FOR THE TORY press the 115th annual Trades Union Congress was as almost as joyous an occasion as the mole-hunt two weeks earlier.
Alongside weighty editorials welcoming the 'new mood of realism' were jubilant headlines glorying in the defeat of the left. The Times carried an article entitled "The Beginning of the End of the Unions?' The question mark at the end was well-advised. Although the outlook for the unions - and the working class is grimmer than at any time since 1945, the ruling class in Britain still has a long way to go before it can achieve its aim breaking the back ot -organised labour. But the signs are ominous.
There is certainly no room for complacency on the left about the situation. The 1983 Congress marked the biggest political shift in the TUC since the left leadership of Jones and Scanlon emerged in the late '60s to replace the right wing dominance of Carron and company. Then the shift took place in the context of the long boom, of growing shop floor strength, and the burgeoning of the stop stewards' organisations.
This present shift however is in the context of a worsening economic crisis, of a new round of attacks on the unions the weltare state, a dramatic of the shop stewards organisations, particularly in heavy industry, and a catastrophic decline in the fortunes of the Labour Party.
When Thatcher came to power in 1979 trade union membership stood at the record level of 12.2 million, or 52 per cent of the working population. ToDeou working population. It is in the major manual unions that the decline is most The Transport and General Workers Union has dropped from over 2 million in 1979 to 1.5 million; the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers from 1.2 million to under La value coesn 850,000. In engineering, the number shoo stewards has about halved National and Local GovernOfficers Association tional Union of Public Employees have made small gains. As a result about 4 million of the TUC's 10.5 million are white-collar and public sector Given the depths of the recession such figures are not surprising. they could not in themselves account for the rightward move at this TUC Much more important are me pontica defeats suffered by the labour movement since 1979, above all the inability of the Labour leadership to take on the Tories. It is an old adage that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. This certainly applies to the left in the TUC.
Their failure to campaign for clear socialist policies, their face of the right's attacks on socialists in the Labour Party, and their refusal to support struggles against the Tories as with the health workers, the train drivers, Labour's debacle on 6 June.
The Tory press, and the right wing on the TUC try to defeats to some fundamental and irreversible process going on in the working population of Britain. They point to the rise growth of the service and banking and insurance sectors as evidence that the trade unions have 'to adjust to the last quarter of the 20th century' Such assertions are rubbish. They must be firmly rejected by Unions such as NUPE and NALGC organise some of the poorest paid and most oppressca sectors or lne population in Britain. And the health unions conducted the most militant struggles that happened in 1982.
Even trade unions such as BIFU -which covers banking, and finance - are remarkable not for being based on a new elite section of the working class, but for the fact even in SuCT traditionally workers have found organise to defend their interests. Civil and Public Servants Association is : of not based on pin-striped civil servants By but on low paid clerks and typists etc These changes Na- position of the TUC membership are not some sudden new discovered by a guru of the right 1983. hey have decades and have been speeded up by the crisis. True traditional industries But however would sociological silence in the and British Leyland led to organise drivers.
attribute these of the working class. of new technology, the socialist socialists Talks insurance privileged areas tion.
in the social com- policy development in been going on for bosses. have been declining. At the same time letarianised - as Marx predicted they new areas have been Tory Britain has not brought forth a new aristocracy of labour embracing the bulk of the working class. In fact with four million unemployed it has done the opposite. The issue is not a VilC that demands political answers. The problem is not the membership. The pro blem is the leadership. And particularly that section of the leadership which claims to lead the left.
Throughout the life of the last Tory government they refused to organise the forces at the base of the movemen who were prepared to take on the government. They made no attempt to.
the ranks for example, against the TUC's sell-out of the train.
They failed to build on the potential of the health workers dispute.
In the run-up to this TUC they accepted, by their silence the framework wing. This framework focussed on Labour's election defeat, and the undoubted shift to the right in The conclusion from this was not the need to put forward policies and campaign for them in the unions. but the ... need for a major reassessment of the TUC'S policies and role'. What this will mean was made clear during Congress.
It will be talks with Tebbit about anti-union legislation, opposition to strikes, dropping unilateralism, opposition to secondary industrial action, and acceptance of the weakening of links with the Labou So in a situation where the Tories are engaged in the most serious attacks on the working class for 50 years, the TUC General Council will be swimming with the stream of ruling class reac This will be in the hope that they can do a deal with Tebbit. But this will only to further demoralise the working class. It will reinforce the myth of Tory invincibili ty. It will drive even more workers into the hands of the Alliance and even the Tories. And it still will not satisfy the
for Murray Chapple and his allies on eneral Council have already made it that they regard the mocrat/Liberal Alliance as a useful il to a left-dominated Labour Party. ad amidst all the hullabaloo about the orean airliner and Scargill's stance on lidarity there was a deafening silence - the question of Tebbit's attack on The right wing are getting mach ere confident. They know tha sea:
e third of the unions in the t affiliated to the Labou: zy see this as a base for ther pace:
talking to the democraticall! ees== ernment' and eventually opening up with the SDP. If they succeed in ing the trade unions' links with Labour Party this would deal a - olow to tne interests of the work.
dass. It would undermine its incadence and help to deliver sections workers' movement into the Is of the bourgeois parties. the Social cowardly TUC.
ingly unlikely the Lazu: 2: 1= 25 The tast is:
===:
I: wi for a new Minority Movement.
next few years.
