Monday, 25 August 2014

Can Trades Unions Change Society?

When possible we like to share the content of our branch meetings. Here is the text of our recent introduction to can trades unions change society? We hope you find it as interesting as attendees to the meeting did!


Can Trade Unions Change Society?

The question posed by this talk probably has a very simple answer for us as socialists. That answer is no: Trade Unions in and of themselves do not have the power to change society and bring about the revolution that we would see as vital to the creation of a socialist system. And yet, we cannot leave it there and go home because the SWP and its members invest a lot of time and energy into building within unions. In order to account for this commitment, we have to acknowledge and address the problems inherent in trade unions and consider our role within them carefully.

The first criticism of unions is that they do not represent all those people who have the power to bring about a change. There are many who share similar politics to us or similar dissatisfaction with the status quo but who are not part of the organised working class. Last year, for example, we saw Russell Brand articulately express his views on the futility of voting. He expressed his ideas in similar terms to those we use ourselves, and yet, Brand is now far removed from the reality of life for members of the working class, enjoying a huge deal of wealth and fame. Even before becoming a celebrity, the drug addiction, homelessness, squatting and poverty which he experienced certainly made him a victim of capitalism but not part of the organised working class, of which he has had no experience. Therefore his vision of rebellion against the system is not consistent with our vision of how to bring about revolution because it is not, I believe, rooted in first-hand understanding and experience of class struggle.

Brand can be seen to represent significant numbers of people who have limited or no experience of working within unions to fight as a class and many of these students, unemployed, self-employed or temporary workers, including those often referred to as a ‘precariat’ may not identify their interests as aligned to those within the organised working class. For these people, movements and campaigning organisations like the People’s Assembly and UK Uncut can hold great appeal and are organisations that we seek to work with because of their power to raise awareness of key political ideas, mobilise people and bring people out onto the streets.

Equally, if we look at employment, official statistics in June of this year seemed to present a picture of unemployment falling in the country down from 7.2% to 6.5%, yet this still leaves a total of 2.34 million people classified as unemployed, not counting the large numbers of people who are underemployed, on temporary contracts, retired, studying, self-employed, on zero hours contracts or not counted as unemployed for other statistical reasons. Though the BBC sought to present this as evidence of economic growth and recovery, this leaves a huge proportion of the population who are not represented by unions and who do not necessarily identify themselves as part of the working class but with whom we would seek to work as they are similarly exploited and disadvantaged by the capitalist system.

Equally, there are huge proportions of the working class who are in employment but not in unions at all. According to government statistics, UK rates of union membership in 2013 were 6.5 million (only 25.6% of those in employment), with numbers of union members in the private sector increasing alongside the rate of increased employment but the proportion of those in the public sector in unions falling. If the unions represent such a small number of the working class it is understandable that many feel they do not have the power to bring about real change.

Therefore, many on the left have recently argued for a shift away from union activity towards creating a mass movement (or mass movements) to reflect the vast proportion of the population who can be mobilised but who are outside of unions.

In addition, many union members have a lack of confidence in their own union leadership. Experience has shown us that unions do not always act in the interests of the class. They are, in themselves, bureaucratic organisations whose function is to negotiate and therefore it is unsurprising that so often unions can be seen to sell out their members. This is a pattern that has been seen repeatedly in the history of workers’ struggle.

In a recent article in the ISJ, Dave Hayes pointed out that, in the miners’ strike, ‘the trade union leadership did not match the bravery and determination of the miners.’1 Those of us who have seen the film ‘Still the Enemy Within’ will know that it acts as a timely reminder of this fact: that the defeat of the miners was not just achieved through the malicious attacks from the Tories but also as a result of betrayals by union leadership, a failure on the part of NACODS to uphold its members’ decision to join the miners on strike, thus shutting down any remaining open mines and strengthening the cause of the NUM. Similarly, the TUC failed to call out other unions. Too often attacks on individual sections of the working class are not met with whole class resistance, the unions frequently fail to act collectively and fail to see their own interests and demands within the context of the class that they represent. Individual unions acting on individual issues in isolation can always be divided from each other and prevented from forcing through real change and the very intermediary role which unions play means that their continued existence relies upon negotiating and making deals rather than fighting, as we tragically saw with the Grangemouth betrayal last year.

