In the addled thoughts of Communists and their allies and successors, the trade unions are potential and sometimes actual revolutionary organizations. Oddly enough, the people who agree with this idea are the sizeable reactionary fringe for whom Conservatism does not go far enough, and who see in every wage demand a plot to bring down civilization. Both are out of touch with reality and fail to see the advantages and limitations of trade unionism.
The Socialist Party recognizes the necessity for all workers to do all they can to maintain wages and working conditions. This is part of the class struggle in capitalism. The working class are the nine-tenths of the population who have to live by selling their only possession: labour-power. It is a commodity. Like all commodities its price reflects its value, i.e. the labour which has gone to make it, and like all commodities it is sold on a market where the interests of buyers and sellers are fundamentally opposed. The need for workers to organize and make use of the weapons available to them collectively is clear.
Organization draws attention to some limits and creates others. The trade unions’ early need was for legal recognition and protection, to allow them to function effectively without penalties and also to enable them to control their members. This protection was given by Acts of 1868, 1871 and 1875, and reinforced by the Trade Disputes Act of 1906; and it was dependent on the unions’ showing “responsibility” towards capitalism. The historian Halévy describes them as zealously cultivating respectability in 1868. The 1905 Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain said:
. . .With this legal protection, however, ideas that had been growing up since the breaking down of the Chartist movement, spread far and wide. Taught by the assiduous agents of the capitalist class that ‘“Capital” and “Labour” were brothers, the workers acted on the theory that between them and their masters were “common interests.”
From the big manufacturers’ point of view the major unions provided a body to negotiate rationally with. Engels remarked in the 1892 preface to his Condition of the Working Class that squabbles over petty items had become a nuisance, and concessions enabled them “to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites”.
The basis of trade-union organization is wages and conditions, without any political reference. Many trade unionists support the Labour Party; others are Communists, Conservatives, Liberals, etc., all of whom need equally to press to maintain or try to improve their living standards. This shows on one hand that everyone, conscious of it or not, is in the class struggle; and on the other, that the overwhelming majority of trade unionists are not Socialists and do not even think they are. To that extent, the unions have hardly needed persuading that workers and employers have “common interests”.
Political-minded militants believe that in a strike, or when otherwise under pressure from the capitalist class, a mass of trade unionists can be led into a general rebellion against the existing order. The same belief is held about the unemployed; and, as with the unemployed, the position is that (unless they are Socialists) they want nothing more than a solution to their immediate problem. When militants are elected to trade-union offices it is in view of their likely success as negotiators, not their political gospels. However, the implication on the part of the militants who profess to be aiming to overthrow capitalism is that they are seeking the support of non-Socialists. This was the position taken up by Keir Hardie and other early Labour leaders.
“Left-wing” doctrines in the trade unions have, universally, had undesirable results for the working class. The idea of “workers’ control” has provided a ready-made structure for totalitarian regimes, where the trade unions are virtually government departments to ensure industrial discipline. Of Communist militancy between the two world wars, Gerald Abrahams says in Trade Unions and the Law (1968):
Communism convinced its converts that Patriotism meant less to a citizen than his loyalty to an economic group. That theory, incidentally, has served well some of those industrial leaders whose function it became to lay down to government the terms on which the worker would co-operate in a war, and Parliaments, which seem to have favoured the conscript rather than the volunteer, appear to have accepted their instruction.
The records of legislation and government action do not show what is commonly believed, that Labour governments are more favourable than others to the trade unions. After the Trade Unions Act of 1871 (Liberal), the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875, which established the legitimacy of “trade disputes”, was passed by a Conservative government. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 and the Trade Union Act 1913 were enacted under the Liberals. Following the General Strike, the Conservatives’ Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act 1927 declared certain strikes illegal; it was held as a grievance, and repealed by Labour in 1945. However, it made little change in practice, and in the opinion of some legal authorities did not alter the existing position over general strikes.
Since the war, Labour and Conservative governments have both pursued the idea of an “incomes policy”, meaning wage restraint, and have both offended the trade unions with legislation: the Prices and Incomes Act (Labour) and the Industrial Relations Act (Conservative). Labour applied the Emergency Powers Act in a docks strike in 1948 and the Seamen’s strike in 1966. No party has seriously opposed the functioning of the trade unions since the Acts of the eighteen-seventies; but they have all (including the Communists during the war) bared their capitalist teeth when the system they hold dear was under duress.
Something which would surprise the trade unionists of the past is the sight of union leaders today in open collaboration with governments to limit pay increases for their members. Up to recent times the accepted practice was for the unions to make bargains with governments without surrendering their basic right of bargaining with the employers (in 1966, shortly before the Prices and Incomes Act, it was held by a court that government policy was “not relevant” to a worker’s claim for a wage increase). In fact the trade unions alone have made government wage-restraint possible. Capitalism battles through its crises at the expense of the working class, but it is something new for it to be given active help on those lines by working-class organizations.
The Webbs described a trade union as “a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives”. Unions are economic organizations with an essential function. It is also a restricted one, and they operate properly by accepting the restriction: political action by them has been chronically damaging to working-class interests. While their success in gaining wage increases depends on the state of production more than anything else, they should always be ready to (as Marx advised them) test the situation and not accept the pleas of the capitalist class and governments.
The restriction means also that trade unions cannot change society. The next step for trade unionists is recognition of the position in which they stand, and the fact that the path to Socialism is separate political organization. With this consciousness they can end the action in support of capitalism which too often characterizes trade unions now, and turn from sectional aims to the interests of the working class as a whole. In a resolution he drafted for the International Workingmen’s Association in 1866, Marx wrote:
By considering themselves champions and representatives of the whole working class, and acting accordingly, the trade unions must succeed in rallying round themselves all workers still outside their ranks. They must carefully safeguard the interests of the workers in the poorest-paid trades, as, for example, the farm labourers, who due to especially unfavourable circumstances have been deprived of their power of resistance. They must convince the whole world that their efforts are far from narrow and egoistic, but on the contrary, are directed towards the emancipation of the downtrodden masses.
Obviously much trade-union action — for instance, that which centres on the idea of a “wages league” in which groups of workers demand as of right to be better paid than others — is divisive and unconcerned with the class issue. Trade unions have much to learn. At the present stage, Socialists observe and approve their efforts to get what they can. But the reservations have to be made: our demand is for workers in the unions to see that they are only half-participating in the class struggle. The question is not what Socialists do about trade unions, but what the trade unions are going to do about Socialism.
Robert Barltrop
Excellent article.
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