Jack Dash (1989)

From the July 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I last saw Jack Dash he lay dying in an East End hospital; he said he knew that his time had come, but hoped that he had contributed his bit to the struggle of his class. The time before that we sat in a pub and argued with the ferocity that good friendship allows. Although we were separated in age by half of a century, and in ideas by an even greater gulf, Jack and I were real mates. He was a marvellous story-teller, and able poet who could recite with passion and sing old cockney songs in ways that brought their class origins to life. When, a few years ago, a discussion circle on Marxism was set up in Jack's flat it was a pleasure to see how willing he was to think afresh about the complexities of Marxist theory: in all his years of being praised and vilified as a "Marxist" he had found little time to delve into the complexities of the history of our class, and it was tremendous to share in the process of such discovery when giving talks to Jack and his friends at those informal classes held on the eighteenth floor of a tower block.

Three passions governed Jack's political life. He was a member of the Communist Party. A real loyalist: not a word would he hear against the Socialist Fatherland which dominated his political vision like Jesus on the Cross in the mind of a God Squad zealot. Secondly, he was a militant trade unionist. Never an official man, Jack. The T & G tried to offer him official posts, but Jack preferred to stick to the rank and file. "You win strikes with the men, not sitting in a union office making plans for them", he would say. He knew the docks as if they were his home and the dockers as if they were family: to sell them out would be like stabbing a relative in the back. He said of the TUC that "there are more knights around the table than there were at King Arthur's. If I'd had my way they wouldn't be knighted but neutered". Thirdly, he loved the arts: poetry (Shelley was his favourite, but he liked plenty of others, including the required "Soviet: writers) and paintings and songs and plays. When Unity Theatre (the first working-class theatre in London to put on radical plays) were being built he volunteered as a labourer. His partner on the site was Paul Robeson who stayed with Jack while he was in London; Jack would complain about Robeson hogging the bathroom in the morning and singing at the top of his voice. Imagine that: months of having one of the finest singers ever to live annoying  you with his unpaid entertaining as you prepare for a hard day's work in the docks.

Uncritical of Russia
Capitalism is a monstrous system which makes fools of worker's ideals. As a socialist, the present writer was hostile to Jack's Leninist politics. Without a doubt, he wanted a better world to love in. When the present writer described the socialism that we so urgently need to establish, Jack would be filled with enthusiasm. His hatred of the profit system and hunger for something new are not to be sneered at. But for all of that he was an unrepentant Stalinist. Not a word of criticism would he ever voice against the atrocities committed by the state-capitalist police state which exists in the Russian Empire. He would lose no time in apologising for it. When Stalin was purging millions of so-called enemies of "socialism in one country", Brother Dash was there to explain that most of Stalin's crimes were invented by the capitalist press, and the others were justified by the "counter-revolutionary" activities of Stalin's opponents. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Brother Dash pointed out that Stalin had gone too far, but now the socialist state was in safe hands. All of the obscene corruption of the Brezhnev years was defended without the merest hint of criticism. When the so-called Eurocommunists began to express complaints about all not being perfect in the Russian proletarian paradise, Brother Dash denounced them as anti-Marxists—or, to use the crazy terminology of the mixed-up "Communists", enemies of "Marxism-Leninism". When Gorbachev introduced the latest reforms, in an effort to integrate the Russian Empire more fully into the capitalist world market, Brother Dash agreed that this is what had to be done in order to modernise socialism. It was one long lifetime of having to pretend that black was white: that oppression was freedom and state capitalism was socialism. It was a life of having to close one's eyes to the Russian bureaucrats whose privileged lifestyles compare well with the fatcat profit-takers who are the capitalists in the West. The poverty of so many East European wage slaves was something to be denied, just as a Tory denies the same social features in Britain.

