Editorial: Trade Unions on the Rocks (1946)

Editorial from the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a confused welter of argument about unofficial strikes, big and little unions and the "Closed Shop,” what is by far the most fateful aspect of the trade union situation is being disregarded, though it is the underlying trouble of which the others are largely symptoms. What has happened during the war, and still more since the Labour Government came into power, is that the trade unions have increasingly ceased to be independent organisations of the workers in the struggle against the employers over wages and conditions of work, and have become instead organisations for disciplining the workers in the interest of the Government’s wages and production policies. The present Government, having taken over from Churchill the responsibility of administering capitalism, puts at the forefront of its programme an intense drive to find markets abroad for British exporters in competition with the capitalists of other countries. The plan has several features that are related to each other. One is the continuation of “ austerity ” at home so that more goods can be sold abroad. Another is the effort to lower costs of production to a competitive level in the markets of the world, partly by modernising the technical equipment of various backward industries and partly by seeking the co-operation of the workers, through the trade unions, in the campaign to increase production. The third part of the plan was the Government’s belief that by retaining the control of prices for essential goods, clothing, etc., wages would remain more or less unchanged at the level reached at the end of the war. Not wanting to take the very unpopular step of preventing wage increases by making them illegal—as some governments have done—the Government here hoped to keep wage increases in check by appealing to the workers, and particularly by appealing to the Trade Union executives, to moderate their demands. In short, it was regarded by the Government as essential, if British capitalism was to regain its overseas markets, that the trade unions should largely abdicate their proper function of struggling to raise wages in the present favourable situation, and should instead act as a brake on the demands of the workers. That this is a correct reading of the minds of the Ministers is shown by Mr. Dalton’s speech ill the House of Commons on October 23rd, 1945, when introducing his budget. He pointed out that the Government was spending some hundreds of millions of pounds a year subsidising food and other articles in order to keep prices down, then he went on to talk about the effect on wages : —

“It has also helped to restrain any disproportionate increase in wage rates, which, if it had occurred, might have disturbed the whole balance of our economic life, and might have sucked us into the fatal whirlpool of inflation. Here I wish to pay tribute to the steadiness and good sense which the trade unions and their leaders have shown during the war in this regard. . . . Wage rates . . . have climbed steadily all the time, and that has been right; yet there has been no break-away rise, no uncontrolled rise such as we might easily have seen had it not. been for this continuing cooperation between the Government—in this case the Coalition Government—and the trade unions, both recognising that the common interest was best served by this joint effort of the two parties to keep prices and wages on an even keel.”

Mr. Dalton calls it “co-operation” between the Government and the trade unions, but in fact it has been co-operation between the Government and the trade union executives to hold back the natural and correct desire of the workers to struggle for higher wages before unemployment and eventual slump make it impossible to do so.

Mr. G. D. H. Cole, himself a Labour Party supporter and one who approves of this damping-down policy, described it in very appropriate terms in the Observer (8/9/46). He sees that the workers are restive because they feel they no longer control their officials, and feel that the unions are “merely a bureaucratic machine run by the officials for the purpose of keeping them in order.”

Mr. Cole seeks a remedy, but adds:—

"This is not too easy, now that most wage bargains are national in scale, and wage demands have to be squared with the requirements of a national wages policy—as they have in fact, even if the existence of such a policy is disclaimed. The Trade Unions have become, perforce, instruments for disciplining their more unruly members, as well as for representing them; and this sets up a tension that will be cured only by time, as people settle down to the changed conditions.”

Mr. Cole has correctly diagnosed the cause of the present discontent of trade unionists which shows itself in unofficial strikes and efforts to break away from the discipline imposed by the officials on behalf of the Government, but he and the trade union officials who support that policy are quite wrong in their belief that the workers should, or will, go on accepting it. The trade unions must regain their independence and freedom of action or they will become moribund and useless. The unions are not being endangered by the virile independence shown already by some trade unionists; they are being throttled from above by the fatal tie-up with the Government. Their health will tie restored only when the members can again know that they are able to exercise democratic control over union policy and are free, when they deem it wise, to use the only weapon they have under capitalism, the strike.

