the unions, and transforming their structure and nature, the IMG refuse to put forward such a programme.
This is made clear by a brief examination of Socialist Challenge’s coverage of Arthur Scargill. Towards the end of 1977, Arthur Scargill attempted to defeat the right wing of the NUM and avoid mobilising his members by taking the union to court over the productivity deals issue. That Scargill should turn to the capitalist state for help against the right wing should come as no surprise to anyone with any understanding of the trade union bureaucracy. Likewise, Scargill’s climb down in June 1978 over the Yorkshire call for strike action to support the pit rescue workers. Though the Yorkshire area of the NUM was committed to strike action from June 1, Scargill called the action off under pressure from Gormley and the NCB to keep negotiations open.
Scargill’s response was predictable. The duty of revolutionaries is to support all positive mobilisations called by Scargill — e.g. of the Yorkshire miners’ flying pickets and the mass picket of miners at Grunwick — while warning workers of his inevitable retreat in the face of pressure from the rest of the trade union bureaucracy. This fact has not been recognised by the IMG and Socialist Challenge. In their coverage of last year’s pay claim and productivity deals dispute, Socialist Challenge refused to take Scargill, who they enjoy interviewing and quoting, to task over his failure to organise the rank and file members in a fight for the £135 a week claim and against all productivity deals. Instead they criticised, correctly, the Scottish miners’ leader and member of the Communist Party, Mick McGahey, but let Scargill off the hook by quoting him on his newfound belief in the uselessness of the British courts, but said nothing of his error in going to the courts in the first place!
It is clear from this and other instances that Socialist Challenge does not see the need to build a rank and file movement in the NUM, independent of the bureaucracy, which can challenge the likes of Scargill both organisationally and, through its programme, politically.
This centrist irresponsibility is particularly damaging given the strategic importance of the NUM. This union — which has played a vital role in all major periods of class struggle (in the 20s and the 70s) has no clearly developed workplace based shop stewards structure. It has remained in the stranglehold of a bureaucracy divided between the right and a primarily Stalinist ‘left’. In these circumstances it is absolutely crucial that revolutionaries refuse to tailor their programme to ‘lefts’ like Scargill, that they organise to build a pit based rank and file movement in the NUM.
The IMG, like the SWP, seek to build a rank and file movement on a limited programme, a halfway house between ‘their’ politics and those of the mass of the workers. They do this quite consciously, arguing that a communist programme would be ‘too advanced’ or ‘premature’ for the class, although they themselves might agree with it. In other words, they both put forward demands and programmes which they know to be insufficient. Neither stands in the tradition of the revolutionary Minority Movement. The SWP, while being explicitly anti-union bureaucracy, have no political alternative to it, contenting themselves with calls for more militancy in the belief that it will, of itself, develop into a political challenge. The IMG base their approach on building broad, democratic alliances with sections of the bureaucracy, tailoring their political programme in order to cement them together.
The IMG’s call for openness and democracy can sound very attractive to militants who have experienced the degeneration of the ‘Rank and File Movement’ into an organisational appendage of the SWP, or that of the All Trade Union Alliance. However, the cause of such degeneration cannot be explained by their internal life. Rather, both have to be seen in the context of the political line behind them.
The Healyite tradition
On a formal level, the WRP (and the Socialist Labour League/SLL before) have a clearer idea than the IMG and SWP of the need to build an alternative, revolutionary, leadership to challenge the bureaucracy for control of the unions. To quote the June 21, 1969, issue of The Newsletter, “the ATUA was formed in order to organise together all those trade unionists moving towards the political struggle of the SLL for revolutionary leadership in the trade unions . . . this is not a trade union in any sense, but a rallying of all the advanced political elements in all unions, trained to take their place as, first and foremost, fighters for a revolutionary leadership in the unions.”
It was the political bankruptcy of the political line of the WRP; the campaign for a general strike to bring down the Tories and assure their replacement by a Labour government committed to unspecified “Socialist Policies”, the false projection of Bonapartism and impending military coups, the focus on bringing down the Healey/Callaghan government — that ensured the ATUA would become the lifeless appendage of a bankrupt sect. Likewise, it was the IS politics, economism, and not the organisational possessiveness of the IS leadership, which made the Rank and File Movement sterile. In a similar fashion, the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement initiated by the Workers’ Socialist League will meet the same fate, unable to intervene anywhere, it will turn in upon itself as a recruiting ground for its parent organisation.