Why do men who are filled with a burning hatred of the inequities of the profit system allow themselves to be dragged down into this web of self-deceit—and then, inevitably, the deceit of others? Why do they blind themselves, these Stalinist dogmatists who refuse to admit that the whole Bolshevik project has been the most awful disaster for the workers who have been its victims? Here we enter the field of political psychology; it is a field which socialists may have to tread upon a few more times before we complete the road between here and human liberation. One factor in it is the sectarian need to stick to the Party line. The CP says that Russia is the Socialist Fatherland and it is the duty of every loyal comrade to prove that true. When loyalty to the organisation—any organisation—overcomes commitment to historical truth (to honesty), then all is lost in a terrible sectarian haze. Perhaps another motive was the desire on the part of some workers to be able to imagine that an alternative to capitalism was actually in existence. A sort of self-delusion to offer comfort to those who have to live under and suffer the miseries of capitalism. Bogus socialist countries might serve to soften the hardship of living in a world which is really dominated from top to bottom by the capitalist system.

Whatever the motives for the irrational faith in the phoney socialism of the Leninist states, socialists must expose the dangers of such beliefs. Fortunately, history is doing our job for us: these days it is mainly the old-timers who still entertain the crass fantasies about socialist countries existing (although there are plenty of younger leftists who are gullible enough to accept variations on the same old Leninist theme). Sadly for Jack, after years of loyalty to the CP, he was forced to leave it shortly before he died. There has been a very recent split between the Communist Party of Great Britain (which is the Marxism Today official CP) and the Communist Party of Britain which remains loyal to The Morning Star and its uncritical stance towards Russia. (There is yet another CP—the New Communist Party—which argues that even The Morning Star is not Stalinist enough and only they are the true inheritors of the truly fascistic outlook of the heyday of the 1930s.) Jack could  not bring himself to talk about the split which was accompanying the collapse of the CP; he just went on as of nothing has changed, pretending that his little faction was the party.

The Dockers' Way Out
As for his loyalty to the dockers, how ironic it was that Jack died a month after the government announced its intention to abolish the Dock Labour scheme. On the day he died hundreds of dockers went out on unofficial strike after the courts had refused to accept the legality of a three-to-one vote (by secret ballot) in favour of striking. What bloody audacity this this: a government passing laws telling the unions that strikes must be preceded by ballots and then sending in the unelected Judges to declare such a ballot illegal because a dockers' strike could damage the national interest! The fact is that the dockers are up against a system which cannot make profits out of them like it used to and so they are being prepared for the economic slaughter. Jack had fought with admirable militancy back in the 1960s when containerisation threatened the wages and conditions of the dockers. But King Capital is mightier than the mightiest defender of the working-class interest. There comes a point at which defence will not do the trick. Only tackling the wages system itself, with its right to exploit for profit, will prevent the dock employers winning. The dock workers, some of whom marched for Enoch Powell in the late 1960s and voted Labour like sheep to the slaughter are not yet in a position to take on the system. That is what they must do. Only by organising to abolish the wages system, with its employment and jobs, and not by the pathetic demands of "Jobs for Life", will the dockers really win.

Steve Coleman

Plus Ca Change . . . Aristocracy, old and new (1969)

From the August 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The French have a saying which, roughly translated, reads: "The more it changes, the more it remains the same thing". This is a very apt description of one aspect of capitalist society. It is constantly changing. Lots of things are very different from what they were even a decade ago, while if a worker of a century ago could come back to life (we're not saying he would want to, of course!) he would, at first at any rate, hardly recognise the dear old system. However, it would not be long before he realised that it really had remained the same thing: society was still divided into two classes and the minority that owned still lived on the proceeds of the exploitation of the majority that did not own. And although he would marvel at the fantastic progress over the last century (after all, when he died only that comparatively short while ago, he knew nothing of cars of planes or nuclear energy or even old-fashioned electricity), he might utter a sardonic comment or two before returning to the peace of the cemetery when he realised that the average worker still left behind him, when he kicked off, more or less the same as he did. Just his bones.

Nevertheless it is sometimes interesting to notice some of the changes which do take place within the system, while not affecting in the slightest its fundamental nature as a system of exploitation. One such change is in the relative positions of different groups of workers in the social scale. Before the war, the upper crust of the working class was generally thought to consist of such people as policemen, teachers, bank clerks and so on. (So much so, that if you met a bank clerk at the tennis club, the odds were that he would indignantly deny he was a member of the working class at all. His white collar qualified him for membership of some vague entity he would call 'middle class'. Nowadays, he would probably not quarrel with the term 'white-collared workers'. Some progress, anyway.)