It is popular in Labour circles to denounce totalitarian regimes under which trade unions are State organs, and strikes are forbidden. Mr. Morgan Phillips, Secretary of the Labour Party, on his return from Russia, wrote about the Russian unions: - 

"I am not sure that the workers’ organisations can be regarded as ‘trade anions' in the British sense that they are free agents to act and speak as their members demand, irrespective of Government stricture. The very fact that strikes are illegal seems to dispose of any pretence to freedom of action as we know it ” (Daily Herald, 21/8/46).

It would not be a bad idea if Mr. Phillips would now take a look at what used to be independent trade unions in this country and observe that, by a less brutal and less obvious process of deterioration, they are heading towards the state of the Russian organisations. It is plain that the unions here will not be rescued from that fate by the Labour Government or by the trade union executives who have been responsible for the present state of things. Salvation will come from the members themselves when they wake up to the fact that Labour government cannot abolish capitalism or the class struggle inseparable from capitalism, and when they regain control of their own organisations for the purpose of defending their interests on the industrial field.

It should be added, however, that while Socialists support sound trade union action they have to point out, too, that trade unions, though necessary and useful organs of working-class resistance, cannot emancipate the working class from capitalism—that can be done only by a Socialist working class politically organised to take control democratically of the machinery of government, for the purpose of abolishing capitalism and introducing Socialism.

Communist slogans for capitalism (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leading Communist Arthur Horner, like the Jack Horner of old, has stuck his finger into the Trades Union pie, and pulled out a nice fat plum—the post of General Secretary to the National Union of Mineworkers. After the cheers of the C.P.G.B. have subsided, let us see if this appointment benefits the mineworkers, or the mine-owners.

Addressing a mass meeting of miners at Tonypandy, he said :—

“Production needs are so great that the time has come to apply the slogan “ If a man won’t work, neither shall he eat ” (Daily Express, 26/8/46). 

Horner, of course, has learned this brutal slave-driving threat from the source of all Communist inspiration—Soviet Russia, and although this self-same slogan was incorporated in the first Russian Constitution of 1918 for the new “Socialist State,” it is difficult to understand why Horner shall proclaim it in Capitalist Britain, unless it is for the extraction of more surplus-value from the miners. Perhaps he, like the Daily Herald, imagines that Britain is now a “Socialist State” !

This wolf in Marxist clothing continues:—

“The present manpower cannot produce the coal that Britain needs to maintain full employment.”

With unemployment figures growing all round him, this so-called ”leader” of the proletariat dares to suggest that “full employment” is even possible under Capitalism, which demands a constant reserve army of unemployed to act as a lever against the struggles of employed workers, much less that it is actually in existence now.

The next “ gem ” (he certainly “went the whole hog” at Tonypandy !):—

“ A large increase of manpower for the pits is vital if there is to be a rapid restoration of coal exports.”

Instead of telling the miners about Marxism, or Communism, this “revolutionary” is forced, by the very nature of his position as ”Labour Tamer ” in the capitalist circus, to sidetrack and confuse the workers’ minds with that old, old capitalist motto, “ Export or die,” which is so necessary (for the capitalist class) at this stage to beat rival capitalist states in the race to hustle commodities into the markets of the world.

Impressively, Horner juggles with figures containing heaps of 000’s, concluding that :—

“If we can restore the 1939 position . . . we can .. . wipe out the American loan and the burden its commitments represent.”

For these few words of cheer the British Capitalist class (who bear the “burden”) will have cause to thank “Comrade” Horner, and perhaps arrange a knighthood for him—who knows? But the matter should not interest the working class of either America or Britain, whose “burden” under Capitalism has always been that of “ making both ends meet ’’—whose wages represent the cost of keeping them fit for reproducing their work and their class. It is absurd to suggest that the American loan is anything but a business arrangement between the master class of America and Britain, and the millions that Horner quotes are of no interest to the working class of either country.

Speaking of unemployment in Wales (having already talked about “maintaining full employment”), Horner, like a Stalin contemplating a “purge,” says:—

“ The cause of the failure must be traced and ruthlessly eradicated.”

For once we can agree, but as the only answer to the social evils of the day is the abolition of the system of society that Horner is supporting, and the institution of a system based on common ownership of the means of life instead of private or state ownership, the task is left to us Socialists to explain to the miners of Tonypandy and workers, wherever the Socialist message can penetrate, their position in society to-day.