The disparity between the union’s interests and the interests of the workers which it represents is a well-established truth. Gramsci, writing in 1919 about the Italian labour union Confederazione del Lavoro, a union which had been founded by socialists but which was, by now, heavily dominated by reformists, comments that 
‘The workers feel that the complex of ‘their’ organisation has become such an enormous apparatus, which has ended in obeying its own laws, intimate to its structure and to its complicated functioning, but extraneous to the mass which has acquired a consciousness of its historical mission as a revolutionary class. They feel that their will for power is not expressed, in a clear and precise sense, through the current institutional hierarchies. They feel that even at home, in the home they have tenaciously constructed, with patient efforts cementing it with blood and tears, the machine crushes the man, bureaucracy sterilises the creator spirit and banal and verbalistic dilettantism attempt in vain to hide the absence of precise concepts on the necessities of industrial production and the lack of understanding of the psychology of the proletarian masses. The workers are irritated by these real conditions, but they are individually powerless to change them; the words and wills of individual men are too small a thing compared to the iron laws inherent in the structure of the union apparatus.’2
This irritation with union leadership is, perhaps, one that most of us will have experienced. Yet, as a party we invest a lot of time and effort working within the unions. So why? Gramsci’s criticisms of the bureaucracy of the union will be very familiar to many of us but he also highlights the powerlessness felt outside of organisations and perhaps implies the power that can be felt as a result of membership within unions. Individually we are unable to change society and so the need to work within unions becomes vital. Indeed, unions play a central role in much of our work.

Though unions only represent a certain proportion of the working class, it is union activity which is often able to have the greatest effect on governments. It was, in the 70s, the NUM who were perhaps most able to bring down Ted Heath’s Tory government, forcing the government to bring in the three day working week to save fuel and prolong the fight against the unions and finally, in a fit of undeserved confidence that the public would turn on the miners, he called an election as a vote of confidence in his government. As we all know, this backfired spectacularly. He asked the public “Who governs Britain?” and Britain responded that it was not him.

Those who argue for the need to build a mass movement often overlook the fact that demonstrations, sit-ins and protests, whilst having their place in raising awareness, cannot force change because in a capitalist system it is sustained damage to profit and capital which is best able to force the capitalists to listen. If we look at the anti-Vietnam campaigns, for example we can see that protest alone was not able to bring about change. In fact, the earliest protests against the Vietnam War were in 1965 and sprang out of the civil rights movement. However, the American troops did not leave Vietnam until 1973 and the war did not end as a result of demonstrations and anti-war rallies alone, though these certainly played a part. In actual fact, mutiny and refusal to fight amongst working class soldiers, many of whom had developed a sense of their politics from the civil rights movement, a large proportion of whom were black and increasingly saw the war as in conflict with their class interests, played a much greater role.

This action within the army was mirrored by increasing strikes in America. The impact of war on the economy meant that the working classes were disproportionately being affected through fighting in the war itself as well as being affected through their wages and the increased cost of living at home. Pressure from the working class to end the war, increasing damage to the American economy as the war progressed and the growth of the anti-war movement into a potentially revolutionary body forced big business to back away from supporting the war, placing pressure on Nixon to pull out from all sides. The role of rallies has, then been overstated in our collective imaginations and the coverage which is engrained in our minds when we think back to the war. As an article from Socialist world points out:

The war also hit people in the pocket book. At first, increased war spending boosted the economy, but the cost of the war and increased social programs at home (to stem an uprising of African Americans) forced the government to print excess dollars to pay for it. This led to a spiral of price increases, inflation, a ballooning budget deficit, and the erosion of the purchasing power of workers’ wages – which triggered an increase in strikes and opposition to union leaders who refused to fight the bosses in order to win decent contracts.
At this point, the anti-war movement developed into a truly mass movement, cleaving society in two… By 1972, one million blacks (sic) considered themselves revolutionary. Millions began to see clearly through the rhetoric of a "war against communism", and saw the naked aggression of the US ruling class in its pursuit of profits and imperialist domination.
By this point, important sections of big business concluded that it was better to end the war rather than suffer further social explosions at home. They feared the civil rights movement, the growing threat of ordinary workers going out on wildcat strikes, and the youth movement all coalescing into one giant movement against the government and the capitalist system.’3

It is, therefore, a combination of factors far beyond the demonstrations and the left anti-war movement which can be seen to have finally forced an end to the war.

Even in the run up to the Iraq war, with a huge anti-war movement and significant protests and demonstrations, the anti-war message did not succeed in preventing the invasion of Iraq by British and American forces, however strongly and compellingly the arguments were made and however popular the sentiment. Movements are limited to raising awareness and protesting but cannot change the systems in place, whereas union activity is able to force through reform and place pressure on governments which can hold back the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation.

It is significant that the first factory in the world, here in Derby, should also be the sight of the first strike and lock out. As capitalism has developed there has been a constant conflict between the workers and the capitalists and from the silk mill workers winning the right to form a union through to the winning of the 40 hour week, minimum wage, paid holidays, maternity and paternity leave and health and safety at work at amongst many others, the unions have seen off the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation and protected workers safety and conditions of work, union activity has achieved a huge deal, in many ways changing significant aspects of society and doing away with some of the most draconian aspects of capitalist exploitation.

Yet equally, and perhaps more importantly, industrial action is often the first stage in revolutionary activity. Those of us who have been on picket lines or participated in strikes, marches and rallies know how much confidence and enthusiasm these instil within the working class. Strikes are also an ongoing part of any revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, in ‘The Mass Strike’ challenges the idea of a clear separation of the politically motivated ‘mass strike’ and the economically motivated general strike. It becomes clear that she sees a continuous and reciprocal relationship between economically motivated and politically motivated class struggle. Yet more importantly she identifies wider political motivations as holding equal import in terms of the motivations for action and sees the general strike of 1896 as a politicising action:

‘Here already we see all the fundamental characteristics of the later mass strikes. The next occasion of the movement was wholly accidental, even unimportant, its outbreak elementary; but in the success of the movement the fruits of the agitation, extending over several years, of the social democracy, were seen and in the course of the general strike the social democratic agitators stood at the head of the movement, directed it, and used it to stir up revolutionary agitation. Further the strike was outwardly a mere economic struggle for wages, but the attitude of the government and the agitation of the social democracy made it a political phenomenon of the first rank. And lastly, the strike was suppressed: the workers suffered a ‘defeat’. But in January of the following year the textile workers of St Petersburg repeated the general strike once more and achieved this time a remarkable success: the legal introduction of a working day of eleven hours throughout the whole of Russia. What was nevertheless a much more important result was this: since that first general strike of 1896 which was entered upon without a trace of organisation or of strike funds, an intensive trade union fight began in Russia proper which spread from St Petersburg to the other parts of the country and opened up entirely new vistas to Social Democratic agitation and organisation, and by which in the apparently death like peace of the following period the revolution was prepared by underground work.’4

Luxemburg highlights quite clearly the power of strike action as workers from one industry to another came out in strike ‘growing like an avalanche’ in 1905.5 Yet she stresses that it is when these strikes become spontaneous that they begin to intersect with revolutionary activity and cease to be a means for the proletariat to protect themselves within the confines of a parliamentary and capitalist system.

