An Open Letter to Dave Douglass (1972)

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Dave,

I see from the News of the World for November 15th that you are the editor of the Trotskyist magazine ‘Mineworkers Internationale’, and that you have published articles addressing the miners on union policy.

You appear to have upset the editor of the News of the World, and the officials of the Communist Party, who say that you are getting the “sane militants” (the C.P.) a bad name.

You wrote (apparently) in one issue of your magazine

“The only long-term justice for the workers will be under a system which they themselves control—a Socialist system.”

and

“Launch the General Strike immediately and occupy the factories, docks, railways without charging, capture the supermarkets and food wholesalers and distribute the food free.”

Hard Enough

And you claim to work for the overthrow of Capitalism.

One can sympathise with your indignation with your exploitation and the fact, as you say, “that Capitalists are making a fortune out of my sweat, discomfort and forfeiture of human dignity”. Fair enough!

But, Dave boy, indignation is not enough! In this business (the class struggle) brains are more important than heart, because our enemy, the Capitalist, is immensely powerful, and helped by a large staff of cunning labour leaders and T.U. Officials.

And I’m going to tell you straight out, that your stuff is doing more harm than good.

First “seize the pits” or “the Supermarkets”, or “the railways”, is rubbish. The workers have a difficult enough job trying seize half-a-pound of steak on a Friday night, without you try to feed them this baloney.

You must begin to learn that the control of the public apparatus of production and distribution is political, not industrial. It is maintained by the Government of the day, if necessary by armed force, although the workers don’t show much evidence of doing any “seizing”, do they? Could it be they’ve too much sense?

The Wrong Interests

Neither are you doing any good trying to cod the miners into taking action for “workers’ control”. The workers will never control Capitalism. What determines class control is ownership, and that ownership is legalised and maintained through Parliament, by the Government of the day, backed by an electoral majority.

It is no business of trade unions to try to usurp the job of a political party. Control of the whole of industry is a political matter concerning the whole capitalist class. The strongest, most militant trade union in the world can do nothing about it and won’t want to, anyway, because people join unions to look after the trade interests, not class interests.

Dave, I’m sorry, but your other stuff urging the miners on strike last year to do as much damage as possible is nonsense too. This is a hang-over from early Russian days when the isolated Bolsheviks sought to create as much dissension abroad as possible, for political propaganda materials.

Strike What For?

I now come to what, for me, is the most stupid and ridiculous nonsense of all. “Launch the General Strike and occupy the factories”. Are you really in your right mind, mate? Don’t you know that whenever the workers have occupied factories, after a few weeks with the wives bringing meals and drinks, they have unoccupied them again?

The capitalists will always beat you at this game; they own everything; they can retire to the Hilton or the country, and starve you out. In fact, the French authorities have said they approve of the strikers occupying the factory because “It keeps the place clean”.

And lastly, the General Strike! What stupid bloody rubbish. First of all, General Strikes for industrial ends are difficult enough, because workers’ action on such a scale concerns the whole capitalist class who have shown repeatedly, all over the world, that they will not hesitate if necessary, to crush strikes by armed force.

But even worse, you are urging a General Strike for “Workers’ Control”, which because you are not clear about it, you call a “Socialist system”.

A Socialist system will and must abolish classes! What are you on about? Will there be wage-workers under Trotskyist “Socialism” then ?

But, worst of all, you are trying to control trade unionists in General Strikes for political purposes — and this is disastrous.

If you claim that all the workers (or a lot of them) are militants, anxious to overthrow Capitalism, why have they got to lose their wages (and some of them, their personal freedom) in General Strikes?

Consciousness Wanted

If they want a General Strike why do they vote for Tory and Labour parties?

If the workers are Socialists, they have a perfectly safe and sane method of abolishing Capitalism, which also happens (as time will show) to be the only possible method — the ballot box.

It is for this reason that the Socialist Party of Great Britain will never support calls for General Strikes for political purposes. People like you, Dave, may feel very strongly, but you haven’t thought very much.