Party had had set in.
of miners, leaving 'Stop unions.' unions derisively base workshops was leadership.
This danger can be fought only by the most vigorous opposition to the positions adopted at this The practices of the left trade union leaders of the past five years have been shown to be woefully inadequate.
sectoral responses, or even worse, which confines its fight to the committee rooms of the TUC, will not be able ie mobilise che 30 per cen:
CEME period will beto gate 25=: == com the General Counci io the sto; ==d atte floor. It will be to build supstruggle against =: he welfare the right across, the labour movement whose sharpest political expression will The lessons of last week's defeats is the need This must be the watchword of the left in the IN 1922/23 the British Communist just about got itself organised. But by then the slump Unemployment was rife. In industry the working class had suffered a series of major set-backs.
In 1921 'Black Friday' had meant that the much vaunted Triple Alliance rail and steelworkers had given in to the Tory government and in 1922 the employers lock out had inflicted a big blow on the engineering workers who during the war years nad been in the vanguard of the workers? struggles. The war-time shop stewards' movement lay In ruins possibilities inside the unions looked very bleak indeed.
For the infant Communist Party the most important question was what to do next. Certainly there was no talk of the TUC and forming new unions. In fact they adopted the slogan:
the retreat Back to the Wherever they could, they rank-and-file organisations inside the - which one right-wing leader dubbed 'minority movements'. These gained their first miners they transport workers. argued for based on th and therefore be more representative than bodies simply based on trade union branches.
Influence They also aimed for trades councils to be represented at the Trades Union Congress to bring workshop influence In 1924 the first annual conference of the National Minority Movement held with 200,000 workers represented. It called for the setting up of factory committees which would be a step towards industrial unionism and for making the local trades councils into centres of genuine working class Minority Movement wanted the TUC General Council to be given more powers so that it could act as a general staff of labour.
The Minority Movement did not suffer from the half-baked illusion that ,the people who led the TUC could be 144, 5 DR. CLIFFORD JAMES MACPUCRRON transformed into action'. It fact that 'when the employing realise the General Council is really the head of the trade union movement much more capitalist "influence"' wil be brought to bear on it ...
But they explained, Minority Movement desire a General Council which will bring into being a bold and audacious General Staff of the trade union movement.' Their way becotong a machine of the capiolisti" stopping becoming Staff' was by tionary consciousness the the trade union membership.' Finally they emphasised that they had to alter 'the constitution of the General Council so as "to ensure that those elected thereon would have the closest contact with the members'.
The Minority Movement thus plac ea isel nea to tne orerron or l struggle to build the trade unions on democratic and accountable lines and at the leadership with real power.
Throughout 1924 by its association with a number of strikes the Minority Movement gained in prestige and extended is influence.
Movement had a basic strategy which was to build a fighting leadership on a series of limited demands to replace the right.
They knew that the crisis of leadership inside the unions could not simply be solved by winning people one by one Communist understood that they had to work with left-reformist leaders who did have the confidence of thousands of workers.
Failing to do that and just saying join the Communist Party was not the route to victory, but was the path to defeat and disaster.
As the Communist Review explained in 1932 '... at the beginning of the 8150 National Minority siderable time and energy had to be expended to fight down the belief that there was no room for a movement dealing with immediate and "narrow"
economic issues ... and that such al organisation would stand ir LIVING-IM SYSTEM STSTE DR. CLIFFORD CLIFFORD JADES MACPHERSIN White collar workers had begun to organise even before the turn of the century 'revolutionaries of made no bones about the This fight 'we of the General Council 'a workers' General 'developing a revoluamongst its sympathisers.
Strike of 1926.
means British same time to invest the union fruit.
The Minority height Movement's They out the Movement working class.
front of SISTEM Socialist Action 16 September 1983 and hide the party from the workers.' against propagandism was necessary if a genuine mass movement was coine Io be built inside the trade unions and in which the Communist Party could win by its policies and examples thousands and thousands of workers with reformist views.
The crucial question was its relationship with the left reformist leaders in the bureaucracy. If it had failed to work with these leaders then it would have remained ineffective. After they commanded the support of hundreds of thousands of workers, whereas the Communist Party had a following of a few thousand even if you included But at all times it had to avoid providing a left cover for these leaders. Unfortunately it fell into the latter trap. In 1925 as a new wave of working class militancy was sweeping the country and the scene was being set for the General In Russia the newly established Stalinist regime had its eyes fixed on the trade union lefts of the TUC. Stalin wanted to use the Anglo. Russian Trade Union Committee as a of establishing detente with imperialism. The policy of peaceful co-existence was about to beal Pressure Under pressure from Stalin's Comintern the Communist Party at the very of the National Minority power began to softpeddle their criticism of the TUC 'lefts' like Purcell and Hicks. In the General Strike the following year the 'lefts' in obedient collusion with the right sold miners. The workers' movement suffered an appalling defeat.
From then on the National Minority Movement went into a decline. But it still stands as a testimony in its earlier days of how Marxists should work inside the unions. It started in a period of downturn with the aim of democratising the unions, and of making them inorganisations that fought for the It recognised that the Communist Party would have to build a mass resistance involving reformist leaders and reformist workers to replace the right-wing union leaders.
Socialist Action 16 September 1983
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LIVING-IN SYSTEM