At this year’s Marxism Anne Alexander and Moustafa Bassiouny’s talk as part of the series on the Arab Spring: Three years on, focused on Workers’ Movements in Egypt. Many of the talks at Marxism had illustrated the role that unions can play in building towards revolution and whilst there were clear examples of union leadership betraying its members, in Egypt as much as in South Africa in the lead up towards the Marikana massacre, it was inspirational to hear how workers in both Egypt and South Africa had refused and still refuse to be limited by their union leadership. In a range of talks we were presented with numerous examples of workers acting without the support of their leadership or creating new unions which will act in their interests. Even now in the midst of the counter revolution in Egypt with severe penalties being imposed on striking workers or protestors, strike action continues in Egypt and the miners in South Africa have achieved incredible successes in the aftermath of the massacre, spreading to other workers in other parts of the country.

However, the inspirational stories of union success and workers’ success is not limited to other parts of the world. We have recently seen successes in unions in this country, from the Hovis workers to individual schools to the impact of ongoing national strike by several of the larger unions.

Yet it is the role that we, as revolutionaries, play in the unions which is most important, as was stressed by Anne Alexandra’s talk. It is the challenges of trying to lead unions which do not have socialists within them which is one of the most concerning aspects of the Egyptian counter-revolution. Without the presence of the party as a vanguard, politicising the workers and maintaining that focus on class politics, the momentum for revolution is more difficult to maintain.

Therefore, we act within the unions as this is where we are able to lead the class forward, build its confidence and politicise other members of the class. Building solidarity between workers creates a sense of shared interest; July 10th showed us that unions coming together can force change as well as building that confidence. It is true that the shake up within the cabinet was carried out for a combination of the usual reasons – to hoodwink the public into feeling that the government is listening, to change the way they are perceived and as part of their build up to the election. It does not represent a change of policy; however, we should not underestimate the significance of the fact that, after prolonged, repeated action and consistently stressing the arguments against Gove’s policies, his popularity was historically low. Three days after industrial action, he was removed from his job along with the architect of the attacks on the NHS, similarly despised by the general public.
In terms of the question posed by the title, then no, this particular union activity has not changed society. However, it has built confidence, brought workers together in solidarity and consistently enabled the conversations which politicise those we work with in the unions. This is not revolution, but it does build confidence for further reform and to continue to sow the seeds of revolutionary ideas.

It is revolutionaries acting within unions who are able to push the arguments for collective action across unions and, in a significant way, were able to bring about the joint action of July 10th. As a small organisation we are able, nevertheless, to influence the policies of our union leadership. However, the unions themselves will only take the fight so far, and whilst we organise within the unions because this is where workers are most powerful and effective, part of the message we must consistently make within the unions is that they are a tool for the workers to bring about change in their interests and that the members must push their unions hard to act with them but must not feel restricted by their union leadership and should not feel limited through loyalty to their union. It is workers acting in their own interests who have the power to change society but the unions provide a context from within which we can fight against exploitation, redress the power balance between the workers and the capitalist and build confidence within the class to fight back.

It must not be forgotten that the function of the union is, in many ways, dependent on a continuation of the present system and can only win reform and an improvement in the conditions of workers’ lives. However, these are improvements which can be rolled back, as we are currently witnessing with the attacks on the NHS, on trade union activity itself, on education, welfare and other key achievements in terms of working conditions. The difference between unions and soviets or workers councils means that whilst the soviet would place the workers in control of the means of production and enable them to determine for themselves the conditions of their own work, the union as it exists now acts merely as a buffer, at best protecting workers from the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation and, as Gramsci points out, they represent the organisation of the workers into a body which mirrors the competitive structures of capitalism rather than communism. Yet this does not mean that all is hopeless because where the workers come together to make decisions about the utilisation of their own labour power Gramsci sees workers bringing into their unions the consciousness of their own power as a result of ‘the simple activity of class struggle.’6 In fact, he observed the potential of unions in the early days after the Russian revolution.