Socialists, in their capacity as trade unionists, because we are exploited like you, and have to join them, say to their fellow workers : Political action is for political parties! Trade union political independence at all costs!

Socialism will be established by a class political party, not the T.U.C., or any trade union.

It Can be Done

Let trade unions mind their own business, the interests of their members.

Let the affairs of the union be run democratically, by the rank-and-file vote, make strikes short and sharp. Procrastination is the death of strikes.

And, lastly, some advice to you, by one who has been right through the Leninist mill himself.

Forget all your Trotskyist dreamworld; it never was right. Look where the Leninist “boring from within” the trade unions has landed the C.P. The very nominees the Communist factions have got “elected” as officials have at times been the first to kick out Communists.

Study Socialism! Get clear on the necessity of conscious political actions by the workers, organised in a political party to take political power, to abolish capitalist control; and replace it by “democratic control”.

This is the road of Success, to Victory.

What you are doing now will only spread apathy as a result of bitter disappointment.

Forget Trotsky, and remember Marx!

Yours for Socialism,

Horatio

11 November 1972.

The Tiny Trots Enclosure (1994)

Book Review from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pit Sense Versus the State - 
a history of militant miners
 in the Doncaster area by David John Douglass.
 (Phoenix Press. £4.50.)

Next time you find yourself on the receiving end of some empty-headed carping about “vanguards" and "leadership” from the Tiny Trots enclosure, you could do worse than to point them in the direction of Pit Sense Versus the State; also essential reading for anyone into first hand accounts from the sharp end of the class struggle.

Focusing primarily on the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 the book begins with a summary of industrial action taken by the miners from 1926 to the late 1960s. and an account of the political and economic background to the State’s assault on the coal industry in the mid- 1980s.

The author, himself a miner (now unemployed and blacklisted), was formerly delegate of the NUM’s Hatfield Main Branch. During the 1984- 85 Strike he served on picket lines and strike committees, in support groups and food kitchens and is thus able to give us an insider’s view of the day-to-day conduct of the strike, capturing the spirit and mood of those engaged in it — something which academic “histories” never do. Nevertheless this is more than a series of personal reminiscences and anecdotes. Douglass draws heavily from the picket log and the minutes of the various strike committee meetings, allowing the strike to speak for itself, again something that opinionated academics and political "scientists" never do.

The strength of the book lies in showing the ability of working people to organise themselves in defence of their own material interests and kills off the myth that strikes are the result of machinations by evil demagogues or infiltration by subversive lefty rabble-rousers. On the contrary, Douglass shows us that the initiative for the strike came from the grassroots and that the failures and setbacks were often the result of interference from above or from outside.

Take the bloody encounter at Orgreave, for example. The miners themselves had organised picketing strategy along "guerrilla" lines, regularly changing targets and maintaining the element of surprise thereby avoiding clashes, making fools out of the police and gaining support along the way. The decision to concentrate on Orgreave changed all this. Intended by the NUM leadership as a rallying point for militant trade unionists and showpiece victory along the lines of Saltley Gate in 1972, the picketing of Orgreave merely resulted in the police being "highly delighted to have the troublesome miners all in one place at one time. They knew where we would be, they set out their troops like Sitting Bull prepared for Custer, then they brayed us all to hell". But needless to say: "the SWP, Workers Power, et al, made Orgreave the test of a true socialist If you didn't think Orgreave was right you were an agent, a spy, a traitor . . . The paper sellers never fought there themselves, of course, they only talked about it".

This is a further strength of the book, the insight it gives into the capers pulled by "the left". These included everything from drawing up hare-brained picketing "strategies" leading to confusion and mass arrests, to what appears to be bald-faced fraud: "The Socialist Workers Party had set up a fighting fund but none of this money was coming back to the NUM. . . .  It was suggested that a public statement concerning the Socialist Workers Party and what it was trying to do should be distributed. A circular should go out to all Branches telling them that money is not coming into the NUM. (Strike Co-ordinating Committee, 22 May 1984)."