Today, however, when one reads glib phrases in the papers about the 'aristocracy of labour', they seldom mean this type of worker at all. In fact, it is a complaint among policemen etc. that whereas before the war they were looked up to as the lucky ones because they had fairly secure jobs while the spectre of unemployment was always hovering around most groups of workers, nowadays they have fallen a rung or two on the ladder of jostling wage-slaves. Unemployment 'only' affects a couple of million people (including families) at present so that there is no longer a premium on security. Only the actual size of the pay packet counts now and in that sense these groups are not among the aristocrats. Who are the new aristocrats then? Well, it seems dockers are (among others of course). It seems they get the vast sum of about 30 quid a week and while there are still groups of workers, such as agricultural workers, who average less than half that princely figure, the dockers really are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. (It's true that even 30 quid is only about five or six in pre-war money but let's not quibble over details.

'Love on the Dole'

Now, I am a trusting sort of chap and would never think of doubting government figures about that 30 quid. Indeed, not all government figures are automatically false (only most of them), One recalls, for example, that Marx went out of his way to praise certain government factory inspectors whose reports he used in connection with his researches. And it happens that, having lived most of my life in an inland part of the country, I doubt if I have stumbled across many dockers. I have merely read about them as being those difficult chaps who are not satisfied with their good fortune but who on the contrary persist in holding the country to ransom and going on strike. And it seems they they don't even give a damn about 'our' balance of payment problem (which worries the rest of the working class so much) when they refuse to load the ships with those precious exports.

But a few weeks ago, I found myself early one morning in the heart of London's dockland and went into a dockers' 'caff' for breakfast. The little place was crowded with about 20 dockers and they looked anything but aristocratic. In fact, the whole scene looked very much like one from Love on the Dole, the famous pre-war play about the depression years in Lancashire. I have no wish to wring anyone's withers and I am not  saying the dockers looked quite like the pictures from Biafra, but it was impossible to resist the thought that if these were the aristocrats the word has certainly changed its meaning. Or, to put it another way, if these were aristocrats, it was Gold help the peasants.

After I had risked my life by making some corny joke about how honoured I was to breakfast with the new aristocracy, one of the blokes pulled out a crumpled wage slip showing £12 and assured me that he had not averaged more than that in take-home pay for months. It seemed, too, that his mates were in more or less the same case. They were enjoying the benefits of 'decasualisation'. One of the great reforms of recent years has meant that dockers (in return for certain concessions on their part, of course), were guaranteed a 'fallback' wage of around £12 a week in cases where they could not get work owing to the spasmodic nature of the industry. These aristocrats assured me that many of them had to live on that sort of money for many months. And how would I like to do that with the present cost of living in London? It seemed they could not even afford to throw bottles at their favourite Millwall football players because they couldn't afford the beer. But while it is good to see that workers cab still keep their sense of humour in such circumstances, it was difficult to see anything funny in the situation. Even less so a little later when I gave one of the men a lift to his dock a mile away. (When I ventured to remark en route that the general impression was that every docker had at least one car outside the door as a basic right under our 'socialist' government he merely gave me a withering 'do me a favour'.) And there I saw how the dignity of man has been rescued under the new enlightened régime since decasualisation.

A group of dockers stood waiting patiently to see if any of them were going to be privileged to be exploited that day. If they were selected, then presumably they would be able to earn the rate of £30 a week we hear so much about. If not, then not. My friend explained to me that, except where there was a sudden spate of urgent work, there would always be a number who were not wanted each day. And, as one would expect, it was usually the same ones who would be chosen. Presumably the ones with the strongest arms. And the weakest tongues. Under any exploitative system, the exploiters will be bound to want workers who are docile and not those who kick against the pricks. It may well be that the old system was even worse. Which only proves that capitalism remains capitalism and the very act of one class buying the other's labour power for the purpose of exploitation is degrading in itself, no matter whether the exploitation takes place under a (more or less) privately owned economy as in America, a so-called mixed economy like Britain's, or a wholly state-owned one like that in Russia. Reforms are merely surface tinkering. It is the thing itself that must be abolished. The act of employment is in itself a degradation.