Armed with sound Socialist knowledge, and the will to unite for victory, the working class will achieve its emancipation, in spite of the confusion and disillusion spread by office-seeking Communist opportunists.

Michael La Touche

Muddled Thinking of a Labour Leader (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

“If ever there was a risk of over-production causing unemployment there is none now. For at least a dozen years there must be conditions of shortage which with the best energy and effort cannot be removed. We are in arrears. We need have no fear of the supply exceeding the demand.”

(Reynold’s News, Nov. 30th, 1919.)

Within two years of making this statement there were over 2,000,000 unemployed.

Now Mr. Clynes is at it again. In a statement from his home in Putney he said:—“Avoidable stoppages, absenteeism and dislocation in the workshop lead to reduced production of goods. The less there is to buy the more men must pay to get what they want. ” (Daily Express, June 17th, 1946.)

Though the wording is different, the implication is the same. All we have to do to ensure a high standard of living is work hard. Intensified production inevitably produces a surplus; under capitalism goods are produced for sale, demand meaning the ability to pay.

At present, in a world denuded of goods, there is a ready market for goods of all descriptions. Modern mass-production methods, as applied to industry, will create an abundance. In due course the markets will be flooded. The capitalists, being unable to sell all the products at a profit, will curtail production, and many workers will be thrown out of work.

Mr. Clynes should think of the years between the wars before he commits himself to these bland statements.

Meller.

"Rake's Progress" (Political Version) (1946)

From the October 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

The majority of people know Mr. Strachey as Minister of Food. There is a minority who have come to regard him as an exponent of Marxism as well. Indeed, Tom Driberg, M.P., in Reynolds' (1/6/46), said that it was as a Marxian economist that he approached the Labour front bench. That a copy of Marx’s “Capital” leaves Mr. Strachey’s bookshelves when invited to Cabinet discussions is doubtful. Nevertheless, in an article in the Daily Herald (28/5/46) on Mr. Strachey, Mr. Francis Williams resolutely refused to convey any suggestion of a Marxist skeleton in the cupboard of Mr. Strachey’s political past and merely commented "He wrote able and bitter political works, some of which have been regarded as minor classics of the Left.” In these minor classics Mr. Strachey developed major attacks on the Labour Party. In the ”Coming struggle for power” (p. 338) he accused them ”of laying down the working-class organisation necessary for Fascism.” Theorists like G. D. H. Cole, who, he alleged, believed in a form of controlled high-wage-paying capitalism, he charged with having the same political objectives as the Fascist Corporate State. His now somewhat uncomfortable prognostication of Mr. Morrison was that he envisaged a Whitehall or Smith Square controlled capitalism, adding that the difference between Mr. Morrison’s views and those of G. D. H. Cole were merely one of emphasis and mode of expression. His own party he summed up as—“Labour Party rotten before it was ripe” (“The Nature of Capitalist Crisis,” p. 341-352). From the Herald's viewpoint such a skeleton is best kept under lock and key. It was left to the New Statesman to frivolously twitter “Mr. Strachey’s series of Socialist studies must have been the one brilliantly successful attempt to translate Marxism into the King’s English.” While the King’s English reputation of the New Statesman is deservedly high, their qualifications to pronounce on Marxism is notoriously low. It is, of course, Mr. Stracliey’s Marxism which is in question.

Mr. Strachey’s exit from the Conservative Party into the Cloud-Cuckooland of I.L.P. politics, his pre- Fascist Mosley associations and monetary reform theories, are without significance apart from confused thinking. His Marxist reputation rests largely on the fact that via the Gollancz Press he spread and popularised Stalinist fairy-tales of Socialism in Russia for political adolescents of the vaguely termed middle class. Ironically enough it was the Fabian anti-Marxist Webbs who were his intellectual paramours in all this, their work, ‘‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation,” his authority. (“The Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 49.) The Public Hangman is not usually asked to write a thesis on the need for the abolition of Capital Punishment. Fabianism, whose high priests were the Webbs, is merely State Capitalism, and it was G. B. Shaw who, on returning from a visit to Russia, proclaimed, “The Bolsheviks have only realised the Fabian Programme.” The Webbs’ work on Russia was then but the priestly blessing of their own creed. The "Marxist” Strachey appears as the uninvited acolyte in the Fabian temple.