As well as their opportunism, "the left" are characterised by their inability to grasp the nature of industrial action and the role of a trade union. To them every strike is potentially "revolutionary”, what stops them from being so is the lack of "leadership" from the unions. Douglass makes clear in the final chapter, "The Left and the Miners", that the left have it wrong. The unions are defensive organisations to resist exploitation by capital. True, they may on occasion be conservative and bureaucratic, they are also constrained by anti-union laws, but they are necessary nonetheless, if only for routine negotiations, welfare benefits, compensation claims, etc. In the last analysis, however, the union is the workers united in the workplace, not the bureaucracy, and it is these workers who know best how to manage their own affairs. Thus we see strike committees, flying picket squads etc., set up in extension of the formal union structure and from which for legal reasons the formal structure must necessarily distance itself. The left don't understand this, but, as Douglass says, why should they?

So what does Douglass say should be the role of revolutionaries in the defensive actions of the class struggle? Simply that: " . . . we should intervene in the struggles the workers themselves engaged in, we should assist them in the way they wish to be assisted. We should put our determination, skill, constructive and destructive abilities at their disposal, and ask, how can we assist you? How are we better placed to do some of the things you want doing but can’t do yourselves? We must fundamentally recognise that the working class was engaged in struggle before any of us organisationally or individually came along. They are engaged in struggle now, with us or without us, they are not waiting for us . . . We will be of relevance as long as we intervene, without preconditions, without delusions of vanguardism, into the actual struggles of the working class, not standing outside the class mocking the crude attempts at combat organisation the workers have built, but alongside them, as part of them."

This said, the limitation of the book is its failure to point to a way out of all these defensive struggles and to a new way of organising society so that classes, and hence the struggle between them over the social product, would no longer exist. This will be achieved not by workers organised in trade unions to fight for crumbs and better conditions of exploitation, but by the same workers organised in a revolutionary party whose aim is the democratic capture and then the dissolution of political power so as to allow the means of production to be taken peacefully into common ownership. Such a party exists — you are reading its journal. 

Ian Simpson

Reality (2012)

Book Review from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Policing the Crisis. Class War. 44 pages. £1.

This is a pamphlet published this May Day by the anarchist group known for the photographic series 'hospitalised coppers' and pictures of the “Working Class Fights Back” at the 1990 Poll Tax Riot.

The section 'Police Crimes Against the Working Class Movement' is a historical survey of the police and the working class in Britain.  Minority class property is why the police exist; the police force is part of the executive arm of the capitalist state, and as such, the enemy of the working class, even if that’s from where its members are recruited.

The pamphlet reproduces Dave Douglass’s 1986 Come and Wet This Truncheon which details police 'crimes' against the striking miners, their families and communities during the year-long strike. This makes sobering reading. If read in conjunction with The Secret War Against the Miners by Seamus Milne which details MI5 and Special Branch operations against them, it is quite clear the state is used by the capitalist class against the working class to further its own economic interests.

Like Bakunin, Class War accepts Marx's class analysis and his economic theories about capitalism. Class War describes how “force is necessary by capitalism to move the developing situations towards a new balance of class relationships more favourable to them. It is never death or pain free”.

As capitalism has become more 'unfettered' since the 1980s, the capitalist state has relied more on its enforcers to ensure the new economic relationships are ‘accepted’, and significantly, although statistics claim crime is going down, the prison population has doubled in size in the last thirty years. Today we have austerity economics imposed on us and dissent is ruthlessly dealt with; the police threaten to shoot protesting students; last summer's social breakdown in the inner cities has resulted in obviously political sentences for ‘rioters’; and the concept of ‘pre-crime’ is now used to prevent any dissent against the bourgeois consensus of the Royal Wedding, Jubilee and the Olympics.