And just to complete the picture, by one of those little ironies with which life abounds, on the same morning I read in the papers that a real aristocrat, not a peasant or a docker, called Lord Melchett, was dissatisfied with his wage as chairman of the 'socialised' (ye gods!) steel industry which the Wilson government has bestowed on a grateful working class. It seems he was only getting around £20,000 a year and he needed another £5,000 to make it pay (figures very approximate; workers shouldn't quibble about a few thousand here or there for their masters). And a little more irony here. How did his lordship become an aristocrat and a millionaire? Answer: he inherited both from his grandfather, Alfred Mond, the founder of ICI and in his day as fierce a fighter against trade unions as any capitalist could wish for. And now the successors of the union leaders of those days are happily rewarding Mond's successor with the overlordship of their own ark of the covenant, the nationalised steel industry. It is as though they are trying to make it clear to the workers that the more it changes the more it remains the same. But when will the workers see?

One last item. My docker friend averred that the dockers' position would be a lot worse were it not for their unofficial leader "good old Jackie Dash". And of course it may well be true. The official union leaders have to try to play ball with the government, especially 'our'Labour government. So a 'communist' like dash can easily fish in troubled waters and gain credit for the Communist Party while so doing. I confess I did not even try to point out that if the Dashes had their way, then the rights of trade unions would go the same way as all democratic rights have gone in the CP's fatherland, the Soviet Union. My friend was clearly in no mood for thinking about such things. He had enough problems on hand in trying to make ends meet that day. But until the dockers, along with the rest of the working class, aristocrats and the rest alike, start thinking about Socialism, they must be resigned to accepting all the miseries that capitalism has to offer.

L. E. Weidberg

An unofficial Workers' Committee (1968)

From the June 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are unofficial committees made up of wreckers? Does the Communist Party finance them? Do the communists and trotskyists work together? A member, formerly associated with one such committee in the printing industry, describes how it worked:

The printing unions, as is well known, are amongst the strongest in the country and are especially well-organised in the national newspapers in Fleet Street. As is also well-known, there are a number of craft unions which feel themselves threatened by the general printing union, the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades. SOGAT organises certain craft sections and also warehousemen, semi-skilled printers, clerks and cleaners. By the autumn of 1966, after the passing of the anti-union Prices and Incomes Act in August, active unionists were growing dissatisfied with Labour. Sensing this mood, a few anarcho-syndicalist printworkers decided to call a public meeting of printworkers to discuss what ordinary trade unionists might do to oppose the wage freeze and the anti-union laws.

At a second meeting, held in a Fleet Street pub on 25 October, thirteen printworkers, mainly SOGAT members, met to discuss the formation of an unofficial workers' committee. Those present besides the anarchists were two trotskyists of the "international socialism" brand, and a few ordinary pro-Labour militant unionists. The promoters had intended that any committee should come out clearly against the Labour Party but the trotskyists opposed this. The week previously, a delegate meeting of the 10,000 strong London clerical branch of SOGAT had carried a resolution calling upon the SOGAT EC

to prepare the Union for a policy of independence from all Governments and political parties and, to this end, suggests that the EC ballot those members who pay the political levy as to whether our present affiliation to the Labour Party should continue.

The trotskyists, both of whom ironically were members of unions not affiliated to Labour, dismissed this. One of them, journalist Paul Foot, said that these people had voted against affiliation because they did not see the point of paying money to a party that froze their wages, and not because they wanted fundamental social change (which was quite true, but their reason seems sensible enough). Foot described this as "mere trade union consciousness". The time to leave Labour, he said, would be when the workers were deserting it for a revolutionary policy.

After much discussion, in which those opposed to Labour made it quite clear that the disaffiliation issue must be raised as this was one of their reasons for proposing an unofficial committee, a compromise was agreed. One of the aims of the Association of Rank and File Printworkers which was established that evening was "to campaign within the printing unions for a ballot of the membership on the question of continued affiliation to the Labour Party". The other aims were: to fight the wage freeze and anti-union laws, including encouraging "sympathetic industrial action" should Labour invoke the penal clauses of their act; one union for printing; and to work with other "rank and file movements".