Our tasks
At the present time, a new period of capitalist instability has led the bourgeoisie, acting now through the Labour government, to attempt to claw back from the working class those gains it made in the period of relative stability following the second imperialist war. Since the mid-sixties, the unofficial organisations of the class have been under attack. Individual victimisation, participation schemes, national bargaining with fulltime officials insulated from the pressures and demands of the shop floor, state organised arbitration and tribunal schemes, are all facets of the employers’ drive to break the strength of the plant-based unofficial organisations. The ranks of trade union officialdom have proven to be willing accomplices of this drive by the employing class, a drive to place them firmly in command of the trade union movement.
In the face of these attacks — a shift of power away from the shop floor — the shop stewards’ movement has proved incapable of sustained resistance. There is a severe crisis of direction and strategy in the shop floor organisations traditionally looked to by workers as their first line of defence.
As the class struggle unfolds, it reveals ever more clearly both the traitorous role of the present labour leaders and the continuing willingness of the rank and file to defend itself and its organisations. The tremendous outburst of militancy amongst the rank and file of the FBU and the sympathy they gained throughout the working class, the fact that even in the EETPU and the white collar unions, the candidates stood for election based on opposition to the entrenched leaders, are all eloquent proof of the potential and the desire to fight back against the attacks of the state. That the rank and file of the FBU were beaten, that the NUM stands divided against itself, that the once powerful dockers and car workers have not defended their jobs, let alone their wages, is equally eloquent testimony to the need for new organisations, new methods and new objectives to wage the class struggle. The class desperately needs to transform its organisations, the movement to achieve that must be rooted in every section of the working class and must recognise the need to go beyond mere defence of previous gains towards the irrevocable transformation of society itself.
Hence the centrality and urgency of the call for a shop steward based rank and file movement in all individual unions and on a national scale. The task of communists is to support every step towards the building of such a movement, while fighting to prove that such a movement can only offer an alternative to the employers’ offensive and bureaucratic betrayal, if armed with a programme to take the unions out of the hands of bureaucrats in the struggle to prepare the class for power.
At the present time, even the nucleus of such a rank and file movement does not exist. Periodically, major struggles — such as in the Grunwicks dispute — pit significant sections of workers against the traitorous plans of the trade union bureaucrats. Groupings such as the Right to Work Campaign, the Rank and File Organising Committee, the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement, the LCDTU and various broad left formations — although they are effectively the industrial peripheries of centrist and reformist organisations — do bring together genuine and serious militants with whom we are prepared to struggle, and put our programme and theirs to the test. We will intervene in all these milieu, to the extent that our size and the frequently undemocratic practices of their parent organisations allow.
We are not ultimatists. We do not demand acceptance of our programme as a condition of our involvement in the rank and file movement, nor do we make acceptance of our programme a precondition of activity with the rank and file. At every stage, in every key struggle, we fight for those elements of our programme vital to victory in the struggle and the strengthening of the movement in its transformation into a revolutionary movement of the rank and file. We seek to build an organisationally totally independent rank and file movement, having its own democratic internal life, its own elected leadership and publishing its own propaganda and agitational material. We fight for leadership of such a movement, openly proclaiming and fighting for our action programme in the day to day struggles of the class, confident that we will be proved the most consistent fighters for the interests of the class and will attract to our banner the best militants.
A mass rank and file movement will include individual members. But in order to develop roots in the factories, offices, mines and docks, where its programme has to be implemented, it must be based on the affiliation of genuine workers’ organisations: shop stewards’ committees, union branches, combine committees, the caucuses of black and women workers. trades councils and union reform movements must be represented by recallable and therefore responsible delegates.
Although the rank and file movement will be built in struggle against the trade union bureaucracy, it is inevitable that elements of that bureaucracy will attempt to attach themselves to the rank and file as it grows in authority amongst the workers. We do not organisationally debar such officials from membership of the rank and file. We do, however, argue for conditions to be placed on their membership. The guiding principle here is that they must prove by their actions that they have not only broken from the bourgeoisie but also from the bureaucratic caste whose position as mediator between the working class and the bourgeoisie means that all its members are potential traitors. We demand of all officials who wish to adhere to the rank and file movement that they lead a struggle for the programme of the movement and that they place themselves, and the union machinery they control, under the control of the rank and file.
The more strongly militants fight for such a movement, the more they will be attacked, vilified and betrayed by all those who fear the independent organisation of the working class fighting for its own interests. A rank and file movement bent on defending the interests and extending the control of the working class against the ever increasing attacks of the state, will be driven, ever more forcefully, towards the communist programme of action for the trade unions. To argue for and fight for that programme and for the building of a rank and file movement committed to it, is the task Workers Power sets itself in the trade unions.