Class War are heirs to Bakunin with their emphasis on the 'propaganda of the deed': direct action philosophy, and opposition to taking part in capitalist elections (although Ian Bone, anarchist publisher of Class War, was involved in Bristol local elections in 2003, and Class War plan to stand a candidate for Mayor of Hackney in 2014).

As socialists we reject Bakunin's love of conspiracy, insurrection and his cult of violence. Marx once described 'anarchy' as the ultimate aim of the proletarian movement when classes will be abolished and the power of the state disappears. He can even be said to have anticipated that other historical anarchist Kropotkin in aiming at an anarchist communism which is a stateless, moneyless, wageless society and not a worker's state.

Steve Clayton

The unions we deserve (2000)

Book Review from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Power to the Imagination!: Revolutionary Class Struggle In Trade Unions and the Petty Bourgeois Fetish of Organisational Purity by Dave Douglass. Class War Federation, P.O. Box 467, London E8 3QX.

This is really interesting and readable book, despite some horrendous comments on "national liberation", particularly relating to Ireland. The author is a life-long mineworker and NUM activist who is also a member of the IWW and the section of Class War which decided to continue with the CW paper and federation. The aim of this book is basically to attack the argument popular in some anarchist and left-communist circles that trade unions are inherently tools of the capitalist establishment that act to stifle workers' militancy and so on.

This position has led some revolutionaries to declare themselves "outside and against the unions"—though whether in practice they would choose not to join a union is another thing. The point about all this, as is brought home by Douglass, is that unions are essentially about workers uniting to defend themselves within capitalism. To criticise "the unions" for being reformist misses the point, as a union and its membership are one and the same. Workers are not "reformist" because "the unions" make them so; rather the level of political consciousness within a union will be a reflection of the general consciousness of the working class at the time. As Douglass points out, trade unions are not ideological monoliths—the processes of class struggle go on within unions.

If more militant members are losing the arguments then this reflects a wider passivity: something that is hardly surprising given the shattering defeats organised labour has suffered in Britain in recent decades. Trade unions can only be as militant and class conscious (and effective) as their memberships are, which must depend on the wider situation. Though this isn't to take away from the damage done by union bosses, whose frequent knighthoods and other "honours" are tawdry campaign medals minted by the real bosses, whose class interests they have served. However, to create a dichotomy between "the unions" and "the workers" can only lead to a distorted analysis of the uses and limitations of union struggle.

As a way of illustrating the dangers of this "against the unions" position Douglass points to the direct correlation between declines in union membership and the decrease in days lost (or won) in strikes. Hardly surprising—but if "the unions" were really responsible for holding back working-class combativity shouldn't the opposite be the case? In reality, non-union workers have not "broken free" from the unions—falls in membership are symptoms of the hammering the working class as a whole has taken. On the other hand, resistance to the attacks of capital is generally stronger in those sectors where there is still significant unionisation. There are some signs however that union membership and general combativity are rising. And let's not forget that this is vital if our class is to develop some of the solidarity and self-confidence essential for the final abolition of wage slavery.

Interestingly, one of the few sources quoted with any sort of approval by Douglass is the October 1994 edition of Spartacus, a publication put together by Socialist Party comrades in Norwich. He generally agrees with the case put in an article called "Socialism and Trade Unions":

"[T]he essence of the trade union is workers uniting to protect their interests in the workplace, and . . . ultimately the union and the workers are one and the same thing. If these workers have reformist outlook on life, i.e. believe that capitalism can be made to run in the interests of all, the unions must therefore have the same outlook; on the other hand if there were more revolutionary workers in the unions—and in society generally—then the unions would have a more revolutionary outlook, no longer harbouring any illusions about 'common national interests' or other such rubbish. That would not in any way alter the essential nature and role of the trade unions as the defensive organisations of the working class; but it would make them far more effective fulfilling that role" (p.10 - quoted from Spartacus).

Ben Malcolm