The Labour government used their anti-union Act three times against printworkers, each time playing on other workers' prejudices against people they believed to be higher paid: against printers and clerks in the national newspapers, against some inkworkers (who, incidentally, did break the law by forcing their employers to pay them more despite the Order. Significantly, the government did nothing) and against clerks in the news agencies. After issuing a journal, the Printworker, the Association, through a SOGAT chapel (as the workshop or office unit is called in the print), organised a meeting to protest against the wage freeze. A left-wing Labour MP. Sid Bidwell (ironically once an IS trotkyist), agreed to speak but withdrew when he learned that the Branch Secretary had declared that, under the rules of SOGAT, a chapel had no right to call a meeting.

At the meeting, held on 29 March and attended by about 70 people, including SOGAT officials Brady and President-elect Flynn, a resolution to organise a strike on 30 June was carried by 36 votes to 12. Brady, a branch secretary, argued that the union leadership was militant enough but they could not act without the support of the members. He felt that most members were apathetic and would not follow a militant lead. Although this was probably true, it was not well received by the meeting. Brady's dilemma was that of all elected officials who want to be militant—elected by a minority of union activists they are responsible to an apathetic majority. Other, conservative officials readily use the apathetic majority to oppose the militants. A committee of eight, including two dissatisfied supporters of the Communist Party, was elected by the meeting to organise any action.

The committee decided to organise a march through Fleet Street on May Day proper, a working day as it fell on a Monday. Some other workers' organisations, mainly influenced by IS trotskyists, agreed to take part and on the day some 200 hundred people marched. A meeting, held after the march, again voted to strike—this time on 3 July, the day the government was expected to invoke Part II of their Prices and Incomes Act, giving them power to delay wage increases. By now it was evident that some members of the Association had grandiose plans for organising a national rank and file movement that would use industrial action against the government. That this was a totally unrealistic aim was soon grasped and it was later agreed to drop industrial action and concentrate on spreading the aims of the Association amongst printworkers.

The Cameron Report on unofficial committees in various London building sites which came out last year refused to believe Lou Lewis, a Communist unofficial leader, when he said that his committee was financed by donations and collections from supporters. The report called him a liar and implied that the Communist Party provided the money. The Report, due to ignorance of working class organisations, could not believe that unofficial committees really had so informal an organisation as they seemed. Though it is true that informal organisation (no constitution, no dues, no minutes) does carry with it the danger of take-ovwer by eltist groups like the Communists and trotskyists, the Report's charge is not backed by any evidence. Certainly, the Association of rank and File Printworkers was financed entirely from donation, collections and sales of the Printworker.

In fact, the Communist Party was opposed to the Association. As the June issue of the Printworker noted:

Already within the Printing industry the people who took part in the demonstration are being branded as 'communist troublemakers'. In fact, although individual members of the Communist party attended the demonstrations and actively worked to make it a success, the official Party made no secret of their opposition to it, and in fact went as far as to describe it as 'adventurist'.

Jack Dash also advised dockers not to take part in the May Day march through Fleet Street.

Present Communist Party industrial policy is to organise discontented workers behind Labour's left and left-wing union leaders like Cousins, Scanlon and, for that matter, Briginshaw of SOGAT. This was one of the reasons why the Association turned down a proposal, sponsored by an IS trotskyist (and Gunther can make what he likes of it!), to join the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unionism, in which the Communists are very prominent.

The theory of the most active members of the Association tended rather to the syndicalist idea of so-called direct action, scorning all political action as useless. Some of its members, and once again they were wrong, saw the Association as a rival and possible replacement of the existing "bureaucratic" unions. From a Socialist point of view (and of course each Socialist Party members makes up his own mind as to what organisation or action is best suited in the place or industry where he works) unofficial committees are a useful adjunct to the unions, putting pressure on the officials from below to act more in the interest of the working class. Certainly they are not an alternative to the unions. 

 

 

Blogger's Note: 

Though unsigned, this article was probably written by Terry Lord.