It is not surprising, then, that he hailed the new Russian Constitution (direct vote and secret ballot) as a super Democracy, quoting Soviet leaders’ views that a classless society was coming into being (‘‘Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 148), although admitting (p. 165) that hitherto the illiteracy of the Russian population had prevented it. Later, Engels is quoted to show that the State is an instrument of ruling-class coercion. The growth of Soviet State bureaucracy indicates, then, a classless society’s need for increasing ruling-class coercion. Leaders, however, were chosen in Russia through long and searching apprenticeship in the Communist Party (p. 163) and were controlled far more effectively than those of the capitalists. It is this, he said, which made working-class control unique. The carefully controlled “chosen” were later liquidated as wreckers, spies and Fascist criminals. Truly this form “of working-class control” was unique. In the section, the Economic System (‘‘Theory and Practice of Socialism”), Mr. Strachey heavily underscored his ignorance of the nature of Socialist society. To Marxists, Socialism is the democratic ownership of the sources of production. But not only will the producers control the instruments of Labour, they will also determine the character and manner of the productive process by which the products of their labour are turned out. Mr. Strachey simply denies this. For him, Socialism is planned production par excellence, the Soviet model its working hypothesis. For common ownership he substitutes a Planning Authority which would control and decree wealth production and distribution, quantitatively and qualitatively. His quick phrase that the Planning Authorities’ conscious and deliberate decisions will be set up and controlled by the community (p. 42) is a pure verbal concession. Ownership and control of wealth production are inseparably integrated; thus the non-control by the wealth producers must entail non-ownership as well, and the workers in Mr. Strachey’s scheme would he as effectively divorced from the means of production as they are now. Mr. Strachey’s “Marxist” production for use suspiciously resembles Stuart Chase's “Economy of Abundance.” Both agree on the economic ideal of maximisation of wealth distribution and centrally organised control. Stuart Chase saw it as a means of continuing Capitalism. Mr. Strachey mistook it for Socialism.

Inevitably, then, all the economic categories of capitalist society reappear in Mr. Strachey’s new one, viz., trade, markets, wage labour, etc. in deference to the new social forces they are called Socialist. Mr. Strachey assures us that Socialism will have an unlimited market, but any Marxist Economic primer could have informed Mr. Strachey that the market is the economic mechanism whereby a profit-making society (Capitalism) merely realises the profits that are created in the productive sphere by exploitation in the form of wage labour. An unlimited market would then presuppose unlimited profits and, of course, unlimited exploitation. A desirable but hitherto unrealisable capitalist ideal. Production of value and surplus value is inherent, then, in Mr. Strachey’s “Socialist Society”; just as in “The Only Socialist Country,” profitability of Soviet enterprise to get higher levels is constantly being stressed by Stalin. Thus the productive limits of such an economy would be set by this profitability principle with its concomitant features of mass overproduction and unemployment. In substance, the difference between all this and a highly developed monopoly Capitalism or State Capitalism is less than the shadow of a ghost’s shadow.

Mr. Strachey thought that inventing, say, a working model of how a planned economy might work in America or here avoids our discussing Socialism in the abstract (“Theory and Practice of Socialism,” p. 29). Actually, it avoids discussing Socialism altogether. Only the theoretically incompetent would pose such a proposition. Socialism cannot be discussed in the abstract because it is itself the historic product and consequence of the actual concrete conditions of present society. True, Socialism will have its technical as well as economic problems (Strachey substituting technical re-organisation for an economic revolution in productive relations confused the two), but these can only be solved by the conscious participation of the majority, consistent with the prevailing ideas and genuine social needs—existing at that time. Socialism cannot, then, by its very nature be a sum of ready-made recipes imposed from above by a Planning Authority. Socialism, because it is an historical process, provides not only the conditions but the means for its own realisation and fulfilment, thus demonstrating its scientific worth over blue-printed Utopias. Mr. Strachey, on his own showing, is a Utopian.