In his article ‘Unions and Councils’, Gramsci leaves us with a hopeful image of unions which are centred on individual trades and industries:

‘In Russia, this is what the industrial unions do. They have become the organisms in which all the individual enterprises of a certain industry amalgamate, connect, act, forming a great industrial unity. Wasteful competition is eliminated, the great services of administration, of resupply, of distribution and of accumulation, are unified in large centres. The systems of work, the secrets of fabrication, the new applications immediately become common to the whole industry. The multiplicity of bureaucratic and disciplinary functions inherent to relations of private property and individual enterprise, is reduced to pure industrial necessities.’7

So, unions cannot in themselves change society because they are too firmly tied to the current system and operate as reformist organisations only. However, with socialists working within unions, unions have the capacity to politicise the class, triggering wider political activity, and possibly mass strike and revolution. As Rosa Luxemburg said of the 1905 revolution in Russia ‘this general direct action reacted inwardly all the more powerfully as it for the first time awoke feeling and class consciousness in millions upon millions as if by electric shock … Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains [of capitalism].’8 As Luxemburg argues throughout the mass strike, class action and struggle is a central tool for effectively educating the class (though there appears to be some disagreement between her and Lenin over the equivalence of the role of pamphlets and literature in raising class consciousness and I can’t help but feel, along with Lenin, that it must be a combination of literature, discussion and activity which will instil and spread this education and prepare the way for revolutionary activity).

Trades unions are a key theatre upon which that class struggle can be enacted but, rather than seeing mass strike and revolution as spontaneous, we must differ from Luxemburg and insist that we work within those unions rather than relying upon them in order to truly change society. If we are to learn the lessons from Luxemburg’s example, we must focus on the central role of the party rather than spontaneity. Yes, working class action politicises and gives confidence to the class. But, there must be a driving force to maintain the focus on politics and give a class explanation for the economic concerns which become the focus of individual groups within the class and which detract from the wider class antagonism. It is essential to any revolution that both the capitalists and the unions themselves, through which we mediate with them, must eventually both be overthrown in place of genuine soviets and workers councils if those economic issues are to be permanently addressed.

As Lenin put it: 

‘Recently, the overwhelming majority of Russian Social-Democrats were almost wholly engaged in this work of organising the exposure of factory conditions. It is sufficient to refer to the columns of Rabochay Mysl to judge to what extent they were engaged in it. So much so, indeed, that they lost sight of the fact that this, taken by itself, is not in essence Social-Democratic work, but merely trade union work. As a matter of fact, these exposures merely dealt with the relations between the workers in a given trade and their immediate employers, and all that they achieved was that the vendors of labour power learned to sell their “commodity” on better terms and to fight the purchasers of labour power over a purely commercial deal. These exposures could have served (if properly utilised by revolutionaries) as a beginning and a constituent part of Social-Democratic activity, but they could also have led (and with subservience to spontaneity inevitably had to lead) to a “pure and simple” trade union struggle and to a non-Social-Democratic labour movement. Social-Democrats lead the struggle of the working class not only for better terms for the sale of labour power, but also for the abolition of the social system which compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich. Social-Democracy represents the working class, not in relation to a given group of employers, but in its relation to all classes in modern society, to the state as an organised political force.’9

I suppose it makes sense to conclude by stressing the fact that it continues to be the work of the party to work within the unions, guiding trade union struggle towards more generalised class struggle. As revolutionaries acting within unions we are well positioned to lead the class towards revolution and to push trade union activity further but, as Lenin stressed, we cannot be satisfied with simply negotiating the best terms for the sale of our labour power but must strive instead to bring the means of production into the hands of the workers.

1 Hayes, D., Thirty years on: the Socialist Workers Party and the Great Miners’ Strike, ISJ: 142, p. 27

2 Gramsci, A., Unions and Councils, L’Ordine Nuovo, 11 October, 1919

3 Lessons from the anti-Vietnam war movement, 2002 Tony Wilsdon and Philip Locker, Socialistworld.net

4 Luxemburg, R., The Mass Strike, pp. 25-6

5 Luxemburg, R., p.26

6 Gramsci, A., 1919

7 Gramsci, A., 1919

8 Luxemburg, p.33

9 Lenin, Essential Works: What is to be done? p. 95

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