Mr. Strachey did tell us that a knowledge of Marxism avoids our becoming the dupes of capitalist planning. Informed by such knowledge, he supported the idea of Popular Front government with a planned programme of social measures. Anyone refusing to co-operate in the formation of this get-together Mr. Strachey stigmatised with the sin of sectarianism. Out of all the political sinners, our sin was the most scarlet. Of our party, he said they neither attempt nor wish to attempt to work in the Labour movement (”What Are We To Do,” p. 909). Had we campaigned for and on behalf of co-operation with the Labour Party a little previously, Mr. Strachey might have hissed "Social Fascists.” He. added that our sole purpose, like religious bodies, was to provide subjective comfort and consolation to our members. Yet Mr. Strachey, in attempting to account for the failure of any real working-class political achievement, had to resort to the expediency of using a S.P.G.B. principle—that working- class knowledge is the essential condition for working-class emancipation—in order to show why this must necessarily be so. In ‘‘The Nature of Capitalist Crises” (p. 347) he admits that lack of working-class understanding leads workers to give their energies, even their lives, hopelessly trying to achieve what is inherently impossible, and finally becoming dupes and blind drudges for talented adventurers. Mr. Strachey unconsciously, it seems, presented the working class with a truly tragic Hobson’s Choice, but at least it concedes us the advantage of providing subjective comfort to our own members rather than material comfort to allegedly "talented adventurers.”

But all this was in the past. Came the war; the second imperialist war, which Mr. Strachey’s Marxist knowledge enabled him to predict with certainty (“The Nature of Capitalist Crisis,” p. 960). What he forgot to predict was that he would support it. At the beginning Russia was outside of it and his former Communist Party allies were violently, even if temporarily, proclaiming it as ”a war between robber nations for world domination.” Mr. Strachey was thus faced with a conflict of loyalties between his own fatherland and adopted one. It was then Mr. Strachey discovered Soviet totalitarianism. He even discovered in the same sentence that “it (Soviet totalitarianism) has not hitherto turned out to be of a totally different character from other totalitarianisms ” (“The Betrayal of the Left,” p. 201).

It is true that the Dictatorship versus Democracy issue (p. 204) is complicated for Mr. Strachey by the fact that the "Socialism” which he supported existed only in the form of a totalitarianism to which he was opposed; and the capitalism which he opposed possessed the democracy which he supported. So Mr. Strachey decided to burn his Russian boats by declaring (on p. 205) "that the enforcement of totalitarianism was a catastrophe from which the world might never recover.”

Nevertheless, the inevitability of war did not necessarily guarantee Allied victory. At times there were difficulties. In an article in the Observer (2/6/46) on Mr. Strachey it is mentioned that a critical moment in the development of British bombing policy had been reached. Heavy raids on German cities, causing heavy civilian casualties among German civilian women might, it was thought, rouse British public objection. But Mr. Strachey was standing by. Says the Observer:

“Strachey was put on the air. Gently he took the minds of his listeners off the receiving end of the bombing attacks and fixed it on the courage of the crews and the plans behind the attack. So the outcry feared by Bomber Harris never came.” 

Consequently, it seems, neither did any bombing respite for German women and children, as the possible result of public sentiment. Mr. Strachey had made a vital contribution. "Mr. Strachey believed in bombing,” says the Observer, "and developed Bomber Command faith with the same invincible logic that had gone before to 'Revolution by Reason,’ the Communist Party and the Popular Front.” The Spectator, once commenting on Mr. Strachey’s “The Coming Struggle for Power,” said "He had established a range of social, intellectual and political contacts which were likely to remain a record.” A range which includes Marxism and Mass-bombing is a record and should remain one.

That Mr. Strachey still accepts the "Marxist” inevitability of war seems to be evidenced in the House of Commons debate (12/3/46). Speaking on the future structure and character of the R.A.F., he said:

"Ultimately it would have to he decided whether the long-range bomber component of the R.A.F. was to be designed primarily for existing types of chemical explosives or atomic explosives.”

It would seem that on many an occasion in the Labour Party a left-wing Mrs. Gamp creates a right- wing Mrs. Harris, not only to give the lady a piece of his mind, but as a useful medium for proclaiming one’s political virtues. As in the case of Dickens’ Mrs. Harris, she becomes after a time an embarrassment to her creator. She is then allowed to quietly lapse into the obscurity from which she emerged. In Mr. Strachey’s case she may have become a war fatality instead—a victim of that mass-bombing from the British, which, from the British side, he supported with such faith and invincible logic.

Ted Wilmott